Winter: Cricket and Grey

By A. R. Williamson

Cricket Winters is a second generation apothecary in the rural Willamette Valley. American culture has just kind of... wound down. Times are hard, and most people don't have much.

Her parents have both died, and burying her father means actually digging the grave. At the grave side she meet Grey, the mysterious man whom her father charged with her safekeeping.

She knocks down an FBI agent, gets over an old love, makes a deal with a gangster, and becomes the target of a very scary killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. R. Williamson
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991178308

A. R. Williamson

A. R. Williamson survived 6 years in the wilds of the Willamette Valley which inspired her first novel 'Winter; Cricket and Grey'. She learned to shoot, to can, and to alienate a whole community of bible thumpers. Now she resides in northern California and enjoys a cozy, if impecunious, life with her husband, son, mother, and six pets.

Book preview

Winter

Cricket and Grey

By A. R. Williamson

Copyright 2013 A. R. Williamson

Smashwords Edition

Cover Art copyright 2013: Sharon Eisely

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter One

The night my mother was delivered home to us on a donkey cart with four bullets to her chest and one to her head, a dark red coagulated river choking through her curly bright copper hair, I thought I’d learned all a person needed to know about death. I saw my father’s spirit empty out like a trickling mountain spring into a great rushing river headed for the ocean to be lost in an anonymous lunar pull of tides and eddies. I saw him leaning over my mother, keening low, crushing tears away from his face with his blocky rough hands, which even now I remember noticing particularly (the way you notice odd details when the greater details are too huge to swallow), how the curly hairs on his big knuckles were shining like red spun gold in the low light of the cottage, wondering how I had managed not to notice how hairy his hands were until that night. Such are the inane things that go through young heads at the most solemn moments.

When my mother died, I learned that watching other people lose their loved ones is much different than losing your own. I learned that up close and personal, death is like a strange gruesome dream; the impossible de-animation of a body that used to scream and laugh and dream and fight and sleep and wake again and again and again, grown hollow, pale, and still. I took the sight of her in, and inhaled the details with a painful hunger to change them; to fill the small crusted hole in her head with flesh and life, and pull her hair back into the chignon she wore, which was always coming loose. Then, just as I braced myself against a rising tide of hysteria, my father took her away from me.

I was not allowed to sit at my father’s side to do my part preparing mother for burial. He secreted himself in their bedroom to perform these offices alone. I remember feeling like a powder keg of conflicting emotions: relief at not having to see her naked chest, shame that I felt relief, and a strange feeling of isolation from both of my parents. My father kept the door closed until she was ready. He ate nothing. He might have been drinking, but though he was ragged when he finally emerged, patting me on the cheek absently as he passed me in the kitchen, telling me she was ready, he didn’t smell sour like a man deep in the bottle. He left our town cottage on his bicycle without another word to me, heading, I knew, for Hill Road, up out of McMinnville proper and into the surrounding hills. We have property up there, a cob cabin father built himself in the likeness of the old thatched cottages in Scotland where he grew up. I knew he was going up there to dig my mother’s grave.

I think mother would have preferred to be buried in town, in our own cottage garden, but it was too small to get a permit for human burial, so she would be buried in a sunny spot in the half acre clearing around our cabin in the woods. This was vastly preferable to the public burial ground, where people could bury their dead in a mass grave that was excavated periodically like a huge human compost pile, the bones removed and sent to the dump, then refilled with fresh bodies. The old cemetery outside of town was still operational, but I have never known anyone who could afford to purchase a plot there.

After my father left, I went in to see mother laid out. I’m not going to lie and say I fell in a heap of tears. I wish I had, because I think that’s what normal daughters do. When I looked at her I was scared, more than anything. It wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen. I’d seen plenty, laid out through every winter in my memory; taken by influenza and the bone-chilling cold, through accidents, and old age. I was scared because I didn’t feel broken, but I could see that father was.

It’s not that I didn’t love her, but I felt unfinished with her, like we’d been working up to something and never quite got there. I was always trying to find myself in her, or to find something in myself that I could say, That part of me is hers. I constantly fell short of her in everything, even the apothecary work she trained me in. My mother would say to me, You’re Peter with breasts, my girl! which made my father laugh out loud, the irony being that I didn’t have much to speak of in the breast department. She wasn’t wrong, of course.

