The shadows in the house had melted together in a black mass, and Old Bob walked through the empty rooms and turned on the lights before coming back into the kitchen to finish up. The shotgun was gone, taken by the police for reasons he failed to comprehend, part of their investigation, they told him, and he felt strangely uneasy in its absence. You’d think it would be the other way around, he kept telling himself. He washed some dishes by hand, something he hadn’t done in a long time, finding that it helped him relax. He thought always of Evelyn. He glanced over at the kitchen table more than once, picturing her there, her bourbon and water in front of her, her cigarette in hand, her face turned away from the light, her eyes distant. What had she been thinking, all those times she’d sat there? Had she been remembering her childhood in the little cottage several houses down? Had she been thinking of Nest? Of Caitlin? Of him? Had she been wishing that her life had turned out differently, that she had done more with it? Had she been thinking of missed chances and lost dreams? His smile was sad. He regretted now that he had never asked.
He finished the dishes, dried them, and put them away. He glanced around, suddenly lost. The house was alive with memories of his life with Evelyn. He walked into the living room and stood looking at the fireplace, at the pictures on the mantel, at the place in the corner by the bowed window where the Christmas tree always sat. The memories swirled around him, some distant and faded, some as new and sharp as the grief from her loss. He moved to the couch and sat down. Tomorrow his friends would gather at Josie’s for coffee and doughnuts, and in his absence they would talk of Evelyn in the same way they had talked of that postal worker in the gorilla suit or the fellow who killed all those children. They would not do so maliciously, but because they had thought her curious and now found her death somehow threatening. After all, she had died here, in Hopewell-not in some other town in some other state. She had died here, where they lived, and she was someone they knew. Yes, she was odd, and it wasn’t really any surprise that she had died of a heart attack blasting away at shadows with a shotgun, because Evelyn Freemark had done stranger things. But in the back of their minds was the conviction that she really wasn’t so different than they were, and that if it could happen to her, it could happen to them. Truth was, you shared an uneasy sense of kinship with even the most unfortunate, disaffected souls; you felt you had known at least a few of them during your life. You had all been children together, with children’s hopes and dreams. The dark future that had claimed those few was never more than an arm’s length away from everyone else. You knew that. You knew that a single misfortune could change your life forever, that you were vulnerable, and to protect yourself you wanted to know everything you could about why it had touched another and passed you by.
Old Bob listened to the silence and let the parade of memories march away into the darkness. My God, he was going to miss her.
After a time his thoughts wandered to the call he had received earlier from Mel Riorden. Mel and Carol had been by that morning to offer condolences, promising they would have him over for dinner after the funeral, when he was feeling up to it. Old Bob had taken their hands, an awkward ritual between long-standing friends where something profound had changed their lives and left them insufficient words to convey their understanding of what it meant. Later Mel had called on the phone, keeping his voice down, telling Old Bob that there was something he ought to know. Seemed that Derry had called him up out of the blue and apologized for scaring him with his talk about MidCon. Said he really hadn’t meant anything by it. i Said he was just blowing off steam, and that whatever the union decided was good enough for him. Said he wanted to know if he could go to the fireworks with Mel and Carol and some of the others and sit with them. Mel paused every so often to make sure Old Bob was still listening, his voice sounding hopeful. Maybe he was mistaken about his nephew, he concluded tentatively. Maybe the boy was showing some common sense after all. He just wanted Old Bob to know.