Stony River (51 page)

He sauntered across the porch. “Hello there, Sevana.”

She tried to think how he knew her name. “Have I met you?” she asked formally.

“You have now. I heard your friend mention you to the bartender when he was ordering your drink. Name’s Ryder.” He stuck out his hand.

She didn’t take it, choosing to take a step backward from him instead.

“Pretty wild in there,” he remarked. “Looks like your friend has forgotten about you.”

“He’s just having fun.” She edged away another step.

“But you’re not, are you?” he persisted, following her. “Let’s get away from this mad crowd and go somewhere we can hear ourselves think.” At close range in the light coming from the windows, he looked scarcely older than herself; but she was afraid of his forward manner and unsmiling eyes that never seemed to leave her.

Even though he had expressed her exact desire, she now had no inclination to agree. “No, thank you—I’m going back in.”

“Wait!” His black eyes flashed as he caught her by the arm. “What’s your phone number?”

She jerked away from him, and ran down the steps and around to the front door. Letting herself into the smoke-filled room, she took her seat again, feeling the rapid hammering of her heart. Willy had not noticed her absence. He was still in the midst of a crowd, proposing toasts in all heartiness.

The back door opened and the man called Ryder came back in. His eyes swept her face before he took a stool and ordered a drink, spinning so his back was to her. She kept track of him warily, wishing Willy wasn’t occupied so he could take her home. She’d suddenly had enough of the evening.

“How are you feeling, Sevana?” Jillian was alert enough to catch the look on her face.

“Willy’s trying to poison her with his vodka,” Ralf explained usefully.

“And everything else,” Len chimed in on cue.

The musician at the piano had picked up a fast, rhythmic tune. A few people were dancing. The stranger spun around, slid off his stool and came toward her. “Dance?” he asked in a grating tone.

“No, thank you,” she replied coolly.

“Come on, your friend won’t mind.” He nodded toward Willy, who glanced over just then and saw them.

“No. Please—” She stood up and cast an imploring look toward Willy.

Willy put down his glass and came over. “Leave her alone,” he said thickly.

“If you want what’s yours, you’d better take care of it,” the man sneered. “Come on, Sevana.” He took hold of her arm possessively.

Len and Ralf were both on their feet now, watchfully. “Let go of her,” Willy demanded.

When the man paid no attention, Willy grabbed his arm and pulled him away. The man let swing a punch at Willy’s face. Willy ducked and missed the blow, but was thrown off-balance by the movement and staggered against the row of men sitting at the bar. One of them caught him, steadied him on his feet. “Go get him, Willy!” he cried.

“Easy now,” pleaded the bartender, setting down a handful of tumblers to watch. The men started cheering Willy on. The stranger looked from Willy to the shouting men; then he gave a last look at Sevana and stalked out the door. Everybody cheered. Willy came over to Sevana.

“Willy, let’s go,” she begged.

Seeing her shaken countenance, he consented. He told the others he was taking her home, and escorted her outside. Sevana stayed close to him until they were in the car, imagining Ryder lurking among the shadowy maples waiting for her.

“What a dimwit,” remarked Willy, starting the engine. “If he ever tries that again, I’ll get him good.” Then he chuckled. “Well, we provided a little entertainment for the locals tonight, didn’t we?”

Sevana didn’t know how he could talk that way. It had come to her during the fight that Saturday night at the Roadhouse was not a good place to be—even though it had seemed enjoyable enough at first. “He knew my name,” she said. “He overheard you talking about me. He wanted my telephone number.”

“Lucky you don’t have one.” Willy maneuvered skillfully out of the full parking lot. “Don’t be upset,” he said to her silence as they drove along. “He didn’t mean any harm. He just wanted to dance, and he was a little too drunk to go about it right. You did have a good time, didn’t you?”

“At first I did,” she admitted, but the reservation in her voice was obvious.

