On that previous occasion, in her confusion and agitation, she had not thought to read the destination that had been entered in the Continental, which she had never programmed, which seemed to have been determined by the vehicle itself. Now she saw what she had expected to see: a number on a county road in Montana, an address that she hadn’t rinsed from memory, the very place where the private lane to Rustling Willows turned off the public blacktop.
“Who are you?” she asked, as if the person controlling the SUV’s navigation system from a distance must be able to hear her.
She received no reply.
18
In each room, no more than one lamp was lit. If it had a three-way switch, Wyatt set it at its lowest brightness. Otherwise, he draped the lampshade with a towel.
He opened a can of gourmet chili—made with filet mignon, rich and spicy—that he found in the pantry. He heated it in an oven and spooned it from the container as he walked the house. Following that, he ate peaches from a can, and when those were gone, he roamed again and again through the rooms and hallways, drinking coffee.
He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just getting a feel for the place. The real work would start in the morning.
The low illumination allowed him to see both the interior and something of the night beyond the large windows. If he had flooded the residence with light, he would have felt blind to any threat from outside. Although he didn’t believe an immediate danger loomed, hard experience had taught him always to proceed as if one existed.
Besides, he was a little bit spooked, not as much by the house as by the land surrounding it. In spite of the verdant quality of these thousands of acres, he might not have felt more isolated if he’d been transported to a barren crater on the moon.
Wyatt Rider, thirty-nine years old and eighteen years a PI, was city born and city raised. Con artists, like his larcenous parents, favored metropolitan living not just because there were more fish to be hooked there, but also because those schooling millions took the bait quicker than did small-town marks. The popular conception of big-city residents as uniformly sophisticated and street smart was undercut by countless studies showing that a higher percentage of city dwellers than rural types not only suffered depression and psychoses, but lived with a simmering paranoia that made them more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. There was some truth to the term “madding crowd.” Good con men and women were quick to take advantage of this us-against-them paranoia, presenting themselves as the enemies of whatever conspiracy or segment of society that their hapless marks currently most feared and despised, deftly winning the confidence of those they intended to fleece.
As a consequence, a private investigator who needed to make a living but who also wanted to bring down the frauds and swindlers was less likely to be able to pay his bills and take satisfaction in his work if he set up office in Mayberry instead of Manhattan. In Wyatt’s case, Manhattan was Seattle, although his cases often took him far afield from the Emerald City.
He hoped never to get farther from the glass-and-steel towers and noisy concrete avenues of teeming humanity than Rustling Willows Ranch. Earlier, after Vance Potter had left, when the sound of his pickup had faded entirely, the quiet of the seeming infinity of land had been, in Wyatt’s experience, so unnatural that a sense of the uncanny had crept over him, akin to what Potter described as his own occasional reaction to the place. Wyatt was the least superstitious of men, not so impressionable that Potter’s words could unnerve him. Yet as he’d stood in the red sunset, in the dying of the light, he had felt that he was being watched. In fact, the feeling had been so intense that, surveying the yard and willows nearest to him, he’d been overcome by the bizarre conviction that whoever watched him was right there, not concealed in the distance and using binoculars, but within a few yards, maybe even within arm’s reach, real but somehow invisible.
Disquieted more by the fact that his imagination had run wild than by anything that might be out there in the fading twilight, he had returned to the house. As a rejection of baseless fear, he had not locked the front door. Later, after nightfall, as he ate while touring the residence, he engaged the deadbolt in passing, without making a production of it, almost unconsciously.
He was still exploring the rooms, studying them, warmed by his second mug of coffee, when the presence he’d sensed earlier revealed itself, though in a form that was incomprehensible to him.
19
As stated in Asher Optime’s historic manifesto, abandoned Zipporah stands testament to the transient nature of humanity, to the truth that the demise of the species is figured in its genes. This is not a ghost town, as the romantics would have it. These are ruins, all that remains of the hopes of self-important men and women who are dead and gone as if they never existed. The crumbling town isn’t haunted, for there are no ghosts, no spirits to survive those who lived and died here.