John Saul (13 page)

“I—I suppose everyone has, one way or another,” MaryAnne replied uncertainly. What was the man getting at? A second later, he told her.

“Well, it seems like somethin’s goin’ on around here lately. Somethin’ went into that barn and spooked that horse so’s it kicked Mr. W. And somethin’ gave Mrs. W. enough of a scare that she lost her balance.”

“But it was dark,” MaryAnne protested, unwilling to let Sikes’s words nurture the seed that Charlie Hawkins had planted in her mind the previous week. If he starts talking about Joey, I’ll fire him right now, she told herself. Right this very minute.

“Not that dark,” Sikes insisted. “And Mrs. W. was up there hundreds of times. Best view of the valley we got. She knew every inch of it, and she wouldn’t have lost her footing even if she was blindfolded. So somethin’ made her fall. And there’s the horses, too,” he added.

Suddenly MaryAnne remembered the night before last, when Joey and Storm had gone out, and she had seen the open barn door. But she was almost sure that despite Joey’s denial, it had to have been him in the barn. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” she said, steeling herself for the words she was certain were coming next.

“Somethin’s spooking them,” Sikes went on. “Seems like it’s practically every night now. I can hear ’em from my cabin. Every night—at least once, sometimes a coupla times—they start snortin’ and stampin’ like somethin’s after ’em. I been down there more’n once, but I can’t never find out what it is. But somethin’s out there, an’ it’s startin’ to make me pretty nervous.”

“Joey was out night before last,” MaryAnne said softly, keeping her eyes on Sikes, waiting for him to rise to her bait.

But Sikes shook his head. “It’s not him. Saw him myself. You was out, too. Heard you callin’ him. He was up by the creek—I was keepin’ an eye on him. Besides, the horses know Joey. They wouldn’t spook just ’cause he was around. Not unless he wanted them to, anyway.”

MaryAnne said nothing for a moment, turning Sikes’s last words over and over in her mind, examining them from every angle.
Not unless he wanted them to, anyway
. Was he implying that Joey himself might have spooked Sheika, causing his father’s death? Yet the man’s expression betrayed nothing save admiration for Joey’s ability to communicate with the animals. She let her guard down slightly. “But there was
something
in the barn that night. It snarled at me, then came at me. I slammed the door just before it got to me.”

“I ain’t sayin’ there wasn’t,” Sikes replied. “I heard the horses, too. But when I checked the barn after Joey came back in here, there warn’t nothin’ there. Just the horses. Nervous. As if a grizzly was skulkin’ around.”

“What about a man?” MaryAnne suggested. “Joey thinks he saw—” She cut her words short as Joey himself came into the room, stopping in surprise when he saw Bill Sikes.

Saying nothing to the handyman, Joey went to the refrigerator. “Is there any orange juice?” he asked MaryAnne.

“In the pitcher,” MaryAnne replied. Then: “Aren’t you going to say good morning to Mr. Sikes?”

Joey glanced at Bill Sikes for the briefest of moments. “Good morning.” He poured himself a glass of orange juice, then sat down at one of the stools in front of the counter.

Sikes, draining his mug, stood up and started toward the back door. “Maybe you and me better talk later on,” he said. Before MaryAnne could reply, he was gone.

“What was he doing in here?” Joey demanded as soon as the door had slammed shut behind Sikes.

MaryAnne picked up the two empty mugs and took them to the sink. “We were having a talk,” she said, suddenly annoyed not only at Joey’s rudeness toward Sikes, but the tone of his voice when he’d demanded to know why the caretaker was in the house. “Is there something wrong with that?”

Joey’s expression darkened. “He shouldn’t be in here. In fact, he shouldn’t be here at all.”

MaryAnne’s brows rose in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dad was going to fire him,” Joey said.

“Fire him?” MaryAnne echoed, her eyes narrowing with uncertainty. “But he’s been working here for years, hasn’t he? Why would your father have fired him?”

Joey gazed steadily at her, and when he spoke, his voice was cold. “Because he’s crazy. He makes up stories about everything. I bet he’s even making up stories that I did something to Mom and Dad.” Draining his orange juice, Joey slid off the stool and went out the back door, heading toward the barn. Stunned by his last words, MaryAnne made no move to stop him, no move to demand an explanation of what he’d just said.