The things my father taught me came easily; the hunting, the boxing, the butchering and the stalking of animals. My temper was his, as was my innate restlessness. But every time she mentioned how much like my father I was, it felt like a dig in my ribs; like a small thorn caught in my clothing, scratching and stabbing me at random moments. Just once, I would like her to have noticed something in me of her own, so that I could feel as close to her as I did to my father.

Seeing her laid out cold and speechless did not make me cry. Instead I felt unfinished and cheated. Then, simply numb.

I learned that death makes people obsequious for no apparent gain. My mother wasn’t a person many people in town loved, but she was a person they all needed. I heard the things they said behind her back, because I know how to keep my mouth shut, and my feet silent. I know what most of them said to each other when they thought none of us were listening; that my parents must have been related, that they must have been cousins, because there were so few redheads in our county. Ignorant fools! My parents weren’t from here. They came from Scotland, where red hair is so common no one even notices it. I heard them call her a witch. Sometimes I heard these things through other girls, and I spent my early years with a string of black eyes, though truth be told, I delivered more of them than I received. I knew some thought mother worshiped the devil. She was called too proud. I’d be proud too, if I was my mother, because no matter how hard she was to impress, she was a person worth emulating. Worth loving. In spite of consistently failing to make her proud, my loyalty and love for her were unshakable.

But these people, when they streamed through our house for the wake, they said, Mairead was such a fine woman! and, I’ll miss Mairead so much! And, She was such a good friend!

They wouldn’t miss her at all. They would only miss what she did for them. How she would come to tend their sick children when no doctor would do it because doctors refused to be paid in cheese, or fruit, or carpentry. She wasn’t too proud to attend bedside vigils; watching fevers rise, never too tired to send overworked sick parents to bed while she stayed with their children all night instead of her own. Instead of me. They said, as they slaked their thirst on our loss, that my mother was so loved by everyone and was such a good woman that she’d surely be accepted into Jesus’ bosom in heaven.

It made me want to vomit.

That’s not true! I wanted to hit them, to lash out and make them shut up. I held my tongue as long as I could, before I had to leave the house. To leave my father to those liars who would none of them lift a finger to help find out who killed this woman they said they loved so much. They would retreat into their own less tainted lives, and feel good about themselves for having said the right thing.

I couldn’t stand it anymore and made for the French doors in the kitchen, when father grabbed my arm to detain me. Take your gun, lass, I won’t be up to the cabin tonight. You know I’ll stay here with James and Mary, drinking. He nodded to the door, Go on. I felt bad to be leaving him, but if I had stayed, I would have laid someone out. Maybe if James and Mary Martin had brought Tommy and Julie, they might have tempered my anger, and I would have stayed, but they had to tend to a farm emergency and couldn’t be spared. Such is life.

I left father to play nice at the wake, and rode my bicycle out of town and up the hill to our property in the woods, where I could hear the crickets singing in the glorious quiet, and my mother whispering over my shoulder that I was being selfish and immature and that father needed me. It’s an uncomfortable fact that if you were never good enough for a person when they were alive, you will never be good enough for them after they die. It’s impossible to impress the dead.

I did learn that you still have to work, no matter how long you’re in black bands. Life keeps moving forward. My mother’s death left a hole in the community that it was my duty to fill. She died in the summer, a slow time for an apothecary as far as dispensing is concerned, but it was a busy time for gathering and processing the herbs I would count on during the winter months, when ailments were exaggerated by the damp cold weather and the lack of fresh produce.

I didn’t spend a lot of time drowning in my loss, and though I know father struggled with his black grief every day, from the moment he woke until the moment he crashed into bed at night, he worked too. He was a guard for various kinds of transport between the surrounding counties so he was gone for periods of time. I believe he found relief in his work. When he was home, he worked hard helping me tend the small crops we grew and forage for medicinal plants coming into season. He helped me prepare our small harvests for the drying shed he had built in the back of the cottage garden. We made and stored our herbals in the town cottage, because the cabin was too far up in the hills for sick people to get to.

We couldn’t take time off from our work to grieve, because we had hefty death taxes to pay for the privilege of my mother dying.