“You’re just not used to it,” he made excuse. “I keep forgetting you’re only seventeen, haven’t seen much. Things do get a little out-of-hand out there once in a while, but there are plenty of good times, too.” A reverent note crept into his voice. “Some of the best times of my life.”

He saw her to the door, squeezed her hand encouragingly, and left again. She had no doubt he was headed back to the Roadhouse where the night was still in full swing. She was glad to be home. She tumbled into bed. Her head ached dreadfully and she felt a little ashamed of her reckless evening, but she was too tired to let it bother her for long.

Joel, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. He got up and looked out the back door thinking he’d heard a wolf pack in the distance, but all was quiet now. There was a glow uphill behind the trees he recognized well. He got dressed and went outside. The northern lights were brightening the sky with shifting flares of pale green. Some nights they shimmered as sheer curtains of soft gold, a few infrequent times as floating shafts of smoky burgundy or eerie opaque ghost-white, but almost always it was those fluctuating vertical streaks of translucent green.

He had seen the same sight so often he watched it only a little while, then went to the barn to check on the sheep since he was up—and because he woke them by doing so, felt obligated to spend some time with them. Then, wide awake, he went back to the cabin. Settling at his desk, he reread the last letter he’d ever gotten from Chantal. He still wasn’t used to the fact that he couldn’t write her anymore—the habit of sharing every thought with her was hard to break. He folded that worn letter, thinking it was time to put it with the others, and took another from his desk drawer to read again the offer from the prestigious violin shop in Vancouver. They had wanted him badly—his skills and his reputation. When he turned it down, they told him the offer stood indefinitely: any time he reconsidered, the job was his. There was no one else in the business that had his status, his level of expertise.

After he and Chantal had gone their separate ways, he had seriously considered it. He’d wanted a change—a drastic one. He seemed to have lost his sense of purpose, and when the wind cried around the cabin at night, he’d heard it in a way he never used to. But time had passed—summer, the early days of fall. He was thankful he hadn’t pursued it. He was no longer so desperately unhappy that he felt an overwhelming urge to run away from his life.

Even so, he allowed himself to consider for a moment what things would be like now if he’d taken it. The salary was far beyond what he made on his own. But he couldn’t picture it, not even remotely. He dropped that letter in the fire and sat whittling on a branch he’d brought back from Stormy Pass.

CHAPTER 34

Sunday morning Sevana put the thought of last night out of her dully pounding head, and resolved in the future to do a better job of keeping her promise to Joel to take care. She couldn’t face the idea of food, so she only drank a cup of Willy’s charry black coffee and made up her mind to visit the church she passed each time she walked out past the crossroad. If it turned out to be the church of David Lindford, Joel would think well of her for looking him up. Even if it wasn’t, if Joel drove two hours to church when he could, she knew he would approve if she made the effort to go there. Besides, even though the sense of revelation she’d had in the high country had been fleeting, it had left a lasting impression on her. She wanted to keep connected to that insight, remember what she’d felt. So she put on a skirt and walked out to the century-old building with the steep belfry. There were only a few cars in the parking lot. One of them was a tiny toylike one she had often seen parked there on her walks.

She went in and took a seat on the next-to-last pew, self-conscious because she was early and hoping no one would pay attention to her. She thumbed through a hymnal, remembering the one she’d held with Joel for the closing song at his log-built church. It brought her a swift sense of destitution. As you lived your life day to day, you took the events you encountered as a matter of course; and it wasn’t until later, looking back, that you realized how exceptional certain of those happenings were, so unique to the moment, so highly to be prized. Was it because at the time you owned the moment, secure in your very richness—and only after it was no longer yours, did you know the sum of what you had lost?

Her desire to go unnoticed was merely wishful thinking. An athletic-looking man of moderate stature was coming down the aisle, an unreserved smile communicating his welcome. He looked to be in his early thirties, with dark-blond hair and a pleasantly angular face, and Sevana thought him handsome.