All she knew was that the Joey she’d just talked to seemed nothing like the boy who had thrown himself into her arms when she’d arrived five days earlier.

This Joey seemed completely different.

He’s still in shock, she insisted to herself once more. That’s all it was—he was still in shock from Ted and Audrey’s deaths. But even as the words formed in her mind, she knew that this time she didn’t believe them.

This time, Joey hadn’t been upset by anything, hadn’t been angry about anything. He had simply stated what he believed.

Or what he wanted her to believe.

Suddenly MaryAnne Carpenter had an uneasy feeling that there was a dark facet to Joey Wilkenson’s personality that she knew nothing about. A darkness she was just beginning to see.

“C
an we go into town, Mom?”

MaryAnne was sitting at the desk in the den as she tried to familiarize herself with the ranch’s accounting system—a process which had so far involved five calls to an increasingly impatient Charley Hawkins, who had finally sighed mightily and suggested that she simply make a list of her questions and bring them to his office the next morning. She glanced up at Alison, who was standing in the doorway to the living room. “I’m not sure I have the time right now,” she began, then caught sight of the large grandfather clock in the corner. “My God—it’s already eleven!”

“You don’t have to take us,” Alison told her. “We can walk.”

MaryAnne stared at her daughter. “Two and a half miles?” she asked. “You and Logan are going to walk two and a half miles to town, and two and a half miles back?” Back home in New Jersey, she couldn’t remember either of her kids ever walking more than a few blocks. Anything farther, and they either took a bus or begged for a ride!

“It’s not like at home,” Alison said, as if she’d read her mother’s mind. “It’ll just be like going on a hike. And anyway, if we’re going to start school tomorrow, we have to get clothes, don’t we?”

Just as she had last year at this time, MaryAnne flinched at the thought of the expense of school clothes. But then she remembered: this year, things were different. For the first time, she could afford to buy the kids what they needed, without having to resent every penny the clothes might cost. Still, she hesitated. “I think I ought to be with you if you’re going shopping—”

“We’re not going to buy anything.” Having neatly sidestepped her mother’s primary objection, Alison pressed her advantage. “It’ll save you a lot of time if we’ve already picked things out and tried them on.” Warming to the idea, Alison rushed on, building her case. “All we’ll do is have them hold the stuff we pick out, and then we can all go back later this afternoon and you can decide which stuff we should buy.”

Though the entire speech sounded suspiciously like something Alison had carefully rehearsed before trying it out on her, MaryAnne had to admit that it made sense. Until she remembered Joey and his strange behavior this morning. “Honey, have you noticed anything different about Joey this morning?”

Alison suddenly looked guarded. “D-Different?” she stammered, her eyes darting to the left. “What do you mean?”

Then Joey himself stepped into the doorway, his dark eyes exhibiting nothing of the chill MaryAnne had seen in them early that morning. “We’ve already taken care of the horses, Aunt MaryAnne. Can’t I take Alison and Logan into town? Please?”

MaryAnne studied the boy carefully. There was no trace left of the arrogance he’d exhibited toward Bill Sikes, nothing of the coldness with which he’d told her that his father had been about to fire the handyman. Once again, he was the appealing thirteen-year-old she’d come to know over the last few days. Whatever had happened this morning, she decided, must have been blown out of proportion in her own mind. “Well, I don’t see any reason why not,” she decided. “What time will you be back?”

Joey shrugged. “Three or four?”

“Fine,” MaryAnne replied. “But if you’re going to be later, call me. Okay? And remember—don’t
buy
! Just
look
!”

By the time the kids had left the house, MaryAnne’s attention was once more focused on the account books in front of her, and though she heard Joey’s voice through the open window, the words he spoke didn’t penetrate her mind.

“This is gonna be great,” he told Alison and Logan. “Wait’ll you see all the neat stuff they have!”

“How much farther is it?” Logan complained, coming to a stop on the trail they seemed to have been hiking along forever. When they’d started out from the house, walking into the woods and then along the creek, it had all seemed like a great adventure, but now, nearly an hour later, he was getting scared, though he’d never admit it. The woods were starting to feel like they were closing in on him, and they had crossed so many other paths that he was sure he could never find his way home. Alison grinned at him. “Afraid the big, bad wolf might get you?” she teased. Logan felt his chin start to quiver, but before Alison could say anything else, Joey pointed through the trees.

