John Saul (2 page)

Susan gushed on: “Would you believe it’s another man? Apparently, the lovely Miss Chandler decided Alan wasn’t quite what she wanted. So she traded him in for a richer model. Some guy with two middle names, a roman numeral at the end, and a trust fund! Isn’t that great?”

And it was—for one completely, blissfully satisfying moment of sweet revenge. Which quickly soured into confusion when Alan called to tell her that “things haven’t worked out with Eileen, and I’ve moved out.”

“Really?” she had replied, carefully revealing nothing of what she already knew, hoping her neutral tone concealed the collision of emotions inside her—the need to forgive and forget and have him back again warring with the longing to punish him for all the hurt he’d caused. “What happened?” she’d asked.

Alan barely hesitated. “It—Well, it was you, honey,” he said, with the perfect amount of appealingly boyish repentance in his voice. “I—Well, I just couldn’t get you out of my mind, and in the end, I found out it’s you I love, not Eileen.”

Another lie. MaryAnne felt her optimism shrivel as she silently hung up the phone.

But Alan was relentless, calling daily, pleading with her to give him another chance, begging her to forgive him,
swearing that the affair had been a terrible mistake and that nothing like it would ever happen again. It wasn’t until he’d admitted that Eileen had thrown him out that MaryAnne finally agreed to see him again.

Since then, her confusion had only grown. She no longer trusted him. She was bitterly angry about what he’d done. But she was just as attracted to him as she’d ever been, and just as susceptible to the charm that had made her fall in love with him in the first place.

And, of course, there was the question of economics.

But as desperate as she was to have her family whole again, she wasn’t ready to take him back.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

But finally she’d agreed to this first family barbecue, a week before Labor Day, and her daughter’s question still hung in the hot, muggy air.

“Are you and Dad going to get back together again?”

As MaryAnne searched for the right words to answer Alison’s question, the doorbell rang, and a moment later Logan charged in through the back door.

“It’s Daddy!” the ten-year-old shouted. “He’s early!”

MaryAnne’s eyes went to the clock, and a faint smile curled the corners of her mouth. Only half an hour late, which, for Alan, was a record of punctuality.

Maybe, after all, he really had changed, really was sorry for what had happened.

Or maybe he just figured it would be a lot cheaper to move back into the house.

MaryAnne stood up to greet her husband, still not sure whether she was glad to see him or not.

More than two thousand miles from the stifling atmosphere of Canaan, New Jersey, Ted Wilkenson stepped out onto the front porch of his house near Sugarloaf, Idaho, and breathed deeply of the crisp mountain air. The day was perfect, the heat of the summer already beginning to fade, the deep blue sky forming an unblemished bowl over the valley in the Sawtooth Mountains in which Sugarloaf nestled like
a forgotten village from a century earlier. His personal Shangri-la.

As he did every day, Ted paused to savor his good fortune in having discovered the valley nearly fourteen years ago. It was still no more than an unknown speck in the mountains north of Sun Valley then, and the refugees from Los Angeles had not yet realized that just beyond what they thought of as paradise was the valley of Eden. The problem now was to keep it that way. For the last five years, since the first developers had begun arriving to cut ski trails in the mountains above Sugarloaf, and build their brick and stucco time-shared condominiums, Ted and a few of his friends had begun buying up as much land as they could, and passing zoning ordinances to protect the original beauty of the place.

Ted’s own ranch had grown from its original three hundred acres to more than a thousand. Tomorrow he would close on a deal to add another two hundred acres of land to his holdings. Two hundred acres straddling Sugarloaf Creek, which joined the beginnings of the Salmon River, ten miles farther down, where Sugarloaf Valley opened into the immense open space of the Sawtooth Valley. That should set Chuck Deaver—“Devious” Deaver, the locals called him—back a pace or two, Ted thought as he started across the wide yard that separated the rambling two-story log house from the weathered barn that was the only original structure remaining on the property. Beyond stymieing the developer, whose plans to use the site as the heart of a much larger project had finally goaded Ted into making the purchase, the acquisition would please Audrey and Joey as well. Both his wife and son had been pleading for the purchase for nearly a year, Audrey to protect the land from the continuing march of condos up the valley, and Joey because he couldn’t wait to have his own private fishing stream. As of tomorrow, a good portion of the stream would be safe from Deaver’s bulldozers, and Ted, with Bill Sikes’s help, could begin moving fences to include the new land into the protected wilderness that was the ranch.

