After Eli (27 page)

“I can’t believe it,” Rachel whispered. “Owen?”

“I don’t think there’s any need to worry. I just wanted to make sure. If there was a chance—any chance at all—that the story of Eli’s money was true, then we’d need to take care.”

Rachel turned from him. She pulled the shawl tight around her shoulders and began to walk ahead of him, near the opening into the main road.

“It’s not true, is it, Rachel?” Michael asked quietly.

She shook her head.

“I mean, I’d understand if you didn’t want to say anythin’, since it’s been all these years and nobody’s ever heard you speak of the money.”

She stopped walking and looked again at Michael. She could see an eagerness twitching in his face.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked simply. “There’s no money. If there was, I’d tell you. Eli put out that story just to cause some talk, then he up and left and everybody believed it.”

He reached for her and caught her gently by the arms and stepped close to her. He could feel her stiffen and pull against his hands.

“Rachel, you could be hidin’ a gold mine, and it wouldn’t matter to me,” he whispered painfully. “I’m not a man after money. If I was, I’d have torn up the place long ago. It’s not that that keeps me here. It’s the feelin’ that I belong. I belong
here, with you. I just don’t want anythin’ to happen to you, or Sarah or Dora.”

She tried to pull away from him, but he held on to her.

“Don’t be pushin’ me aside when I know you don’t want to,” he said. “What d’you think it’s been like for me? I’ve been achin’ just to touch you. Nights at the jail, when the boy was sleepin’, I’d think about you and the hurt was more’n I could bear. If I’d thought mentionin’ the money would drive you away, I’d never have done it.”

“It—it didn’t,” she stammered. “It’s—it’s just wrong.”

“It’s not wrong,” he argued quietly. “It’s right, because we both feel it.” He pulled her into the dark hull of the limbs of a chinaberry tree beside the road.

“Don’t,” she whined softly. She tried to move from him.

He slipped his hands over her crossed arms, rubbing his palms over the nipples of her breasts. She trembled, but she did not move.

“I want to hold you,” he murmured. “I want to pull you near me and press myself into you, and feel the fit of your body on me.”

“Please, don’t—”

“It’s dark. There’s nobody watchin’. Nobody.”

He lifted her face with his hand and cupped it and kissed her. He could feel her mouth part and the moist heat of her lips pressing against him, and his hand circled eagerly over her breasts and he could feel the thunder of her heartbeat.

IT WAS A SINGLE STEP
that Tolly Wakefield heard. Not the step of an animal or the fluttering of a bird in dry leaves. It was the step of a man, a single, heavy step, and then silence. Tolly’s mind snapped like a trap. The sound was above him in the dense underbrush of mountain laurel that rolled off the side of Yale Mountain, and whoever was there could see him easily. He had not tried to hide as he searched for Owen; he wanted to be seen, to prove that he was not an enemy. He knew Owen would be careless in his escape. Owen would have followed the flat hem of the mountains, along the narrow paths of animal trails that were imperceptible to most woodsmen. Tolly read their invisible braille with his fingers, and his fingers understood what his eyes could not tell him. Owen would have followed these trails like a map, not because he saw them, but because his senses would have led him along them until he became tired and stopped to rest. Tolly knew if Owen had disappeared into the mountains south of Yale, as the sheriff had said, he would be found, and he did not want Owen to be afraid of him.

But Tolly knew instinctively that it was not Owen who had taken the step above him. There had been no sign of Owen. Nothing. And Owen would have left signs. He would be weak and confused. Whoever was above him was not.

The echo of the step was still in his mind when he turned quickly and began running up the hill toward the sound. He
saw a movement, a flash of brown, and knew he had surprised whoever had taken the step. He could hear someone running and he stopped and dropped into a crouch and peered through the brush, but he could see nothing. There was only the sound of running, but it was not wild and thrashing; it was easy and sure, almost teasing. Tolly cursed bitterly. He was tired and knew it. For two days he had zigzagged the mountains, bent at the waist, moving in a walking trot as steady as a runner, his eyes darting like a bird’s eyes, reading the woods in words that he understood better than anyone. And now he was tired and there was someone in the woods with him, but not Owen. His mind, his senses, told him that it was not Owen, and he felt as though someone was taunting him.

