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Harmony Creek Hollow, New York
The bottle of spaghetti sauce at the top of the pyramid swayed.
The three bottles below it rocked.
The whole stack quivered.
Eli Troyer leaped forward and hooked an arm around his nephew. He yanked the six-year-old away from the grocery store endcap. Kyle let out a shriek. Whether it was shock or a forewarning, everyone within sight in the small grocery store froze.
But not the bottles. The stack began to crumble.
Just as the wall had.
Irrational terror swelled through Eli, clamping talons around his windpipe. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. Sounds erupted in his mind. The memory of an earsplitting crack from a wall that couldn’t stand any longer. A man’s horrified shout, a woman’s scream, crashing stone, pain...silence.
Always the silence.
Knowing he had to protect the little boy, Eli put out a hand in a futile effort to stabilize the bottles, to keep the display from crumbling. Too late. Just like before. In a slow-motion avalanche, the tower collapsed. He bent over Kyle, keeping himself between the little boy and disaster. Time escalated again when the first jar hit the concrete floor and shattered. The rest followed. Some bounced and rolled, but most exploded in a spray of marinara sauce. The sharp sounds resonated through his hearing aids as if he stood in a giant hailstorm.
Shouts, loud enough so he could hear them, though he couldn’t pick out words, rang through the store. His fear faded into knowing he must deal with what had happened in Salem’s only grocery store. He fought the yearning to flee as a different panic burst out in a cold sweat. After four years of staying out of the limelight, eyes were focused on him. It was the moment he dreaded, the moment he’d hoped wouldn’t come.
Someone was going to talk to him. Ask him questions. Expect him to understand what they’d said and then answer.
What once would have been a snap now was torture. Since the retaining wall had fallen on him and his brother and sister-in-law, he’d asked God at least once a day why Kyle’s parents had been killed and he hadn’t. He’d survived, but most of his hearing had been lost, leaving him encased in silence.
Not just his hearing had changed that day. His whole life had. If the wall hadn’t capsized, he’d be married to Betty Ann Miller. He hadn’t been sure if her averted glances had been pity or if she was ashamed because she found herself walking out with a damaged man. Either way, he never walked out with her again, and she’d married someone else.
He avoided talking to people. Most when they saw his hearing aids raised their voices and spoke slowly as if that would have helped more. Before he’d brought Kyle north from their home district in Delaware, he’d known when to dodge chatty neighbors. The storekeepers near Dover had learned it was easier to let him point to what he needed and not engage him in conversation.
Ach, how he missed the simple pleasure of a chat. Now he mostly spoke to Kyle, who helped him with even the simplest interactions.
“Are you okay?” he asked his nephew.
The little boy, who looked like Eli’s late brother with his bright red hair and freckles, nodded.
“What happened?”
Kyle shrugged and held up a box of brown sugar before going to stand by where the sugar was on a shelf. It was at least three feet from the endcap, farther than the little boy could reach. The motions were Kyle’s way of telling him that he hadn’t touched the bottles.
His mud-brown eyes widened, and he pointed past Eli.
Expecting to see an angry store manager, Eli squared his shoulders and prepared to strain what little hearing he had left to pick up the manager’s words. He turned.