Cry for the Strangers Page 0,103

all night and all morning still fell softly, soaking into the beach immediately, leaving the sand close-packed and solid. The tide was for out, and the level beach, exposed far beyond its normal width, glistened wetly.

Glen walked out toward the surf line, then turned south, moving slowly, almost reluctantly. He was trying to decide how to break the news to Rebecca and what her response would be.

She would give up and demand that they leave Clark’s Harbor. Or she would be angry. Or prepared for a fight, ready to do anything to show that she could not be frightened off. The last, he thought, would be typical of Rebecca.

He was wrong. Rebecca saw him coming when he was still fifty yards from the old house on the beach and went out to meet him.

“It happened, didn’t it?” she asked softly.

Glen looked up, startled. He hadn’t seen her coming—he’d been staring at the sand at his feet, preoccupied. He nodded mutely.

“What was it?”

“The gallery’s been vandalized,” Glen told her.

“Vandalized? You mean someone broke in?”

“They broke in, they wrecked the gallery, they smashed all your pottery, and they shredded all but one of my canvases.”

“Which one?” Rebecca asked irrelevantly, and Glen realized that she was shutting out what he had said. Of all the possible reactions, this was one Glen hadn’t considered.

“The one I gave Chip,” he said softly. Rebecca turned slowly and gazed at the old house that was the subject of Glen’s only surviving canvas.

“Somehow that seems right,” she commented. Then she slipped her arm through Glen’s and stared up into his troubled eyes. “Let’s not worry about it now. Not this minute anyway. If I have to decide what to do right now I’ll make the wrong decision. So let’s wait, all right? We’ll talk it over with Brad and Elaine, then pretend nothing’s happened for the rest of the day. And tonight when we’re in bed we’ll make up our minds.”

Glen pulled her closer and kissed her softly. “If we decide in bed I know what we’ll do: we’ll stick it out here. When we’re in bed anything seems possible.”

“Then so be it,” Rebecca murmured. “But let’s not talk about it right now, all right?”

The chaos in the Randalls’ house was only slightly more orderly than that in the gallery, and Glen tried to sound cheerful as he made the comparison. But as he listened to Glen’s story of what had happened the night before Brad wondered if Robby had stayed in bed last night: Glen’s description of the gallery sounded all too much like the havoc the boy had been known to create in the past. So when Robby and Missy arrived, scrambling over the driftwood on their way home from school, Brad quickly found an excuse to take Robby for a long walk on the beach.

“Pretty out here, isn’t it?” he said casually when they were out of earshot of the house. Robby nodded noncommittally.

“Your dad tells me you love it out here,” Brad prodded gently.

“It’s all right. But I like it best when it rains.”

“Why’s that?”

Robby turned the question over in his mind. Nobody had ever asked him that before, and he hadn’t ever thought about it. Now, with the openness of childhood, he began thinking out loud. “I guess I feel excited when the storms come up,” he said slowly. “But it’s a funny land of excited. Not like Christmas, or my birthday, when I know something good’s going to happen. It’s more like a feeling in my body. I get sort of tingly, and sometimes it’s hard to move. But it’s not a bad feeling—it’s more like it’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s exciting and relaxing all at the same time. Sometimes when I’m out in the storms I feel like lying down on the ground and letting the rain fall all over me.”

“You go out in the storms?” Brad tried to keep his voice casual but there was a note of concern in it that Robby detected immediately. He stared up at Brad, his eyes large and frightened.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” he begged. “They wouldn’t like it. They’d think I was still side, but I’m not. The storms make me well.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Brad reassured the boy. “But I’d like to know what happens when you go out in the storms.”

“Nothing, really. Missy thinks she sees things when we’re out together, but nothing ever happens. Sometimes I go by myself, but sometimes Missy comes with me,” he explained, though Brad