John Saul (29 page)

At six-thirty she’d gone upstairs to awaken the children. Alison was already up and dressed. “I didn’t sleep very well,” she admitted, and from the look of her daughter’s
reddened eyes, MaryAnne was fairly certain she hadn’t slept at all.

Logan’s first words when MaryAnne woke him up were to ask if Joey was back, and when MaryAnne shook her head, Logan had voiced the question that MaryAnne had refused to think about all night: “Is he dead?”

“No,” MaryAnne had replied instantly, knowing even as she spoke the word that the wish was father to the thought. And yet she knew, deep down inside her, that somewhere up in the mountains, Joey
was
still alive.

But how had he managed to elude Frank Peters’s hounds?

It was as if Joey had vanished from the mountainside, disappearing like a wraith into the night.

Now both the children were at the kitchen table, wolfing down the pancakes Gillie Martin had fixed for them, and MaryAnne was counting scoops of coffee into the basket at the top of the enormous restaurant-sized percolator she had found on the top shelf of the pantry behind the kitchen. She had just measured the last scoop when a flicker of movement far across the field caught her eye, and her pulse began to race.

Joey!

It had to be Joey!

She hurried to the back door, jerking it open, expecting to see the boy running across the field, only realizing as she stepped out into the yard that what she’d seen wasn’t Joey at all.

It was Storm, standing at the edge of the forest. MaryAnne called out to him, but instead of breaking into a run toward her, the dog turned and disappeared back into the trees.

Joey! she thought. He had to be with Storm—he had to be! Surely the dog wouldn’t leave his master in the middle of the wilderness. Wheeling around, she dashed back into the house. “How long before Rick gets back here?” she asked Gillie Martin.

“Maybe ten minutes,” Gillie replied, staring in puzzlement at MaryAnne. “He said—”

“Let me have the radio,” MaryAnne cut in. “Show me
how to work it, and stay with the kids.” She began to shove her arms into the sleeves of the jacket that had been hanging by the back door.

“Where are you going?” Gillie asked, alarmed.

“Storm is out there,” MaryAnne told her. “He’s in the woods on the other side of the field. Joey must be there, too! Don’t you see? Storm wouldn’t come back without him!”

Gillie Martin was about to argue with her, to urge her to wait until Rick got back, but even before she spoke, she realized that if she were in MaryAnne’s place, she would do exactly what the other woman was doing. She picked up the small radio, handing it to MaryAnne. “All you have to do is press the button on the side and speak into the mike. It’s already set on the same frequency as Rick’s radio. But be careful what you say,” she cautioned as MaryAnne started out the door. “Quite a few people in town have scanners, and every one of them will be listening in.”

As MaryAnne started purposefully across the yard, Gillie closed the door and turned to Alison and Logan, who were still sitting at the table, worriedly watching through the window as their mother ran across the yard. “It’s going to be all right,” she assured them, sounding a lot more confident than she felt. Though she said nothing to the children, she was almost certain that if Storm led MaryAnne to anything at all, it would not be to Joey.

In all likelihood, the best MaryAnne could hope to find would be the boy’s dead body.

MaryAnne climbed over the fence, terrified that by the time she got to the woods, Storm would be gone, vanishing into the trees long before she could catch up. Still, the thrill of at last being able to take an active part in the search for Joey caused a rush of adrenaline to surge through her blood, washing away the exhaustion and giving her a burst of energy that allowed her to break into a run. She was three-quarters of the way across the field when she spotted the shepherd again, barely visible in the trees, pacing nervously as he watched her. As soon as she caught up with him, he started off again, moving quickly up a trail that
wound through the trees, but pausing every few seconds to look back at her as if making certain she was still following.

They came to a fork in the trail, and Storm bore to the right. As MaryAnne started after him, she realized where this trail led.

The great cliff from which Audrey Wilkenson had fallen to her death.

Could it be where Joey had gone?

Could he have spent the entire night up there, somehow needing to be close to his mother, and going to the last place she had been when she was still alive? MaryAnne’s pulse quickened with the possibility that she might yet find him. She pushed herself harder, barely feeling the strain of the climb as the trail steepened.

