Empire Falls

unless for some inexplicable reason you were duty bound to remain right where you were. Perhaps it was the fact that Grace was not looking at the camera, but rather off at an oblique angle, that suggested she might have been listening to that same distant rumbling. If indeed it was an intimation of her own mortality she was hearing, Miles reflected, it had been closer than she thought.
    Several others in the photograph were people Miles recognized, some dead, some living, some still residing in Empire Falls, others long gone. In one case he thought it was a man he knew well, then realized it had to be the man’s father. And at the end of the first row stood a small, white-bearded man dressed in a three-piece suit, C. B. Whiting himself, proprietor of the Empire Shirt Factory. If anything grim was bearing down on Mrs. Whiting’s husband, he did not as yet seem aware of it. How many years after this photo was taken, Miles tried to remember, did he return from exile in Mexico and put the cold barrel of a revolver against his own pulsing temple? How strange, he thought, that just yesterday he’d stood at the foot of this man’s grave.
    After the game, once the crowd had dispersed and they’d made their slow, careful way back to Miles’s car, Cindy had asked if he’d be willing to take a short walk, and he’d made the mistake of agreeing before asking exactly what she had in mind.
    “I think it’s the prettiest place in town,” his companion said as they followed the well-tended path, Cindy leaning more on her cane now than on Miles, though she did have a firm grip on his elbow just in case. Losing her balance on the bleachers and pitching forward into Jimmy Minty’s arms had unnerved her.
    At her suggestion they’d parked just outside the east gate, the closest one to the Whiting section of the cemetery. Now in the late afternoon, the sky had clouded over and a chilly wind had come up, rustling brown leaves along the path.
    “It is peaceful,” Miles had admitted, sniffing the air. Was it his imagination or was the breeze redolent of cat piss? Since entering the cemetery Miles had seen several cats darting among the stones. They couldn’t possibly be feral, could they? He didn’t like to think what would offer them sustenance in a cemetery. The swelling where the Whiting cat had bitten him had gone down, but the hand began to pulse, inviting another round of scratching. This time Miles decided to resist. A police cruiser rolled silently by on the other side of the cast-iron fence about a hundred yards away, too far to make out whether Jimmy Minty was at the wheel. Cindy also tracked its progress until the cruiser turned onto Elm and headed back toward town.
    When they arrived at the top of the hill, the river was just visible in the distance, and a shaft of bright afternoon sun from a break in the clouds electrified the blue water. When they stopped before her father’s grave, Cindy said, “He brings me here sometimes.”
    Miles considered this statement. Knowing his companion’s lifelong distaste for metaphor, he decided she was not claiming that C. B. Whiting drew her to this place by supernatural means.
    “Who?” he decided to ask.
    “James.”
    No help. “James?”
    “James Minty.” Now it was her turn to regard Miles dubiously, as if he were either slow or not paying close attention. He tried to think whether he’d ever heard anyone else call Minty “James,” then gave up.
    “I haven’t been a very good friend, have I?” he confessed, hating to think that with respect to this poor woman he’d remained as stingy as an adult as he’d been as a boy. After all, how much time would it have taken him to bring her to visit her father’s grave on her rare, short visits to Empire Falls.
    “Oh, Miles, you were married,” she said, apparently reading his thoughts.
    There was a large pot of what had once been marigolds on C. B. Whiting’s grave. They’d drooped and gone brown, the pot itself filling with brittle leaves. Here the smell of urine was even more pronounced than it had been before. “I put these here just a few days ago,” Cindy said, bending over precariously to examine the marigolds. “They should have lasted.” She paused. “James works for my mother, you know. I’m sure she paid him for his time.”
    “Works for her how, exactly?” Miles asked.
    “Different ways. He looks after the house when she travels. He helped her put in a security system. Keeps an eye on the