I’ve heard my parents and their friends reminiscing about the days when you were only taxed if you inherited something substantial. Nowadays the government took an opportunity to take a larger chunk from something they could always count on – death. Father brushed off my questions about the total bill, telling me not to worry, that he would take care of it, and I trusted him, letting it go.

Other people noticed a change in father, and hinted darkly that maybe he was never going to recover from my mother’s death. How’s your father, Dearie? they’d ask. Peter was always devoted to Mairead, I’m sure I haven’t heard him laugh for months. So sad…so sad. Their comments gave me the feeling that I was somehow outside the sad event, that I was just an interloper in The Great Life of Peter and Mairead Winters. What right did I have to expect anyone to think my life had changed at all? I was not crying at her grave each day, or draping myself across their doorsteps begging for surrogate mothering. I’ll bet they all would have loved that, to see me knocked down, humbled with pain and suffering. It’s true that father never removed his black bands, but it’s not as though he went dragging his heart through the dust behind him every day in any great display of bereavement. Still, he was greatly pitied (and sighed over) by the local women.

If it hadn’t been for the Martins, I suppose I would have felt almost completely alone. Making any trip over the hills to Pacific City, fifty miles of broken road to the west of us, usually required staying the night. In the years since my mother’s death I made that trip a lot more often than my mother would have approved of me doing, what with it taking time away from my work and my responsibilities. But Mary and James were my parents’ oldest friends and they filled some of the silence in my life with their comfortable warm presence. Julie, their daughter, is the best person in the world I know and at the time of my mother’s death she was embroiled in a particularly messy affair with some slightly older man, and listening to her tell me all the improbable details that only best friends tell each other kept me tethered to my own life with some enjoyment, and when we couldn’t see each other, we used our fathers’ pigeon post to send messages back and forth, which were occasionally intercepted by her older brother Tommy who was running the farm by then. James relinquished the reins to Tommy, so he could take more jobs as an armed guard; work he and my father often did together, and which was how they met each other before any of us kids were born.

Like so many girls, I used to be in love with Tommy Martin. Tall Tommy with hair so pale it appeared to be illuminated by sunshine even on cloudy days and dark brown eyes that glint with mischief and undress you while he laughs…that’s what other girls say about him but the sad truth is that Tommy has never undressed me with his eyes.

Anyway, Tommy thought we were degrading the pigeon post’s purpose by sending messages about things like the men Julie was dating, and the men who weren’t dating me. Before he took over running the Martin farm in James’ stead he was a lot more fun. I guess he had to become dour in order to be taken seriously, but nothing is more tiresome than people becoming so stiff that they don’t see the fun of sending cheerful notes on the leg of a carrier bird. He said we could call each other or use the public internet to gossip, but I reminded him that we still hadn’t replaced our phone after it broke years ago, because most of the people we would have wanted to call couldn’t afford a phone service anyway, and using the public computer was annoying and expensive when we could send Euclid or Troy back and forth for free. The hidden bonus in using the pigeons is that it necessitated more visits, in order to trade the birds back (pigeons, you know, only fly one direction: home).

It was within the first year of my mother’s death that Tommy began his ridiculously long engagement to Rebecca Foster, a chaste little dab of a girl with the most exquisite skin I’ve ever had the pleasure to wish a pox upon, and it was my personal little hell watching him court her with all the princely gestures a gently bred girl could hope for, that rougher girls like me would never inspire. I was only ever his devoted wingman and he liked it that way. I don’t think he even saw me as a girl at all. Why should he? I have a lamentably flat bosom which doesn’t tend to heave or swell the way attractive heroines’ do and I’m more likely to get into a fistfight than a gentle embroilment from which I might be rescued and then be eternally grateful for. Men of Tommy’s cut like a woman with a lot of gratefulness in her. When he began his engagement to The Orchid it was clear that my girlish dreams were over.

I thought I knew everything about death when we laid my mother in the ground, but the day my father died I discovered I knew next to nothing at all.

