Possession (23 page)

She thought they had been moving steadily upward for almost a mile, and that his leg muscles must be screaming in pain as hers did. It was a clean pain and she almost welcomed it. He betrayed not the slightest slackening of effort. She followed him six paces behind, her boots slipping on the rocky scrabble that scaled off the boulders. His sweat soaked his armpits and formed a wet V on his shirt from his shoulders to the lower point of his spine. It was a different shirt; she wondered what he had done with the bloodied green shirt.

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It was odd how her mind jumped as if it had to skitter away from dark places where it would be trapped. She tried to dull its sharp edges with safe thoughts, the way she did at home when she couldn't sleep, when she built a little house in her mind, with her own safe room where rain danced on the roof and she lay swaddled in soft blankets. She could create the exterior of that cottage now, but she could not find the safe room. The stairs leading to it became the mountain trail with nothing certain at its end.

Just as she knew she could climb no farther, they reached the top of the pass. He stopped and waited for her.

"There. Look."

She gazed where he pointed and felt sharp disappointment; there was only more wilderness below them, nothing that promised freedom. The trail down was so steep that she gasped aloud. Dropping, dropping, and snaking around a sheer rock face. One misstep and death waited just out of sight, over the edge.

"Rest here," he panted. "Then down through that forest, into the meadows, and out to the trail. Five hours. Six maybe."

She didn't speak, but accepted the canteen he passed to her and drank until he took it from her.

He gazed down into the meadow. From this angle he looked boylike and, when he closed his eyes and leaned back against the rock face, almost angelic. Lucifer. Fallen angel.

Sometimes all men looked like boys—in sleep, or in grief, or in moments of exuberance when they dropped their armor. He sensed her watching him, even with his eyes closed, and he turned to her and smiled, the first open smile she had seen on his face. It transformed him, making it almost impossible for her to believe that he had raped her. She felt suddenly dizzy.

He stood up and stripped off his soaked shirt, his back to her, and she saw the scar that flashed brilliant on his shoulders. At some time he had been terribly burned. She spoke without intending to. "How did you get that?"

"What?"

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"That burn scar on your back."

"That? I was just a little kid, and I pulled a coffee pot down on me. I was screaming, I guess, and the old lady in the next trailer put lard on it and wrapped it in a sheet— wasn't supposed to do that. Some nurse had to peel it off and my skin came with it."

"Where was your mother?"

"Working. My father took a hike before I was born."

"Does it hurt?"

"Nothing hurts anymore. You ready?"

He didn't wait for her answer, and she had to scramble to catch him. They worked their way downtrail now, the brunt of the pull on different muscles, making her ankles ache and strain against the laces of her hiking boots. The larch trees were close, but not close enough to stop her if she began to slip. Then the forest pulled back and there was only the rock shoulder of the mountain. She slid often and felt a thrill of fear erupt from her stomach and tingle in her arms and legs. He held out his hand and she took it instinctively, letting his power steady her.

"We're dropping a thousand feet in a mile," he said. "Put your feet sideways if you start to slide. Don't panic. I can stop you." Halfway down the slope he paused, so suddenly that she could not keep from bumping into him. He put one hand back and propped her against him. She followed his eyes and saw the avalanche meadow far below them. She could see the short grass and forest edging it. Some of the great trees had been wrenched from their hold on the earth by avalanche, their roots dead or dying in the cold air, but she could see no way out. No trails at all. She turned to ask him which way they would go, but the waterfall spewing out of Bowan Mountain filled the air with a roaring din that absorbed human sound.

She trusted that he knew and trusted him in that way only. She followed him again through a forest that expanded from stunted, struggling fir, pine, spruce, and the changed larches to tall trees that blocked the meadow view.

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Miles and miles of it, closing her in with him. She was close enough to smell his odor, to see the jagged scar stretched even tauter by the movement of his free skin, and the barely healing scratches along his arm. She saw that he had bite marks on his hand, purple indentations too small to have come from the huge bear teeth he'd described. She wondered about them, wondered who—or what—could have bitten him.

