question. If you’re planning to try to watch her every minute of every day, then maybe you should have locked her up.”
“Carl,” Mary began, “you don’t understand—”
“No, I don’t,” Carl broke in, his voice much gentler. “I don’t understand at all. But I know you brought Kelly down here to give her a chance at a new life, and it seems to me you might as well start right now.”
Mary hesitated for a moment, her eyes never leaving her father-in-law’s face. It was a strong face, unlined, looking at least twenty years younger than its sixty-four years. His hair, the same burnished chestnut as Ted’s, showed not a hint of gray, and his blue eyes were as bright as those of any young man just starting out in the world. That, she supposed, was the result of his ultimate triumph—he’d hung on, and finally made a success of his life, and it had given him a strength she’d never really noticed before.
The words he’d just spoken, she realized, had the ring of truth. They were here to start over again—all of them—and they might just as well start now. She turned to her daughter.
“How long will you be gone?”
Kelly felt a surge of hope. “N-Not very long. I just thought I’d walk along the canal and look at all the houses Granddaddy built.”
Mary took a deep breath. “All right. But come home before it gets too dark, okay? And stay away from the swamp.”
Kelly nodded, hurrying out of the house before her parents had time to change their minds. She crossed the lawn, paused when she came to a narrow footpath that edged the canal, then turned right. She walked slowly, studying the houses strung along the waterway. They were much smaller than her grandfather’s, occupied by retired people who didn’t need nearly as much space as her grandfather had.
“I don’t need it either,” he’d said that afternoon. “I guess I built this big place just because I could afford it, and I’ve been rattling around in it ever since. No fool like an old fool. Still, it seems like it’s finally come in kind of handy.”
She walked about a quarter of a mile, slowly realizing that the houses were all alike—there were only four models, and two of those were simply mirror images of the other two. Bored with the houses, she turned her attention to the swamp on the other side of the canal.
She’d heard about it from her parents all her life, but now that she was actually seeing it, it didn’t look at all as she had imagined. She’d always thought of it as a scary place, filled with a tangle of vines and infested with snakes and insects. But now that she was close to it, it didn’t appear frightening at all. There were vines, all right, twisting up into the cypress trees, and the mangroves looked strange with their branching roots, but there was something about the swamp that struck her as vaguely familiar.
As if she knew it, although she’d never seen it before.
Her pace slowed as the hypnotic drone of tiny creatures drifted out of the wilderness. Finally she stopped walking altogether and stood listening, beginning to sort out one sound from another. There were bird songs rising above the drone of insects, and the high whistles of tree frogs contrasted sharply with the lower tones of the bullfrogs.
A flicker of movement caught her eye. She peered across the canal, straining to see through the failing light. Then, almost hidden in the foliage, she saw a face.
As quickly as it appeared, the face was gone. For a moment Kelly thought she had imagined it.
Had the man—the man she’d seen in her dreams, and in the mirror that night a month ago—followed her here?
No. This face had been younger.
A boy’s face.
And it had been real. Real, and somehow—in a way she didn’t understand—connected to her.
Her eyes swept the area again, and she caught sight of a footbridge a few yards up the canal. Without thinking, she hurried up the path and crossed the bridge.
She paused on the other side. There was still enough light so she could clearly make out a narrow track leading through the foliage. She hesitated, then made up her mind. It wouldn’t be fully dark for at least another half hour. Certainly it couldn’t take her more than a few minutes to find the boy.