Although Jimmy’s eyes had been strange when Joanna had been a child, she didn’t believe they had been bright with derangement, but there was madness in those eyes now.
His finger curled back into his hand, and he shook his fist at her. “I brought the bear out of the forest, down from the foothills, guided it to your wretched father where he was riding his favorite horse. I triggered its memory of the smell and flavor of rich blood, then turned it loose to do the work for which nature had shaped it. I did this for your mother, for your mother!”
“My mother was a gentle soul. She believed in justice but not vengeance.”
Infuriated by the implied accusation, he shrieked his response, spittle flying. “It wasn’t vengeance! It was fair retribution, the impersonal visitation of the doom of righteous law! I’m forbidden vengeance. I am forbidden!”
He leaped off the footstool and hurried to the nightstand. He yanked open the drawer and fumbled through whatever it contained.
For an instant she thought he would turn toward her with a knife and deadly purpose. As she was about to pivot toward the door, he found what he wanted and brandished it at her: a simply framed photograph of Joanna when she’d been seven or eight years old.
Jimmy brought it to her and threw it on the floor at her feet. “The pitiful monkey wanted it for whatever stupid monkey reason, but he doesn’t want it now. He can’t have it now. He can’t ever have it, because you aren’t you anymore. You’ve changed! You’re so changed! You’re just another one, just like all the rest of them, another plague virus, pestilence.”
This extraordinary individual, whether merely malformed and maladjusted or in fact a monster, compelled her attention and was the fulcrum on which her future would be leveraged. There could be no forgetting him again, and there absolutely must be an ultimate understanding of him, of all that he could do and all that he had done, for she could not have a normal life or write anything worth writing if she fled Montana and left the mystery of him unsolved. What she had forgotten—been made to forget—of her childhood had shaped her more than she yet understood, and it no doubt explained why, at thirty-three, she remained without a partner in life, and why her six novels were filled with such yearning for transcendence of one kind or another.
He kicked the framed photograph that he had thrown down. “Take it. Take it and get out.”
Although Jimmy had rebuked her instead of attacking her, Joanna believed he had the capacity to commit horrendous violence, not just in the name of retribution, but for reasons quite irrational. Though she hadn’t harmed anyone, she felt no safer here than her homicidal father had been when he’d ridden Spirit into the farther reaches of the ranch on the last day of his life.
Nevertheless, when Jimmy shouted at her—“GET OUT!”—she said, “No,” and walked past him to the only window, where she raised the pleated shade and let in some welcome light.
48
The brick came free in a sudden crumbling of fractured mortar, and pale daylight shaped the vacant space.
A surge of emotion filled Colson Fielding, something better than grief, healthier than anger, far cleaner than a thirst for vengeance. This small success with one brick gave him a profound sense of connection with his lost father, because his dad had been so knowledgeable about so many things, so competent by nature; and he felt as well close to his grandfather, who still lived, who still built houses and knew about mortar and had given him the Swiss Army knife years earlier; and in his mind’s eye, he saw his mother’s kind face, she whom he loved above all, she for whom he must survive to give her strength when she received the news of her widowhood. Not for the first time, though more powerfully than ever before, he understood the value of family, the comfort and power of generations who, whatever their faults, shared a history and were devoted to one another as much as human nature allowed. The weight of the brick in his hand was a small fraction of the weight of the Fielding family in its many generations; a healthy family was a fortress.
Ophelia switched on the Tac Light. The beam found the brick, and she said, “One down, like just two hundred to go.”
“More like a hundred sixty.”
“Gimme the knife, and I’ll dig one out.”
“The next will be a lot easier,” Colson predicted, placing the first brick on a nearby pew, as if it were a sacred relic that must be treated with reverence. “And the third is gonna be easier than the second.”
Switching off the flashlight and setting to work with the blade in the dim glow—and the whispering draft—that entered where a brick was missing, Ophelia said, “Why easier?”