The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Read Free Page B

withered away and died. Sister Marie Therèse, she was like the Bridey over there. She had such a sense of fun. She used to tell us stories ofwhat the patients did behind the doctors’ and nurses’ backs. They still believed in spells and potions. She called them
les petites feticheurs
! I loved the Africans too. They needed so very little to make them happy. Mommy used to say that the best smiles she ever saw were African smiles.”
    Alan saw that the living room was like a mirror image of the living room back at the sawmill. Bridey and Padraig had each made a shrine to happier times.
    “What happened, Kate?”
    Her head jerked and her eyes darkened. “There was a lot of trouble going on. There were enough bad people locally already without others coming out of Rwanda. Mommy and Daddy had been told to leave. But they knew if they abandoned the hospital the mission would have been finished. And they thought they were safe because they were a hundred miles away from the border.” She hesitated, blinking a little fast, still staring at the photographs.
    “Good thing you weren’t there!”
    “I was there and so was Billy.” Kate inhaled and her nostrils dilated. “Sister Marie Therèse saved me. She was in charge of the kitchen gardens. We were out there gathering vegetables when we heard the trucks drive in and then the shots and the screaming. I wanted to run back but she stopped me. There was a . . . a kind of pit. An underground store where she kept yams and stuff. She pushed me into it.” Kate sniffed and rubbed at her nose. “I hid there all through it.” He could see she wasdoing her best to fight back tears. “I was still there when government soldiers came around, I don’t know how many days later. They found me in the pit. They . . . they told me the rebels had killed them all . . . everybody . . .”
    “Oh, God. I’m . . . I’m really sorry . . .”
    “I had counseling. I couldn’t bear to go out. I couldn’t face meeting people—nobody. Not even my friends.” Kate’s face was flushed and her eyelids were blinking so fast they were fluttering. She looked very different from the girl who had pushed him out of the way of the swans.
    He touched her shoulder and spoke softly. “C’mon, Kate. Let’s go explore the garden.”
    She scampered back out through the door, half running. He gave her a little space to recover her composure. When he caught up with her he found himself standing at the top of a gentle slope of lawn leading down to the open river. Alan followed her gaze across the forty yards of reed-strewn water to the Green, and beyond that, to the mountains, which were so close you felt you could put out your hand and touch them. He realized that they were standing almost exactly opposite the place he had been fishing, but closer to the big fork in the river.
    “A good thing Bridey wasn’t watching us earlier!”
    Kate managed a nervous laugh. “Bridey would have needed binoculars. But if she had, she’d have had a heart attack.” She was hurrying on again. “Come on—I told you there was something I wanted to show you!”
    “Show me what?”
    “You don’t know about BSBI.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The Botanical Society of the British Isles. I’m helping them with a project on rare and threatened plants.” She stopped in front of a small tilled piece of the garden, right by the water, about as far away from the house as it was possible to be. It was divided up into tiny beds, each about a foot square, separated from its neighbors by uneven rows of bricks. He guessed that Kate had laid out the bricks.
    “You see?”
    The beds were empty except for one.
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “Go on! Take a closer look!” Kate squatted down, so he did the same. He saw a flower that looked a bit like a dandelion. The label read “Irish fleabane (
Inula salicina
)—rare. K.S. Clonmel, Tipperary.”
    “K.S.—that you?”
    She nodded, proudly. “It’s on the