Stony River Read Free Page B

notepad on his open palm, an angry sound that jolts her. “I’m trying not to push you but I need more to go on here, Miss Whoever You Are, more than you’re giving me.”
    James flashed with impatience, too, yesterday morning when she asked would he bring back strawberries. “I cannot cover the sun with my finger, can I?” he said.
    Well, she too can be stroppy. “How are you knowing the dead man is James?”
    â€œHe had a library card with him.” Nolan glances at the bookshelves lining two walls. “Seems he liked to read.”
    The card was for her benefit. Most books on the shelves were published before Miranda was born; they don’t hold all James wants her to learn.
    â€œI mean to see him,” she says. The dead man might have stolen that card. James could be in a public house right now, performing card tricks for drinks.
    â€œI can arrange that, provided you’re next of kin.”
    Nolan’s words call up a line from a book forgotten until now: It is understood that the next of kin is Mr. Henry Baskerville .
    â€œJames is my father,” she says, thinking how deficient a word is father . “My mother passed over years ago and there’s no one else.” She thinks on her mother’s parents, brothers and sisters all perishing in their summer cottage when it was swept out to sea by a fierce storm two years before Miranda was born. James spoke of it only once because Miranda trembled and cried for days afterward, imagining herself tossed about and pelted by flying crockery. If there be family alive in Ireland she doesn’t know of them.
    Nolan is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s rough. I’m sorry.” He reaches over and pats her knee, sending a shiver of longing through her. “There a priest or minister I can call for you?”
    She shakes her head. James says a soul’s journey needs no priest, no mediator.
    â€œAn unusual name, that—Key-uhn. How’s it spelled?”
    She tells him and, sensing the need to offer more, adds, “It means ancient one.”
    â€œYou and the boy can’t stay here by yourself,” he says, putting words to the terrible truth creeping into her mind: only James knows where the money tree grows, how to find food, bless the well, chop wood.
    â€œAnd where shall we go?”
    â€œChildren’s Aid will find you a family, might take a day or so.” He spins his hat around in his long-fingered hands. “You can stay at my house tonight, at least.”
    She cannot recall being anywhere but here.
    â€œI don’t suppose you have a telephone,” he says.
    â€œWe do not.” Or anything else that would allow a tradesman access to the house.
    â€œDid your father have an employer we should contact?”
    â€œHe did not.”
    â€œWill you be okay if I leave you a few minutes to radio the station? I should let my wife know you’re coming.”
    She nods and stands with him. She follows him to the door and watches it close behind him. With both men outside now, she considers locking it. The family they found for Jane Eyre treated her badly: You ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us .
    She’s never tried to leave their house before, though she could have easily. James locked the back from the outside when he made his forays into the World, but he always left the key inside the front door.Finding her gone would have shattered him after all he’d forfeited for her: a professorship, old mates, his mother’s wake. She could never be that ungrateful.
    Her mind flies through each room of the house. The windows facing the back are shuttered from the outside. The small window on the back door at the bottom of the kitchen stairs isn’t. She’d have to smash it, drag a chair down the stairs to the landing, stand on it and crawl out. Push Cian through first and drop him to the ground. Would the officers hear?