He stood and moved slowly through the tangle of the undergrowth, his eyes scanning the ground carefully. Beside a thin white oak, he saw it: a footprint, pushed deep into the leaves. He knelt and studied the print. It was large and had pushed the leaves aside as though the man had stood for a long time, waiting. In front of the print was a sharp hole, perhaps two inches deep. Tolly’s eyes tightened into a puzzled frown. He touched the hole with his fingers. Something bothered him, something remote and disturbing, but he did not know why.

A bluejay chattered angrily in the top of a beech tree fifty yards away and Tolly lifted his head and stared at the tree. A squirrel sprang from a limb to the trunk of the tree and flattened itself in a camouflage. Tolly strained to listen, but he could hear only the bluejay. It was enough. The man who had taken the step and then run away was waiting for him at the beech tree.

Tolly eased into a sitting position. It was past midafternoon and the shadows on the eastern side of Yale Mountain were deepening. He watched the bluejay and traced his own location in his mind. There were no pines, only hardwood, and it would be impossible to move through the fallen leaves of the hardwoods without being heard. He wondered if the man waiting at
the beech knew that, had planned it that way. A half-hour earlier he had been in a forest of pines. A half-hour earlier he could have moved on the man without a sound. But he knew the woods. The mountain turned into a natural wall, like a collar, and the land below it spread open in a perfect oval, covered in thick grass. A stream tumbled out of the mountain, over a rock bed, and curled out of the palm of the oval valley and emptied into the Naheela River miles away. Tolly had hunted deer in the valley. If he could get above the beech tree, the man who was hidden there would be forced into the open plain. He wondered again who the man was. It was not Owen; he was sure of it.

“Dammit,” he muttered. He pushed from the ground and began a sprint up the side of the hill, above the beech, thrashing loudly through the undergrowth. He heard the bluejay scream at the noise and dive screeching from its perch. Suddenly, he was out of the brush and into timber and he ran harder until the beech was directly below him. Then he stopped and waited and watched the tree. He was breathing in long, deep gulps, and he could feel the perspiration rolling from his face. He began to move cautiously down the hill, kicking leaves as he walked. He saw the movement, a brown blur, drop from behind the beech and roll and then he saw the man spring to his feet and run easily toward the grass field in the oval opening. “Dammit,” Tolly said again. He turned left and ran along the crown of the hill that formed the base ridge of the mountain, keeping the man below him. From the shadows and distance, he could not tell who the man was, but at least he knew it was not Owen. The man was taller and heavier and older, and he was not afraid: He did not look back as he ran.

The man dashed suddenly out of the edge of the woods and into the field of grass, running away from Tolly, toward a small knoll that rose in a terrace that separated the field from the stream. Tolly could see the man clearly, but still he did not know him. The man carried something in his hand that looked
like a long rifle, and for the first time Tolly felt the queasiness of danger. He watched as the man ran smoothly over the ridge of the knoll and disappeared from sight on the other side, just above the bank of the stream. Then it became clear to him: The man wanted him to think that he had taken to the stream and would follow downstream until he reached the protection of the pines. It was a game, he thought, a goddamn game, and he would not be led into it like a child. He scanned the knoll carefully, but he could see nothing. The man was there, watching for him; he knew that. He knew also that he had the cover of the trees and that he was too far away to be heard. “The sonofabitch,” he muttered. He turned back and moved up the hill to his left, squatting and slipping behind the wall of trees. He knew how the stream came from the mountain, slithering over its rock bed like a string of ice. High on the hill, at the top of a waterfall, the trees cupped open and a flat ledge jutted over the straight drop like a platform. The entire valley was visible from the ledge and it would be easy to see the open stream until it disappeared into the pit of trees at the southern end. He had watched deer feeding in the valley from the ledge and once had seen a bear and her cubs playing in the stream. The man who made the footstep, the man who was playing a game of hide-and-seek with him, would not go south as he wanted Tolly to believe; he would go upstream, into the mountain. And Tolly would be waiting for him.

