For a long moment, his hesitation surprised and disturbed him, for his apprehension had no valid cause. But intuition, the primary knowledge born in the mind before all teaching and all reasoning, had served him well before, and if it previously had been a trickle charge, it was now a high-tension wire buzzing insistently in the back of his mind. The fireflies had gone elsewhere, so whatever the explanation behind the phenomenon might be, it wouldn’t be found in the boathouse. Nothing in there warranted investigation at this late hour—and would still be there in the morning.
As he returned to the house, he glanced back only once. In the kitchen, after rinsing out his coffee mug, he poured a cold beer into it and spiked the brew with a shot of whiskey.
At 11:10, he retreated to the guest room, where he’d left his luggage. From a suitcase, he retrieved a Heckler & Koch Combat Competition Mark 23 chambered for .45 ACP. He inserted the magazine and put the pistol on a nightstand.
Although their experiences had been unsettling, Liam and his family hadn’t needed a weapon to defend against a threat or ensure that they could leave at will. However, as events at the ranch had taken a strange turn, the seeming malice behind them had at one point rapidly escalated. If they had delayed another hour or two, they might have found that even the pistol Liam was licensed to carry would have been inadequate.
A pair of French doors led to a deck that overlooked the lake, and there were two bedroom windows. He pulled the draperies shut at all of them.
His intention had been to turn off the lamps throughout the house before going to bed, but he changed his mind. He didn’t have a flashlight. If during the night something unsettling occurred, he didn’t relish making his way through the dark house, fumbling with light switches.
21
Numerous thin shafts of afternoon sunshine pierced the branches of the pines and the boughs of other evergreens, scattering treasure on the trail, a wealth of gold coins that didn’t clink or clatter under young Joanna’s feet as she chased the bear. Where no low branches obstructed the way, the immense grizzly ran on its hind legs, towering eight feet tall, but otherwise it loped on all four, lumbering but as fast as a cat. She followed, laughing and calling out to the bruin—“Mr. Smokey”—although of course it wasn’t the cartoon brown bear from the forest-service commercials on TV. They came into a sun-splashed clearing, a meadow where green grass and wildflowers seemed to leap out of the earth to greet them. Two deer grazed there, an antlered buck and a doe. Chewing contentedly, they raised their beautiful heads, regarding Joanna and Mr. Smokey with interest, though not with fear. The grizzly led the girl to the deer and stopped short of them lest they misunderstand its intent. Joanna dashed ahead, and as she approached, the deer gamboled away from her, not in fear but as her guides for the next phase of the game.
Buck led doe and doe led girl out of the meadow, into another arm of the forest, along a continuation of the deer path. Flocks of rock doves winged through the woods, jubilantly singing their p-p-p-proo flight call, and red foxes ran to both sides of her, their thickly furred tails streaming behind them like long, wooly scarves. They hurried past a grown-up Joanna asleep in a bed among the trees, in the pale light of a TV turned to a dead channel, onward and now down through a forest that thinned enough to allow undergrowth of Kesselringii and tatarian honeysuckle and lush emerald carpet with its urn-shaped blossoms. Onward, still onward, they ran, past a rock formation on which stood a Lincoln Aviator, past masses of Farrer’s potentilla with cascades of white flowers, lowbush blueberry with red leaves and blue fruit, maidenhair spleenwort and licorice fern, all plants whose names she knew because her mother had taught her about them. Buck, doe, girl raced past goat’s beard with its plumes of creamy flowers, past white mugwort, past a pair of suitcases packed and ready, out of the trees, through wild grass, where the deer stopped to graze again.
Young Joanna hurried on alone, out of the tall grass, across recently mown lawn, to the bosk of apple trees, at the center of which a small, slump-shouldered figure sat on a bench. Although she had run and run, she was not breathing hard when she settled beside the boy. She was eight years old, and he was eleven. His head was turned away from her when she declared, You are amazing, Jimmy! You’re the best secret friend a girl could ever have. He faced her then, his mouth half again as wide as it should be, full of crooked teeth. One eye blue and clear, the other dark and bloodshot. Large head misshapen as hers might be if she were to look at herself in a fun-house mirror. This boy who was thought to be incapable of language, this boy who had never spoken a word in his life, who communicated to others his wants and needs in grunts and broken sounds, said in a rough and raspy voice, “I’m in a dark place. I’m lost. The terrible big dark sky. I’m a danger to myself and others. Only you can help me, Jojo. Please come and help me.” Before she could reply, he looked past her, toward the distant lake. If some people might find his face already fearsome, the dread that suddenly gripped him wrenched his pitiable countenance into a goblin mask. When she turned her attention toward the lake, she saw her mother coming toward them, hair hanging wet and straight, clothes sodden, as if she had risen out of the deep water. Mother’s face was gray and swollen, and her eyes were milky. Joanna was only eight, a year younger than she had been when her mother drowned. This made no sense. How had Mother drowned a year before her time? Yet here she came, almost to the apple orchard, reaching out with one hand for her daughter, among the trees now. Jimmy Two Eyes said, “Run, Jojo. Run!” Joanna sprang up from the bench but did not know to what haven she should flee or whether she should flee at all. Drowned or not, this woman was her mother who had always loved her. “RUN, RUN, RUN, JOJO!” Jimmy Two Eyes shouted, and the Aviator appeared beyond the orchard, and Jojo sprinted to the SUV. The back door flew open as she approached. She clambered inside. The door slammed shut. Her mother’s dead face loomed beyond the window, and the woman pounded on the glass with both fists. The unknown driver, whoever he might be, accelerated away from there, across the acres of lawn, past trembling willow trees, toward the house, which was when Joanna realized she wasn’t alone in the back seat of the vehicle. Somehow, the corpse from which she’d sped away now sat beside her. Eyes as white as hard-boiled eggs, gray face pocked and pale lips tattered by nibbling fish, teeth stained with whatever filth, Mother smiled—