A Widow's Curse by Phillip Depoy Page B

had ever indulged in an affair.
    â€œI see,” I told Hek and June after too long a silence. “Did my dad have other stories about Conner’s kin in Wales? You said something about a phone call.”
    â€œSurely did.” Hek finished his coffee and took a seat at the table. “When Conner died, your dad sent a letter to the family in the old country.”
    â€œHek told him to,” June whispered, as if it were a secret. She took her seat, as well.
    â€œSent a letter,” Hek repeated, “and got a phone call back. The kin over there wanted to know if it was money to be had.”
    â€œIf Conner had left them anything in his will,” June explained. “There was this one man who was a college professor, like you, and he—”
    â€œI can tell you,” Hek interrupted June the way he always did, “that it made your daddy plenty mad, the way those people carried on after Conner’s death.”
    â€œAccording to what your father always said after that,” June explained, “the Welsh are no-account. To a man. They work in coal mines and all they want is a free handout.”
    â€œThey are a strange lot.” Hek nodded slowly.
    I considered how likely it was that everyone in the world thought of their own home as the norm and the rest of the world as at least a bit off-kilter. There was no doubt that the residents of Blue Mountain felt they were the model of humanity; the rest of the population would be well served by the realization of that fact. I was also secure in the suspicion that people in any small town in Wales felt exactly the same about themselves. An inability to see past that basic myopia was, I had always thought, the primary reason for 98 percent of the misery in the world.
    â€œI’ll tell you what’s strange,” I countered. “The fact that someone calls me out of the blue about this artifact, and it turns out I may have an intimate connection with it.”
    â€œThat is quite a coincidence,” Hek agreed.
    â€œYou say his name was Shultz,” June said. “The man who called you.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd how much do you know about him?” Hek finally made eye contact.
    â€œWhat?” I was a little taken aback, looking right into his eyes. It didn’t happen that often.
    â€œSeems to me, Fever,” he said, as if I were an idiot, “that Mr. Shultz could have already known the coin had something to do with your great-grandfather, and that he called you for a completely different reason than you think.”

Five
    All the way home, I tried to imagine Shultz as a devious criminal with some great crime in the offing, but it didn’t quite pan out. Hek, like most in Blue Mountain, operated out of the “never trust a stranger” motif. It was part of the general attitude of suspicion about most of the world.
    And it was clear to me that neither Hek nor June would reveal the rest of what they knew about the coin. Even if I had destroyed their kitchen with a sledgehammer. Once a secret’s locked in the rib cage of anyone I know in my little town, it’s there for good.
    So it was a quick good-bye and a dark road home for me, worrying about the things I hadn’t been told.
    Rain made things worse. It fell in silver stems, less translucent than water should be. All color was obviated. A dynasty of gray conquered the horizon. The buzz and hum of it on the roof and road conquered every other sound: Anything too soft could never be heard; anything too loud would be kin to the clatter. Thunder’s will was dispersed; no bird would call across the indefinable sky. Each raindrop blasted the ground, an explosion of wet earth. Each shaken, blinding stab of lightning accomplished that same destruction in the air.
    Finally, it came to me why rain had made it seem unlikely that anyone in Blue Mountain could have known about Shultz’s coin. Rain is a perfect curtain. It hides sound