When he first started getting sick, we tried a number of remedies we found in our natural medicine books. Sometimes it seemed we were making progress, that whatever was ailing him was going away, only to be disappointed a month later when his symptoms recurred. Mixing medicine is a precise craft, but for a small town apothecary with no fancy equipment, diagnosing is a hit or miss business. You make the most educated guesses you can without cutting someone open, or seeing inside of them with x-ray machines or testing their blood with lab chemicals. When the symptoms grew worse, he got a government voucher for diagnostic tests through the medical lottery system. He made the trip to Salem General, a long twenty seven miles by horse cart, but after his diagnosis of stomach cancer, he couldn’t get vouchers for treatment. No one was approved for cancer treatments who didn’t have the money to pay all expenses, the irony being that if you had the money to pay for all your expenses you didn’t need to get a voucher to get treatment. I did everything I could for him, everything I thought my mother would have tried, to keep him comfortable near the end. I suppose it was the right order of things for a daughter to feed her father at the end of his life, just the same as he fed her at the beginning of hers, but the right order of things pissed me off. I knew it must have been hard for him, an ex-boxer always up for a fight to be fed soup in delicate spoonfuls.

From the time he was diagnosed, it took him six months to die. As he drew nearer to the end, he began to tell me what I would have to do when he died. How to clean him, and dress his dead body. How quickly I would need to accomplish this. He told me where to bury him up in the woods near the cabin, and what permit requests I would need to fill out. He told me how deep and how wide the grave would legally need to be. He told me what would happen if I didn’t get him dressed before rigor mortis set in. All of this he said quietly, and no matter how much I might have wished to have more cheerful conversations as his life drew to a close, I didn’t have the luxury to have gentle chats. I didn’t have the luxury to send him off to a mortuary like I’ve heard people used to do. Everything that needed to be done had to be done by me. I could have asked the Martins to help me, father told me I should ask for their help, but I didn’t want a fuss. Shockey, our nearest neighbor and possibly the oldest man alive, was the only one I let help and I only let him help because I – wait – I’m getting ahead of myself.

Take notes, Cricket. Father said quietly. This is important. I can trust you to take care of yourself, girl. Your mother taught you well. Though your temper is deplorable, you’re good at what you do, but burying me is not something you’ve been taught. I ought to have let you help with your mother. I waited for more in that line, secretly hoping he might explain why he’d performed all the cleaning and dressing offices behind closed doors, but he gave me nothing more.

He told me how I might have to break a bone to get him dressed but as unpleasant as it may sound I had to do it or else my mother would – would what? Come back from the grave to spank me? I heard her in my ear You get him dressed as a sign of respect, child. We have no need of wood coffins or fancy plaques but a man needs to go to ground in his most comfortable clean clothes. It’s about respect, Cricket. You don’t care about it now but you will when it’s your turn. Or else mother would admonish me from the grave, apparently.

He told me what papers I would need to fill out for the county health officer and who I would need to call. He laid out all of my death duties and responsibilities. He told me what alcohol to ask Shockey to bring to his wake. And when I say wake you will think Irish, but we’re not Irish. We’re Scottish, so having a wake might seem strange. What can I say? My parents didn’t want to be sent off with the grim tee-totaling prayerful dry affairs that most people favor in our community. My father chose to let people view mother the day before her burial, but not during the wake. Few people chose to view her, but many had chosen to attend the drinking and eating part. For practical reasons, my father’s wake wouldn’t include a viewing either, because I wasn’t going to bring his body all the way to town for people to stare at. I invited anyone who wanted to view him to call at the cabin, but that was a long trek to see an emaciated dead man, and no one did.

I took it all, I think, with good grace. My responsibilities might feel solemn and daunting, but I understood that it was my honor to do these things for my father. Except for throwing the wake. I hated that I had to repeat that awful experience. The things people said about my mother were no more colorful than the things people said about my father behind his back and I didn’t think I could listen to all the insincere honey they would pour over him in death after calling him a shady bruiser, a smuggler, a foul mouthed son of a bitch, and a lady killer. None of it true, of course. Well, mostly not true anyway.

His last hours were not comfortable or peaceful. As his body shut down, organ after organ, he kept trying to suck up enough oxygen into his lungs, reminding me of a fish pulled out of water and left on the shore; mouth opening and closing in a futile effort to fill it with life – the slow drying up of whatever it is that animates us, makes us who we are. I had always imagined that if one was dying one could simply give up, let go, and be dead. Isn’t that what old people do? I always imagined there’s some mysterious switch whose location we discover at exactly the right moment we need it, and then we simply flip the switch when there’s not enough air left to breath.

