John Saul (11 page)

But this morning a camper had appeared in town with a report that his campsite had been destroyed. Though Rick had suspected the man might be exaggerating, he’d followed him back up to Coyote Creek to take a report.

What he found had shocked him.

The tent, one of the old-fashioned kind made of thick canvas, was in tatters, and when he examined the frayed edges where it had been torn, Rick saw no signs of knife marks. Searching through the ruins of the tent, he found one of the sleeping bags, which had been torn nearly in two. Oddly, most of the feathers were still inside; indeed, when he turned it over, the down cascaded to the ground. Surely, if an animal had done the damage, the feathers would already have been spread all over the campground. All his life, growing up in one part of the mountains or another as his father had moved from sawmill to sawmill, he’d watched wildlife hunt, watched animals stalk their quarry, watched predators worry their prey once they’d caught it. They never simply ripped something open and then let it lay. Invariably, the animals he’d watched picked up their kill and began shaking it, just as his dog shook the occasional rat he managed to kill, instinctively trying to break the rodent’s neck even long after it was dead.

Finally, after he’d examined the rest of the ruined camping gear and searched the area for tracks, he’d shaken his head uncertainly. “I want a couple of other fellows to take a look at this—see what they think—but I have to tell you, I’m not sure what we can do about it. Unless someone saw something, or at least heard something, I’m not real sure we’ll ever figure out what did this.”

“What about a bear? Or wolves?” the camper, whose name was Roy Bittern, suggested, unwilling to accept that he might never find out what had savaged his gear.

“Could be a bear, I suppose,” Martin had agreed. “Except with this kind of damage, and no reason for an attack, you have to assume a rogue bear. And rogues don’t stop. They just keep on rampaging, till someone comes along and shoots ’em.”

Bittern had gazed speculatively at his shredded tent. “Unless this is just the beginning,” he mused out loud. “What about wolves?”

Rick Martin had already thought about that possibility and dismissed it. “Not a chance. Wolves have a bad reputation, but as far as I know, that’s all it is—just a reputation. They stick to themselves, and grab a sheep now and then, but that’s pretty much the worst of it. Never heard of wolves doing anything like this. Best guess I can come up with is that it’s a grizzly gone bad, and if it is, you’re right. This is just the beginning.”

Finishing up his notes on the incident, and assuring Roy Bittern that two rangers would be up to look over the vandalism within the hour, Rick Martin had gotten into his Jeep and started back down the rutted dirt track that led to the valley floor.

If it was a bear that did the damage, he suspected there would be another incident within a night or two. Once a bear went bad, it never stopped.

But if it was a bear, where were the tracks?

As he came to the main road, he thought of Joey Wilkenson.

Joey, who had always been a little odd, and who had now lost both his parents to “accidents” that neither Rick nor his assistant deputy, Tony Moleno, were yet willing to accept at face value.

Joey, who often took off into the woods on his own, with only the company of his dog.

Was it possible that Joey might have come up here in the middle of the night and wreaked havoc on the campsite?

On the spur of the moment, he’d decided to go up to El Monte and have a talk with the boy, and watch his reactions carefully.

“Lucky those people weren’t there,” he finished now, covertly keeping his eyes on Joey as he spoke. “If they had been, they probably would have been killed.”

MaryAnne shuddered at the words, but didn’t miss the fact that Rick Martin was watching Joey as he made the statement. Her own eyes shifted to the boy, who had listened silently to Martin’s account.

Joey, though, said nothing, betraying no reaction at all.

“What I was wondering,” Martin went on, “was whether any of you heard anything last night, or saw anything.”

Now Joey stirred in his chair. “I did,” he said. As everyone in the room turned to face him, his brow knit into a deep frown. “Something woke me up,” he said. “I don’t even know what it was. Anyway, I went to my window and looked out, and I thought I saw someone outside.”

Rick Martin felt his heartbeat quicken. “You thought you saw someone?” he pressed. “Or did you actually
see
someone?”

Joey’s eyes flicked toward MaryAnne for a moment, almost as if he was seeking her help, but then he turned back. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It was just a sort of shadow outside. At first I thought it was a deer, but then I knew it wasn’t. It was out in the pasture, and I could barely see it. But it looked like a man.”