Halfway down the damned mountain, he should have been able to spot the trail, but he hadn't seen anything ringing the meadowland but trees. He was more annoyed than alarmed. He had studied the relief model in the ranger's office and read the guidebook they sold for three bucks. The route was clear from both those sources. But the trail wasn't there. He couldn't find it when they were in the meadow either. The book said to look for cut-ends of deadfall trees, but there were so many of the giant pick-up sticks, and none of them pointed the way out.

But he had her, and that was good. She was already depending on him to save her. Just like Lureen, unsure of herself, looking for a man to rescue her. She was only acting mad because she was scared—just like Lureen did when she had her temper tantrums. She was physically stronger than Lureen, but even so she was slowing them down. It was midafternoon. If he didn't find the trail in an hour or so, they would be trapped by night. He paced the perimeters of the grassy plateau, searching for a channel through the trees while she sat in the meadow plucking the little daisies that grew around her.

Her chin lifted defiantly at his approach and her eyes were dark with fatigue and indecision.

"You're not a policeman, are you?"

"No."

"And you're not from Oregon either, are you?"

"No."

"And you're going to kill me, aren't you?"

He dropped beside her and slowly unbuttoned her blouse,

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letting his fingertips touch her breasts lightly. "Why would I kill you?" He pressed his lips to the vein that beat frantically between her breasts and felt her breathing stop. "I won't kill you. I love you. You've always belonged to me. You belong to me now. You're my possession."

She realized then that he was quite insane.

She didn't fight him or beg. She lay back and let him touch her. She felt his penis slide over her eyelids and circle her mouth, poke into her ears, and move over her body as if he was anointing her with it, and heard him chanting "Your eyes belong to me, and your mouth, and your breasts. It all belongs to me—all of you." It was all a dream, and she was not really part of it. She was no longer inside of her own skin, but stood somewhere away from it, watching but not feeling. She moaned when the red man told her to, and she parted her legs when he burrowed between them. When it began to hurt, she let the woman on the ground absorb the pain.

He held her afterward, rocking her in his arms, stroking her as if she were a rabbit until her breathing quieted. When she tried to pull away, he pressed his thumbs against her throat and choked her again, and she made herself be still. He seemed pleased with her.

She tested him later, pulling away just an inch or so at a time, and he allowed her to slip away from him. She put on her clothes and he watched her.

"You are the most beautiful, most perfect woman in the world. I will protect you and keep you safe. I didn't hurt you. You didn't fight me. It was the way it should be. You're part of me now." She walked away from him, toward the edge of the wood. He made no move to stop her, but he watched her while she pushed into the foliage. She tried several places, willing the trail to be there. When she found it, she would run and if he caught up with her, she would find someplace to jump off. Some high place.

She looked for a long time, but she could find nothing that looked like a trail; it was all choked with woods and

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underbrush. After a while she walked back to the meadow and lay down, curling herself into the smallest possible ball. He walked over to her, but he didn't touch her; he only cast his shadow over her and then he went away and she slept.

14

Sam turned his pickup into the lane and headed up to the farmhouse; it was raining again and the weeds seemed to have grown a foot in four days, his fenders catching them wetly and then flopping them back away in a shower of water. No one had answered when he called at seven, but that was cutting it close. Their boat should have come into Chelan at six, and the drive south would take a good hour, barring Labor Day traffic. 7:45 now, they should be back. He was disappointed when he pulled into the yard and saw that Danny's truck was not in the shed. He lit a cigarette and waited for Billy Carter to waddle up in full attack, but the gander didn't appear. The farmhouse had that lost look of all empty houses. The grass was tall here too, and Joanne's sunflowers bent like old women's heads from their weight of water. He finished the smoke, lit another, and listened for the distant throttle of Danny's truck coming up the hill. He heard occasional tire-on-gravel sounds from the road itself, but nothing nearer.

