LITMIR.BIZ

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his ears, like after a high-board dive, and he hadn’t heard rightly. “Amusing?” he repeated, stupidly.

      “He plays games. Like a wayward child.”

      People were approaching, cautiously.

      “Games?” Ned repeated again, his voice high-pitched, as if it hadn’t broken yet. He was aware that he wasn’t holding up his end of this conversation very well. “I…that thing went for my throat.”

      “You did choose to come out,” the man said. “We invite our fate, some of the time.”

      He said it the way you might comment on the weather or someone’s new shirt or shoes. He brushed at his jacket and looked at the crowd around them. “I suggest departing, unless you want to spend an evening answering questions you can’t answer.”

      Ned swallowed. The man looked at him another moment. He hesitated. When he did speak, Ned had to strain to catch it.

      “She is worth it, always and ever,” was what he heard.

      Then, before Ned could say anything, or even begin to think of what he might say, the man spun around and began to run, north up the road towards the cathedral.

      For an uncertain moment, Ned looked at the frightened, concerned faces around him. He shrugged, gestured vaguely, and then took off as well.

      He ran the other way, across the market square, hearing urgent shouts in his wake. Someone even grabbed for him. Ned slashed the brief, restraining hand away, and kept going.

      He sprinted until he was out of town.

      Only on the Route de Vauvenargues, leading east towards the cut-off to the villa, did he settle into a proper stride. He was in jeans, wasn’t dressed for a run, but he had his Nikes on, and he badly needed to be moving just now.

      Somewhere along the way he started to swear under his breath, rhythmically. His mother hated it when he swore. A failure of imagination, she called it.

      His mother was in a civil-war zone where people were dying every day. Ned’s shoulder hurt, his cheek was banged up, and he was scared and angry in pretty much equal measure. He actually felt as if he might be sick for the second time in a day.

      Amusing? Someone had meant that to be funny?

      It occurred to him that the man—he really needed a name—had said pretty much the same thing about the skull and sculpted head yesterday.

      Ned could almost smell the hot breath of the animal that had leaped for him. If he hadn’t grabbed that chair on the way out—he had no idea what had made him do that—he’d have had teeth ripping into him.

      How amusing. Just hilarious. Put it on America’s Funniest Home Videos with all the other cute little animals and men falling over tables. And how extremely grateful that arrogant son of a bitch had been, come to think of it. Not a word of thanks.

      We invite our fate, he’d said.

      Whatever the hell that meant. Ned, rubbing his shoulder now as he ran, muttered a few more words that would have got him into trouble if either parent had been there to hear.

      Well, they weren’t. And they weren’t going to be much good to him in this. Whatever this was, anyhow.

      She is worth it, always and ever.

      He was pretty certain that was what he’d heard.

      As he turned off the main road, taking their own uphill lane, the words hit him hard, a different sort of blow. Tidings from that still-distant, really complicated adult world he seemed to be approaching. And from somewhere else, as well, a place farther away, that he also seemed to be entering now, like it or not.

      A few dozen strides later it occurred to Ned Marriner that if he’d wanted to, or had been thinking clearly enough, he could have taken those last words as a thank-you of sorts, after all. A confiding, explanation, even an apology from someone not obviously inclined to any of those things.

      As the villa came in sight at the top of their roadway, beyond a sloping meadow and the lawn, framed against the trees that sheltered it from the wind, he was thinking of a rose placed yesterday beside a sculpted figure that was not the Queen of Sheba.

       CHAPTER VI

      The others were on the terrace having a drink as Ned came up the gravel drive. The sun, west over the city, sent a long, slanting light. It fell on the cypresses, the house, the water in the pool, and on the four people sitting outside, making them look golden, like gods.

      “You should see yourselves,” Ned called, keeping his tone cheerful. “The light’s amazing.”

      In a moment like this, he thought, you could get a pretty good idea of what people loved so much about Provence.

      He kept on moving; he didn’t want to get close to the others until he checked himself in the mirror. “I’m gonna shower, be right out.”

      “Dude,” Greg called out, “you were supposed to phone me for a ride!”

      “Too nice a day,” he shouted back, going around the side of the house to enter through the front, not from the terrace doors where they were.

      “Ned, are you all right?” his father called.

      They’d told him about earlier, obviously. He supposed they’d had to. He’d been pretty sick.

      “I’m fine,” he said, not breaking stride. “Down in twenty minutes.”

      He passed Veracook in the hallway and she didn’t seem too alarmed at the sight of him. He looked in the bathroom mirror upstairs. His shoulder hurt, he’d have a bruise, be sore for a couple of days, but nothing worse than what you got in a hockey game, and he didn’t think his cheek looked too bad. They might not even notice.

      “oh, my god, Ned! What happened to your face?” Melanie cried, the second he walked out on the terrace with a Coke.

      Melanie, he thought. He bet the three men wouldn’t have seen a thing.

      He shrugged. “Stupid accident. I got rushed by a dog near the fruit-and-veg market and fell over a café table.”

      “A dog?” his father said.

      “Big one, too,” Ned said, taking a chair and stretching out his legs casually. He sipped from his Coke and put it on the table. Larry Cato had told him years ago that when you lied you cut as close to the truth as you could or way far off. One or the other. It was aliens with ray guns, or a dog and a café table. Larry was the type who had theories about these things.

      “What the hell?” Steve said. “Did you, like, get bit?”

      “No, no, no. I just fell. He ran off when people yelled at him.”

      Melanie had gone into the kitchen. She came back out with ice cubes in a plastic bag, a dish towel wrapped around them. She handed it to him, wordlessly.

      “My own fault, probably,” Ned said. “I was jogging through the market and who knows what the dog thought I was. A terrorist or something.” His father looked dubious. “I’m okay, really. A bruise. I’ll live, Dad.” He held the ice dutifully to his face.

      “What about earlier?” his father asked. “On the drive?”

      He really did have a lot to explain. “That was weird,” Ned said. “And then it totally went away. Don’t say food poisoning or Veracook will kill herself.”

      “We all ate the same food, anyhow,” Melanie said. “I’m thinking motion sickness after jet lag.”

      Ned managed a grin. “You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at.”

      Steve laughed. Movie joke. Ned

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