Moonshadows Read Free Page B

was aware of the doctor’s eyes.
    Little things she still remembered, insignificant things: a nurse squishing by the door on creped footsteps, cold shards of December sunshine slanting through the windows, a steady drone of the heating system thrumming the air.
    As with all Lancaster interments, the double funeral was private, with only the family and a few close friends in attendance. Her parents joined the ancients and were laid to rest in the family cemetery located to the leeward side of the estate. It was a miserable day as fog tumbled in from the ocean and made Janet’s eyes water. She stood beside the open graves and stared at the mounds of dirt scooped from the earth to make room for her parents. Clumps of ice crystals had already scabbed over the edges of the raw earth piled neatly beside the gaping holes. In anger, she jabbed the toe of her shoe into the frozen honeycomb and watched as the fragile crystals crumbled. Then she peed on herself.
    The memory of the mist that hung in the air that day still lingered heavy on her cheeks, and Janet shook her head now to revive herself from the past and to clear her mind.
    “Yes, Grandmother,” she repeated the promise. “I’ll be careful.”
    Returning her attention to the drive, Janet drank in the scenery. Across the highway and to her left the wooded hillside was at its glorious peak.
    Laurel Mountain had gotten its name from the over-abundance of wild blossoms; great spattering and splashes of smoky purples and muted magentas, fused colors that ran on for miles up the mountainside. Below, and to the right, the waves of the Atlantic continued to assault the coastline at the foot of a deep bluff. The highway climbed and curved close enough to the shore to hear the waves breaking against the rocks. Out the window, well below the level of the road, seagulls screeched as they darted and dipped over the water, their dark-tipped wings flashing in the fading light. The clock on the dash showed almost six-thirty. In a short time she passed the familiar welcoming sign.
    Briar’s Point was a small fishing village with a few businesses and stores, a couple of churches, a post office, and a municipal building. It also had its own funeral parlor. The Point’s residents were a rascally bunch; not a one had ever come off the mountain to be buried. “Damn right,” the old timers would growl. “Plant me where the soil knows the sound of my footsteps.”
    The Point’s one claim to fame was the pier that docked more than its share of boats and boasted great fishing. From where she drove past, Janet could see the teeter-totter of the boats as the waves slapped against the hulls of the anchored vessels. Nothing much ever happened in Briar’s Point. Most of the houses had no locks, and the ones that did were seldom used. The size of the town had dwindled, as many of the young people went away to college and never found their way back again. Someone once figured the average age of the town’s citizens to be around sixty-seven, far too old for the town to survive unless there was an infusion of new blood. The thought of the village dying saddened Janet beyond words.
    The main street was empty as Janet drove past windows shuttered against the wind. She slowed the car at the post office to make a sharp turn right onto a smaller lane. Soon the town lay behind her and ahead, where the tip of the land jutted out to meet the sea, lay Heather Down .
    The driveway was lined on either side by trees whose ages were measured not in decades but in centuries. Their topmost branches intertwined and wove themselves into a palate of splendor that brought out the artist in Janet. On sunshiny days, when the light played through, Janet considered it her own private Sistine Chapel.
    But now, beneath the canopied ceiling, the seams of twilight deepened to a gauzy gloaming and ghostly shadows flickered across the windshield in an almost hypnotic trance. At the end of the driveway, the three-storied house