59
With only the palest face of dusk at the window, Asher Optime moves in the familiar darkness of the saloon without a misstep. He is as comfortable in this absence of light as the Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis, with his human body and his jackal head, is at home in the darkest of underworlds. Asher puts the shotgun on the table and, with a butane lighter, fires up the gas lantern. The fabric sacs, which serve as wicks, swell with an eldritch glow.
The first wrongness that he notices involves the journal containing his manifesto in progress. He left it directly in front of his writing chair, aligned precisely with the edge of the table, open to the half-empty page on which he will continue to explicate his revolutionary philosophy. An intruder has pushed it to one side, as though this is a volume of no value that anyone is free to touch without consequences. Items from the backpacks once carried by the Fieldings, father and son, are missing: a compass, trail maps, an Attwood signal horn in a small pressurized can . . .
When he realizes that Colson’s backpack is no longer here, Asher snatches the shotgun from the table. He doesn’t know how the bitch and boy could have escaped, but he doesn’t delude himself that anyone other than those two have been here, doesn’t waste time going to the church to see if they huddle in the stench of decomposition. When he came in from the front, there had been no one in the street. So he hurries now into the back room, past his stacked supplies, and out the door to the broad sward between town and river.
He looks left and right, but no one is in sight. He hurries through the tall grass, from which clouds of midges leap, in which crickets sing, past the outhouse where he had humiliated the haughty Ophelia while she urinated, heading toward the river. The red light has been extinguished with the sunken sun, and the dusk is gray for a brief interlude before the clutching darkness of a moonless, starless night will grip the land in advance of the storm.
He doesn’t need proof that Nature is aware of his efforts on her behalf, but if he did need such proof, it’s provided to him now when he looks south and catches sight of the fugitives, two small figures who might have been so easily overlooked. They have just crossed the river and are moving toward the cover of the trees in the west, the forbidding evergreen forest rising above them like serried battlements. If he’d been a minute later, even just thirty seconds, they would have vanished, and he would not now be aware of the direction in which they have chosen to escape.
They are far beyond the range of the shotgun, and Asher isn’t equipped to follow them at once. By the time he gears up to go after them on foot, they will be too far ahead of him. Fortunately, he has the Land Rover, which can negotiate difficult terrain, and he is familiar with a network of forest service roads that should make the pursuit almost as easy as a trip to the mall in suburbia.
Asher has hiking-trail maps like those the runaways possess, and he is sure to be more familiar with this territory than is the boy. Colson and Ophelia might hope to find help within a mile or two, perhaps a mountain man’s isolated cabin or a fire tower manned by one or more rangers, but safety and succor are farther away than that, sufficiently distant that Asher will be able to get ahead of them and lie in wait.
He knows the forest. He knows the trails. He knows that he is meant to add the woman and boy to his testamentary necropolis. They are not dressed for inclement weather, and Nature will rain down on them such misery that they will founder far short of freedom.
60
In the rapidly fading dusk, the headlights were insufficient for the vastness of the land, and what blacktop they revealed seemed to extend into infinity, as if already the Range Rover had journeyed out of the world.
As she spoke, Joanna Chase stared fixedly ahead, never looking at Wyatt, though he glanced repeatedly at her. Quiet dread informed her voice, and in the lurid glow of the instrument-panel lights, her beauty had the severe quality of a woman haunted by the specter of her mortality.
Wyatt had felt an affinity for her when she first stepped out of the Explorer into the company of elk, and his tenderness toward her had grown. Now, as she shared her torment at learning that her father murdered her mother, Wyatt’s intuitive liking for her became an attachment that felt profound. When he was a child, his parents weren’t who they seemed to be; by the time he was ten, he understood that they were deceivers, thieves, ruthlessly preying on the weak, and when he was fourteen, he discovered they were capable of murder. He had feared being like them, and if he’d not been strong-willed, with sympathy for their victims, he might have lost his way, been seduced into the romance of predation. His parents had not stolen only from others, but also from their son, robbing him of his innocence and of the more normal life he might have had if they had not been corrupt. Joanna still had the memory and example of her mother, but now her father had been taken from her by something worse than death, by the revelation that who he’d pretended to be was not who he had been, that his character had been of the worst kind. She would be stricken by a cold type of grief twined with anger, which Wyatt knew well, a revelation sure to shake her sense of self-worth. He was the right man to help her cope with such dark and tangled emotions, and he wanted a chance to lend his support.