Vision in Silver(54)
“Why not?”
“Just receiving a letter was one new thing too many that day.”
“Maybe you should read it soon.”
The curtains didn’t block all the light. Now that his eyes had adjusted, he could see her sitting at a simple wood table, turning her silver razor over and over in her hands.
His heart gave one hard bump, then seemed to freeze in his chest for a long moment before it started beating again.
“What I’d like to do is open the curtains and get enough light in here to take pictures of the rooms,” he said. “Then I’ll take pictures of the Gardners’ house and the barn and other buildings. I’ll take pictures of the animals.”
“So I can stay in here and see outside through images?”
He heard bitter, weary resignation in her voice.
“It’s reference so that going outside and seeing the real thing isn’t as much of a shock. Meg and the women working with her to create a guide for blood prophets suggested this. We did this for the girls staying at the B and B, and it helped them. Today I’m here to do the same for you, if you’ll let me.”
“Meg, the Pathfinder,” Jean said softly. “Meg, the Trailblazer. All right, Steve Ferryman. Show me the first trail marker.” She gave him a strange smile. “I don’t know what such a thing is or what it does, but it was one of the training images.”
“You never saw it in context?”
Her smile chilled him. “That would have provided too much information.”
In the compound, she had been battered and abused in almost every way one person could abuse another. He’d heard, in confidence from one of the island’s doctors, that she had a crosshatching of scars over several parts of her body and, in some places, layers of scar tissue.
Was she sane? No one wanted to make a diagnosis one way or the other. As long as she wasn’t a threat to the Gardners, the doctors and the terra indigene were willing to let her stay in the guest cottage.
Steve held up the camera. “Start of a new life, Jean, and a way to live outside again. Ready to try?”
She pushed away from the table. “I’m ready.” She paused. “And while you take the pictures out there, I will write a short note to Meg.”
CHAPTER 13
Firesday, Maius 11
“The two apartment buildings are in pretty good shape,” Pete Denby said, sitting at one of the tables in A Little Bite. “Eve says all the apartments need sprucing up—fresh paint and wallpaper, that sort of thing.”
“Nothing the new tenants couldn’t do for themselves,” Eve said. “You might want to hire a professional to check out the buildings, but we didn’t see any structural problems.”
“Then why sell the buildings?” Simon asked. Elliot, Tess, Henry, and Vlad had joined him in the coffee shop to hear the Denbys’ report. Since she was a member of the Business Association, he’d told Jenni Crowgard about this meeting, but she’d expressed no interest in joining them. That troubled him a little, but hearing about something wasn’t the same as having the opportunity to poke around someplace new, so maybe it was all the blah, blah that wasn’t of interest to the Crows.
“Lack of tenants,” Pete said. “The current owner of the buildings is behind on the mortgage payments because he’s not getting the rental income he needs. Each building has four two-bedroom apartments. Only half those units are occupied now, and all the tenants will be out by the end of the month, with no new ones moving in.”
“The owner and the real estate representative didn’t put it in quite those terms,” Eve said. “They talked about potential and a clean sweep—new landlord, new tenants. They were very careful not to say why tenants didn’t stay. Like I said, Pete and I didn’t see any sign of insect infestation or water damage or any structural reason why people wouldn’t want to live in those apartments.”