Yet now, as she stared in mute horror at the woman, Kim had no idea who she might be.
Then the horrifying tableau came to life.
The car's horn blasted again. The woman screamed.
The scream was cut off by a terrible thumping sound.
The woman's body was lifted into the air, and a second later it dropped back, falling onto the hood of the car, where it glanced off the windshield and was hurled to the street.
There was a screech of brakes, nearly lost in the screams of the crowd. In an instant the woman on the street was surrounded. Kim could hear someone shouting for a doctor.
Then she saw a priest-Father MacNeill-kneel down by the woman and begin to pray.
Kim's father and mother started to move toward the fallen woman, and she moved along with them. But then something, some force, made her pause.
Jared!
She could feel him!
She could actually feel him again!
But where was he?
Stopping, Kim scanned the area and saw nothing except the quickly growing crowd around the injured woman, who was now moaning and reaching up for help.
Then she spotted him.
Her brother was standing in the square, perhaps fifty feet away. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the woman who'd just been struck by the car.
Looking at her, and smiling.
She opened her mouth to call Jared. Before his name left her lips, however, he turned and looked at her, as if she'd actually called to him.
The smile-the strange grimace of pleasure that had twisted his lips as he gazed at the accident victim-was gone.
Instead, Kim saw him glaring at her. Glaring at her angrily, as if he'd just been-
Kim stopped short, unwilling even to think the word she'd been about to use. But as she watched her brother, she knew there was no other way to describe his expression.
He looked guilty.
He looked as if he was doing something wrong, and he knew it.
He looked as if he'd just been caught.
CHAPTER 29
Phil Engstrom banged the gavel to bring the meeting to order exactly one hour after it had originally been scheduled. He struck the podium again and again, but the murmur refused to die away as the crowd that had turned out for the meeting continued to whisper among themselves about the accident.
An ambulance had arrived from the fire station around the corner less than a minute after the car struck Ellie Roberts, and she was rushed to the hospital no more than five minutes after she fell to the pavement. Phil himself had seen the accident from start to finish, and in his eyes it had been quite simple: Ellie stepped out from between two cars to cross the street at exactly the same time that Clarie Van Waters turned the corner. To Phil, the accident had been an unfortunate confluence of Ellie not watching where she was going and eighty-year-old Clarie insisting on driving her ancient DeSoto years after her license should have been lifted.
Nevertheless, the rumors began flying even before Ellie was taken to the hospital. The crux of the gossip was that since Ellie had been on her way to protest the variance Ted Conway wanted, Conway therefore must have had something to do with the accident. That Ted had been nowhere near either Ellie or the car and could in no way have been responsible seemed to cut no ice whatsoever. The problem, Phil thought, was that the accident and the talk that quickly accompanied it was enough to change the whole tenor of the meeting. Where an hour ago he had sensed that the town was fairly evenly split and a vote could go either way, now he could feel support swing toward Father MacNeill's opposition to the variance. He'd toyed briefly with postponing the meeting, but quickly abandoned that idea, knowing it would be interpreted-correctly-as a stalling device. So, even as he banged the gavel to bring the meeting to order, Phil Engstrom was wondering about how he and Ted might reverse the decision later.
"All right, everyone," he said. "If we don't want to be here all night, we better get started." He droned through the legalisms and rules of procedure, then decided to let Father MacNeill have his say first. Better to let Ted see what he was up against, he thought, and then decide how to handle it.
Father MacNeill moved to the podium slowly, his head bowed as if he were just now thinking about what he wanted to say. Even when he faced the crowd, he said nothing, fingers tented beneath his chin as if he were still deep in thought, or perhaps even seeking divine guidance. But when he finally spoke, he never mentioned God or the Church. The Catholics in the room, Phil Engstrom knew, were mostly already convinced. Instead, Father MacNeill talked about the history of the town, about its stability, about its continuity. Phil Engstrom didn't even need to look at the approving nods coming from every part of the room to sense which way the wind was blowing.
"Here in St. Albans," the priest said, moving into his summation, "there has always been a place for everything, and everything has always been in its place. Certainly, none of us can have any objection to a new inn opening in our town. I, for one, would support it. But the Conway house stands in a residential area-a family area-and to invite strangers into the very heart of our neighborhood strikes me as folly." His eyes moved from face to face. "The place for strangers-and whatever pleasures they might seek-does not lie in the area in which our children play." A murmur of approval rippled over the room, and Phil Engstrom knew it was all over. The priest's invocation of the specter of child molestation-although he hadn't quite said it-would be enough.
As Father MacNeill moved back to his seat, pausing every few steps to accept the murmured praise of his parishioners, Phil turned the podium over to Ted Conway. "Good luck," he muttered under the rustle of the audience readjusting themselves on the hard benches, though he didn't see how Ted was going to turn this around. Right now, he didn't think Conway would get more than ten votes out of the whole lot of them.
Ted stood at the podium, gazing out at the sea of faces that filled the auditorium. Throughout the priest's speech, he had felt the mood of the room harden, sensed that what little support he'd had left when the meeting opened was washing away under the cleric's river of words.
But Ted had also noticed that as Father MacNeill scanned the audience, addressing himself first to one person, then to another, meeting the eyes of nearly everyone in the room, he'd never looked at him.
Not once.
Now, Ted's own eyes sought out the priest, who was sitting next to Father Bernard with his head bowed while his fingers manipulated his rosary beads. Ted willed him to look up, to meet his gaze.
Though Father MacNeill continued to pray, Ted was certain he saw the line of the priest's jaw harden.
He can feel me, Ted thought. He knows I want him to look at me, and he won't do it. His eyes shifted away from Father MacNeill, and once more he scanned the room.
A month ago he would have been feeling the thirst for a drink-indeed, he wouldn't have come to the meeting at all without at least a couple of belts of scotch to bolster his courage. But not tonight. Tonight, as he gazed out at the hostile eyes fixed on him, he felt no desire for a drink.
Nor any fear that he would fail.
Ted picked a man in the fourth row whose eyes were already smoldering, although he had yet to utter a word.
"My family has been in St. Albans as long as St. Albans has existed," he said. "I know it. You know it." He focused on the angry-looking man. "We've all heard the stories, and I'm not going to deny them." The man frowned, looking less certain. "But I'm not going to talk about those old stories. Instead, I'm going to talk about myself, and my wife, and my three children, and the dream I have."
The audience stirred once again, and Ted saw that it wasn't only the man in the fourth row who now looked uncertain; he saw hostility dissolving into curiosity throughout the room. When he resumed speaking, his voice was as low as Father MacNeill's had been, but commanded every bit as much attention as the priest's. Slowly, his eyes moving from one face to another, he told the story of how he had come to bring his family to St. Albans.