Other than giving me detailed instructions on how to dig his grave, and file paperwork, and be a good daughter, and invite people over to make me sick to my stomach, he didn’t say a lot. He didn’t give any eloquent death-bed soliloquies, but we did have two conversations that turned out to be poignant in hindsight. He told me that I was to be careful of Smith and Hesse. No – those weren’t his exact words. It was stranger than that, as though there was a meaning within meaning that came out of nowhere, but he said it as though we’d been having a long conversation about it. Maybe he was having his soliloquies without me. What he actually said a few days before his death was, I know you don’t carry, but you need to now. Is your .38 here, or at the cottage? I told him my gun was here in the cabin. Get it. Wear it at all times, loaded. Watch out for Smith and Hesse, they’ll be closer than you think. I asked him what he was talking about but he would only repeat it and looked so tired I didn’t pester him. Instead I considered his warning silently. Mitch Smith and John Hesse were the two federal officers in charge of my mother’s murder case. They’re the ones who brought her back to us and led the investigation that came to nothing. I remembered Smith and Hesse only vaguely. Mostly I remembered Smith throwing his weight around to impress and intimidate, but however much others might find him impressive, my father was not one of them.

The second conversation we had just before he died was slightly more cryptic than the first. Listen to me lass, I leaned in to listen to his fading voice. Grey is coming, he meant to get here before. He promised me pipes. You’ll let him play. Grey was a man my father worked with whom I’d never met. I knew he was a Scot and not much else. Of course, father. Of course I’ll let him play. My father smiled at me with a wide grin making deep shadows in his gaunt face. You’ll not punch him, little scrapper? The look I gave him made him laugh, which turned to coughing. I had water ready for him, but he pushed it away, saying he was done with all that. He looked at me intently, making the hairs on my arms rise; there was something keen in his look, something hard. He pulled me close so I could hear him clearly, Do you trust me, girl? I said of course I trusted him. Then you will keep him close. You’ll need him. I began to object, but he shushed me and fell asleep.

He died in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t even notice because I’d fallen asleep in the chair next to him, so I can’t say if he called out for me, or if he just guttered out like a candle with no wick left. Gone and gone. Done and done. I was completely alone.

I did all that my father told me to and the preparations for his burial went more or less exactly as he told me they should. Except for the part where I got myself thrown into jail on the day of his wake.

Chapter Two

Dawn broke frigidly across the hills, the grey rising to reveal a frail winter light, not quite sun, but enough change in brightness to wake the birds, their sharp territorial cries like little knives puncturing the soft skin of sleep. Cricket heard the rustlings and felt the dark dissipate, but didn’t lift her head. She sat in her father’s fresh dug grave; knees pulled to her chest, arms resting loosely across them, her head bent between them in exhaustion, too tired to feel the cold reach through her.

Her father’s stiff shrouded body lay on the cabin floor in the deep shadows of dawn, waiting to be laid to ground; the ground in which Cricket sat, her head still ringing with the rhythm of digging. All she could do was think of her mother, dead three years. Mairead had always said Cricket was just like her father, as though this was too bad for a girl child, chiding Peter for turning their daughter into a pugilist by the time she was six. He laughed it off, saying that the girl would soon enough be the spitting image of her mother, full of wit and grace and beauty. He would remind Mairead that it was his job to make sure Cricket could protect herself. It wasn’t the old country they were living in where family might come to help. They were alone here.

For twenty years we’ve lived here, Peter. How long does it take to stop being ‘newcomers’?

I don’t know, darlin’, he’d say. I suppose it’s the same everywhere; we’re newcomers til we die if we move from the place we’re born. Our girl belongs here, that’s got to be enough.

It was strange how losing her father made her miss her mother more all of a sudden. She missed the smell of her skin, the sound of her husky laughter and the way she’d read aloud in the evenings from favorite books. She missed crawling through meadows with her in the summer foraging for chicory root and self-heal, the air hot with the smell of drying salvia. Looking up from the grasses she would see her mother blazing like a wildfire in the bright sunlight.

