Dark Rivers of the Heart

flowers. She appeared to be radiantly innocent, not naive but unspoiled and without cynicism. Maybe Ellie was reading too much into a photo, but she perceived in Spencer's mother a vulnerability so poignant that suddenly tears welled in her eyes.
        Squinting, biting her lower lip, determined not to weep, she was at last forced to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. She wasn't moved solely by Spencer's loss. Staring at the woman in the summer dress, she thought of her own mother, taken from her so brutally.
        Ellie stood on the shore of a warm sea of memories, but she couldn't bathe in the comfort of them. Every wave of recollection, regardless of how innocent it seemed, broke on the same dark beach.
        Her mother's face, in every recaptured moment of the past, was as it had been in death: bloodied, bullet-shattered, with a fixed gaze so full of horror that it seemed as if, at the penultimate moment, the dear woman had glimpsed what lay beyond this world and had seen only a cold, vast emptiness.
        Shivering, Ellie turned her eyes away from the snapshot to the starboard porthole beside her seat. The blue sky was as forbidding as an icy sea, and close beneath the low-flying craft passed a meaningless blur of rock, vegetation, and human endeavor.
        When she was certain that she was in control of her emotions, Ellie looked again at the woman in the summer dress-and then at the final of the four photographs. She had noted aspects of the mother in the son, but she saw a much greater resemblance between Spencer and the shadowshrouded man in the fourth picture. She knew this had to be his father, even though she didn't recognize the infamous artist.
        The resemblance, however, was limited to the dark hair, darker eyes, the shape of the chin, and a few other features. In Spencer's face, there was none of the arrogance and potential for cruelty that made his father appear to be so cold and forbidding.
        Or perhaps she saw those things in Steven Ackblom only because she knew that she was gazing at a monster. If she had come upon the photo without reason to suspect who the man was-or if she had met him in life, at a party or on the street-she might have seen nothing about him that made him more ominous than Spencer or other men.
        Ellie was immediately sorry that such a thought had occurred to her, for it encouraged her to wonder if the kind, good man she saw in Spencer was at best only part of the truth. She realized, somewhat was and to her surprise, that she did not want to doubt Spencer Grant.
        Instead, she was eager to believe in him, as she had not believed in anything or anyone for a long time.
        If I was blind, if I'd never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.
        Those words had been so sincere, such an uncalculated revelation of his feelings and his vulnerability, that she had been left briefly speechless.
        Yet she hadn't possessed the courage to give him any reason to believe that she might be capable of reciprocating his feelings for her.
        Danny had been dead only fourteen months, and that was, by her standards, far too short a time to grieve. To touch another man this soon, to care, to love-that seemed to be a betrayal of the man whom she hadfirst loved and whom she would still love, to the exclusion of all others, were he alive.
        On the other hand, fourteen months of loneliness was, by any measure, an eternity.
        To be honest with herself, she had to admit that her reticence sprang from more than a concern about the propriety or impropriety of a fourteen-month period of mourning. As fine and loving as Danny had been, he never would have found it possible to bare his heart as directly or as completely as Spencer had done repeatedly since she'd driven him out of that dry wash in the desert. Danny had not been unromantic, but he had expressed his feelings less directly, with thoughtful gifts and kindnesses, rather than with words, as if to say "I love you" would have been to cast a curse upon their relationship.
        She was unaccustomed to the rough poetry of a man like Spencer, when he spoke from his heart, and she was not sure what she thought of it.
        That was a lie. She liked it. More than liked it. In her hardened heart, she was surprised to find a tender place that wasn't merely responsive to Spencer's forthright expressions of love but that