Tolly reached the ledge quickly and stood hidden beside an ash tree and looked down on the stream that split the valley in a straight line. The man was easy to find. He was a brown dot hidden in the grass that grew along the bank of the stream. He moved cautiously toward the mountain, toward Tolly, stopping every few feet to peer downstream. He was deliberate, Tolly thought. Patient and deliberate and practiced. He wondered if the man had a gun.

It was fifteen minutes before the man worked his way to the foot of the mountain and scurried quickly from the grass into
the trees and out of sight. Tolly’s senses tensed. He was now the hunter and the game was his to play. He slipped quietly from the ledge and began to move downhill, delicately, like an animal gliding through a pool of shadows. The stream poured past him in its swirling music and he could feel the air cooling, with a fine spray mist leaping off the rock bed. His eyes focused on the banks of the stream; he knew he would find his man near water.

The man was no more than ten feet away when Tolly saw him. He was sitting on a bed of moss, with his back to Tolly, resting. Tolly looked at him closely: It was the Irishman. A great, shuddering anger coursed through Tolly. Goddamnit, he thought. He wanted the Irishman to turn on him, to challenge him.

Tolly stepped from behind the oak that covered him. He was in a slight crouch.

“Mister,” he said in a growl.

Michael whirled at the sound. He scrambled to his feet and faced Tolly. His mouth was open in surprise.

“Stay where you are,” Tolly warned.

“My God, man, you’ve scared away half my life,” Michael replied weakly.

Tolly stared at him. He saw the walking stick that Michael held loosely in his hands, with the carving of a face on the knob. He knew there was no gun to fear.

“What’re you doin’ out here?” he asked evenly.

Michael ignored the question.

“I remember you,” he said. “You’d be Tolly Wakefield. The sheriff introduced us yesterday mornin’. I’m Michael O’Rear.”

“What’re you doin’ here?” Tolly asked again.

“Why, lookin’ for the boy,” Michael answered in astonishment. “The same as you.”

“You been followin’ me,” Tolly said coldly.

“Followin’ you? Why, man, I’ve been chased by some fellow who rushed me back in the woods and I made it to the fields and up to here, scared to death I’d wind up a corpse.”

“You’re a liar,” Tolly replied calmly. “That was me in the woods and you know it.”

Michael slumped to his knee on the moss, leaning against his walking stick. He wiped his face across the sleeve of his shirt and shook his head wearily. He looked back to Tolly.

“If it was you,” he said earnestly, “then you’ve a right to think that. But I swear on the holy head of God that I didn’t see who it was, but there was all that crashin’ about and it put the fear in me and I ran, and that’s the truth of it.”

Tolly said nothing. He stared hard into Michael’s face.

“For God’s sake, man, that’s the way it happened,” Michael exclaimed in exasperation. “Maybe I shouldn’t be out here, and I promised the doctor I’d stay away, but I couldn’t help it. The boy was in my care. I let him get away.”

“Go home,” Tolly said.

Michael stood. He breathed deeply and stretched his back.

“I will,” he replied. “Indeed, I will. I guess the good doctor was right. I’m doin’ nothin’ but interferin’.”

“You see anybody else, don’t run,” Tolly advised bluntly. “Some of the others have got guns. You run, they’ll kill you.”

“Don’t be worryin’ about that,” Michael said. “I’ll stand as still as Lot’s wife.” He turned to leave, then stopped and looked back at Tolly. “Tell me,” he said, “if that was you down in the woods, how’d you get up here?”

“I been here before,” Tolly answered simply.

Michael smiled and nodded and began to stride down the mountain. He felt good. Tolly Wakefield had surprised him, but that did not matter. He had followed Tolly for more than an hour before letting Tolly find him. That was victory enough. He was as good as the best of Curtis Hill’s men.

* * *

Tolly slowed his pace down the mountain. There was no reason to hurry. It was after sundown and he knew the sheriff and the other men had already met in the field where the sheriff’s car
had been parked. They would not have waited for him because they knew his habits: If he wanted to follow the hunt for Owen into the night, he would. Tolly did as he wished, when he wished, and he did it alone. He preferred being alone. It was safe. With people, there was always a bargain, always compromise, always someone with tender feelings souring around a wound that had been pricked by an innocent word. The sheriff and the other men would have left him in the woods, without any effort to find him, because they understood him.