The Final Judgment Read Online Free PDF Page B

for now, at this moment, she had no wish to be elsewhere. It was dusk when the telephone rang. She hesitated, trying to arrange her thoughts. A moment passed before she answered the phone. “Hello.”
    “Caroline?” At first, her mind did not quite absorb it. But she felt it on her skin: a voice she had not heard in twenty years, yet more familiar than any other. A voice that belonged to this house. Caroline stood, suddenly alert. She found that she could not answer. “Caroline.” His voice was older now, perhaps rougher with what this call must be costing him. “There’s been trouble here, with Brett. You must come home.”
     
     

PART TWO
THE RETURN
     
     
CHAPTER ONE
    The next morning, Caroline Masters flew to Boston, rented a Jeep, and drove north. An hour later, she crossed the state line into New Hampshire and felt herself—leaden and filled with premonitions—drawn from her future into her past. Twenty-three years ago, she had left this place for good. She remembered little of that; sitting in the back seat behind Betty and her husband, Larry, as they headed toward Martha’s Vineyard and their last summer as a family, she had felt no sense of moment. By summer’s end, she had sworn never to return. And now she had done so. She had called Walter Farris before leaving the island, explaining only that she had a family emergency that might require a few days. He was gracious and understanding; perhaps Caroline had only imagined the faint undertone of caution, the unspoken question—what kind of emergency could be so serious that it distracted her at a time like this, so sensitive that she chose not to explain it. But refusal to explain herself was the defining choice of her adulthood; she was already fighting the superstition—foolish and egocentric, she chastised herself—that by visiting Martha’s Vineyard she had reopened the past, which now waited for both Caroline and a girl she did not know. But still he knew that she would come. Driving deeper into New Hampshire, she felt him. The scattered farms and small towns were remnants of the long-ago prosperity that had helped make him who he was. Climbing toward the White Mountains—sheer cliffs, winding streams, and plummeting gorges, miles of dense trees broken by granite faces hewn by time and the harshness of weather—Caroline recalled his belief that New England was a place unlike any other, his admonitions on nature and the virtues of winter: how they built resourcefulness and resolve, reminding man of the challenges ahead and the prudence needed to face them without any help but God’s. And she knew, despite all her years and all her efforts, that this man, and this place, had defined the deepest part of her. Descending from the cloud-swept summit, she drove north and west toward Vermont and into a gray, seeping rain. Yesterday seemed far behind. The towns had grown sparse, farther apart; the roads were better, some lumber mills emed to have closed, but little else had changed. It was a place where relationships mattered, Caroline remembered, where lives were private but memories were long, where respect—for a man or for the family he came from—once earned, went deep. For it was not a place where strangers came: the refugees from Massachusetts, the seekers of summer homes, tended to stop short of this corner of New Hampshire. These were the people who had always been there, dwindling a little, their sons or daughters drifting away to look for better jobs, others hanging on. So that life seemed as timeless as the pristine lakes, the rivers, the deep, silent forests. The country now was undulant valleys, streams, hills rising abruptly against a broad sky. The roads became smaller; at a crossroads by a shabby church, Caroline turned down a tar-and-gravel road where the arrow pointed to “Resolve Village.” A mile short of the town, she left the road, climbing a gravel path through woods that had once been pasture, until she reached the clearing that was still