Are You Haunted (part nineteen)

Are You Haunted

(part nineteen)

He writhed, freed one arm and sat up.

His damp hair had taken the smell of Guy’s blankets like a sponge, mixed with the powdery scent of soap flakes. He was full awake. He was almost heartbroken. The window showed a gentle light, like dawn…

But fading.

A few twilit minutes more.

Then the sky went dark, and the night had just begun.

Powell remembered the shirt washed in his bathwater. Still clipped outside by one weatherbeaten clothespin. Maybe dry by morning. Maybe a dew-drenched mess on the ground.

How long had the house been empty? Chilled from his bath, he had snugged under covers and drifted, puzzling on this…

Something banged the roof. Something knocked…a pipe, bubbling and settling brought on by the running toilet.

So Rohdl was safe in town, staying with Summers…

Old Mrs. Drybrook might have lived here during the war. Summers hardly had talked about the son, Tovey’s father.

Powell furnished the dining room, placed Davis and his white-haired mother at one end of the table. He invented Drybrooks; ciphers, not speaking, unhappy together. The wife (he saw Isobel, knew this was untenable, covered her face with the waitress’s from the Crown) would be seated apart, near the front door: Go, interloper.

Next to her, little unloveable Dennis.

Was it guilt Tovey employed now, to have his way with Mrs. Drybrook? Were the others all dead? And would Isobel come back tomorrow, so he could ask her?

He woke to a pain, the knob of his elbow against the floor. It was so dark.

A window open…

Just to hear a car pass by would steady his nerves. It took jamming high in its frame before it would stick, and Powell, breathing the windless thick air, feared the window would crash onto his shoulders.

Summers so intent on telling his story to Powell in particular.

He thought about Guy’s bumping floorboard. What a sudden inspiration, making him stay the night, putting him on sentry, policing after Tovey. Tovey, at large with the car, might get himself anyplace…

Powell still felt leery of Lettie Drybrook. He plumped blankets, wrapped again, began to count snowflakes that fell over the Drybrooks’ ditch.

The equation was irrational.

He had allowed himself to be persuaded, and Rohdl no longer understood…

He could not now make these representations to himself and come to the same conclusion. He had been a hated child. He had been a gifted chemist. He did not count himself as having loved anyone, but he had shared in deprivation. He had been part of a circle.

Speak to me the name of a place, and my mind’s eye sees what your eyes have seen. Say a word that only you and I know—

19

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part twenty)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)