It occurred to him a little before eight that Danny might have left him a note. But the little cedar house with a notepad attached hadn't been opened for a long time; there was an old cobweb across the latch. If Danny was really running late, he'd probably taken Joanne to her mother's and gone straight to work; he had a spare uniform in his locker. Sam felt for the key they always kept under a loose shingle over the porch. It seemed important to go into the house—just to see if there was some sign that they had been home at all.

He walked into the silent kitchen. The ticking of the old

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gradeschool clock on the wall the only sound except for his own steps. The room smelled stale—cigar smoke, dust, and a faint trace of garbage—two plates left sitting in the sink with moldered toast and hard yellow egg bits. A row of canning jars sat on the counter, and he ran his finger along one and he saw the mark left in the thin veneer of dust. They were labeled in Joanne's neat hand: Peaches— September 3, 1981. He smiled; she'd been canning right up to the last minute. It must have bothered her to have to leave dirty plates behind.

He walked to the phone and dialed the office. "Fletch?" "You better get your ass in here, Sammy." "Danny show up there?" "Negative."

"I'm out at his place, and they're not back here yet." "Probably got held up in traffic. Everybody waiting until the last minute to head home."

"Yeah, well—I'm coming in. Tell him to wait for me if he comes in before I get there."

The trip out to Danny's place had fouled up Sam's timing, placing him in the squad room with the under-sheriff, Walker Fewell—or, more likely, Fewell had cooled his heels waiting for a deliberate confrontation. Fewell was a short, well-muscled martinet of a man who looked like a Marine DI shrunken and preserved—which he was. He'd squeaked into the Natchitat County Sheriffs Office through a loophole in the civil service qualifications list. Everything he knew about police work could fit into a shotglass with room left over; perhaps worse, he realized it. So he made up for his inadequacies by demanding absolute respect, spit-polished boots, and perfectly creased, spotless uniforms. He brown-nosed the press, and he nit-picked everything Sam did because he couldn't stand a deputy who simply refused to acknowledge his existence. Sam always stared somewhere over FewelFs right shoulder when the under-sheriff addressed him.

Walker Fewell sat now in his little office with walls plastered with certificates and awards for work not done, behind his clean desk, and worked over Sam's field reports

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from last night, marking out and changing Sam's round printing with the prissiness of a schoolteacher.

Sam eased past his door, and signaled to Fletch to toss him the keys to his unit, but Fewell called out in his high, nasal voice.

"Deputy. Deputy Clinton. Would you step in here before you leave?"

"He's gonna check to see if your shorts are ironed, Sam," Fletch whispered.

"Hell, I'm not wearing any."

"Then Lord help you. Sam—don't get him riled up. He's been going over the time sheets and he saw you were late three times last week. He'll have you sweeping up the jail if he can work it."

Sam leaned into FewelFs office, his hands splayed on either side of the doorjamb, dwarfing the under-sheriff where he sat in his little chair at his huge desk. His expression was respectful, but Fewell either recognized or imagined mockery in Sam's eyes.

"Clinton, you're not indispensable."

"No sir."

"You were tardy several shifts last week, and you're seven minutes late this evening. Is punctuality a problem?"

"No sir. I've had some trouble with my truck."

"Then you should make other arrangements."

"Yes sir. Is that all, sir?"

"We're a small department, but our standards are as high as any in the state. You know the pride I take in running an efficient, productive organization?"

"Yes sir."

"This follow-up on the incident last night with—er—a Mrs. Alma Pavko," He tapped the yellow sheet in front of him with the bowl of his unlit pipe. "Deputy Clinton, this comes across as a very crude comedy routine. We do not use the word 'shit' to refer to human excrement. They'll read your FIRs and follow-ups into the record in the courtroom, you know, and 'shit' and 'bare-assed' show an appalling lack of taste."

"I have testified in court a few times, sir. I am aware of

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the use of the reporting officer's follow-ups. I doubt that Mrs. Pavko's case will go into litigation. I would expect she's somewhat embarrassed today."

"Perhaps it won't—but I think you take my point."

"Yes sir."

"Where's your partner? Is he late too?"