Stony River Read Free

his face, round and pale as the moon but with small, cold eyes. It looks as if the man’s spirit has been nearly pinched out of him, which is what James says about his own spirit on days he can’t bear to be human anymore.
    â€œYou’ll vex him,” she says.
    â€œWhere’re you from?” Dunn asks. “The way you talk is strange.”
    How to answer? She speaks like James. The officers are the strange-sounding ones. Dawg . Tawk .
    â€œHow ’bout you radio the station, Frank?” Nolan nods toward the door. “Let ’em know what’s up.” Officer Dunn leaves.
    Miranda climbs the stairs and hurries down the hallway to Cian, who’s rattling the bars of his cot and bleating.
    â€œMandy!” he cries, his mouth pitifully distorted. He stands in his cot, hiccuping little sobs. A sodden nappy rings his ankles. Ammonia from it and others in a nearby bucket stings Miranda’s eyes. Cian’s fair hair is sweaty, his wee organ an angry red from rash. When James left yesterday, he said he’d return with the ingredients for a healing salve.
    â€œMandy’s here, poor biscuit.”
    If she had the lad’s trusting nature she’d chance opening a window in hopes of a cooling breeze. If she didn’t fear exhausting the drinking water, she’d bathe Cian and launder his nappies. Fear is the mortal’s curse, James says. Look at me, so dreadfully afraid of losing you. She lifts the slight child, shaking the wet nappy from his feet. She carries him down the stairs.
    Nolan peers up from a notepad. His eyebrows lift. In surprise? Dismay? For a moment Miranda forgets to wonder why he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t. It’s easy to imagine herself, James and Cian as the only souls alive.
    She heads for the burgundy horsehair sofa in the library. As she sits, dust motes rise in a slow dance and drift back down. She drapesCian across her lap and wriggles one arm free of the petticoat. He clamps his mouth on her breast and wraps a spindly arm about her waist. His head is warm and damp in the crook of her arm.
    Nolan remains in the entryway. To see him, Miranda would have to wrench her head around. “So the child is yours?” he asks. “You look too young.”
    In three years, when she’s eighteen, nobody can wrest her from James. She will stand beside him under a ceiling of stars while he invokes the mighty ones. When she’s eighteen, she’ll venture out on her own for Cian’s earthly needs. James won’t have to bring her lilacs each spring. She’ll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent. She’ll lie on soft grass, garbed in gossamer and sunlight. She will climb Merlin’s oak tree and Heidi’s mountain, row a boat down the enchanted river behind the house, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear. She and Nicholas will lope over carpets of dandelions as they do in her dreams. Lope is a word she likes to say out loud for the way her tongue starts it off before disappearing behind her lips.
    â€œYou say you have news?”
    â€œYes.”
    She hears him inhale deeply, hears his belt jangle as he shifts weight from one foot to the other. “Mr. Haggerty died on the three-forty-two from Penn Station yesterday,” he says.
    â€œWhat’s a three-forty-two?”
    â€œYou serious?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “A train.”
    â€œDid he jump?”
    â€œWhy would you even think that?” He jangles again.
    â€œAnna Karenina did.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œA woman in a book.” The longest she’s ever read, one James challenged her to get through, hoping to seduce her from the youthfulfantasies she prefers. “ But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit ,” she says aloud, trying to say it daintily like Anna.
    Nolan releases a short, tuneless whistle and