“Do you know who it was?” Martin asked.

Joey shook his head. “I told you—I could hardly see it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it this morning, Joey?” MaryAnne asked.

Joey shrugged. “I hardly even remembered it when I woke up,” he explained. “I mean, it was almost like it happened in a dream, you know?”

“What did you do after you saw it, Joey?” Rick asked.

“I just went back to bed.”

“You didn’t go outside?” the deputy pressed. “You didn’t go out and take a look?”

“Why would I do that?” Joey asked, his eyes narrowing.

Though he could sense MaryAnne Carpenter glaring at him, Rick decided to go on with his questions. “But you do that sometimes, don’t you Joey? Your dad used to tell me you like to go out in the woods by yourself.”

“Y-Yeah, I do that sometimes,” Joey reluctantly admitted. “But I didn’t go out last night.”

“Are you sure?” Martin pressed. “You went out a few nights ago, didn’t you? The night your mom—”

“Do we have to do this?” MaryAnne interrupted. “He told you what he saw last night, and he told you what he did.”

Rick Martin hesitated, then decided that for now he’d gone far enough. But he’d watched Joey carefully while questioning him, and taken careful note of one thing.

The boy hadn’t flinched at the deliberate mention of both his mother and his father.

Indeed, though the funeral was only a couple of hours away, Joey had barely reacted to the mention of his parents at all.

Didn’t he care that they were dead?

Or was he still in shock?

As he left the house a few minutes later, Rick Martin knew that at the funeral, he would watch Joey Wilkenson very carefully. He still wasn’t sure whether he believed Joey’s story of having seen someone in the pasture last night, just as he still wasn’t sure Joey had told him the whole truth about what had happened the day his parents had died.

That, in fact, was Martin’s whole problem with Joey.

He could never tell when the boy was telling the truth and when he was lying.

MaryAnne Carpenter stood in the graveyard on the edge of Sugarloaf, Alison and Logan on one side of her, Joey Wilkenson on the other. Her eyes were fixed on the twin coffins that stood at the edges of the open grave, and she determined once more not to give in to the sob that was rising in her throat. Her role here was not only that of the grieving friend, but that of the survivor’s guardian, as well. For Joey’s sake, she must not give in to the terrible sense of loss that had all but overwhelmed her last night, after the children and Alan had gone to bed and, unable to sleep, she had found herself alone in the cavernous downstairs rooms of the house. Finally she had retreated to the den, built herself a fire, and had herself a good cry.

Today, though, there would be no tears. She would bid her closest friend farewell, and then begin the process of building the new family that would, from now on, include Joey Wilkenson.

Not that it would be a difficult thing to do, she reflected. Already, Logan seemed to think of Joey as the big brother
he’d never had, and Alison appeared to have taken to him as well, though MaryAnne suspected Joey’s primary attraction for her daughter was his knowledge of horses. Horses, for Alison, had been at the center of her dreams for the last five years.

Dreams that, until two days ago, had been all but unattainable.

But for the last two days, with Joey showing her what to do, Alison had learned to groom the horses, saddle them, feed them, exercise them, and, MaryAnne had noted with amusement, muck out their stalls.

Now if only Alison would muck out her room, as well, she thought.

Suddenly she was aware that the murmuring of the crowd around the twin graves—nearly the entire population of Sugarloaf—had ended and the service had begun. MaryAnne automatically reached down to take Joey’s hand in her own as the minister began the first prayer. When it was over, amens dying away, the boy made no move to pull his hand away, but stood silently staring at the caskets in which his parents’ bodies lay, his expression almost puzzled, his eyes dry. MaryAnne squeezed his hand reassuringly, but if Joey was aware of the pressure, he gave no sign.

Shock, MaryAnne told herself. He’s still in shock.

And yet, though she tried not to let it even take form in her mind, another thought wormed its way in as well.

It’s almost as if he doesn’t care
.

She banished the thought instantly, wishing that Charley Hawkins had never planted the tiny seed of doubt about the two deaths in her mind, and that Rick Martin, when he had come to the ranch this morning, hadn’t nourished that seed with his questioning of Joey.

