“So maybe there’s not as much to be afraid of as you’d like me to believe. Maybe you’re not sure who John Ross is either.”
“Maybe,” Gran said softly.
“I invited him to come to church tomorrow morning,” Old Bob went on deliberately. “I asked him to sit with us. Will you be coming?”
There was a pause. “I don’t expect so,” Gran replied.
Nest took a long, slow breath. Her grandfather moved away from the window. “I invited him to picnic with us in the park afterward, too. So we could talk some more.” Her grandfather cleared his throat. “I like him, Evelyn. I think Nest likes him. I don’t think there’s any reason to be scared of him.”
“You will pardon me if I reserve my opinion on that?” Gran replied after a moment. “That way, we won’t all be caught by surprise.” She laughed softly. “Spare me that look. And don’t ask me if I plan to have another drink either, because I do. You go on to bed, Robert. I’ll be just fine by myself. Have been for a long time. Go on.”
Nest heard her grandfather move away wordlessly. She stayed where she was for a moment longer, staring up at the empty, lighted kitchen window, listening to the silence. Then she slipped back through the shadows like the ghost of the child she had grown out of being.
CHAPTER 16
Nest did not sleep when she finally reached her bedroom, but lay awake in the dark staring up at the ceiling and listening to the raucous hum of the locusts through the screen window. The air felt thick and damp with the July heat, and even the whirling blades of the big floor fan did little to give relief. She lay atop her covers in her running shorts and T-shirt, waiting for midnight and her rendezvous with Two Bears. The bedroom door stood open; the hallway beyond was silent and dark. Gran might have gone to bed, but Nest could not be certain. She imagined her grandmother sitting alone at the kitchen table in the soft, tree-filtered light of moon and stars, smoking her cigarettes, drinking her bourbon, and reflecting on the secrets she hid.
Nest watched those secrets dance as shadows on her ceiling.
Was John Ross her father? If he was, why had he abandoned her?
The questions repeated themselves over and over in her mind, suspended in time and wrapped in chilly, imperious solitude. They whispered to her, haunting and insidious.
If John Ross was her father, why was Gran so bitter toward him? Why was she so mistrustful of his motives? What was it that her father had done?
She closed her eyes, as if the answers might better be found in darkness. She stilled herself against the beating of her heart, against the pulse of her blood as it raced through her veins, but she could find no peace.
Why was her father such an enigmatic figure, a shadow barely recognizable as being a part of her life? Why did she know so little about him?
Outside an owl hooted softly, and Nest wondered if Daniel was calling to her. He did that sometimes, reaching out to her from the dark, a gesture she did not fully understand. But she did not rise to look this night, locked in her struggle to understand the doubts and confusion that beset her at every turn. Like a Midwest thunderstorm building out on the plains and working its way east, dark and forbidding and filled with power, a revelation approached. She could feel it, could taste it like rain and smell it like electricity in the air. The increasing boldness of the feeders, the deterioration of the maentwrog’s prison, and the coming of John Ross and the demon signaled a shift in the balance of things. In a way Nest did not yet understand, it was all tied to her. She could sense that much from the time she had spent with John Ross. It was in the words he had used and the secrets he had shared. He had taken her into his confidence because she was directly involved. The challenge she faced now, on thinking it through, was in persuading him to tell her why.