The Walking (18 page)

She talked about his father as she cried, and each recalled memory brought forth a renewed burst of tears. It was painful to think about, but the pain felt good in a way, searing, cleansing. For the first time since his father's death, he allowed his mind to think about the old days, the good days, the days before the stroke. He had been concentrating only

on the here and now, afraid if he let himself dwell upon better times in the past, he would sink into an emotional abyss from which he could not crawl out.

After a while he was all cried out, and soon so was she. They broke apart, sat down on the couch, and for the first time since the divorce, they talked.

He was still in love with her, he realized, would probably always be in love with her, but they did not speak of that. They did not talk of their marriage or their former life together, though that was a subtext under everything they said. They did not talk of their current lives or their possible futures.

They talked about Bob.

The shadows lengthened, the house grew dark. The) turned on lights but made no effort to move. Miles did nol offer Claire anything to eat or drink, and she did not ask for anything. They remained in place, remembering the life of a man they loved, until well past midnight.

It felt strange not straying from that topic, but it felt right Miles knew that any attempt to broaden the conversatior might break the spell, might disrupt the tentative rapproachment they had forged, and that was something neithe of them wanted, so they continued sharing their memories good and bad, happy and sad, until each of them had saic everything they had to say.

They both had to work in the morning, and Claire got up to leave. She asked if he was all right, asked if he need ex her to stay, and he told her he was fine. She said good-by" but promised to return tomorrow, after work, and she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before walking out to her car

He watched her drive away, still standing in the door way stating at the empty street long after her taillights had disappeared around the corner.

Claire.

He was not sure he understood what had just happen

They had not seen each other since the divorce and at that time she'd made it clear that she never wanted to see him again--but she had raced over at the news that his father had died, and had even offered to spend the night if he needed someone to be with. It could have been just kindness. Maybe, for some reason, she thought he might be suicidal and was showing him the same consideration she would show anyone in mortal distress. Maybe she simply loved her ex-father-in-law and wanted to share her feelings with someone else who had known and loved him and would understand.

Maybe.

But he had the sense that there was something more going on here, and while he usually did not allow himself to cling to false hope, he wasn't sure this hope was false, and in his mind he could see the two of them together again.

Miles fell asleep thinking about how nice it would be to once more wake up with Claire under the covers next to him.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of ringing, and it took his sleep-fogged brain a moment to sort through its catalog of sounds and identify what the noise was. By the time he finally picked up the receiver, the phone had already rung at least ten times. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he spoke into the mouthpiece. No good news ever came from someone so desperate to get ahold of a person at this ungodly hour. "Hello?"

"Mr. Huerdeen?

His heart rate accelerated. Formality was never good either. "Yes?"

"This is Smith Blume, deputy county coroner. I work the night shift here, and I've been assigned to your father's case." Blume cleared his throat embarrassedly. "I'm afraid there's been well, not exactly an accident, but we have a small problem with your father."

Miles gripped the phone tightly. "What are you saying?" The coroner took a deep breath. "I'm saying, Mr. Huerdeen, that your father has walked out of here. He's gone."

Liam dreamed he was running through the desert, being chased by a horde of homeless people with raggedy black. clothes and glowing blue faces.

It was a very lush desert, and he kept getting scraped and stabbed as he ran between the closely growing cacti. Ahead was a small shack, a ramshackle building barely bigger than the Unabomber's cabin, and though there were no windows, the door was open and standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the yellow-orange light of a fire, was a hunched old woman.

The woman scared him, but the mob behind him scared him more, and he ran toward the open doorway. As he drew closer, he could make out details of the old woman's appearance. There was something strange about the crone's features, something unearthly in the makeup of her face.

She was his only hope, however, and he ran up to her. "Let me in!" he yelled. He turned to look over his shoulder, saw the blue faces. of the homeless people running toward the shack.

"Eat an apple." The old woman held forth a shiny red apple, and he understood that the only way he would be allowed into the hut was if he took a bite of the fruit. He recognized the scene---it was from Snow White, the Disney version--but there was a real sense of menace here, an intensity that Walt Disney never could have invested in any movie.

He didn't want to eat the apple, was afraid to even touch it.

-"Let me in[" he screamed.

"Eat the apple."

The old woman handed him the fruit. He had no choice, the mob was almost upon him. He bit into the apple.

Immediately he regretted it. He felt warm wetness in his mouth, and he tried to spit the piece out, but it was moving on its own, and it wiggled past his tongue and down his throat. He looked down. The apple was filled with veins of pumping blood. He could see them running through the whiteness of the interior fruit, beneath the shiny skin that now looked like real skin, human skin.

He whirled around. The desert was empty, the mob was gone.

They had been chasing him here, he realized. The old woman was in charge of the homeless people, and as he swallowed the bite of bloody apple he saw her change. She stood straighter, grew, the years dropping from her. She was now a gorgeous, statuesque woman, and though the features of her face were now young and beautiful rather than old and ugly, they were no less terrifying.

"It's " " flame, the woman said, smiling in a way that made him want to scream.

Behind her, the fire went out, all light disappearing from the shack.

She grabbed his midsection, pulled him with her into the darkness, and they fell into water that was black and cold... He awoke drenched with sweat, shivering. He'd left a window open, and the damp beach air had permeated the room. That was not what had instigated the nightmare, though. He knew that sometimes the outside world dictated the conditions of his inner night thoughts, that his brain incorporated snatches of dialogue from the television when he napped, or set him down on a tropical island when it was summer, but that had not happened here, he was sure of it, and though he couldn't say why, he knew with tm shakable certainty that the impetus behind this dream was nothing so benign.

