John Saul (9 page)

“It’s been tight, but I’ve still managed to save a little,” she said, her voice cold. “There’s enough for the plane tickets, and I don’t want to argue with you. But I want my children with me right now, and you can either bring them or send them. It’s up to you.”

Her tone of voice told Alan not to argue with her any further. And it also told him that if he hoped to put his marriage back together, he’d better go, too.

“We’ll be there,” he said. “I’ll get the kids packed, and we can be on the same flight you took, tomorrow morning. Okay?”

MaryAnne let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Thank you, Alan,” she said quietly. “I’ll have the tickets waiting for you at the airport. See you tomorrow.”

She put the receiver back on the cradle, then leaned back in the chair.

In the space of twenty-four hours her entire life had changed.

L
ogan Carpenter snuggled deep into the soft mattress and pulled the down-comforter right up to his chin.

“Ready for me to turn the light out?” MaryAnne asked, smiling down at her son.

“But it’s only nine o’clock, Mom,” Logan protested, though he already knew it wasn’t going to work.

“And it’s eleven where you woke up this morning,” MaryAnne replied. “You were falling asleep in the den half an hour ago.”

“I was not,” Logan objected. “I was—”

“You were sound asleep, just like you will be in another five minutes,” MaryAnne broke in. She bent down and kissed him, then snapped off the light that stood on the pine table next to his bed. “Want me to leave the door open?” she asked as she started out of the room.

“I’m not a
baby,
” Logan protested with the full maturity of his ten years. Pointedly silent, MaryAnne pulled the door closed. As soon as Logan heard the latch click, he slid out of bed and dashed over to the window.

Idaho!

He was in Idaho, on Aunt Audrey’s ranch, and there was no one in the bedroom except him!

He stared out into the moonlit Sugarloaf Valley, which seemed to spread away from the house forever. In the distance he could just see the glow of lights from the town at the mouth of the valley, and then, beyond that, a great black void hung over the Sawtooth Valley—he’d already memorized its name—and even farther away was the black silhouette of Castle Peak. The window was open—which never happened back home, where you always had to make
sure everything was locked before you went to sleep—and the cool night air drifting down from the mountains caressed his face, entrancing him with the pure scents of nature, which were nothing like the sour smells at home that always made him want to hold his nose.

There were sounds, too, that weren’t anything like the rumble of the trucks on the turnpike just a block from their house in New Jersey.

Now the quiet of the night was broken by sounds he couldn’t ever remember hearing before.

The cry of an animal drifted down from somewhere up in the mountains, and Logan shivered as he imagined a wolf, sitting on one of the huge granite cliffs that soared above the house, howling at the moon.

There was a cracking sound, coming from the forest off to the right, and Logan was instantly sure he knew what it was.

A bear—probably a grizzly—was stalking something.

Maybe a mountain lion!

Suddenly he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t close the window, after all. He peered down, staring at the roof of the porch, just a few feet below the window.

What if a bear got up on the porch roof and crawled into his room in the middle of the night?

Another crackling came from the woods, and Logan jerked his head up, a stab of panic shooting through him. But then, as he watched, a doe emerged from the forest, followed by two fawns, and trotted across the yard to the field beyond the barn. As he watched, transfixed, the deer and her young began grazing contentedly in the moonlight.

Finally turning away from the window, Logan went back to his bed, crawled in, and lay staring up at the peeled logs that supported the cathedral ceiling above him.

A ceiling so high, he probably couldn’t touch it even if he jumped up and down on the bed.

Should he try it?

Why not? For the first time he could remember, bossy old Alison wasn’t in the room to tell him what to do, and what not to do. For as long as they stayed here, this was
his
room, and he could do exactly what he wanted! A new
thrill of excitement racing through him, he threw the comforter back and stood up again.

He flexed his knees, testing the springiness of the mattress.

Tentatively, he tried a jump, reaching up to see how close his hand came to the large beam that spanned the room and supported the smaller posts that braced the actual roof beams.

Not even close.

He jumped higher, stretching his arm upward, crouching lower every time he came down, until he had the rhythm right and each jump was higher than the one before.

