July Thunder

After three years, he told himself, it should no longer seem like a personal affront when the sky wasn’t filled with low, leaden clouds that wept. So maybe he had just developed some bad habits.

Still, he wasn’t happy to see a sky so blue it hurt to look at it or feel the warmth of a summer day, a day the locals would call “hot,” even though they would be lucky to see eighty.

He locked the door of his snug little house behind him, closing it on the memories within that had haunted his nights for a long time. This morning, for some reason, closing that door didn’t feel like a betrayal. At once, the realization filled him with guilt.

Was he healing? Part of him thought it was about time, and part of him wondered how he could even think of letting go.

Sighing, he got into his patrol car and headed for his job as a sheriff’s deputy in Whisper Creek. Another day, another dollar, he told himself. But this morning the words didn’t sound quite so…despairing. This morning they just sounded cynical.

It occurred to him to wonder if he would even like the man he had become, assuming he bothered to look closely, then he dismissed the question. When life dealt you lemons, you made lemonade. He wasn’t at the lemonade stage yet, though. He wondered if he would ever be.

And he wondered why he should even bother.

Morning roll call, such as it was, was quiet as usual. A dozen deputies, just waking up, got ready to go out to their cars and patrol the remote byways of the county and the quiet streets of the town. The kinds of crimes that plagued major cities were rare here. Domestic violence and brawls topped the list of problems, followed by relatively rare robberies and burglaries. That was one of the reasons Sam had moved here from Boulder. A quieter life. A less dangerous job. Because he and Beth had planned to start a family.

The thought darkened his soul, but he was making a decent effort at shaking the mood off when Earl Sanders, the sheriff, stopped him on his way to the car.

“Hey, Sam,” Earl said. “How’s it going?”

“Great,” Sam replied. He wouldn’t admit to anything else. Earl had held his hand through some of the darkest nights of his life, a friend at every turning, and Sam was determined not to lean on him any longer.

“We’re still on for dinner tomorrow night, right? Maggie’s swearing she’ll kidnap you if you don’t show up under your own steam.”

Sam summoned a smile to his stiff face. “I’ll be there.” He couldn’t blame Earl for checking. He’d accepted more than one invitation to dinner with the Sanders family only to beg off at the last minute because he couldn’t bear the thought of being immersed in their happiness for several hours. “I promise.”

“No excuses.”

“Not a one.”

“Good.” Earl’s smile suggested doubt, but he wasn’t going to say so. “I wanted to ask you…. Didn’t you say your dad was a minister?”

Sam wondered which of his drunken binges had caused those words to tumble out of his mouth. He never talked about his family, made a policy of pretending he had none. Which he didn’t, not really. But more than once in the last few years he’d gotten in a mood and drowned his sorrows in beer, and he had probably babbled unwisely.

He didn’t drink like that anymore. A sign of healing, maybe, or a sign of despair. He didn’t know which. Something inside him had begun a painful dying when Beth was killed, and maybe it had finally given up the ghost, leaving him dead inside. Which was fine with him. Feelings weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “Why?”

Earl shrugged, but the sharpness of his gaze belied his seeming indifference. “There’s a new minister over at The Little Church in the Woods. He arrived in town yesterday. I wondered, because his name is Elijah Canfield.”

Elijah Canfield. Recognition hit Sam like an explosion in his head, and for an instant he couldn’t even see. And he had thought he was dead?

Life poured into him, painful life, with an anger so pure it burned in him like a white flame, with a hurt so deep it filled his gut with molten lead. Holding himself in became a nearly impossible act of will.

He could barely see Earl’s face. Between clenched teeth, he said, “He’s my father.”

Then he turned and walked out of the station, his limbs as stiff as ice.

In his patrol car, he sat for long minutes trying to calm himself. Nothing had changed, he told himself. The old bastard was just closer than he had been before. It didn’t make any difference. Elijah would still treat his son as dead, and Sam would continue to ignore the existence of his father. They might see each other on the street or in a store from time to time, but what would that change?

