Free Under the Same Blue Sky by Pamela Schoenewaldt Page A

back as if fearing attack. His clothes, hair, eyes and slouch felt hat were gray. His face was pale, like one who lived in shadows. He seemed barely thirty, and yet had an air of constant travel, of a man unused to life in houses. “Weren’t you afraid at night?” peopleasked later. I wasn’t. He seemed as harmless as Ben, with an eerie wash of sadness and regret.
    “I brought your blue paint, miss,” he said, pointing to a line of covered buckets set on the porch. He shifted slightly to peer around me into the house. “Could I have some water?”
    I brought him a glass. He drained it and gave it back. Our fingers never touched. “Henry McFee sent you, or Jim Burnett?” He shook his head. I took a wild chance. “Ben Robinson?”
    “Nobody sent me. I just wanted to help out. It’s good paint.”
    “I’m sure it is, but you don’t know me. How did you know I wanted blue?”
    “I just heard. Good evening, miss.” He touched his hat rim, still looking past me into the house. The idea shot across my mind that he might melt like a ghost into the gray.
    “Wait! Tell me your name at least.”
    “John,” he said, so softly it might have been the wind that spoke. “I have to be going now.” He stepped backward off the porch and hurried away, dodging puddles. He must have left his car around the bend. I heard it rattle, catch, and drive away, leaving only the sound of rain. Had I imagined the whole encounter, made dreamy by the weather? But I held the glass he’d drained, and on the porch sat five buckets with “Blue” neatly written on top and two good brushes. They were real enough, heavy and sloshing.
    When had he even brought them? I’d only heard his step once on the porch. Could he have carried all five? I shivered. I’d met most of Galway and would have remembered his grayness. Why would a stranger bring paint? How did he know I wanted blue? He hadn’t spoken to Henry. And even if he had, what were my wants to this man? Inside the house, his melting form seemed to hover in every corner and outside each window. Don’t be scary. When I splashed cold water on myface, a name roared back at me: John Foster . I splashed more, wetting the floor. The killer of newlyweds, the preacher’s kid gone wrong. His age seemed right, and there was that insistent peering into my house. Did he think to see Ethel Harding here alive? Was he crazy, far more than Ben? Surely he had no debt to me. Why serve Ethel’s house if she’d never see it? And how could paint repay two lives? Of course, “John” was a common enough name, but what other John could be so sad, alone, and fixed on my house? I couldn’t sleep. Gray men swirled over my bed, bathed in blue light.
    Hot sun blazed the next day. I hurried outside. The buckets were still there, still marked “Blue.” I opened one and saw the blue of my father’s eyes. I searched the mud around my house. There was no trace of my visitor, no footprints or tire tracks, but of course rain would have washed them away.
    What about the paint? Should I use it? Why not? It was a gift, however mysterious. If my visitor was John Foster, and if, for his own reasons, he felt a debt to the house or its tenant now, why not let him pay it? Besides, the paint was a beautiful blue. My mother always claimed that blue brought good spirits. I’d tell Henry what happened, and he might believe me. If he asked why I’d accepted a killer’s paint, I’d say I would have accepted the school board’s paint if it had been offered.
    Ben came by at dusk, his clothes filthy and torn, blotched with crusted blood from scratching. “My voices go bad in the rain,” he said. He gulped down a bowl of potato soup, eyeing the buckets. “I could paint your house, you know, Miss Hazel. Except—up there.” Anxious eyes climbed to the eaves before dropping back to the comfort of earth.
    “Suppose I borrow a ladder?”
    “And hold it?”
    “Of course.” We settled that for painting my house, he’d have