“I want the evening off, to take Mary to the movie. There’s things I need to tell her about me, the sooner the better.” Fritzi nodded worriedly. “Macurdy,” he said, “I like what I know about you, but I don’t know very much. I don’t know what happened last night, only that it seemed to end all right. But I love my daughter more than my life. Don’t hurt her.” Instead of answering, Macurdy reached across the desk and shook the sheriff’s left hand. “Now,” he said, “I’m ready for that list.”
The movie was a western, The Last Roundup, starring Randolph Scott. They ate popcorn, and when the popcorn was gone, they held hands.
Afterward they strolled Nehtaka’s tree-lined residential streets. In jackets; September had brought offshore breezes, and the evening was cool and humid. For the first fifteen minutes they hardly spoke at all, but Macurdy’s mood was pregnant with things needing to be said. He’d lost totally the confidence he’d felt Saturday night.
Finally he broke the silence. “How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“That’s not old.”
“Old enough to have been married. Twice.”
There was a long moment’s silence before Mary responded: “Tell me about it.”
“My first wife’s name was Varia. She’d always seemed kind of strange, but we were in love. We were married about six weeks when her family sent people to kidnap her, and I followed them. Out of the country. By the time I found her, she was married to someone else.”
“But-that was bigamy! Couldn’t you get her back?”
“Not under their laws. And her new husband was an important man. Later I married a girl there named-it translates to Melody-and I got a farm. But a few months later she drowned.”
Her hand on his arm, Mary stopped him, looking earnestly into his eyes. “Those things were no fault of yours. Were they?”
“Not so far as I know. But that’s just part of what I’ve got to tell. The easy part. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy when I tell you the rest of it, but it wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t.”
When he said nothing more, she turned, and they began walking slowly again, still holding hands. “I have a secret, too,” she said. “Not like the one I told you on Saturday, that I’d hidden from myself all those years. It’s one that goes on every day of my life, and I’ve only ever told one person.”
He didn’t ask, but let her continue in her own time. “You’ve seen pictures of Jesus and Mary, with haloes around their heads.”
“Yeah.”
“I see haloes. Everyone has one, and not just around their heads. They’re brightest there, but when I take the trouble to, I can see them around their whole body.” She peered at him earnestly. “Does that sound crazy?”
This time it was Curtis who stopped. “You see them? I do too! Varia called them auras.” He paused, his features vague in the darkness, but to Mary’s eyes his aura had expanded: pastels of red, gold, violet-a kind of personal aurora. “That makes it easier for me,” he said. “Easier to tell you what I need to.”
They walked again, one street after another, Macurdy talking at length. He told her more about Varia, who’d married his Uncle Will when Curtis was four years old. Varia had seemed about twenty. Twenty years later, when Will was killed felling timber, she still looked twenty. Then she’d married Curtis.
The story grew stranger, Macurdy’s voice becoming monotone as he told it, as if he’d lost hope again that Mary could possibly believe. Varia had come from another world, he said, then repeated it another world, named Yuulith, with gates that from time to time opened into this one. In Yuulith she’d belonged to a Sisterhood that was like a tribe. Its women used magic-nothing all that amazing, but useful-and stayed physically young for nearly a century, then rapidly grew old, and died in just a few years. They had men in the tribe for breeding and soldiering, but the head Sister was the boss, like a queen. What she said was. law.