For wilderness was what El Monte was, since neither Ted nor Audrey had any interest in developing more land
than was necessary to raise fodder for the three horses that were the sole occupants of the barn. The whole point of the ranch was to protect the valley in its natural state, and both Ted and Audrey were aware of the irony that their current low-tech lifestyle was a direct result of Ted’s former hightech experience in the overdeveloped morass of Silicon Valley. Now they were using the profits from the immensely successful software company Ted had founded in California to protect their private wilderness in Idaho.

Ted and Audrey had discovered Sugarloaf together, only a month after they’d discovered each other. Audrey had spent the summer working as a waitress at the Sun Valley Lodge, and Ted had come up for a weekend respite from the pressures of running SoftWorks, which had already grown into a major software company, employing three hundred programmers, though Ted was still only twenty-five. He had met Audrey the first night he was there, and wound up staying the rest of the summer, running SoftWorks by phone, and discovering in the process that he wasn’t nearly as indispensable to his company as he’d imagined.

On the last Sunday morning of the summer, she’d joined him for breakfast on the terrace between the lodge and the ice rink, and before lunch they’d driven over Galena Summit and stared in awe at the Sawtooth Valley, revealed before them like a hidden treasure. Surrounded by towering mountains that protected it from the world beyond, the valley’s floor was a vast sea of grass and wildflowers, dotted with clumps of aspens and cottonwoods, the streams that would converge to become the Salmon River seeping out of the marshes at the head of the valley, to meander slowly down toward Stanley, the town that lay at its foot. For a long time they gazed silently at the flanks of the mountains, heavily forested on their lower slopes but barren above the timberline, soaring up to the jagged peaks that had given the Sawtooth range its name.

“This is it,” Ted had finally murmured. “This is paradise. Now all we have to do is find the perfect spot.”

They’d driven down into the valley, explored the weathered old buildings of Stanley, then started back, turning up
each road that wound into the foothills until finally they stumbled into the Sugarloaf Valley, a miniature version of the vast reaches of the Sawtooth, blocked at its eastern end by the rugged face of Sugarloaf peak.

The village, near the mouth of the valley, appeared as perfect as a set for a Western movie, with raised wooden sidewalks connecting the false-fronted buildings that flanked the unpaved road. Between the town and the face of Sugarloaf, the valley rose with increasing steepness; the wilderness broken only by a few cultivated fields, occasional long, twisting driveways leading to nearly invisible farmhouses which were the only signs of human habitation.

At the end of the road, they’d come upon a sign offering three hundred acres, together with a house, a barn, and outbuildings.

“Here it is,” Ted had said.

“Here is what?” Audrey had asked.

“Here is where we’re going to live after we get married,” Ted replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be proposing to a woman he’d known only a month, and deciding that they would live on a crumbling farm hundreds of miles from anywhere.

“Looks all right to me,” Audrey heard herself reply. “Do you think we ought to look at the house, or should we just buy it?”

“Let’s just buy it,” Ted had said. Half an hour later he had done just that.

The farm duly purchased, they headed back to Sun Valley, but by the time they got there, they’d decided there was no reason not to finish the job they’d already started, so they continued on through the resort town and drove down to Hailey, picked up a license at the courthouse, and got married before dinner.

“You’re sure there isn’t anyone you want at the wedding?” Ted asked at the last minute.

There was only MaryAnne, her childhood friend and still her best friend, but MaryAnne was two thousand miles away. “No,” Audrey had said. Then, with the sudden thought: “You sure you don’t want to at least call your parents?”

Ted’s laugh had filled the car. “No chance. My mother ran out on me about a week after my father dumped her. I haven’t seen either of them since. And I’m not about to spoil the best weekend of my life by trying to find them.”