“We’re almost there, Logan, see?” He held the smaller boy up so he could peer through a gap in the heavy underbrush. “We just go a little farther, then there’s a trail to the left.”

Sure enough, there was the town, only a little way off. Even if he got lost, all he’d have to do was start walking downhill and he’d be out of the woods in just a few minutes. As Joey put him back on the ground, he stuck his tongue out at Alison. “I wasn’t scared,” he insisted with far more conviction than he could have mustered a second before. “Come on!” Striking out ahead of the two older children, he took off down the trail, and sure enough—around the next bend was another path, winding off down the slope, just like Joey had said. Another minute and he burst out into the meadow that covered the valley floor, and ran over to the bank of Coyote Creek. “How do we get across?” he called back to Joey.

“We don’t,” Joey told him. “We just walk along it till we get to the cemetery. There’s a bridge there.”

At mention of the cemetery, the three children fell silent and their pace slowed, until finally they came to the stone wall that separated the graveyard from the meadow.

Joey climbed up onto the top of the wall, offering his hand to Alison while Logan scrambled up on his own. Spread out before them were two acres of well-kept lawn
dotted with white-baric pines, which made up the Sugarloaf cemetery. The three of them stood silently staring at the spot on the far side, close to the forest’s edge, where Joey’s parents had been buried the day before yesterday.

“Do you want to go visit the graves?” Alison finally asked.

Joey hesitated, then shook his head. “They wouldn’t even know I was there.”

“They might,” Logan said.

But Joey shook his head harder. “I don’t want to, okay?” His voice was harsh. As Logan recoiled from the older boy’s disapproval, and Alison flushed with embarrassment, Joey quickly added, “I mean, you guys are my family now, and when I’m with you, I feel good. But if I went to visit their grave …” His voice trailed off and he wiped his sleeve across his eyes, then fumbled in the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. “Let’s just go into town, okay?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he turned and started along the wall, only dropping off it when he came to the spot that was closest to the bridge across the creek. As the three children crossed the bridge and headed along the narrow path toward the graveyard’s entrance, none of them looked back at the place where Ted and Audrey Wilkenson had been buried.

“Where shall we start?” Alison asked as they came into the center of the little town a few minutes later. The shopping district occupied only two blocks, crowded with shops offering a brightly colored array of clothes, ranging from T-shirts to elaborate ski outfits, but almost everything displayed in the windows seemed calculated to attract tourists, not townspeople. “Where are the regular clothes?”

“The Mercantile,” Joey told her. “And there’s Conway’s, too. You guys like western clothes?”

“I do!” Logan instantly declared, garnering him a scornful look from his sister.

“You don’t even know what they are,” Alison told him.

“I do, too!” Logan shot back. “The shirts are real fancy, with lots of snaps on them! I want a blue one! And boots! Can I get some cowboy boots?” he asked Joey.

“We can’t buy anything,” Alison reminded him. “You heard what Mom said. All we’re doing is looking!”

“But Joey said—” Logan began. Alison cut him off.

“Logan, we don’t even have any money How are we going to buy anything?”

Logan’s bubble of excitement began to deflate in the face of reality.

“Don’t worry, Logan,” Joey told the smaller boy. “We’ll still get you some boots, and lots of other stuff, too.” Holding Logan’s hand, he started down the wooden sidewalk, with Alison scurrying to catch up. In the next block, hanging from one of the larger stores, she could see the sign identifying it as the Sugarloaf Mercantile. As they approached it, the door burst open and several boys and girls about her own age came out. They turned as if they were coming toward her, but abruptly stopped, looked at each other, seemed to make up their minds without exchanging a word, and headed without a backward glance across the street.

Joey, who had stopped stone still as the group came out of the Mercantile, watched them go but said nothing. And yet, from the look on his face, Alison was sure he knew them. “Who are they?” she asked. “How come they went the other way?”

Joey’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. “Just some kids,” he said. “They don’t like me, that’s all.”