Free KIN by Kealan Patrick Burke Page B

her the usual perfunctory responses, and when he'd forced himself to look at her, he was struck, not only by her beauty, but by the sense that she was peering past his facade, into the dark turbulent sea of his guilt, as if she recognized it because she'd swam in those waters more than once herself.
    "Wanna talk about it?" she asked, and though he'd thanked her and shaken his head— I ain't much of a talker —she hadn't left, or taken those incredible eyes of hers off him, and at last he began to speak, slowly at first, then with more ease, until that darkness flowed out of him in a torrent he feared might wash her away and out of his life forever.
    "The boy ain't yours?" she asked when he was done.
    "He were already in the oven when I met my wife," he told her. "She never told me who the daddy was, and I guess it didn't matter. He was long gone when I showed up."
    "Where's she at now?"
    "Dead. She died givin' birth to 'im."
    "I'm sorry."
    "Yeah, me too."
    That day had broken down some barrier between Jack and Louise he hadn't realized existed. It had been more than just the protective bubble that surrounds each and every man and woman when in the company of people they have no reason to trust. He got the feeling Louise had seen something in him he hadn't known was there, something that appealed to her. Though in hindsight, he thought maybe suited her might be a better way of putting it.
    "Pa, say somethin'..."
    She'd loved him for a time, and they'd been happy, but if he was honest with himself now, he could admit that he knew from the moment she stepped foot into this house, and their lives, that she wasn't going to stay. It wasn't because she didn't love them. She just wasn't a homebody. After eleven years of living with a man who'd beaten her senseless with whatever object was close at hand whenever she dared sass him, she wasn't willing to be owned again, or tied down to relationships that were just waiting to go sour. In walking out on that sonofabitch, she'd found her freedom, and though he'd sensed her restlessness right from the start, had known she would never stay, Jack had allowed himself to ignore the reality of it until it smacked him right in the face two years after the day she'd moved in.
    We're moths in a killin' jar, Jack , she'd said to him when he'd come downstairs to find her with a single suitcase at the open front door, an unfamiliar car with a tall handsome black man at the wheel, engine idling, waiting for her. You leave that lid screwed on tight, we're gonna die sooner'r later. Best just to set us loose while we still know how to fly. Then, without another word, she'd kissed him and walked out the door, leaving him with an eternity to think of all the things he should have said but didn't.
    Now he turned and looked at the boy who was not his blood, the boy he wanted to love but couldn't.
    Then he looked down at the rifle.
    Set us loose while we still know how to fly.
    "Somethin' we gotta do, son," he said, and slowly rose from his chair.
     
     
     
     
    -9-
     
     
    Deep night came and with it long shadows that crept inexorably toward the Lowell farm.
    The Merrill clan was among them.
    Aaron had parked the truck at the foot of the hill and killed the engine then joined his father and Luke in walking the long straight path up the rise to where the Lowell farm sat brooding in the dark. The twins stayed in the truck, along with the body parts they had wrapped in plastic, surveying the night for signs that the old farmer and his boy were fleeing, or that there were flickering lights burning the bellies of the clouds on the horizon, foretelling of trouble's advance on them if it turned out they were too late.
    Luke said a silent prayer that they weren't.
    He carefully scanned the wide open areas to their right, where nothing sprouted from the dead earth, and listened to the hissing of the corn in the field to their left. Those sibilant whispers seemed like voices, but he had heard such things enough to