“I didn’t marry his mother.”

She had wondered about the marital status of her parents. There had been hints here and there, a look from an Ickyite now and then. Icky was a notoriously upright village, and they wouldn’t take kindly to illegitimate children. And she had wondered about the families they had come from. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t already suspected the truth, but last summer Moses himself had refused to answer the direct question.

And now he was volunteering information like there was no tomorrow. “You are my grandfather,” she said, testing the sound of it on the night air. The stars did not alter in their courses. The meteor shower seemed to have tapered off. Everything seemed much as it was before she had said the words out loud.

And yet everything was changed.

“Yes,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Why?” she said in quick protest. “Why not? You knew I wanted to know who my family was, that one of the reasons I decided to come back to Newenham was to find out.”

He sighed, a sound she had never before heard him make. “I got as drunk as I could before I came out here.”

“Why?”

“Same reason as anybody looking for the courage to do the right thing.”

“Moses, I don’t know what you mean.”

He heaved himself to his feet and stood looking across the river at Bulge, the three-house village on the opposite shore, away to the south at the lights of an approaching boat, anywhere but at her. “I hear voices. It’s a hereditary curse, according to legend. You’re my granddaughter.”

When she got it, she only wondered why it had taken so long. “Are you saying I’m going to start hearing voices?” Her voice scaled up.

“I’m saying I think you already do.”

She searched frantically for something to say in reply to that, and came up empty.

“It’s why I started teaching you tai chi in the first place.”

She blinked, confused. “What? I thought… What are you talking about? You showed up on my doorstep one day and bullied me into horse stance and you wouldn’t leave until I got it right, and then you left me standing in it until I actually fell over! I thought it was some kind of initiation, that you did it to everyone who moves to Newenham, and so I went along with it because I wanted to make friends.”

“I was hoping,” he said, ignoring her interruption, “that if and when they started in on you, the discipline would give you some peace. Be nice if you didn’t have to start boozing it up. Boozing’s hell on the liver, and you’ve got a kid to raise.”

She was on her feet without knowing how she got there. She was so angry she stuttered. “You- I’m- This is bullshit, Moses. This is just total bullshit. Voices. Nobody hears voices; sometimes I think you don’t even hear voices.”

“Yeah, that’s your mother talking through your mouth, girl.”

“Nobody talks through my mouth but me!” She pulled herself together and said tightly, “You know, Moses, you’re going to have to make up your mind. Either the voices are talking or my mom is.”

His voice was quiet and a little sad. “I knew you’d be pissed.”

“Pissed?” She almost lost it, and only by an effort of iron will kept control. “I’m not pissed. You’re just confused, Moses, is all. You said yourself you’ve had too much to drink tonight. I’m grateful to you for telling me about my parents, and…” She softened, touched his shoulder, wary of offering an embrace. “You,” she said. “I have family now.”

“Not a family you can take much pride in,” he muttered.

“Stop that,” she said. “I am proud of you. A lot of people are. Liam cares for you, Bill loves you with everything she’s got, even Tim-”

“They’ll come, Wy. They’ll come when you least expect them, at the most inconvenient, inopportune times.”

“Moses-”

“They’ll come whether you want them to or not. I wish to God- Hell.” He turned and walked away.

“Moses?” she said, coming down the steps after him. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

“I’m fine, girl. Track down that man of yours and take him to that itty-bitty thing you call a bed. He’ll wipe the voices right out of your mind.”

He disappeared around the corner of the house, and she probably imagined what she heard next.

“At least for a while.”

The boat was closer to the mouth of the river, and she wondered in a detached sort of way where it was going, and why it had left the voyage upriver so late in the year. More meteors fell, but fewer and farther between, until at last they seemed to stop altogether.

Inside, the monitor was still flying through space. She shut the computer down and went to bed.

Liam never did come home.

TEN

Bill was curious about that coin.

She couldn’t say why exactly. She didn’t think it was because it was a gold coin. Maybe it was because she’d never seen any kind of a coin roll out of a dead man’s hand before, but then that had to be a pretty rare experience for everyone privileged enough to witness it.

Diana Prince had left the coin with Bill, in the custody of the local officer of the court. Bill, after a hard day’s work at magistrate’s court, didn’t want to deal with it, and so had left a blistering message on Liam’s phone mail, with as yet no response.

The coin was in a plastic bag inside her desk drawer. She drew it out now and scrabbled around for a pair of reading glasses. Maybe it was the way her eyes, blue and intense and thickly lashed, looked out over the tops of them, measuring, challenging, their expression somewhere between a dare and an invitation. The man standing in the doorway, for one of the few times in his life feeling every one of his years, knew a sudden, excessive need for comfort, for satisfaction, for forgetfulness.

It was a weeknight, and the bar had closed at midnight. He closed the door behind him. When she heard the lock snick home, she looked up. “Well,” she said, and sat back. She knew that look. Her heart skipped a beat. Twenty years, more, and her heart still skipped a beat, her nipples still hardened, the warm rush of feeling began between her thighs. Damned if she’d show it.

“Take your clothes off.”

She stood up. “Make me.”

He came around the desk at her and she kicked the chair out of the way before they fell on it. There wasn’t time to get to her house, there wasn’t time even to make it to the couch. He ripped her shirt open, buttons flying everywhere, and pulled her jeans down her legs, where they caught on the one shoe she hadn’t been able to get off in time. He didn’t kiss her or caress her, he pulled her legs apart and plunged in. She gasped and arched up, digging her nails into his bucking, heaving back. He bellowed out his pleasure and relief and collapsed on top of her, almost insensible.

They lay together, speechless, for a time. He stirred at last. “Christ.” He raised his head. “May I come in?”

Her laugh was a bare thread of sound. “Depends. Who wants in, my man or the old crank who’s been hanging out in my bar for the last month?”

“Both, I think.” He propped himself on an elbow and smoothed the long strands of thick white hair back from her face. “I’m sorry.”

She gave her hips an experimental flex. “You going to make it up to me?”

He laughed, burying his face in her hair. “You bet.”

They dozed a little, impervious to the fact that they were half-dressed, on the floor, and that one of the wheels of the desk chair had rolled over a lock of Bill’s hair.

“I told her,” he said after a while.

“Finally got up the nerve?”

“Finally got enough beer in me.”

She hesitated. “Moses?”

“What?”

“Are you sure?”

He nuzzled her breast. “I wish I wasn’t.”

So did she. “What do you think she’ll do?”

“Get a lobotomy.”

“Seriously.”

He sighed and rolled to his back, swearing when he cracked his head on the couch. “I don’t know. Up to her. I’ve prepared her as much as I can. I’ve delivered the bad news. She didn’t believe it, but she’s been told.”