Free Fear Itself by Duffy Prendergast

note that I had written. I unfolded the note and it read:
    I wish that I could kiss you forever. Love Mathew.
    I cried out loud for a while but then, through tear clouded eyes, I continued my search for clues to Catherine’s relationship with Uncle Henry. I didn’t find a single tittle of information; no love notes; no cards; no scrap of paper with his name or phone number.
    I did find Catherine’s journals, a series of diaries that she had kept since high-school, but the pertinently dated logs had been stripped of their pages, charred pieces of which I remembered seeing recently on the hearth of our seldom used basement fireplace. After hours of self-inflicted mental torture while searching through Catherine’s private papers I found not a thing. I sifted, carefully at first, and eventually impatiently, until it was almost morning and the floor around Catherine’s desk (along with her desktop) were covered with a collage of papers, photographs and mementos. And then, just before dawn, I started to pack.

6
    I too had a secret.
    I had an escape vessel that nobody knew I had.
    After waiting for several hours for the darkness of night to pull the sun up over the horizon, I left Sarah sleeping in her bed, her little body from head to toe buried beneath the warm blue and green patch quilt that Catherine had made for her while she carried her in her belly, and I slipped outside through the rear sliding glass doors, in case anyone was watching the front of the house, and I crept through the patch of woods that separated my yard from my neighbor, Harriet and Gabriel
    Crump, to the rear. I pushed aside low leaning autumn shorn tree branches and kicked through fallen pine needles and rotting tree limbs until I reached the Crump’s garage. The morning air was dry and brisk and my arms were cold because I had foolishly worn only a short sleeve polo shirt. I sidestepped along the side of their garage and then along their house and then sauntered out from the path to the end of the Crump’s driveway as though the property were my own and I stooped and picked up the newspaper and looked around to see if I had been watched or followed before dropping the paper back where I had found it. I stepped into the street walking toward the little white house where my good friend John Bonjiovoni lived. It was Saturday so the street was quiet except for the creaking of the tree limbs swaying in the breeze and the low fading hum of the Crump’s heat-pump. I could smell the strong scent of firewood burning in someone’s wood-burning- stove and I could almost taste the soot in the air. The sky was overcast and the wind blew briskly sending leaves scuttling past my path as I scurried (the lack of light still too little for my personal comfort) like a scared gofer to the safety of its hole until I reached the sanctuary of John’s Garage.
    John was almost seventy years old and the longest standing citizens of my neighborhood. He inherited his house, a well maintained two story red-brick colonial anchored by wide towering sandstone chimneys on each side and adorned with black shutters which flanked the windows and a slate roof, from his parents. After he got married he raised his family there. I met him while walking my dog, Socks, my now long deceased Labrador retriever, almost twenty years prior just after we had moved into the neighborhood. A quick “Hello, welcome to the neighborhood!” turned into an hour-long conversation about old sports cars, of which he had a small collection: a candy-apple-red GTO, a yellow Grand Torino with fat red stripes painted diagonally across the sides and a sapphire blue nineteen-sixty-five Mustang convertible that Catherine fell in love with one warm Spring day when the old man took us for a jaunt through the country. The Mustang was his baby and it was the only car he had kept once his health began to fail.
    John approached me a few months previous and asked me if I wanted to buy the Mustang from him. I told