Before he could find a few words of comfort, however, Joanna shared with him the astonishing fact that whoever used Jimmy Alvarez as an avatar was able to read minds. At first he thought she meant the minds of animals and of those like Jimmy who were of gravely low intelligence, but the truth was more terrible than that. While being Jimmy, the controller had read Joanna’s mind as easily as he could have read a newspaper. She tested his claim, and he passed the test.
“He says this ability has a limited radius,” Joanna remembered. “A mile? Ten miles? That’s crazy, godlike power. Except he’s no god. So maybe he’s here with us right now, reading me or you.”
Rugs had been pulled out from under Wyatt repeatedly during the last two days; however, this felt like the floor of reason itself disintegrating under him. “You feel his . . . his presence?”
“No. I suspect it. He says he’s sick of knowing our minds, that we’re corrupt, that we disgust him, so he’ll never read one of us again. But he’s mercurial, and I don’t believe he’ll stay . . . stay out of us.”
Paranoia was an essential part of the human survival instinct. Suddenly the darkening land around them suggested imminent peril in every direction, and the headlamps of the oncoming traffic seemed hazardous, like a lethal radiation spawning cancer in the bones.
“Do you really think he’d harm you?” Wyatt asked.
“I’ve failed him by growing up. He hates me for not remaining an innocent child. There’s something terrifyingly infantile in that. He’s seething with hatred, but not just for me. He wants all of us dead. Everyone.”
61
The automatic landscape lights came on, silvering the trees. In the wind, the willows tossed their tresses as if they were mourners capable of anguish and bedeviled by the grim history of the ranch.
Wyatt used the remote control to raise the garage door as they approached along the driveway, but Joanna said, “No. Park here and come with me.”
“Where?”
“The lake.”
“It’s about to rain.”
“Let it.”
She opened her door and got out into the blustery night, which was cool and humid and scented by the fecund earth. The willows didn’t merely rustle, but thrashed with a roar like cascades of water spilling over a high cataract.
She believed that she was in mortal danger and knew her fear was justified. A grizzly bear could live as long as thirty-five years in the wild. The beast that had fed on her father might still be alive, but if it was dead, surely others were out there in the higher foothills, near enough to come if called by the master of nature and of Jimmy Two Eyes.
When Wyatt caught up with her, halfway across the expansive lawn, his presence didn’t diminish her fear, although she felt less alone, which was blessing enough. In addition to the other solemn epiphanies of this eventful day, Joanna realized that, in spite of Auntie Kat, she had felt alone most of her life. Having lost both her mother and her father, having left behind Hector and Annalisa and Jimmy, having been taken from the ranch that had nurtured her and seemed so safe, she had thereafter believed that no one and nothing could be counted on to last. Throughout the rest of her childhood and adolescence, she had expected Auntie Kat to die and leave her desperately alone. As a consequence, she had never given her heart entirely to that generous woman. For the same reason, she had been unable to trust that any man in her life would be there for her tomorrow if she dared to commit herself to him.
“Why the lake?” Wyatt asked as they reached the dock, their footfalls drumming on the planks, the scent of wet wood rising, and the fainter scent of creosote under it.
“This morning, on the flight out of Santa Fe, a memory of Jimmy suddenly came back to me. Just one. Not like other memories from childhood. Strangely vivid after all these years, so detailed. Jimmy and I were in lawn chairs, sitting right here, watching the sunset, crimson and purple, the water full of the sky’s colors. He said something . . . something curious.”
She led Wyatt to the end of the dock. The attached boathouse loomed to their left. The black lake lay before them, worked by the wind but still as glossy as a mirror. The shrouded, slowly roiling sky loomed less dark than the lake, just vaguely revealed by the ghastly light of the drowned moon lost in its depths. The shapes of the faintly limed clouds were dimly reflected on the wind-feathered water, but they seemed to be malevolent creatures swimming a few feet below the surface, metamorphizing from one lethal form to another.
Joanna suddenly felt that the lake was the locus of—the answer to—the mystery of Rustling Willows. Not because her mother had died in these waters. Not solely because of Wyatt Rider’s story about the invader of the boathouse, the thing that slammed repeatedly into the electric Duffy. Hour by hour, since being welcomed by the elk, she’d become increasingly sensitive to the unsettling truth that the ranch was haunted by something other than a ghost. Some Presence resided here, unseen but ever observant, in sunlight and in shadow, no door or wall an obstruction to it. And now as she stood staring into the dark fathoms, where the storm seemed to be building as surely as it gathered power in the heavens, she knew the lake was the answer, if only she could form the right questions with which to begin to seine its secrets from its waters.