Nora Roberts - The Pagan Stone

“I’ll take my phone, and I’ll put on a jacket. And I won’t take candy from strangers. Relax, Mommy.”

When she breezed out, Quinn turned to Gage. “Just don’t go far, okay? Keep her close.”

“This is Hawkins Hollow, everything in it’s close.”

She put on a light sweater and slipped black skids onto feet that were so often bare. The minute she stepped outside, she breathed deep. “I like spring nights. Summer’s even better. I like the heat, but under the circumstances, I’m hoarding spring.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“ Main Street, of course. Where else? I like knowing my ground,” she continued as they walked. “So I walk around town, drive around the area.”

“And could probably draw a detailed map of both by now.”

“Not only could, have. I do have an eye for detail.” She took another breath, this one loaded with the scent of peonies rioting pink in someone’s front garden. “Quinn’s going to be happy here. It’s so absolutely right for her.”

“Why?”

He saw the question surprised her-or, he thought more accurately, the fact he’d asked surprised her.

“Neighborhood. That’s Quinn. Developments, suburbia, no, not so much. Too… formed. But neighborhood, where she knows the tellers at the bank, the clerks at the market by name? That’s all Q. She’s a social creature who needs her alone time. So, the town-that gives her the neighborhood. And the house outside town-that gives her the alone. She gets it all,” Cybil decided. “And the guy, too.”

“Handy Cal falls in there.”

“Very. I admit, when she first talked about Cal, I thought Bowling Alley Guy? Q’s gone deep end.” Laughing, she shook back her hair. “Shame on me for assuming a cliché. Of course, the minute I met him, I thought, oh, Really Cute Bowling Alley Guy! Then seeing them together clinched it. From my standpoint, they’re both getting it all. I’ll enjoy coming back here to visit them, and Fox and Layla.”

They turned at the Square, and onto Main Street. One of the cars stopped at the light had its windows open and Green Day blasting. While Ma’s Pantry and Gino’s remained open-and a few teenagers loitered outside the pizza joint-the shops were closed for the night. By nine, Ma’s would be dark, and just after eleven, Gino’s would lock it up. The Hollow’s version, Gage thought, of rolling up the sidewalks.

“So, no yen to build yourself a cabin in Hawkins Wood?” he asked her.

“A cabin in the woods might be nice for the occasional weekend. And the small-town charm,” she added, “is just that-charming for visits. I love visiting. It’s one of my favorite things. But I’m an urbanite at heart, and I like to travel. I need a base so I have somewhere to leave from, to come back to. I have a very nice one in New York, left to me by my grandmother. How about you? Is there a base, a headquarters, for you?”

He shook his head. “I like hotel rooms.”

“Me, too-or to qualify, a room in a well-run hotel. I love the service, the convenience of my well-appointed chamber in a hive where I can order up Do Not Disturb and room service at my whim.”

“Twenty-four hours a day,” he added. “And somebody comes in and cleans it all up while you’re out doing something a lot more interesting.”

“That can’t be overstated. And I like looking out the window at a view that doesn’t belong to me. Still, there are other types in the world, like many of the people in this town Twisse is so hell-bent to destroy. And they like looking out at the familiar. They need and want the comfort of that, and they’re entitled to it.”

That brought it back to square one, Gage thought. “And you’d bleed for that?”

“Oh, I hope not-at least not copiously. But it’s Quinn’s town now, and Layla’s. I’d bleed for them. And for Cal and Fox.” She turned her head, met his eyes. “And for you.”

There was a jolt inside him at that, at the absolute truth he felt from her. Before he could respond, her phone rang.

“Saved by the ring tone,” Cybil murmured, then drew out her phone, glanced at the display. “Hell. Damn. Fuck. Sorry, I’d better deal with this.” She flipped the phone open. “Hello, Rissa.”

She took a few steps away, but Gage had no trouble with the logistics or the ethics of eavesdropping on her end of the conversation. He heard a lot of “no”s between long, listening pauses. And several chilly, “I’ve already told you”s and “not this time”s followed by an “I’m sorry, Marissa” that spoke of impatience rather than apology. When she closed the phone, that impatience was clear on her face.

“Sorry. My sister, who’s never quite grasped the concept that the world doesn’t actually revolve around her. Hopefully she’s pissed enough at me now to lay off for a few weeks.”

“This would be flat-tire sister?”

“Sorry? Oh.” And when she laughed, he could see her click back to the night they’d met when they’d nearly run into each other on a deserted county road as each of them traveled toward Hawkins Hollow. “Yes, the same sister who’d borrowed my car and left a flat spare in my trunk. The same who routinely ‘borrows’ what she likes, and if she remembers to return it, generally returns it damaged or useless.”

“Then why did you lend her your car?”

“Excellent question. A weak moment. I don’t have many, at least not anymore.” Annoyance darkened her eyes now, the steely kind.

“I bet.”

“She’s in New York, flitting back from wherever she flitted off to this time and doesn’t see why she and whatever leeches currently sucking on her can’t stay at my place for a couple weeks. But golly, the locks and the security code have been changed-which was necessary because the last time she stayed there with a few friends, they trashed the place, broke an antique vase that had been my great-grandmother’s, borrowed several items of my wardrobe-including my cashmere coat, which I’ll never see again-and had the cops drop by at the request of the neighbors.”

“Sounds like a fun gal,” he commented when Cybil ran out of breath.

“Oh, she’s nothing but. All right, I’m venting. You have the option of listening or tuning out. She was the baby, and she was pampered and spoiled as babies often are, especially when they’re beautiful and charming. And she is, quite beautiful, quite charming. We were children of privilege for the first part of our lives. There was a lot of family money. There was an enormous and gorgeous home in Connecticut, a number of pied à terres in interesting places. We had the best schools, traveled to Europe regularly, socialized with the children of wealthy and important people, and so on. Then came my father’s accident, his blindness.”

She said nothing for a moment, only continued to walk, her hands in her pockets, her eyes straight ahead. “He couldn’t cope. He couldn’t see, so he wouldn’t see. Then one day, in our big gorgeous home in Connecticut, he locked himself in the library. They tried to break down the door when we heard the shot-we still had servants then, and they tried to break it down. I ran out, and around. I saw through the window, saw what he’d done. I broke the glass, got inside. I don’t remember that very well. It was too late, of course. Nothing to be done. My mother was hysterical, Marissa was wild, but there was nothing to be done.”

Gage said nothing, but then she knew him to be a man who often said nothing. So she plowed on.

“It was afterward we learned there’d been what they like to call ‘considerable financial reversals’ since my father’s accident. As his untimely death gave him no time to reverse the reversals, we would have to condense, so to speak. My mother dealt with the shock and the grief, which were very real for her, by fleeing with us to Europe and squandering great quantities of money. In a year, she’d married an operator who squandered more, conned her into funnelling most of what was left to him, then left her for greener pastures.”