Then, at last, she was at the top. As she stepped out onto the broad, flat area of bare rock between the edge of the forest and the vertical drop to the valley below, her heart began to race again.

He was sitting at the very edge of the cliff, his back toward her. It looked as if his knees were drawn up against his chest, and some kind of fur blanket was wrapped around him.

Storm, whimpering, had moved close to Joey, trying to lick at the boy’s face, but Joey seemed oblivious to the dog’s presence as he stared out at the valley that stretched away far below.

Something inside MaryAnne warned her not to call out to him, not to startle him in any way.

She started toward him, moving quietly, finally coming up beside him and dropping down to sit next to him. Still saying nothing, she slipped her arm around him and pulled him close. For a moment he seemed to resist, but then let himself go, his head dropping to her bosom.

“Are you all right?” MaryAnne asked, feeling no anger at all toward the lonely figure she had come upon less than a minute ago.

Joey hesitated, then shook his head. “No,” he whispered, his voice barely audible. “I’m not all right at all, Aunt MaryAnne. I’m scared. I-I wanted to die.”

A wave of pity for her tortured godson broke over MaryAnne, and she felt tears well in her eyes. She pulled him closer. “I’m very glad you didn’t die,” she told him. “We’ve all been very worried about you.”

Joey said nothing for a long time. Then, in a tiny voice, sounding as if it were coming from a great distance away, he said, “I bet Alison wasn’t worried. I bet she hates me.”

“Nobody hates you,” MaryAnne told him. “Nobody at all.”

“But I tried to hurt her,” Joey wailed. “Something awful happened to me, and I—” He fell silent for a moment, unable to finish. Then he spoke again: “Aunt MaryAnne, am I crazy? Is that what’s wrong with me?” He began sobbing. “I didn’t mean to hurt Alison,” he wailed. “I really didn’t! I just couldn’t stop! A-And now Bill Sikes is dead, and—and—Aunt MaryAnne, what’s going to happen to me?”

MaryAnne held Joey in her arms, gently stroking his head with the fingers of one hand. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him, as if crooning to a baby. “I’m here, and you’re safe, and everything’s going to be all right. You didn’t hurt Alison at all, and whatever happened to Bill Sikes couldn’t have been your fault.”

“But—But I don’t
remember
!” Joey sobbed. “I don’t remember anything until I woke up, and I was all by myself, and …”

He went on, babbling almost incoherently, and though she tried to follow what he was saying, none of it made any sense to her. But slowly she realized that he hadn’t been here all night, that he’d slept somewhere far up in the mountains, and that when he awoke, he’d been in a bed in a cabin, wrapped in the blanket that was now all he wore.

And when he’d come up here, just after dawn this morning, it had been his intention to kill himself.

“But you didn’t do that,” she told him as she finally helped him to his feet. “Instead, you waited for help to come. And that proves to me that you’re not crazy.”

Joey looked up at her, his wide brown eyes frightened. “Are you going to send me away?” he asked. “Am I going to have to go to a hospital?”

MaryAnne rested her hand reassuringly on his cheek, but
couldn’t bring herself to make any promises she might not be able to keep. “Let’s not worry about that right now,” she said. “Let’s just get you back home, where you belong.”

With Storm leading the way, they started back down the mountain, neither of them saying a word.

T
hey had set out an hour after MaryAnne had brought Joey down from the bluff, as soon as Joey got dressed and Rick Martin had heard his strange story of waking up in a cabin high in the mountains. Joey had led the way up the trails that Rick himself had followed through the long night. When they’d come to the place where Bill Sikes had been slain, Joey paused, staring at the spot where the corpse had lain, and where Tony Moleno—finally allowed to go home to bed—had stood guard when Joey passed just after dawn had begun to break. Bill Sikes’s body was gone now, and the area, like the campsite at Coyote Creek a few days before, was being combed by the technicians from Boise, who this morning had redoubled their efforts, sealing everything they could find into plastic bags for analysis. Joey had said nothing as he gazed at the site, but finally turned away and started trudging again up the trail. Then, half an hour ago, he had veered off it and into the forest, sometimes following the narrow paths left by deer making their habitual rounds, more often than not winding his way through the trees.

