Free Bloodstone by Nate Kenyon Page A

haven’t gotten around to doing anything yet.”
    There were others out now, walking through the park-like atmosphere, enjoying the sunshine. They passed a young couple, holding hands. Stowe asked them if they’d seen the falls. They told him they hadn’t, and so he took them down past the church on a nicely paved path, over the banks of a steep hill to an overlook of the river, where the water rushed through a series of deep channels and burst out over the drop, the spray reaching all the way up to them.
    As they stood on the edge of it, looking down, Stowe told them the story of Annie’s son Joseph, the boy who had fallen to his death in 1958, the subsequent uproar over the safety of the falls, and the argument regarding the installation of a fence around the edges. Ultimately, the town had decided that a chain-link fence would ruin the natural beauty, which was another way of saying it would scare away the tourists. Stowe told them there were still a few people that were sobitter about the decision they wouldn’t attend town meetings anymore. “And Annie, she just wasn’t able to handle it. Her mind went, she started predicting all kinds of things, the end of the world. Hellfire and damnation, that sort of stuff. She told everyone that her boy was coming back for her before the end, and they would go up to heaven together. It’s in the Bible, you know—Armageddon?”
    “The faithful will be saved,” Smith said.
    “Exactly. Well, she just wouldn’t let up. The people felt sorry for her and a little guilty, I guess, and so they kept her out of the state institution and took care of her themselves. They still do. Sue Hall is just the latest in a long line of them to look after Annie.”
    The three of them stood and talked for another few minutes before Stowe glanced at his watch, apologized, and said he ought to be getting back to work.
    As they walked back across the green grass, Smith thought they had found a friend in White Falls, or at least a friendly face; but later when he thought of that day, it was Annie he kept going back to, crazy Annie’s savage face as she spat out her words from the Gospel According to Luke. Smith had recognized the quote from his early church school days; it recounted the occasion of Easter. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body .
    The resurrection. The day Christ rose from the dead.
    And that other. Her touch on him, and her words; You’ve come back .
    So much pain for one woman to take. Her little boy gone, just gone, and nothing had been done about it. By the time they reached the Old Mill Inn again, though the sky was warm and bright, Smith felt as if a great black shadow had fallen over the world.

CHAPTER SIX
    Jeb Taylor was in the Friedman’s back garden with the manure again, troweling it under the loose soil, pulling up tree roots near the garden’s border. He had been working through the pain, concentrating on it, focusing it into a small spot in the center of his forehead where it was easier to deal with. God, what he wouldn’t do for a drink right now. Take the edge off a little.
    It always struck him, what people would do to have a nice garden, what they would pay . Here he was digging and digging and digging, and for what? For plants that would grow and flower and then wither and die in the fall. And then he, or someone else, would be back next spring to do it all over again. Turning the old dirt, mixing in the manure, peat moss, and maybe a little Miracle-Gro . Planting the seed, covering it all with a bit of straw for heat, watering carefully, weeding out the unwanted elements. Like a recipe from one of Ruth’s old cookbooks. It seemed like such a waste of time.
    In the midst of these thoughts he happened to look up at the house. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat—Mrs. Friedman, standing at the second-floor window in nothing but a white bra and panties. When she saw him she did