Free Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie Page B

o’clock, he’d sleep straight through his alarm the next morning.
    Shrugging into her cardigan, Vic stood on the terrace a moment, looking up at the sky. The clear day had become a crisp night, but the stars looked blurred round the edges from moisture in the air, and to the north they faded against the pink glow that was Cambridge. She doubted tomorrow would be as fine.
    When her eyes had adjusted, she stepped from the terrace onto the lawn, crossed it swiftly, and let herself out the gate at the bottom of the garden. There was no moon, but she knew the path to the river almost by instinct. A shadow moved beneath the chestnuts at the water’s edge. As she drew closer the shape coalesced into a man, stocky, starlight gleaming faintly from the surface of his oiled jacket and his silver hair.
    “Nathan.”
    “I thought you might come. Kit giving you fits again?” So rich was his voice in the dark that it seemed to her it might stand alone, disembodied, a condensation of personality.
    “It’s these dreams,” she said, huddling a bit more tightly into her sweater as she felt the chill rising from the river. “It’s odd—he never had nightmares when he was small.” She sighed. “I suppose it has to do with Ian, although if he misses Ian he never says so. And he won’t tell me what the dreams are about.”
    “Children’s capacity for forming little hedgehog balls round their suffering never ceases to amaze me. Our adult propensity for exposing all our traumas to the world must be a learned behavior,” he said, chuckling, but she heard the sympathy in it.
    “It’s silly of me, but sometimes I forget you’ve been through all this. I just see you as Nathan, complete in yourself, without all these family appendages that most of us carry round.” Then, as she realized what she’d said, she gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Nathan, I’m so sorry. That was incredibly thoughtless of me.”
    This time he laughed outright. “On the contrary, I take it as a compliment. Have you any idea how hard I’ve worked these last few years to achieve that sort of self-sufficient independence? At first it was merely a defense against the well-meaning—I couldn’t bear being fussed over—and then it became something I needed to do formyself. I’d had twenty years of operating as one half of a whole, and there were times when the task seemed insurmountable.” He paused, as if aware of the weariness that had crept into his voice, then added more heartily, “And as for my girls, you just haven’t met them yet. You’ll have no doubt that I’m fully parentally qualified, though I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to believe they’re my biological offspring. Perhaps all parents feel that way.”
    How little she knew him, thought Vic, and how odd that she felt so comfortable with him, as she had never been one to form easy alliances. She must have come to All Saints’ shortly after his wife died, and she remembered having a vague awareness of him as an attractive, if somewhat abstracted, man with whom she exchanged occasional pleasantries over sherry in the SCR. But their paths rarely crossed outside college functions, and it was not until she began her preliminary research on Lydia Brooke that she’d learned Nathan was Brooke’s literary executor.
    When approached, he’d been helpful enough in supplying Lydia’s materials, but he had not offered any reminiscences. It was only when she’d mentioned living in Grantchester by chance one day that he’d responded in a more personal way, and since Ian’s disappearance they had spent more and more time together.
    “Listen.” Nathan put a finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”
    Vic held her breath, listening. She heard the blood in her ears, then on the threshold of sound, a shriek. “What is it?” she whispered.
    “A barn owl. It takes some perseverance to hear them these days; they’re becoming quite rare. Reminds me of my childhood, that and