Cry for the Strangers Page 0,50
been?” Elaine asked. “Or am I prying?”
“You’re not prying at all,” Rebecca said emphatically. “In fact, maybe it would be good for us to talk about it, just to hear what someone else thinks. Sometimes we think we’re paranoid about Clark’s Harbor. But frankly, I hate to subject you to it—it’s so depressing.” She picked up the bottle of wine and refilled everyone’s glass.
“Oh, come on,” Elaine said. “If nothing else at least it’ll let us know what we’re in for.”
Softly, almost as if she were ashamed, Rebecca explained how they had come to feel that the whole town was somehow united against them. “But there’s never anything you can put your finger on,” Glen finished. “Every time something goes wrong there’s always a reasonable explanation. Except that I always have the unreasonable feeling that if I weren’t a stranger here none of it would ever have gone wrong at all. And then, of course, there was this morning.”
“This morning?” Elaine thought a moment. “Oh, you mean Mrs. Shelling?”
Glen nodded and Rebecca’s face tightened.
“Did you know her?” Brad probed.
“Not really,” Glen said. “I ran into her last night on the beach. Apparently just before she did it.”
“Just before she did it?” Elaine echoed. “You don’t mean—?”
“It happened on our property,” Glen said. “Our land goes back into the woods to the road, then parallels the road for a hundred feet or so. Miriam Shelling hanged herself from one of our trees.”
“Oh, God,” Elaine said softly. “I’m so sorry. Rebecca—it must have been terrible for you.”
“I keep seeing her,” Rebecca whispered. “Every time I close my eyes I keep seeing her. And the kids—what if one of them had seen her?”
“But it wasn’t anything to do with you,” Brad said.
“Wasn’t it?” Rebecca’s face was bleak. “I keep wondering. We talked to Miriam yesterday. She came to the gallery and started ranting at us. We thought she was just upset—”
“Obviously she was,” Brad pointed out.
“She kept saying ‘they’ got her husband and ‘they’ were going to get us too. And then last night—” Rebecca broke off her sentence and fought to keep from bursting into tears. While she struggled to hold herself together, her husband spoke.
“So you can see, it hasn’t been easy.” He laughed self-consciously. “Some welcome we’re giving you, huh? Really makes you want to settle down here, doesn’t it?”
“Actually, yes, it does,” Brad said. The Palmers stared at him. “You mentioned paranoia, and I’m not sure you were so far off base. You two have been living in pretty much of a vacuum out here as far as I can tell. Odd things happen in vacuums. Things get blown all out of proportion. Things that would seem small in ordinary circumstances suddenly seem terribly important And the longer it goes on, the worse it all seems to get But the key word is ‘seems.’ How bad are things, really? Are you going to be able to open the gallery before you run out of money?”
“It looks like it, but I’m not sure how we’ve managed.”
“You want me to tell you? By working steadily along, dealing with whatever has happened. Actually, everything has gone pretty much according to plan, hasn’t it?”
“Well, I’d hoped to have the gallery open by now—”
“Hoped,” Brad pounced. “But what had you planned on?”
Glen grinned sheepishly. “Actually, if you get right down to it, I’m a little bit ahead of schedule. I allowed a lot of time for clumsiness.”
“So what’s really gotten to you is the attitude you’ve run into, or more accurately, what you think you’ve run into.”
“Oh, come on, Brad, be fair,” Elaine cried. “You know damned well what Clark’s Harbor is like for strangers. You can read it all over the place. And you heard as well as I did what those people were saying about Glen the first day we were in town.”
“They were talking?” Glen said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. Elaine looked away, wishing she hadn’t spoken so quickly.
“Well, that’s something new,” he went on. “When I’m around that’s like everyone’s been struck dumb. What were they saying?”
“Oh, just the typical small town stuff about artists,” Elaine said, forcing a lightness she didn’t feel into her voice. But Rebecca would not let the subject drop.
“It must have been more than that,” she said gently. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have remembered it.”
“Well, the gist of the conversation—if you can call it that, since it was mostly just backbiting—was that no one in town seems to be glad you’re