Cast the First Stone by David Warren (booksvooks txt) 📕

it—the numbing grip of the below-zero temperature stinging my nose, but as dreams go, I can’t really feel anything. I can only hear. The wind, moaning through the willows and behind it a voice.

Always the voice, haunting, calling.

I turn, searching the shore. Empty. Just the skeletal arms of birch and poplar reaching to the gunmetal gray sky.

Then I hear the crack. It’s sharp, like a shotgun, fracturing the air, and although it’s expected, I flinch. Ravens startle and lift from the rushes. The wind whips the snow into a dervish at my feet and only then do I think to look down.

A vein has fissured open below my feet.

I start to run.

I’m fast. I can feel it, running with my mouth open, breathing hard. I pump my arms, careening across the ice, but my feet betray me and I slip. I fall, slam hard. My wind explodes out of me.

Another crack, and this time the report shatters my bones. Shaking, I lift myself off the glass. The ice webs under my mittened hands.

As I scramble to my feet, I’m no nearer the shore.

Now, a voice is calling.

I’m gasping, my breath labored, fatigue weighting each step.

The cycle repeats. I run, I fall hard, and it knocks my world sideways. Then the crack, the voice and in my soul, I know I’ll never reach shore.

The lake will open, and I’ll slide into the dark, murky, frigid depths. Disappear.

They’ll never find me.

Rembrandt!

I wake with a rush, as if the voice is right beside me and I’m trembling, my breathing rough. If I were at home, next to Eve, she would have her hand pressed to my chest, her voice in my ear. It’s just a dream.

I lean my head back into my headrest. I might be able to travel through time, but clearly I’ve brought my demons with me.

Sweat slicks my body and I run my hand across my mouth, find it dry.

The dawn has peeled back the night, sun hovers just above the horizon, filtering light along the dusky streets. Gold dew speckles my windshield and a chill slinks through my car. June in Minnesota can still find the temperatures in the low sixties and I shiver, now free of the horror of the dream.

I need coffee. Ironic, I know, but I glance at the shop across the street, wondering if it’s open.

The windows are dark. A car drives up and pulls into the alley, to what I assume is parking in the back.

I glance at the watch. A little after 5:30 a.m. It must be the owner, up at the crack of dawn to care for the early risers. The shop is still dark, the place locked up. I sit up, scrub a hand down my face, the other on the steering wheel. Burke hasn’t called, and I pick up my phone just in case he texted.

Nothing.

Then it hits me.

5:30 a.m. Up at the crack of dawn.

Right now, my father is heading to the barn to feed and milk his small herd of dairy cows before he takes off for work.

Mom is in the kitchen, making his breakfast. By six a.m., Sheriff Rickland will have arrived, and with my father still in the barn, Rickland will accept the cup of coffee my mother offers.

But she’s suspicious, and doesn’t need to wait for my father to know the truth. She’ll guess that Rickland is there with news of my brother’s body recovery, and then time will repeat itself.

Her high blood pressure will burst a vessel in her brain, and she’ll collapse with a hemorrhagic stroke.

Maybe it’s just naive, but I’ve always believed that if my father—or I—had been with her, maybe the stress would have been easier to bear, and she wouldn’t have collapsed.

Wouldn’t today—or at least in my today—be walking with a cane, struggling to speak.

The light in the coffee shop flickers on.

The street is still empty. But I know, and it’s not just my gut, but history, that tells me the bomber will be here. The bomb explodes shortly after 7 a.m. Before, I was in bed, sleeping.

Before, I was awakened by Burke.

Before, I didn’t answer my father’s frantic call as he rode in the ambulance with my mother because I was counting bodies outside 10th Avenue Brew.

I pick up the phone and dial, my gaze scanning the street. Please.

“Hello?” My mother’s voice is cheery and for a few seconds, it jars me to hear it so pure, so unblemished.

I swallow, clear my throat. “Mom. It’s me.”

“Rembrandt. It’s so early—are you okay?”

She doesn’t mean to, but she wears in her voice the terrible fear that something might happen to her only remaining son. “I’m fine. Actually, I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, about to go to work, but…” And my brain is groping for something, anything— “Is Dad around?”

“He’s on his way to the barn—”

“I need to talk to him.”

“I’ll tell him to call you back—”

“Mom?” My voice shakes a fraction. No one else would have noticed, but I know Mom does. I swallow again. “I need to talk to him right now.”

She’s quiet because we don’t do big emotion in our family, but after a second, “All right. Hang on.”

A car pulls up outside the shop and parks in front. A man gets out, in a pair of track pants, a T-shirt, running shoes, and I agree with him. Coffee before exercise, right? He carries nothing, so I let him go.

One minute, two, then, “Hello?”

My father is out of breath, and a streak of guilt goes through me. I don’t want to lie, but I’m not sure what to say. Stay with Mom.

“Rem?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“You okay?”

They were good parents to me, despite the grief, the complete shutdown of our family after Mickey went missing. And they never said it out loud—you should have stayed with him. This is your fault.

They didn’t have to. It was carved into my DNA.

“I’m okay. But Dad—” I draw in a breath and say the only thing that makes sense. “Happy Birthday.”

Silence.

“What?”

“It’s your