Page 42 of The Instruments of Darkness

“Why is it called blue when it’s kind of white?”

“Because it’s still young. They stay white for their first year before their feathers darken. My grandfather told me that one of the reasons was protection: the young herons hunt with snowy egrets, and the egrets protect them, but only as long as the herons are white. When they turn blue, the egrets don’t want them around anymore.”

“That’s rough.”

“I think herons are solitary by nature in adulthood,” I said. “And they’re good hunters.”

The heron, spotting prey in the shallows, disappeared from sight. I sat at the table to check my phone. Moxie, who had no objection to early mornings, only to those who objected to them in turn, had tried getting in touch twice already. Sometimes I think he liked to call just to remind me that the clock had a habit of turning seven twice a day.

“I hope you don’t mind my preparing breakfast,” said Colleen. “It was the least I could do after you made dinner last night.”

She put a plate in front of me. It held enough fried food to make me a poster boy for statins, and might even have given Moxie pause.

“I wasn’t sure how you liked your eggs so I went for over medium.”

I steeled myself and tried to make some inroads into the stack. I noticed Colleen was sticking to coffee.

“Aren’t you having anything?”

“I had an egg before you came down,” she said.

“Is this where I tell you again that you have to eat?”

“Only if this is where I ignore you.”

I remembered the wine she’d drunk the previous night. If I’d knocked back three quarters of a bottle of red wine on a virtually empty stomach, I’d have been struggling the next morning, but she showed no ill effects. Her eyes were red from crying, not from a hangover. Yet on the night her son disappeared, she claimed that less than a single glass had left her sluggish.

I asked what she planned to do with her day. She told me she was going to watch TV, or sit in the backyard if the weather stayed fine.

“I’ve tried to read, but I struggle to concentrate since Henry went missing. I can’t lose myself in anything because I always come back to him. It’s got so that I’m almost afraid to forget him, even for a moment. If I do, the loss returns with greater force, just to punish me for letting him slip my mind. If I do it too often, he’ll be gone forever, and I won’t even be able to recall his face.”

She sipped her coffee.

“I know you don’t want to talk about your own child,” she said, although she didn’t look at me as she spoke, “and I think I understand why. This is a job for you. It’s business. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, but you have to maintain a distance. Am I right?”

“That’s some of it,” I admitted.

“Just tell me one thing. How do you go on? Not just you: I mean how does one go on? Because every day I want to die, and the only thing stopping me is the desperation to know what’s happened to Henry. Once I have an answer, and if it’s the one I fear, I think I may kill myself.”

She wasn’t being melodramatic, or seeking attention. I accepted the truth of what she was saying because I’d felt it myself. I’d lived through it, and continued to live through it. I endured, in both senses of the word.

“The pain grows duller,” I said. “There are days when you barely notice it.”

“And the guilt?”

“Some of that went away when I realized I couldn’t have stopped what occurred. The man who killed my wife and child made the decision to hurt them, and that was beyond my control. Had I been there with them on the night he came, he might have tried to take us all; because of the mess I was back then, he’d have succeeded. But I think he’d have bided his time and waited for a better opportunity. For him, it was very personal.”

I set aside my silverware. I was done with eating.

“Somebody targeted your son, Colleen, and they came prepared. If you’d been standing watch over him that night, they’d have returned when your guard was down. Don’t put that burden of guilt on yourself. Too many other people are already willing to do that. Our task is to prove them wrong.”

She pointed at my plate.

“You really don’t eat breakfast, do you?”

“Not as a habit,” I said, “but I appreciate the effort.”

I began to clear the table.

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