The phone rang, but he was afraid to answer it, and he let it ring and ring and ring until the ringing finally stopped. He took the phone off the hook.

Why was she playing with him? Why didn't she just get it over with?

She ?

Where did that come from? His dream, he supposed, although it felt more substantive than that. It seemed more like something he'd always known but until now had not been able to recall, and the picture in his mind was of the statuesque woman standing in the doorway of a shack in Wolf Canyon.

Wolf Canyon.

It always seemed to come back to that.

Liam got out of bed and walked into the bathroom to get a drink of water.

He'd felt, even back then, that Wolf Canyon had been more than just an accident or a tragic mistake, and that feeling had grown, not diminished, over the years. He felt responsible, yes, but he'd known even at the time--they'd all known--that there'd been more at work here than the physical facts of the event. And the lack of information they'd received from the government, the fact that no charges had ever been brought against anyone, that the incident had never been acknowledged and that no word had ever leaked out about it, only confirmed his suspicions.

Still, he knew that he and his crew had the direct responsibility for what actually happened, and on some level, he supposed, he probably thought he deserved to be punished for it.

Maybe that's why he was resisting Marina's detective, why he wasn't making more of an effort to enlist help in defending himself.

He got his drink, then walked back out to the bedroom. On-an impulse, he opened the curtains and looked outside.

He would not have been surprised to see either a band of homeless people standing on his lawn or a long black car parked in his driveway, but there was neither, and he crawled back into bed and spent the rest of the night sleeping dreamlessly.

Then

He met Isabella two days out of Cheyenne. She was wandering westward, allowed, through fear rather than charity, to leave the town in which she'd been practicing instead of being executed.

William first saw her on the trail far ahead, a dark dot in the distance, and he hurried to catch up, spurring his horse onward.

He reached her quickly. She was pretty, he saw as his horse pulled next to hers. Beautiful in fact. But it was a wild, dangerous beauty, frightening somehow, and totally unlike that of any woman he had ever seen. Her black hair was long even by Territory standards, and though it framed her face in an unkempt tangle, it looked somehow natural.

She greeted him with a tired unsurprised smile, a remarkably mundane expression that seemed inappropriate on the otherworldly features of her face. "I thought I sensed another," she said simply.

"My name is William," he told her.

"I am Isabella."

She had no destination in mind, was merely following the setting sun, having heard of more tolerant communities in the West, places where people were less judgmental of those who were different.

She'd come from Fallbrook, a tiny settlement three days east of Cheyenne, where she'd lived for the past several years, acting as the town's unofficial healer and midwife.

No one there had peered too closely into her life or examined too carefully what she did--not because they didn't suspect anything but because she was too valuable to the community and they thought it better not to know.

All that had changed with the coming of the missionaries. Three closely knit Pentecostal families had moved into the valley in an effort to save souls, and they had known what she was immediately. The townspeople feigned ignorance, staved off the inevitable as long as they could, but soon they were pretending to be outraged and pretty soon their outrage became real.

They came for her one night, a mob, the whole town almost, trampling her herb garden and demanding that she come out and repent for her sins.

They did not want her to repent, Isabella knew. They wanted her to pay for her sins. But she had been ready for this, and she scattered them with a windstorm while she gathered together her belongings. She had no horse of her own and had to steal one, but a man at the stable saw her and ran to fetch the others.

She'd escaped only by killing a baby girl and threatening death for all other infants, blight and disease for all crops and livestock.

A baby girl.

William didn't like that, but though he could not imagine himself ever doing such a thing, he realized that these were desperate times for their kind. He had not been there. Who was he to judge? Besides, maybe he too would be capable of such an act if it meant his own survival. Maybe.

But he didn't think so.

He would have found some other way to demonstrate his power.

He watched Isabella as she rode along the barely discernible trail.

There was a hardness to her--the familiar hardness of whores--but something else as well, something solid, icy, and unfathomable that penetrated the deepest center of her being. She was not like anyone he had ever met, and though that made him wary, it also at acted him. He was enticed by her mystery and her strength as much as by her beauty.

She glanced over at him. "Where are you from?" she asked. "And where are you going?"

He told her about Wolf Canyon, how he'd come up with the idea and gone about getting a grant of government land, how it offered a place of safety and refuge for those of their kind, a chance to live in peace without having to always worry about exposure. Her eyes widened at the news, and he saw in her face the excited wonder and anticipation he had seen in so many others when they first learned that they had a community of their own.

He was returning from a meeting in Cheyenne with a government representative, he told her. The mine in Wolf Canyon had proved to be quite profitable, and there had been some question as to whether the government had to buy the mined ore from them or whether it was entitled to the ore outright since the land deed specified occupational rights, not mineral rights. The official with whom he'd met had signed a document granting the residents of Wolf Canyon all land rights and agreeing to buy at full market value any ore mined.

Isabella grinned. "Did you force him into signing?" William was puzzled for a moment. "Did I--?" Then he understood what she was getting at. "You mean, did I use magic?"

She nodded.

"No. Of course not."

"Would you have? If you needed to do so?" "I hadn't thought about it." "Think about it now."

He was uncomfortable with this line of thought, but it took him only a moment to declare emphatically, "No, I would not have used magic."

"Hmmm." She nodded, saying nothing else, and they con tinned on for a while in silence.

He knew what her answer would have been, and while it disturbed him, he could understand her feelings and was not entirely unsympathetic.

They were soon talking once again, and of course she asked about the town. He invited her to accompany him, to visit if she wanted, to stay if she so desired, and Isabella quickly agreed to come.