“Hello, how are you this morning?” he asked, his eyes telling her he was not asking as a formality, but truly cared to know. And when he introduced himself as David Lindford, she forgot the awkwardness of being one of the handful of early-comers scattered in the pews, for the import of knowing she had indeed found Joel’s friend.

When she told him she knew Joel Wilder, David’s face grew even more illuminative as he exclaimed, “Joel’s one of the best friends I’ve got!” Then he asked after him with such interest, that she was not shy to tell him about his flock and fiddles, and recent return from summer pastures.

“Good to know. I don’t get to see him nearly as often as I’d like,” David said regretfully. He also regretted that Sevana could not meet Krysta, his wife of four years; but she was teaching up on the reserve, and it was such a drive she didn’t come home every weekend. Learning that Sevana had moved there to take art lessons, he responded favorably by saying everyone in town spoke very highly of Willy’s class. Then an elder came up to him about a pressing matter downstairs, but before David went off with him, he shook Sevana’s hand again and stressed that if there was anything he could do to help her get settled in her new life there, she should not hesitate to let him know.

Sevana thanked him, realizing Joel had gotten just what he wanted out of that exchange. She knew he would be glad when she wrote him about it.

As the church filled up, others came over to greet her. Ranch and farm people mostly, from the surrounding countryside—hearty, hospitable folk she instinctively liked. Maybe, she thought, those rural families had been going to that country church for generations before the city had sprawled almost to its door. Still, despite their welcome, she felt a reticence to mingle with the after-church crowd, and slipped away while David was talking with other people at the door; but she was not sorry she had gone.

At home she thinned down some oil paint and brown-stained a creamery crate she had appropriated from the alley, setting it in front of the couch for a coffee table when it was dry. For the rest of the afternoon, using her original watercolor as a guide, she blocked Snowshoe Meadow onto a canvas—losing herself to a world where amethyst flowers still bloomed in an unbroken field of color, and a dark creek slipped through it in languorous turns, its glassy surface scattered with petals as over a bridal path.

She pushed her work away late, her mind still in Stony River country where she had spent the day. Her dreams that night took her to Landmark Peak. She stood on the catwalk of the old tower as it swayed back and forth in a battering wind. She could look down the perpendicular drop to the bottom of the chasm, so far below the trees looked like matchsticks. Dizzily she clutched the rail as the lookout reeled more and more violently. Then a furious gust pushed the tower past the point of recovery, and for a heart-stopping moment it hung swaying in space, teetering over the dropoff—and then she was falling, falling—

Monday she took a long walk through town to clear her head. She browsed a few little clothing boutiques, but they disinterested her strangely. Coming across a bookstore, she spent an hour or two perusing such diversified subjects as sheep breeds, rock pikas, and forest plants, and bought several books of the same. She ate at an odd little nook, and returned to the apartment in late afternoon with the books and the only other purchases she’d made that day: a brightly dyed Hudson’s Bay blanket to cover the couch, and a package of red candles, both born of a worry that Joel would feel out of place when he came to visit. Joel, who was used to wooden floors and subtle lamplight glancing off hand-cut logs—how comfortable would he be in her city apartment?

She lit one of the candles and ate dinner by its flame, noticing how the mellow light softened the glare of the white-painted walls. The effect was so evocative of evenings on the mountain that she burned a candle often after that, seeing in its glimmering flame a remembrance of another life she had vowed not to forget.

Tuesday she arrived at the shop early, only to wait for Willy who was a few minutes late. He apologized when he arrived, and Sevana thought he looked slightly fatigued as he fumbled to fit the key in the lock. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked in concern.

“Stayed out too late last night, is all. I’ll get another key made at lunch so you don’t have to wait for me again.”

When he was settled behind the counter devouring a maple bar in defiance of Jillian, he asked, “Have a good weekend? Where were you Sunday, anyway? I came by to see if you wanted to spend the day at the river with me while I worked on my picture, but I couldn’t find you anywhere.”