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Show 120 of her frock, and smiled, showing gums. What she had come for they never learned. Lorin's great-grandmother never forgave herself for losing control and dropping the thundermug. As it hit the floor, confusion had pierced her brain, followed by despair, followed in turn by a paralysis of the senses and by a growing, sickening realization that nothing but shadows and dapples of sunlight stood in that doorway. The moment had been lost to reach through the veil, and the child never came again. Lorin remembered the polished translucent rock-some kind of quartz, probably-he had found in her cedar chest and played with furtively as a kid, and remembered the things he had imagined he saw in it when he held it up to the light. He sometimes fancied his great-grandmother sneaked it out herself now and then in later years to see if the daughter would turn up in it. Lots of the grizzled patriarchs in Utah in the old days had had stones like that one that they had found in the desert or been given by mysterious visitors to their remote farmhouses. They used them to find lost cattle or children or farm implements that had been stolen. Lorin even knew the story about a man whose stone quit working for him and whose daughter had to take over as the finder of lost objects in the neighborhood because the stone continued to work for her. At some point she imprudently asked to see Satan in the stone, and did, and after that the stone never worked again for anybody. He also cherished a story about a black-sheep great-uncle. This uncle was known to drink and to visit brothels in Evanston. He had kept the Randolph confectionery with a barber shop attached, and lived in a small house in back with a gaunt wife whose eyes were always red and a number of children who turned out poorly. He had a fine voice within a narrow middle range, A-flat to E above middle C, and he played a small melodeon that he kept in a corner of the living room and forbade his wife or children to |