As they stood before the magistrate, their hands clasped while they repeated their vows, it occurred to Audrey that after only a month in a resort town, she really didn’t know much about Ted Wilkenson at all. But somehow it didn’t matter. Since the loss of her own parents to a junkie who had mugged them on the steps of their apartment house on New York’s Upper West Side, she had felt just as alone in the world as Ted must have during the years after his mother abandoned him. But in the four short weeks since they had met, they’d come to feel as if they knew each other perfectly.

And that feeling had never changed, as far as Ted was concerned.

Joey was born less than a year after they were married, and Ted had essentially retired from SoftWorks, going back only often enough to explain his ideas for new programs and to get the programmers to begin producing them.

The old farmhouse was torn down, and the log lodge built in its place.

The ranch slowly grew, and the Wilkensons slipped easily into the fabric of the town.

Both of them knew that through some strange fate, they had found in one another the perfect partner.

And so Ted, not quite forty yet, was now living in his idea of paradise, with a wife who was his best friend, and raising his son far from the problems of the city.

His son.

The only fly in the ointment, Ted thought ruefully. Instantly regretting the thought, he reminded himself that Joey seemed to be getting better. Discipline was all the boy had needed, really, and he had administered it. Not that Joey had ever been a truly bad kid—he’d just let himself fall into moods of silence and forgetfulness. Sometimes he wouldn’t speak for hours at a time, or would disappear from the house for an entire day.

Ted had finally put his foot down, a couple of years ago.
“He’s not a baby anymore,” he told Audrey before taking his belt to Joey’s backside the first time. “We’ve tried getting him to grow up your way, and it hasn’t worked. Now we’ll try it my way.”

That first time Ted used the belt, Joey had sulked for two hours, until Ted explained to him that if he continued sulking, more punishment would follow. It had straightened the boy right up, and soon afterward Joey stopped giving in to his strange moods.

Yesterday, however, Joey had disappeared after breakfast, leaving his chores undone and telling no one where he was going. When the boy finally appeared as the sun was setting, Ted hauled him out to the barn, explaining to him that what was about to happen was for his own good. He had taken off his belt as Joey cowered. But the boy hadn’t resisted his punishment, Ted now recalled with satisfaction, and he hadn’t gone crying to his mother. Instead he’d told her that he and his father had been feeding the horses. Well, that was that.

The boy hadn’t complained, and he hadn’t sulked.

He was finally growing up.

A feeling of well-being surged through Ted as he stepped into the barn to begin mucking out the stalls.

He led Sheika, the black Arabian mare that was his favorite, to the cross ties, tethered her, then began the process of mucking out the horse’s stall. He’d barely gotten the soiled straw shoveled into the wheelbarrow when Sheika whinnied nervously and pawed at the ground.

“It’s okay, Sheika,” Ted called out, but instead of settling down, the horse pawed at the floor of the wash stall once again, then tugged her head against the restraining tethers.

“Hey, settle down, old girl,” Ted soothed, leaving the stall and moving toward the horse.

Sheika ignored him, her eyes fixed on the open door of the barn, her ears laid back against her head as she snorted nervously.

“What is it girl? What’s wrong?” Ted glanced toward the door, but the glare of brilliant sunlight outside blinded him and he could see nothing. “Joey? Sikes? Is someone out there?” But he knew his son had gone fishing, and he’d
seen Bill Sikes, his caretaker, drive off toward town. What the hell was going on?

Suddenly he felt vaguely uneasy. For a while now, strange things had been happening on the ranch. The horses had been spooking, and at times even he had experienced the unsettling sensation of being watched by unseen eyes. Just a couple of nights ago, telling Audrey that he felt like getting some fresh air, Ted had gone outside to have a look around. The horses were restless in their stalls that night, but they’d calmed right down when he talked to them, and he’d found nothing amiss in the barn.

Yet even as he’d returned to the house, he’d still had the distinct feeling that somewhere, hidden in the darkness, eyes were watching him.

Despite the warmth of the evening, he’d shivered, and found himself hurrying back to the brightness of the house.