The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin

Author:Stephen M. Irwin [Irwin, Stephen M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53356-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Suzette sat in a silent simmer the entire drive back from the church. Nicholas pulled up in front of Katharine’s house at 68 Lambeth Street. Rain pattered on the roof.

“You are your own worst enemy, you do know that,” she said.

He nodded. “Cate used to say that.”

Suzette blinked. He hadn’t said it for sympathy; it was true. Cate had often chastized him for acting before he thought things through. But the mention of Cate turned down Suzette’s thermostat just a little.

“She was right. What did she ever see in a twit like you?”

He shrugged. It was a mystery he’d never be able to solve.

Suzette opened her door. “Coming in to see Mum?” she asked.

He begged off. His mother’s forced pleasantness so soon after the defensive hostility of Pritam Anand would give him the bends. He agreed to meet Suzette the next morning for a decent breakfast at the café near the railway station and make a plan for visiting Plow & Vine Health Foods. He waved and watched her hurry across the front yard and through the form of Gavin Boye. The sight made his stomach tighten. He looked quickly away and drove off.

By the time he’d parked outside his flat on Bymar Street, the rain had dropped to a steady drizzle. He was halfway up the concrete stairs when he decided he didn’t want to go inside. His feet were anxious to move. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and walked back down the stairs and onto the street.

The rain finally petered out and a wind had invited itself to shift the air, turning it cold and nudging the black tops of trees. Nicholas was angry with himself. It could have gone so much better with Pritam. Suzette was right. And now he’d alienated a person who felt like a man who could be trusted. Nicholas couldn’t blame the reverend. Spoken aloud, his theory on the murders was a fabulist’s: the stuff of nineteenth-century fairy tales where endings weren’t happy and evil was as powerful as good.

How had everything gone so wrong so fast? Four months ago, he and Cate had had a life to be envied. Was that the problem? That they’d had the gall to be truly happy? Had they offended the gods by flaunting their pleasure with their simple plans and simple love? One motorcycle trip. One ladder. One phone call. Halloween child. Samhain child.

Church. Green Man. Walpole Park. A face wreathed in leaves.

One fall down cement stairs and a day world becomes a night world. The dead walk unmollified, doomed to mark time while some cosmic starter gun fires, reloads, and fires again and again.

They saw him, the dead. And they knew he could see them; they watched him. As some respite from their own morbid television rerun performances, perhaps they looked to Nicholas for help. But he couldn’t help them. Nor could they teach him.

Why hadn’t he died in the bike crash?

Why had Cate died instead?

Why hadn’t Gavin shot him?

Nicholas stopped. He was at the corner of Lambeth Street.

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