Read Online Fool's Gold by Ted Wood - Free Book Online

silly, but you certainly go right to the heart of things."  
    "I'm sorry if I opened up any old wounds." I sipped my drink again, taking one last look at the man in the picture and then turning away to check the watercolors close to it. "All your work?"  
    "Don't tell me they're good," she said almost angrily. "They're competent, able even, but they don't have the real touch."
    "I don't know that I would recognize it in a landscape, even a brilliant one." I turned back to her and saw a frightening brightness in the corners of her eyes. She put her drink down and went to the counter for a tissue. She blew her nose and then turned back, smiling again.  
    "Sorry about the dramatics," she said with a wide smile. "Some nights it hits me that he's never going to come in through that door with a string of pickerel and three days' growth of beard."  
    "When did it happen?" I knew what—from the picture I guessed he had been an outdoorsman, one of those guys who out-Indians the Indians, paddling alone into lakes where only bears and trappers ever penetrate. That kind of guy usually tempts Providence one step too far at some point.  
    "August seventeenth, last year. He was alone, like always. He was heading upriver in his canoe, then carried it over the portage to some place he loved. I never found out what happened. His canoe was there, on the river below the rapids. The guy who found it figured he was trying to shoot the white water on his way home. His body never surfaced."  
    She looked so frail in that moment that I wanted to put my arm round her, would have done it if I'd known her longer. Instead I said "I'm sorry," and turned away to look at a watercolor.  
    She came up beside me, pointing out a rock in the foreground. "That's where we sat, the night he asked me to marry him. It was the same lake he was heading for when he ..." She let the sentence dangle for a heartbeat and then finished it bravely, "... when he died."  
    "And it's the same lake you've been painting ever since?"
    She nodded, then laughed awkwardly. "Can't paint the damn place out of my mind. I'd never done landscapes before, I always was a portrait painter, in watercolors yet, it made me halfway unique and I was good. I was very good, but since Ivan died, I haven't seen any faces I wanted to paint."  
    I left her looking at the painting and went back to the stove to check on the logs. This wasn't going to be the evening I had expected—a few drinks, a little steak, a gradual warming up that might have led anywhere while I was in Olympia, maybe longer. This was like the time I visited the widow of a man in my platoon, a plain girl with glasses who knew she had lost the only husband she would ever have and spent the evening in tears. I felt clumsy and inadequate.  
    Then she came over and sat on the couch next to the stove. "You do good work," she said brightly. "That's going just fine. Now if you'll pick out some music I'll think about tearing some lettuce up and scraping the frost off some fish fingers."  
    I laughed with her and the bad moment was over. She had a good record collection, light on rock, which is fine with me, but heavy on classics and, surprisingly, country. I picked out Willie Nelson's "Stardust" and sat across from her, enjoying the warmth of the stove.  
    She spoke first. "Sorry to seem such a Harlequin Romance character," she said. "It's just that you remind me of ... of the way things used to be. He was big, like you, only blond, but he had the same blue eyes."  
    I took the reins of the conversation and steered it away gently. "That's what you get from an English father and a Quebecois mother. Black hair and blue eyes. You should see my sister, she makes the combination work."  
    From that we moved to safer ground. I even told her about my divorce, and the reason for it, the aftermath of the encounter I'd mentioned to Gallagher.  
    She picked up her drink, still almost untouched, and