Less for Colson’s information than to reassure herself, she said, “I can swim.”
“Good. But you’re not going to fall in. Piece of cake.” He shouldered the backpack and secured the strap. “Just follow me and try to do what I do. You’ll be all right.”
The first link in the natural bridge lay close to the river’s edge, and he stepped easily from the shore to that stone.
Heart knocking so hard that her vision pulsed at the periphery, Ophelia turned to look back toward Zipporah. The impending storm claimed two-thirds of the sky, and the sun slid below the horizon. In the shrinking light, the dead town seemed to swell higher, as though it had been half sunk in a grave from which it was being resurrected by some malignant power, its darkening walls like the ramparts of a lair where monsters bred. There was no sign of Asher Optime.
“Come on,” Colson urged from the second stone, and she stepped onto the first.
58
When Hector Alvarez swung the vintage Studebaker pickup into his graveled driveway, Joanna Chase was standing behind the Range Rover, hair tossing in the wind, arms crossed on her breast. Wyatt knew at once that something terrible had happened. Her body language suggested stress, anguish, fear.
She favored Hector with a smile and hugged him and said that she’d had a lovely visit with Jimmy, that she was sorry she hadn’t visited sooner, that she wouldn’t be a stranger anymore. The old man seemed to think she was sincere, but Wyatt wasn’t buying a word of it. She hugged Hector again and kissed him on the cheek.
Behind the house, the rotor on the windmill was spinning so fast that the vanes blurred into a single disc, and the wind cried as if it were a living thing being sliced to ruin by those blades. Joanna turned away from Hector just as three red-tailed hawks, which should have been sheltering from the oncoming storm, diurnal raptors that didn’t hunt at this late hour, swooped low overhead. The birds, usually elegant in flight, were buffeted in the turbulent air as they soared toward the windmill. One by one, they flew into the spinning vanes, exploding in showers of feathers, blood, and bones.
Hector gaped at the grisly spectacle. “Mother of God, what’s that about?”
“It’s never happened before?” Wyatt asked.
Hector shook his head. “Never a hawk. Maybe another bird now and then, one now and then, never three. Never saw any fly straight into it on purpose. And I hope never to see it again.”
As she opened the front passenger door on the Rover, Joanna gave Wyatt a look that said, Let’s get the hell out of here.
He settled behind the wheel and started the engine. As he turned left onto the county road, he said, “When we were coming back, four deer blocked both lanes and wouldn’t be chased off by gunfire. I figured it was him.”
Although Joanna clasped her hands in her lap, Wyatt had already seen that they were shaking. She was pale and obviously afraid, yet her expression was fierce with anger or determination or both.
“Joanna?”
She said, “He wants me dead. That’s what the hawks were about—a warning. No, a promise.”
“Jimmy? Jimmy wants you dead? But you said—”
“Not Jimmy. He never was Jimmy. He was using Jimmy back in the day, just like he uses animals. He considers Jimmy just another animal, a weak mind easy to control, with the vocal apparatus to allow speech, so he could talk to me. My secret friend never was Jimmy, and he was never really my friend.”
“He? Using Jimmy? Who are we talking about?”
“I don’t know who he is, what he is. I don’t know anything I thought I knew about my childhood. He says my father killed my mother for money, hit her on the head with a boat oar and held her underwater till she drowned. It rang true, for God’s sake, ’cause whatever else he is, he’s not a liar. My secret friend”—she put an ironic twist on the word—“my caring friend witnessed the murder more or less. Later he used a grizzly bear to execute my father, to gut him and tear him apart and devour him. ‘Fair retribution, the impersonal visitation of the doom of righteous law’—that’s what he called it. He sees himself as being of superior virtue, with some great moral purpose, above us all, says he’s always done the right thing, says by his nature he simply must do the right thing. Even twenty-four years ago, he had to have been a megalomaniac, but he’s something far worse now, Wyatt. He’s rabidly judgmental, paranoid, seething with hatred that I don’t believe he felt back when I was a little girl. And he’s so powerful, more than you know. Powerful and hidden, his whereabouts unknowable.”