The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole

Twenty-Nine

       Chapter Thirty

       Chapter Thirty-One

       Chapter Thirty-Two

       Chapter Thirty-Three

       Chapter Thirty-Four

       Acknowledgments

       Excerpt

       Reader’s Guide for the In-Between Hour

       Questions for Discussion

       Listening Guide

       A Conversation with the Author

      One

      Will imagined silence. The silence of snowfall in the forest. The silence at the top of a crag. But eighty floors below his roof garden, another siren screeched along Central Park West.

      Nausea nibbled—a hungry goldfish gumming him to death. Maybe this week’s diet of Zantac and PBR beer was to blame. Or maybe grief was a degenerative disease, destroying him from the inside out. Dissolving his organs. One. By. One.

      The screensaver on his MacBook Air, a rainbow of tentacles that had once reminded him to watch for shooting stars, mutated into a kraken: an ancient monster dragging his life beneath the waves. How long since he’d missed his deadline? His agent had been supportive, his editor generous, but patience—even for clients who churned out global bestsellers—expired.

      Another day when he’d failed to resuscitate his crap work-in-progress; another day when Agent Dodds continued to dangle from the helicopter; another day without a strategy for his hero of ten years that wasn’t a fatal “Let go, dude. Just let go.”

      The old-fashioned ring tone of his iPhone burst into the night as expected. Almost on cue. His dad’s memory might be jouncing around too much for either of them to follow, but it continued to hold both their lives hostage.

      Answer, aim for the end of the call, get there.

      “Hey, Dad.”

      “Fucking bastards. They’re—”

      “Fucking bastards. You told me earlier.” Fifty-seven minutes earlier.

      Finally, this vacuous loop of repetition had given them conversation, and always it started with the same two words: fucking bastards.

      “Fucking bastards won’t let me sit out and talk to the crows. Took away my bird call. Said I were disturbin’ folks.”

      “We talked about this last time you called, Dad.” Will kept his voice flat, even. Calm. Defusing anger was an old skill—the lone positive side effect of his batshit-insane childhood. And emotional distance? He had that honed before he’d turned eighteen. “I told you I’d look at the contract in the morning. And you promised to take a temazepam and go to bed.”

      There had to be some way to persuade the old man to meet with a psychologist, some way to unpick the damage of Jack Nicholson’s performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

      “Fucking bastards. Want to steal my Wild Turkey, too.”

      His dad veered off on the usual rant: trash the staff of Hawk’s Ridge Retirement Community—check; pause to exclude the new art teacher with the cute smile—check; ask Will when he last noticed a woman’s smile—check; hurl expletives at ol’ possum face, the director—check. Strange, how the old man failed to drop his g’s with the f word.

      A retired grave digger who’d dropped out of school at sixteen to work in the cotton mill—third shift—Jacob Shepard might refer to himself as dumber than a rock, but he’d read every history book in the Orange County Library before retirement. The old man was an underachiever by choice, devoting himself to the only thing that mattered: loving his Angeline.

      His dad was cussing again. One obscenity, two obscenities, three obscenities...four.

      All those years in the family shack, neither of them had sworn. Wouldn’t have dared. Four foot ten, magical and mad, Angeline Shepard had ruled the house with more mood swings than a teenage despot. There had been no room for anyone else to flex temper muscles. Raising a voice in his mother’s domain would have been akin to standing in front of the biggest fucking bonfire and pouring on enough gasoline to fuel an Airbus. Great, now he was swearing. Will never swore (batshit didn’t count). But since his dad had started calling to unleash rage ten, fifteen times a day, Will’s psyche had slipped into battle-fatigue mode.

      Will sighed. “There are rules about drinking in your room. You know that.”

      “I’m eighty years old, son. I reckon I’m old enough to partake, if I so choose.”

      “But you’re a loud drunk, Dad.”

      “So I pick my banjo—”

      “And tell people they’re dickheads.”

      “That’s why I don’t talk to no one ’cept you. Half them folks in here is dickheads, son. Half them is.”

      “And the other half?” Will didn’t mean to smile.

      “Old-timers who get to complainin’ about bladder control. At least I don’t need no adult diapers, and my health is still good, pretty good. Why you at home of an evenin’, son? You need to be out dancin’ with an angel like your mama.”

      “I write at night. You know that, Dad.”

      Darkness keeps me alive, keeps me on the edge. Keeps me sharp. There was always a moment, in the middle of the night, when the world hardly breathed. When he could write safe in the knowledge that no one would intrude, that he had nothing to fear. But New York Times bestselling author Will Shepard wasn’t writing. Wasn’t sleeping in his institutional white bedroom, either. These days he catnapped fully clothed on his leather sofa—as if he were a millionaire hobo.

      Even when he managed to close his eyes, there was no peace. His favorite dream in which he glided like an owl above the forest had contorted into a nightmare. In his subconscious state, Will didn’t drift on air currents anymore—he stumbled through the woods on Occoneechee Mountain. Searching for, but never finding, escape.

      “So when you goin’ to start livin’ that dream of yours, son? Find a woodland property with a driveway that’s impassable after a real heavy snowfall?”

      “That was a kid’s fantasy. I’m never moving back to North Carolina, you know that.”

      You know that. Why keep bashing his dad over the head with all that he’d forgotten?

      A gust of wind whipped through the chocolate mimosa in the huge glazed pot. Buffeted, the delicate leaflets held on and bounced back. You can do this, Will. You can do this.

      “The new guy, Bernie, who just moved in down the hall, his grandkids took him to that fancy diner on Main Street last Sunday. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had blueberry pancakes?”

      When did the old man start caring about pancakes?

      “You know what they give us for breakfast? Little boxes of cereal fit for kids. You know how long it’s been since I’ve eaten anywhere real nice? I want blueberry pancakes. And I want to see my grandbaby, goddamn it. When you bringin’ Freddie to visit?”

      Time