He strained upward, but his fingertips still missed the beam by several inches.

Higher. Higher …

“For heaven’s sake, Logan! What are you doing?”

Too startled to keep his balance, Logan collapsed onto the bed just as the overhead light went on and he saw his mother glaring at him from the doorway.

“Nothing,” the little boy said, jerking the comforter back up, even though it was far too late to pretend he was telling the truth. “I wasn’t hurting anything!”

“Well, from downstairs it sounded like the whole house was coming down!” MaryAnne told him. “And what are you thinking of, jumping on the bed? You know you’re not allowed to do that.”

“I-I was just trying to see if I could touch that,” Logan stammered, pointing to the beam above his head. “I wasn’t—”

“Don’t say you weren’t hurting anything again,” MaryAnne cut in. “You could have broken the bed, or even worse, you could have fallen off and broken your arm.”

“Aw, Mom …”

“And don’t ‘Aw, Mom,’ me, either. Now just settle down and go to sleep. Okay?”

“But—”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Logan sighed. “But tomorrow, can I ride a horse? Joey says—”

“We’ll see,” MaryAnne interrupted. Given the chance,
Logan would go on for at least five minutes about what Joey—who had instantly become Logan’s idol simply because he was three years older and lived on a real ranch—had told him about the horses in the stable. “For now, just go to sleep! And no more jumping on the bed!”

Switching off the overhead light once more, she pulled the door closed, leaving Logan alone in the moonlit room once again. Go to sleep? How could he go to sleep? He was going to stay up all night, listening to the animals hunting in the woods. In fact, as soon as he was sure his mother wasn’t listening at the door, he’d get back up and go look out the window again. The deer were probably still in the field, and he might even see a bear, or a wolf, or …

He drifted off to sleep, imagined visions of forest creatures still prowling through his mind.

And, because he was asleep, Logan Carpenter missed the dark form that emerged from the woods beyond the pasture a few minutes later, lingering in the shadows that rendered it all but invisible as it stared across the field at the lights glowing in the windows of the house. Lights that would soon go out, encouraging the shadowy figure to move closer.…

“Maybe we ought to go back,” Andrea Stiffle whispered. It was a little after eleven, and she and her twin brother were moving quietly along the trail through the woods that led up to El Monte Ranch, almost a mile farther up the valley than their parents’ house.

“You scared?” Michael asked. He, too, was whispering, but Andrea could hear the scorn in his voice.

“No, I’m not
scared
,” Andrea lied, for even though she and Michael had celebrated their thirteenth birthday last month, she still turned her night-light on every night, and had never quite gotten over the fear she always felt on the nights when clouds obscured the stars and darkness closed in around the house like a blanket, so the world beyond her window seemed to disappear completely. But tonight the moon was shining brightly, and she hadn’t been about to admit to Michael that she was still scared of the dark, so when he’d suggested they go on “an adventure,” she’d instantly
agreed. Now that they were a quarter of a mile from the house, in the thickest part of the stand of aspens that covered this part of the valley floor, she’d begun to have her doubts.

Every time she heard something rustle in the brush, her heart leaped and she had to choke back the startled yelp that rose in her throat. But she still wasn’t about to admit how frightened she really was. “I just don’t want to get in trouble, that’s all,” she said, hoping she sounded a lot less scared than she was. “I mean, what if someone catches us?”

“Who’s going to catch us?” Michael sneered. “Mom and Dad are both asleep, and there aren’t any lights on at El Monte, either.”

“How do you know?” Andrea demanded, her voice rising.

“Will you shut up?” Michael hissed. He glanced around quickly, betraying the vague discomfort that had come over him a few minutes before, when they’d moved from the pasture behind their house into the dense stand of trees. “I can see the house from my window. They shut all the lights off half an hour ago.”

“You can only see the front of the house,” Andrea reminded him. “What if someone’s still awake in the back?”

Michael groaned impatiently. “Then we won’t do anything, that’s all. We’ll just go back home, okay?”

“Promise?” Andrea demanded.

Michael glared at her in the darkness. “If you’re going to chicken out, do it now,” he told his sister. “If you want to go home, just go!”

