"Bailey-HomeBurial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

window. The storm had abated, the wind died down. Rachel held her breath and
listened.

Nothing.

And then, just as she began to breathe, there it was again-- the shrill cry of
the child cutting through the night from the burying ground. Panic knotted
Rachel's throat. She pushed aside the covers and crossed the icy floor to stand
in the chill radiance of the window.

Through her faint homely reflection, twisted by the brittle skin of ice that had
grown over the glass, Rachel looked out at a world rounded and dimensionless
beneath a dingy lid of snow. The oak tree loomed against the moonlit sky like a
shaggy grandfather, bearded gray by the storm. Farther away, on a hill that
would turn gentle and green come spring, lay the burying ground. Three roughly
carved wooden markers and a single wooden cross, knotted about with rawhide
strips, leaned like jagged teeth from the frozen earth. The markers indicated
the graves of Breece's folks, dead two decades, and his first wife, Shelley,
dead near upon three years now. The cross wasn't even two weeks old; it marked
the spot where Rachel's child had been buried.

"Rachel?" Breece said, and she turned to see him sitting upright in a tangle of
blankets. He watched her alertly.

"Listen," she said. "Can you hear it?"

She looked back out the window and the sound of the baby came to her with the
icy clarity of undiluted pain. Rachel felt as if a knitting needle had been
plunged into her heart.

"Hear what?"

Rachel wrapped herself in an embrace and saw that tiny goose bumps had erupted
along her forearms. "The baby."

Breece sighed. She heard the covers shift, his bare feet against the
floorboards. "Come to bed now," he said, appearing in the window as a ghostly
reflection. "Ain't nothing out there."

"Don't you hear it?"

"I don't hear a thing except you talking foolishness." His hands closed about
her arms. "Ain't nothing to hear."

"Our baby's crying, Breece."

"Baby's dead, Rachel," he said gently. "You know that."

Anger boiled out of some poisoned well within her. "I don't know that," she
said. "I never saw the baby. You buried him without me ever seeing him. I don't