A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,116

so? I was talking to one of the kids about a hotel down there that she'd stayed at as a child. If it's still there, it should be wonderful.

A view of St. Michael's Mount. I thought we'd take the train down and hire a car when we got there. Or bicycles. Would you like to hire bicycles, Nell?"

He felt her hand on his cheek. At the touch, his heart swelled, and he knew he was horribly close to tears. "Jo," she whispered. "Nell's dead."

"Don't say that!" he returned fiercely.

"I've done terrible things. I can't bear for you to know. I thought I was safe from them, that I'd run from them right into forever."

"No!" He continued mindlessly, passionately to see to her wounds.

"I love you, Jonah."

That stopped him. His face sank into his hands. "What do I call you?" he whispered. "I don't even know who you are!"

"Jo, Jonah, my love, my only love - "

Her voice was a torment he could barely endure, and when she reached out for him, he was broken and ran from the room, slamming the door firmly, and irrevocably, behind him.

He stumbled to a chair, hearing his own breathing tear at the air, feeling wedges of panic drive themselves into his stomach and groin. He sat, staring unseeing at the material objects that comprised their home, and desperately pushed away from him the one piece of information that was at the core of his terror.

Three weeks ago, the police sergeant had said. He had lied to her, an immediate response rising from the horror of her incomprehensible allegation. He had not been in London with his wife at that time but rather at a four-day conference in Exeter, followed by two additional days of fundraisers for Testament House. Nell was supposed to have gone with him but at the last moment had begged off with flu. So she said. Had she been ill? Or had she seen it as an opportunity to travel to York-shire?

"No!" The word came out involuntarily, from between his teeth. Despising himself for even considering the question for a moment, Jonah willed his breathing to calm, willed his muscles to relax.

He reached for his guitar, not to play it but to reaffirm its reality and to reestablish the meaning it had in his life, for he had been sitting on the back stairs of Testament House, in the semi-darkness, playing strains of the music he loved when she first spoke to him.

"That's so nice. D'you think anyone could learn?" She came to crouch next to him on the step, her eyes on his fingers as they moved expertly among the strings, and she smiled, a child's smile, lit with pleasure.

It had been simple to teach her to play, for she was a natural mimic: something seen or heard was never forgotten. Now she played as often to him as he did to her, not with his assurance or passion but with a melancholy sweetness that long ago should have told him what he didn't want to face now.

He stood abruptly. To assure himself, he opened book after book and saw the name, Nell Graham, written in each volume in her neat script. To show ownership, he wondered, or to convince herself?

"No!"

He picked up a photograph album from the bottom shelf and hugged it to his chest. It was a document of Nell, a verification of the fact that she was real, that she had no other life but the one she shared with him. He didn't even need to open the album to know what lay within its pages: a pictorial history of the love they shared, of the memories that were an integral part of the tapestry of their lives being woven together. In a park, on a trail, dreaming quietly at dawn, laughing at the antics of birds on the beach. All of these bore testimony, were illustrations of Nell's life and the things she loved.

His eyes drifted, for more assurance, to her plants in the window. The African violets had always reminded him the most of her. The beautiful flowers poised themselves delicately, precariously, at the tips of their stalks. The heavy green leaves protected and surrounded them.

They were plants that looked as if they could never survive in the rigours of the London weather, but in spite of their appearance, they were deceptive plants really, plants of remarkable strength.

Looking at them, he knew at last and fought fruitlessly to deny it. Tears, long in coming, broke