She still hadn’t moved a muscle when Shockey walked up to the lip of the six by six, his large belly visible over the edge before his head. Removing his smashed up soiled rag of a baseball cap, he mumbled something meant to be respectful and grave-appropriate but which sounded more like a rough shambling speech appropriate for a congregation of prison lifers. Cricket had long since learned not to try to decipher everything he said. Whatever was really important always came to light eventually if you waited patiently for it. Which it did, more quickly than usual this time, when he asked her if she was planning on burying herself instead of her father. Before she could form an answer, another figure appeared at the edge and looked down into the grave. When Cricket looked up at him, he froze in surprise.

Grey Bonneville had heard a hundred late night stories about Cricket from Peter, told like all proud fathers are prone to do, though most fathers told such fond stories over friendly barbeques, not during armed stakeouts. Grey had practically fallen in love with Cricket through Peter’s colorful stories. Peter had made her out to be larger than life; brave, reckless, beautiful, strong, impatient, and unintentionally amusing, always getting into trouble with her temper and her fists. What Grey saw when he peered over the edge of the grave was a shivering woman covered in smears of dirt who looked startlingly like his old friend, staring up at him with the same clear grey eyes. Though her hair was straight and cut in a bob, instead of being short and wavy, it was just as red as Peter’s had been. How could this girl be the fierce person Peter had told so many stories about?

Grey was nearer to Cricket’s age than she’d imagined he would be. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was well built, with dark short-cropped hair. His clean-shaven face was weathered but was otherwise handsome, with high cheekbones, grave hazel eyes, and a sharp straight nose. The first thought that ran through Cricket’s head when she saw him peering down at her was how annoying it was that her father was friends with such a good looking young man who was undoubtedly fond of delicate females with floral complexions who could bake the fluffiest cakes out of nothing but water and dust. The last thing she needed on the day of her father’s burial was to be reminded that she was nothing but a scrapper of a girl.

First impressions can be a real bitch.

Need a hand outta that big hole? Shockey asked. Although she was only five foot six she didn’t think it was particularly difficult to climb out of a six foot deep grave when there was a ladder within reach. Time for dreaming with the dawn, for waiting on ghosts to subsume the quiet was over.

She unbent herself and stood up stiffer and colder than she realized she’d become. It was thirty five degrees and she’d been working without her coat for hours. She was shivering now, but paid no attention as she climbed out of the hole.

Shockey performed his version of introductions which went something like, Mumble mumble - Peter’s half pint - blah blah - hardest left hook mumble - old friend gonna play the pipes for Peter - blah blah – stayin’ with me. Don’t tell no one.

Introductions done.

Cricket said hello quietly, and Grey said, I’m sorry for your loss. The three of them stood at the edge of the grave awkwardly, Cricket shivering, but not noticing it, Shockey noticing it, but distracted by thoughts about Peter and, impossibly, summer cherries. Grey noticed it and waited for Cricket to pick up her coat which lay crumpled on the ground at her feet.

When it seemed obvious she was going to ignore both the frosty air penetrating her cotton shirt and the wool coat that was the remedy, Grey picked it up and said with exasperation, Jesus pet! Do you not notice you’re all to pieces with the cold? He put her coat around her shoulders, which she wanted to resent but was too tired to bother. She was distracted by Grey’s accent, so much like her father’s that for a moment she thought she might turn around and hear him admonish her for being so careless of her health. The thought hurt a little and Grey noticed the small look of pain cross her face and felt guilty that he’d been impatient with the girl. He would have been surprised to know that his accent had given both pleasure and pain and that it would continue to be a source of both.

I’m not your pet, Jimmy, but thank ye, she said, mimicking her parents’ dialect as she pulled her coat more tightly across her body adding, Come ben the hoose. This surprised a smile out of Grey. His smile was arresting, not because he had a great big mouthful of bright white straight hero teeth (his teeth were neither especially white nor very straight) but because it was in such contrast to the serious expression he generally wore.

Aye, it’s fair Baltic the day, Grey said, still smiling. Cricket wasn’t proof against such warmth, and it felt familial to hear it on a day otherwise caustic with loss. Without realizing it, she was smiling too. Shockey watched the two of them, rubbing at his messy white hair, absently pushing it to new levels of dishevelment. He let their funny words wash over him, like a pleasant echo of Mairead and Peter, whose lively voices had filled his life for over twenty years. He thought Bonneville and Cricket were both too serious and needed to let go a little, have some fun like young people.

Cricket, suddenly aware that she was standing around shooting the shit in Scots with a man she’d just