For a second Andrea was tempted to do just that, but as she began thinking about having to walk all the way back to the house by herself, she changed her mind. “I’m not chickening out,” she decided. “I just don’t want to get in trouble. If we get caught, Dad’ll ground us for a week.”

“We won’t get caught,” Michael insisted. “So just shut up, okay?” Turning away from his sister, he started along the narrow path once again, so familiar with its twists and turns that he could have walked it blindfolded.

Her nervousness growing by the second, Andrea followed, staying as close to her brother as she could.

A few minutes later they came to the Wilkensons’ driveway, and as she stepped out into the road, Andrea felt a little better. Here, at least, the branches of the trees were no longer brushing against her face and the underbrush wasn’t tickling her ankles. But as they came into the wide, empty expanse in front of the house, she realized that anyone looking out the windows would be able to see them clearly in the moonlight.

“We’ll go over by the barn,” Michael whispered. “That way we can get a lot closer before anyone could see us!”

Dropping low to the ground, he scuttled across the yard toward the barn, and Andrea quickly followed. Within a few seconds they were crouched in the deep shadows behind the barn. Michael led his sister around the far side, staying close to the wall as they neared the building’s front. From inside the structure, they could hear the horses nickering softly; one of them whinnied as they passed. Finally they came to the corner and peeped around it to gaze at the house, thirty yards away.

All the windows were dark. Except for the soft hooting of an owl, the night was silent.

“Come on,” Michael whispered. “Let’s do it.”

“But which room is Joey’s?” Andrea asked. “What if we do it at the wrong window?”

“It’s the one over the end of the porch,” Michael replied. “I’ve seen him at the window thousands of times. Just staring out, but not looking like he was seeing anything, you know? Me and Jeff Tate saw him a couple of weeks ago, and Jeff waved to him, but Joey didn’t even see him.”

“How come he’s so weird?” Andrea asked.

“He just
is
,” Michael said, his eyes rolling at his sister’s denseness. “He’s nuts. Jeff thinks he killed his folks.”

“Really?” Andrea gasped. As she stared up at the window above the porch roof, she shuddered, imagining a weird, wild-eyed Joey staring back, and wondered once again if maybe they shouldn’t just forget about what they were going to do and go home. “What if he sees us?”

Michael grinned maliciously. “Then maybe he’ll kill you,
too.” Without waiting for his sister to reply, he darted away from the shelter of the barn and dashed across the yard toward the house.

Andrea, left by herself, hesitated a moment longer. Finally, the fear of being left alone in the darkness overcame her fear of being spotted from the house. Taking a deep breath—as if she were about to plunge into cold water—she ran after her brother.

Together they crouched in the shadows, catching their breath. Michael reached down and picked up a handful of the cinder rocks that covered the area between the house and the barn. Stepping away from the house, he threw them up at Joey Wilkenson’s window, ducking back into the shelter of the porch roof even before the small rocks hit the glass.

There was no response from above. Michael had reached down to pick up another handful of gravel when Andrea grabbed his arm.

“I saw something!” she whispered.

Michael froze. “Where?”

“O-Over there,” Andrea replied, her voice quavering as her heart began to pound.

Michael followed her pointing finger with his eyes, staring off into the darkness beyond the house. At first he saw nothing, but then, across the yard near the woods, something moved.

A deer. It had to be a deer. If he and Andrea held perfectly still, it would come out of the shadows of the tree into the moonlight, and they would see it clearly. He reached out to Andrea, his fingers closing on her arm, the forefinger of his right hand going to his lips to keep her from speaking again. Together the twins froze in the darkness, waiting.

After what seemed an eternity, the shadowy figure moved again, then emerged from the woods.

It wasn’t a deer.

The form they beheld was large, like a tall, muscular man. He moved a few steps on silent feet, with the grace of a wild animal. The two children stared at him, barely able to discern the shape from the surrounding shadows. As
the figure came partly into the moonlight, he suddenly stopped, freezing like a rabbit catching the scent of danger, and both of them were suddenly certain he was watching them.