[Oxrun Station] The Last Call of Mourning Read Free

with a wry grin—now they were standing before her, their hands clasped behind their backs and looking for all the world like schoolboys trapped placing a snake in Mother's desk.
    She called out softly, waved though she knew they would pay her no mind, and buttoned her raincoat absently as she stepped outside.
    Despite its pretentions to size, the front of the house was weathered plain and unimposing. It faced a circular drive that enclosed the only garden her mother permitted, narrowing to a blacktopped lane that darted almost fearfully under a canopy of elm toward the Williamston Pike. A generation earlier spotlights had illuminated facade and flowers from sunset to midnight; now the only light came dimly from within, as if the glow had retreated from the grasp of the trees.
    Cyd rubbed a thoughtful finger along the smooth line of her nose and jumped the four low steps of the half-moon porch to the cracked concrete walk that led along the outside of the circle to what had once been a row of stables, off the house's left side. The building was wooden, low and flat-roofed and badly in need of another coat of white. Where the stalls had been were five broad doors, one for each of them, hers on the far end where the trees blocked the bulk of the perimeter wall.
    Her car.
    A blue four-door sedan Father had complained she drove like a fury when the police weren't around and she was on her own. Skybright when new, now it was faded from hood to trunk, sporting signs of spreading rust along the door rims and pitted chrome bumpers. When, not long before she'd left for England, her father had none-too-subtly suggested she trade it in for something . . . nicer . . . she had cried all night and slept on the back seat.
    Gently she kicked in a ritual all the tires in turn, and sighed with a grin at the hubcaps dented and unmatching.
    She loved it, babied it, had once decided that her life since graduation was so tied up with it that, when it died, she would too.
    After closing and locking the garage door behind her, then, and slipping back behind the wheel, she glanced over at the house, frowning slightly, wondering if perhaps she shouldn't call Doc Foster on her own, or drop in at his Centre Street office. And immediately she thought it, she dismissed it. Since the night Barton Yarrow had almost been lost through clumsy surgery for what was supposed to have been a routine extraction of a benign larynx tumor, her mother had sworn off most doctors on a hastily implemented principle. And when no one complained, home remedies became the rule as if they had always been.
    Still, the fall . . .
    Forget it, she told herself; you've enough to worry about as it is.
    Slowly she drove down the lane, turned west onto the Pike and headed for the village.
    The road here was narrow—two miles from the Station's center—had once been a carriage route leading to the estates belonging to Oxrun's founders. But though the road and its name remained, the estates were dwindling rapidly, for the most part sliced into smaller parcels on demand of higher taxes and a life-style dying. The division was still there, however; the area "beyond the park" and the town itself; a division Cyd thought foolish, and somewhat embarrassing.
    The rain stopped.
    The only sound the beat of the windshield wipers thumping.
    On the left began the village park behind its black iron fencing as the road rose and fell over a low ancient hill. And once crested, she blinked at the lights that marked Oxrun Station. As many times as she had driven this way, she was never prepared for the sudden appearance of the town, as though a dark grey veil had been abruptly yanked from her eyes. She snapped on her running lights and took the second left turn onto Centre Street, barely noticing the library on the corner, paying more attention to the three blocks ahead of her—the town's only business street, the hub of daily living. Here were the shops, the luncheonette, the banks, and the lawyers,