What the Night Knows

50

FOR FIVE MONTHS AFTER JOHN DISPATCHED ALTON TURNER Blackwood to Hell for the second time, the Calvinos lived in a rented residence while the interior of their house was repaired, painted, carpeted, and cleaned from top to bottom.

On the morning that they returned home, Father Angelo Rocatelli, the priest from their new parish, formally blessed each room of the house. He even climbed into the service mezzanine between the second and third floors to bless that space. Minnie loved him as much as she loved Father Albright, and Minnie’s opinion carried a lot of weight in the Calvino family.

On day one of his investigation, Lionel Timmins discovered a connection between Preston Nash and Roger Hodd. The reporter’s wife, Georgia, had been Preston’s rehab therapist. Why the two men would conspire to invade the Calvino home and terrorize the family, no one could quite say, though theories abounded. Georgia Parker Hodd suggested that her late husband’s alcoholism and Preston’s addictions gave them something in common, but she theorized no further. It was thought that Professor Sinyavski must have been stabbed by Nash or Hodd and dragged into the arbor after spotting them entering the house with malevolent intent. In any event, John acted in self-defense, and no charges against him were ever considered.

Walter and Imogene Nash accepted a position as estate managers for a magnificent eighty-acre property in California. The Calvinos missed them, but Lloyd and Wisteria Butterfield, who replaced the Nashes, were good workers with sunny dispositions. Mr. Butterfield had once been a United States Marine, and Mrs. Butterfield knitted hats and matching scarves.

A month after returning home, the Calvinos rescued a year-old golden retriever from the pound. Minnie named him Rosco and said that Willard approved of him.

Nicky successfully finished the painting of the children. She hung it in the living room, where the baroque mirror once had been. She continued to imagine scenes and make them real, as she would until the end of her days.

A year after they prevented Blackwood from keeping the hateful promise, John and Nicky flew back to John’s hometown, where he had not been for twenty-one years. For three days, they walked the streets that he had walked as a boy. The residence in which his lost family lived had been torn down, another built. It looked like a good house. Each day, they went to the cemetery where the four graves were side by side, and they spread a blanket to sit on the grass. Embedded in each gravestone was a porcelain medallion bearing a photo of the deceased. The sun had not faded them, nor had two decades of weather worn away the glaze. John found the faith to ask forgiveness for having failed them, and he felt forgiven. He no longer dreaded that a moment might come, after the world and outside of time, when he might see them again, because he was able at last to imagine that such an encounter would be about one thing and one only—love.

At last at peace, he and Nicky flew home, where they belonged.