Free Covenant by John Everson

schools of tuna through her once-black hair, and she groaned as she eased back into the sofa across from him.
    “What can I help you with?” she said in a soft voice.
    Here it was. Joe either hooked her here or left without learning a thing. “A source either trusts you in your first few words or they never will,” one of his editors used to caution. So far, he’d found the advice fairly accurate. And you didn’t generally gain people’s trust by lying to them. At least
he
hadn’t found a good way.
    “Ma’am, I’m the guy who wrote the obituary for the Canady boy’s death last month. For the Terrel Daily Times . Now, I’m fairly new here in town, so I didn’t know what to think when nobody wanted to talk about a boy jumping from a cliff at such a young age. I thought that especially odd when the boy seemed to have so much to live for. That got me looking around a bit, and pretty soon I found that James was not the first kid in this town to jump off that cliff, not by a long shot. I found out that you lost a boy, and Margaret Kelly lost her daughter. And then there was the boy before her.”
    Karen’s eyes didn’t look away from his at all as he gave his litany. She almost looked ready to smile.
    “Now, I still wouldn’t have thought too much of this—kids in Chicago, where I’m from, knock themselves and each other off all the time. Not a big deal. What got me about this, though, was not that some kids here in Terrel were copycat jumpers; what got me was that they all jumped on exactly the same date .”
    Karen didn’t look shocked at his bomb. He hadn’t really expected her to. Instead she gave a sad grin and shrugged.
    “And you want me to tell you what, Mr. Kieran? That there was a calendar in my son’s room that said ‘May twenty-second, the day of atonement’? What are you asking me?”
    “I’m asking you if you have any idea why four kids over the course of five years decided to jump off the same cliff in the same town on the same day. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”
    She stood up, smoothing the loose-fitting fabric of her blouse to her waist.
    “Odd, Mr. Kieran? No.”
    She crossed the room to stare at her painting.
    “Sad. Heartbreaking. Maddening, even. But not odd. We all deal with grief in our own ways, and the kids were all very close. If you’d been here long enough, you’d know—and maybe you’ve found this out already from your ‘investigations’— but all of us mothers have been friends for a long time. So the kids were always around one another.”
    “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sander. I didn’t…I shouldn’t have said odd . But I’m trying to understand what’s been going on in this town. And nobody seems to want to talk about it. It’s as if they’re all afraid to speak, as if they’re protecting someone. I’m inclined to think that these kids didn’t jump off that cliff of their own accord, and I was hoping you could steer me in the right direction.”
    “Do you see this picture, Mr. Kieran?”
    Karen pointed at the gloomy sea painting in front of her.
    “Yes.”
    “I told you I call it The Covenant .”
    “Yes. You painted it yourself?”
    “I did. Almost twenty years ago. It was the first time I held a brush.”
    “That’s incredible,” Joe said, wide-eyed. He looked harder at the painting, with a critical eye. It gave one a chill—its melancholic depiction of the sea looked almost real. The detail in the piece was intricate, even for a seasoned artist.
    “Have you ever done a gallery showing?” he asked. “If this was your first, I’d love to see what you’re painting these days!”
    “I’ve never painted again,” she said.
    Karen turned and took Joe by the shoulders. Her eyes were lit with an inner fire as she spoke.
    “The Covenant, Mr. Kieran, is that in Terrel, we live off the sea, but ultimately, the sea will take us all. What we take from it, we merely borrow. It will drown us and choke us and pull us under. It will dash us on the