Her eyes flickered over the crowd. She found the deputy at once, standing almost directly opposite her.

His eyes were fastened on Joey, his frown reflecting his own suspicions of her godchild.

But Joey was a little boy, for God’s sake. A little boy who had loved his parents! Slipping her arm around him protectively, MaryAnne pulled Joey closer, as if to shield
him from the disturbing doubts that suddenly seemed to be hanging in the very air of the cemetery. Indeed, as she scanned the crowd now, she imagined that everyone there was gazing at Joey with veiled eyes, their suspicions barely concealed, ready to boil to the surface at any moment.

Even a couple of children his own age—a boy and a girl who looked enough alike that MaryAnne was certain they had to be twins—were staring at Joey, then whispering to each other as if passing on some dark secret.

No! MaryAnne told herself. You’re acting like a paranoid, and thinking like one, too! Steeling herself against the unsettling thoughts that had begun seeping into her mind, she turned her attention back to the service, forcing herself to concentrate solely on the words of the minister until he’d finished his eulogy.

Then, one by one, the people of Sugarloaf stepped forward to say a few words about Ted and Audrey, and MaryAnne slowly came to realize just how important a part of the village her friends had been. There didn’t seem to be an organization in town that one or the other of them hadn’t been a member of, nor an individual anywhere who at one time or another had not received a helping hand from them.

“I don’t think Ted Wilkenson ever met a man he didn’t like,” Tom Granger, who owned the town’s single grocery store, began. “And I sure as hell never met a man who didn’t like him. Or, anyway, an
honest
man who didn’t like him,” he quickly amended himself when a murmur about real estate developers ran through the crowd. The murmur turned into a ripple of laughter. “All right, he didn’t like developers any more than they liked him!” The laughter grew, and Tom Granger flushed with embarrassment. “Oh, hell,” Granger finished. “You know what I mean! Ted Wilkenson was the nicest son of a bitch I ever met, and that’s all I have to say!” Flustered, he retreated into the crowd, and someone else stepped up. But before the man could even begin his speech, a voice called out from the crowd.

“Hey, Phil! Tell ’em about the time Ted took you and me hunting, and he wound up talking us out of shooting anything!”

One by one people began telling their stories, and slowly
MaryAnne came to comprehend the closeness of the town, the value that each of these people had to one another, and the loss the town incurred whenever someone died. For these people, their neighbors were their family. It would be a long time before the wound caused by the deaths of Ted and Audrey Wilkenson would heal. They would be missed, and they would never be forgotten.

After an hour, the last of the memories had been shared, and the final prayer was begun.

And Joey Wilkenson’s hand suddenly tightened in MaryAnne’s, his fingers digging into her flesh. Startled, she looked down to see Joey staring off into the distance. Following his gaze, she saw nothing at first. Then, barely visible in the trees at the edge of the graveyard, she thought she could distinguish the figure of a man.

A large, hulking man, with wild-looking hair and a full beard, whose clothes seemed not to fit him at all.

She looked again, straining her eyes to see him more clearly, but the figure was gone. Shaken, she wasn’t quite sure she’d seen it at all.

A few minutes later the service was over, and MaryAnne led Joey back to the car that would return them to the ranch. Only when they were away from the cemetery did she finally question the boy about what she thought she’d seen.

“I think there was a man,” Joey replied uncertainly. “I-I think he was watching me.”

“Watching you?” MaryAnne asked, feeling a chill as she remembered Joey’s words of a few hours ago, when he’d told Rick Martin about seeing a man in the pasture during the night. “Could it have been the man you saw last night, Joey?”

Joey was silent for a moment, but finally shook his head. “I hardly saw him,” he whispered. “I-I was thinking about Mom and Dad.” His eyes brimming with tears, he looked at MaryAnne worriedly. “But why would he be watching me?”

She slipped her arm protectively around the boy. “Maybe he wasn’t,” she tried to reassure him. “Maybe he was just someone who knew your parents and wanted to come and
pay his respects.” But the strange, fleeting image of the man stayed in her mind, and as the reception at the ranch went on through the afternoon, she began questioning people as to who the stranger might have been.