Walls of ice could be opaque. Elijah had built those walls block by block, and finally, when the anguish surpassed bearing, Sam had sprayed water over them, sealing even the tiniest chink. The anger that burned in him now was dangerous because it might melt that wall.

He couldn’t allow that. By sheer force of will, he tamped it down. Ice. He had to maintain the ice. It was the only protection he had.

Mary McKinney was driving to the store for her week’s groceries, puttering along Main Street, thinking about nothing in particular. She was good at that when she didn’t have something to occupy both her hands and her mind. Often she wasn’t quite sure where she drifted to, but things popped in and out of her head. Safe things. Simple things. Like whether she should drive down to Denver to visit her aunt this weekend.

The cat darted out from between two cars, directly into her path. It was as if time slowed down and her entire universe suddenly focused on that cat. Orange, tiger-striped. Big. Ratty looking. And right behind it there would be a little boy. She could almost see the dark top of his head as he ran after the cat.

She jammed on her brakes, tires squealing. An instant later there was a loud crunch and she was slammed back in her seat, her head banging against the headrest.

The cat paused to look at her, then darted away across the street. The little boy—oh, God, there was no little boy. She started to shake, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that it shook with her.

Deputy Sam Canfield was suddenly beside her, looking in the passenger window. “Mary? Mary, are you okay?”

Still shaking, she turned her head, speaking through stiff, bloodless lips. “The little boy…”

“What little boy?”

“Did I hit him?”

His rugged face changed. At once he straightened and walked around to the front of her car. There were some passersby standing there, and they spoke with Sam, but Mary couldn’t hear what they said. Her mind was spiraling downward into a dark, terrible place, a place she couldn’t let herself go again.

“Mary?” Sam was back, leaning down to her, his face now concerned. “Mary, there’s no little boy. You didn’t hit anything. Nobody saw a little boy. Just a cat.”

“Oh, God…” Tremors shook her so hard that her teeth chattered. No little boy. No little boy. The words whirled around in her head, almost incomprehensible. She’d seen…no, she hadn’t seen. She hadn’t really. She’d just expected to see.

“Mary, are you okay?”

Licking her dry lips, she made herself look at him again. “I’m fine,” she managed to say. “Just shaken.”

“You got rear-ended pretty hard. Can you put the car in neutral? I want to push you over to the curb.”

She nodded and reached for the stick shift. The car had stalled when she jammed on the brakes, and she didn’t try to start it. Sam opened the driver’s door and leaned against the post, pushing the car with deceptive ease to the curb just ahead. Mary managed to steer, even though her hands felt welded to the wheel.

“There,” he said, when the car bumped gently against the curb. “Set the brake and take it easy.”

But her tremors were easing somewhat, and she couldn’t just sit in the car and think. She needed to be active. Immediately. Before the pit swallowed her again. Climbing out, she stood on rubbery knees and looked at the vehicle that had hit her.

It was a pickup truck that had probably been young about the time Elvis had been in the Army. It was driven by an eighteen-year-old boy who was claiming the Subaru had stopped too soon.

Mary recognized him. He’d been one of her students last year in senior English class. He was a good student and pretty much a good kid, she thought. Just careless, the way many of his age group were.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Jim Wysocki said. “Honest it wasn’t, Deputy Canfield. She shouldn’t have stopped there.”

Sam wasn’t looking too forgiving, Mary noticed. That surprised her, and she clung to the surprise, because it kept her from thinking about anything else. Still feeling wobbly, she walked to where they were standing between the vehicles. Cars eased past them, people craning their necks to look.

Oh, God. The pit of memory yawned, opened by the familiarity of the scene. Mary leaned against the side of her car, looking down at her crumpled rear fender without seeing it. No sirens, she told herself. There were no sirens. Nobody was hurt. Nobody.

But nightmare images hovered at the edges of her mind like the fluttering black wings of bats, waiting to pounce. She closed her eyes and bit her lip until it hurt, then tasted blood. “It was my fault,” she heard herself say hoarsely. She didn’t know whether she spoke to the memories or to the present.