And she clearly liked Guilford, though she didn’t pay him serious attention until he stopped coming in to Antonio’s with the stink of fish all over himself. He cleaned up, saved his salary, worked double shifts until he could afford to buy the gear to start his own photo studio — the only portrait studio in town, even if it wasn’t much more, in those days, than a storeroom over a butcher shop.
They were married in 1930. Nick came along in ’33. There had been another child, a baby girl, in ’35, but she died of influenza before she could be christened.
The shop had fed his family for fifteen years.
Nothing remained of it but bricks and char.
Mackelroy stared woefully through a mask of soot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”
“You were here when it started?”
“I was in the office. Thought I’d make up some invoices before I headed home. A little after business hours. That was when they came through the windows.”
“What came through the windows?”
“Milk bottles, it looked like, full of rags and gasoline. Smelled like gasoline. They came through the window like bricks, scared the crap out of me, then boom, the room’s burning and I can’t get through the flames to the fire extinguisher. I called the fire department from the phone in the diner, but the fire burned too fast — it was just about a done deal before the pumper got here.”
Guilford thought: Bottles?
Gasoline?
He took Mackelroy by the shoulders. “You’re telling me somebody did this on purpose?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t an accident.”
Guilford looked back toward his car.
Toward his son.
Three things, perhaps not coincidence.
The arson.
The picket.
The stranger Abby had talked to this morning.
“Fire chief wants to talk to you,” Mackelroy was saying, “and I think the sheriff wants a word too.”
“Tell them to call me at home.”
He was already running.
“Son of a bitch!” Nick said in the car.
Guilford gave him a distracted glance. “You want to watch that kind of language, Nick.”
“You said it first.”
“Did I?”
“About five times in the last ten minutes. Shouldn’t we slow down?”
He did. A little. Nick relaxed. Summer-brown wildlands fled past the Ford’s dusty window.
“Son of a bitch,” his father said.
Abby was safe, if concerned, and Guilford felt somewhat foolish for hurrying home. Both the fire chief and the sheriff had telephoned, Abby said. “All of that can wait till morning,” he told her. “Let’s lock up and get some sleep.”
“Can you sleep?”
“Probably not. Not right away. Let’s get Nick tucked in, at least.”
Once Nick was squared away, Guilford sat at the kitchen table while Abby perked coffee. Coffee this close to midnight signified a family crisis. Abby moved around the kitchen with her usual economy. Tonight, at least, her frown resembled Nick’s.
Abby had aged with supreme grace. She was stocky but not fat. Save for the gray just beginning to show at her temples, she might have been twenty-five.
She gave Guilford a long look, debating something with herself. Finally she said, “You may as well talk about it.”
“What’s that, Abby?”
“For the last month you’ve been nervous as a cat. You hardly touch an evening meal. Now this.” She paused. “The fire chief told me it wasn’t an accident.”
His turn to hesitate. “Tim Mackelroy says a couple of homemade firebombs came through the window.”
“I see.” She folded her hands. “Guilford, why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what’s been bothering you?”
He said nothing.
“Is it something that happened before we met?”
“I doubt it.”
“Because you don’t talk about those times much. That’s all right — I don’t have to know everything about you. But if we’re in danger, if Nick is in danger—”
“Abby, honestly, I don’t know. True, I’m worried. Somebody torched my business, and maybe it was random lunacy or maybe somebody out there is holding some kind of grudge. All I can do is lock up and talk to Sheriff Carlysle in the morning. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you or Nick.”
She gazed at him a long time. “I’ll go to bed, then.”
“Sleep if you can,” Guilford told her. “I’ll sit out here a while.”
She nodded.
The arson.
The stranger at the door.
The picket.
You leave a thing behind, Guilford thought, and time passes, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years, and that ought to be the end of it.
He remembered it all vividly, in all the bright colors of a dream, the killing winter in the ancient city, the agony of London, the loss of Caroline and Lily. But, Christ, that had been a quarter of a century ago — what could be left of that time that would make him worth killing?
If what the picket had told him then was true—
— but he had written that off as a fever dream, a distorted memory, a half hallucination—
But if what the picket had told him was true, maybe twenty-five years was the blink of an eye. The gods had long memories.
Guilford went to the window. The bay was dark, only a few commercial vessels showing lights. A dry wind moved the lace curtains Abby had hung. Stars shivered in the sky.
Time to be honest, Guilford thought. No wishful thinking. Not when your family’s at stake.
It was possible — admit it — that old debts were about to be collected.
The hard question. Could he have prevented this?
No.
Anticipated it?
Maybe. He had wondered often enough if there might not one day be a reckoning. Far as the world knew, the Finch expedition had simply vanished in the wilderness between the Bodensee and the Alps. And the world had got on well enough without him.
But what if that had changed?
Abby and Nicholas, Guilford thought.
No harm must come to them.
No matter what the gods wanted.
He followed Abby to bed a couple of hours before dawn. He didn’t want to sleep, only to close his eyes. The presence of her, the soft music of her breath, eased his thoughts.
He woke to sunlight through the east window, to Abby, fully dressed, her hand on his shoulder.
He sat up.
“He’s back,” she said. “That man.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
He thought of all the ways the continent had changed in the last quarter century.
New harbors, settlements, naval bases. Rail and roads to the interior. Mines and refineries. Airstrips.
The new District system, the elected Governors, the radio networks. Homesteads on the Russian steppes, this side of the volcanic zone that divided Darwinia from Old Asia. Skirmish battles with Arabs and Turks. The bombing of Jerusalem, this new war with the Japanese, the draft riots up north.