Now they were high up, near the timberline, picking their way across the rubble of one of the glacial moraines. Rick shuddered as he tried to imagine anyone spending a winter up here, with the snow ten feet deep and the wind howling down from the mountains. He glanced at Joey, and the boy seemed to read the deputy’s doubts.

“We’re almost there,” Joey said. “There’s a trail up a little further.” Fifty yards farther on, after they had slipped through a narrow gap between two immense boulders, the path developed, and a few moments later they emerged into
a small clearing. At the far end, crouched against the rocky mountainside, was the cabin.

Its two empty windows seemed to stare balefully at them, and its open door formed a gaping mouth. But from the rusted metal chimney that rose from the shanty’s patchy roof, a tiny wisp of smoke still drifted. The home of a mountain man, Rick Martin thought, though in the ten years he’d been in Sugarloaf, he’d never so much as set eyes on one. Until he’d talked to MaryAnne Carpenter yesterday, he’d heard only the vaguest of rumors that one of the strange hermits might still be living high above the valley. Yet here was exactly the kind of ruined cabin one of them would inhabit.

“See?” Joey said. “I told you it was here!”

Drawing his pistol from its holster, and telling Joey to stay where he was, Rick started toward the sagging door. “Hello?” he called out. “Anybody here?”

There was silence from the house, which, despite the telltale smoke from the chimney, exuded an aura of emptiness. At last Rick stepped up onto the porch and peered inside.

The inside of the cabin was as close to ruin as the outside, but it was obvious that despite the shack’s condition, someone did, indeed, live here. “It’s empty,” Rick called to Joey. “I’m going to take a look.”

Joey, still standing at the head of the trail, watched as the deputy disappeared into the shack, then he started across the clearing himself. If he showed Rick Martin where he’d slept, he’d have to believe him!

Abruptly he stopped, the hair on the nape of his neck standing on end as goose bumps crawled across his skin.

He was no longer alone.

He glanced around, certain he would see someone—or something—behind him.

There was nothing.

He stood perfectly still, listening for a sound that would betray the unseen presence, but the silence of the morning was broken only by the whispering of the wind in the trees.

He sniffed at the air, as an animal might search for a scent.

Nothing.

And yet he could sense the presence close by—so close he felt he could almost touch it.

Just as it, unseen though it was, seemed to be touching him.

He hesitated, then turned away from the cabin and darted back toward the trailhead, where he took refuge among the trees, screened from the cabin by the underbrush that thrived in the shelter of the tall pines.

The presence was stronger.

He moved quickly through the dense undergrowth, guided by nothing more than a whisper inside his own mind that seemed to tell him which way to go. He had gone no more than fifty yards when he saw the figure crouched among the trees ahead, watching him.

Joey stopped, staring at the man. He was clad in clothing so worn it was almost colorless. His hair was long, and his unshaven face was composed of rough-hewn features.

Joey recognized him instantly. It was the same man who had been standing in the trees at his parents’ funeral, watching him.

The man, he knew, who lived in the cabin.

Except for that one fleeting glimpse of him in the graveyard, Joey had no recollection of ever having seen the man before, his memory of two days ago wiped from his mind as completely as that of last night. Yet now, alone with him in the forest, a strange calmness came over him. Without thinking, he began to walk toward the man, stopping only when he was a few feet away from him.

The man held out his hand. “It’s all right, Joey,” he whispered, his voice as rough as his coarse features. “You know me, don’t you?”

Joey hesitated, then slowly nodded, for inside him a conviction had already formed that he did, indeed, know this man, that somehow he was connected to him. He felt himself being drawn toward the rough countenance as though by some irresistible force.

“We’re alike, Joey,” the man whispered in his low voice. “You and me are just alike. We’ve got the same blood, boy.” His dark eyes never left Joey’s face. “That’s right,”
he whispered once again. “We’re not like the others, Joey. Not like anyone else. You understand me, Joey?”

Joey’s brow knitted into a deep frown. The words had no meaning for him, but something in what the man had said struck a chord deep inside him, and unaware, he found himself nodding silently, his entire being focused on this stranger who seemed so familiar.