Refiner's Fire by Sylvia Bambola

Author:Sylvia Bambola [Bambola, Sylvia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76942-8
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Alexander Wainwright sat on the bench beneath the plum trees. He watched as several birds pecked for grubs among the crabgrass. The gardeners were nowhere in sight. Since his initial conference with the house staff, Alexander had seen the gardeners only a handful of times. One flower bed in the corner had been weeded, but the remaining were still overrun. Only a small section of the fruit trees had been composted. The lawn was in need of cutting, and the unruly shrubs continued to snag hair and clothing.

He had never had a garden so poorly tended, and it occurred to him that the country and these grounds were similar. In both, grubs and weeds were master; one visible, one invisible. One spread over the surface, like Communism, and one worked underground, like the Securitate. But the results were the same. In time, everything was destroyed. He hoped he wouldn’t be here to see it. Demolition and cleanup were hard work.

Loretta was right; he was a level one. He never let people get too close. Getting close to a person meant getting close to his problems. Heartache by association. He had enough heartache, he thought, as he pictured Loretta. What grub had come into their garden? What was eating away, unseen, at their marriage?

On two other occasions, he had seen Loretta take a note from Yuri. That made three notes in all that he had seen. Who knew the number of those he had not? He chided himself for thinking such evil about his wife, but just when he would begin to believe nothing was happening, Loretta would do something else to plunge him back down into that pit he couldn’t seem to climb out of. She would get another note from Yuri, or sneak out of the house and not tell him where she was going. She had become withdrawn, secretive, and sometimes he would awake in the middle of the night and hear her crying in the bathroom. A guilty conscience trying to cleanse itself? He remembered Lucy telling him of the nights she had heard Loretta cry. Just how long had this been going on? And how much longer could he take it?

He found it more and more difficult to concentrate at the office, and at a time when he needed all his wits. The political situation was as strained as it could be. Donald Walters had been picking up the slack admirably, but how long could he be expected to do that? Alexander knew people were talking. He would see heads together, whispering, then they would separate when he was sighted. This was the second time this week he had left the office early. And this was the second time this week Loretta had not been home when he arrived. How much of his marriage had the grubs eaten?

Alexander had already decided that no matter what, he would not divorce his wife. No matter what Loretta had done, it could not be as terrible as life without her.

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