Blood Brothers Page 0,76

smaller ones. "I put this together earlier. I wasn't sure what you might bring," she said to Cal.

"You made salad?" Quinn asked.

"My specialty. Chop, shred, mix. No cooking."

"Now, I'm forced to be good." Quinn gave up the dream of two slices of pizza, settled on one and a bowl of Layla's salad. "We made progress," she began as she forked up the first bite.

"Yeah, ask the ladies here how to make tallow candles or black raspberry preserves," Fox suggested. "They've got it down."

"So, some of the information contained in the books we're going through may not currently apply to our situation." Quinn raised her eyebrows at Fox. "But one day I may be called on in some blackout emergency to make a tallow candle. By progress, however, I mean that there's a lot of interesting information in Ann's journals."

"We've read them," Cal pointed out. "Multiple times."

"You're not women." She held up a finger. "And, yes, Essie is. But Essie's a woman who's a descendent, who's part of this town and its history. And however objective she might try to be, she may have missed some nuances. First question, where are the others?"

"There aren't any others."

"I disagree. There aren't any others that were found. Essie said these books were passed to her by her father, because she loved books. I called her to be sure, but he never said if there were more."

"If there'd been more," Cal insisted, "he'd have given them to her."

"If he had them. There's a long span between the sixteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds," Quinn pointed out. "Things get misplaced, lost, tossed out. According to the records and your own family's oral history, Ann Hawkins lived most of her life in what's now the community center on Main Street, which was previously the library. Books, library. Interesting."

"A library Gran knew inside and out," Cal returned. "There couldn't have been a book in there she didn't know about. And something like this?" He shook his head. "She'd have it if it was to be had."

"Unless she never saw it. Maybe it was hidden, or maybe, for the sake of argument, she wasn't meant to find it. It wasn't meant to be found, not by her, not then."

"Debatable," Fox commented.

"And something to look into. Meanwhile, she didn't date her journals, so Layla and I are dating them, more or less, by how she writes about her sons. In what we're judging to be the first, her sons are about two to three. In the next they're five because she writes about their fifth birthday very specifically, and about seven, we think, when that one ends. The third it seems that they're young men. We think about sixteen."

"A lot of years between," Layla said.

"Maybe she didn't have anything worth writing about during those years."

"Could be," Quinn said to Cal. "But I'm betting she did, even if it was just about blackberry jam and a trio of active sons. More important now, at least I think so, is where is the journal or journals that cover her time with Dent, to the birth of her sons through to the first two years of their lives? Because you can just bet your ass those were interesting times."

"She writes of him," Layla said quietly. "Of Giles Dent. Again and again, in all the journals we have. She writes about him, of her feelings for him, her dreams about him."

"And always in the present tense," Quinn added.

"It's hard to lose someone you love." Fox turned his beer bottle in his hand.

"It is, but she writes of him, consistently, as if he were alive." Quinn looked at Cal. "It is not death. We talked about this, how Dent found the way to exist, with this thing. To hold it down or through or inside. Whatever the term. Obviously he couldn't-or didn't-kill or destroy it, but neither could it kill or destroy him. He found a way to keep it under, and to continue to exist. Maybe only for that single purpose. She knew it. Ann knew what he did, and I'm betting she knew how he did it."

"You're not taking into account love and grief," Cal pointed out.

"I'm not discounting them, but when I read her journals, I get the sense of a strong-minded woman. And one who shared a very deep love with a strong-minded man. She defied convention for him, risked shunning and censure. Shared his bed, but I believe, shared his obligations, too. Whatever he planned to do, attempted to do,