Watchers (34 page)

Read Watchers Online

Authors: Dean Koontz

Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Thrillers

BOOK: Watchers
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“They’re brilliant, they really are,” he said. “Do you have others?”
 
 
Did she have
others!
 
 
She made two additional trips to her bedroom, returning with six more paintings.
 
 
With each new canvas, Travis’s excitement grew. His delight and enthusiasm were genuine, too. Initially she thought that he might be humoring her, but soon she was certain he was not disguising his true reaction.
 
 
Moving from canvas to canvas and back again, he said, “Your sense of color is excellent.”
 
 
Einstein accompanied Travis around the room, adding a soft
woof
after each of his master’s statements and vigorously wagging his tail, as if expressing agreement with the assessment.
 
 
“There’s such mood in these pieces,” Travis said.
 
 
“Woof.”
 
 
“Your control of the medium is astonishing. I’ve no sense that I’m looking at thousands of brushstrokes. Instead, it seems as if the picture just
appeared
on the canvas magically.”
 
 
“Woof.”
 
 
“It’s hard to believe you’ve had no formal schooling.”
 
 
“Woof.”
 
 
“Nora, these are easily good enough to sell. Any gallery would take these in a minute.”
 
 
“Woof.”
 
 
“You could not only make a living at this . . . I think you could build one hell of a reputation.”
 
 
Because she had not dared to admit how seriously she had always taken her work, Nora had often painted one picture over another, using a canvas again and again. As a consequence, many of her pieces were gone forever. But in the attic she had stored more than eighty of her best paintings. Now, because Travis insisted, they brought down more than a score of those wrapped canvases, tore off the brown paper, and propped them on the living-room furniture. For the first time in Nora’s memory, that dark chamber looked bright and welcoming.
 
 
“Any gallery would be delighted to do a show of these,” Travis said. “In fact, tomorrow, let’s load some of them into the truck and take them around to a few galleries, hear what they say.”
 
 
“Oh no, no.”
 
 
“I promise you, Nora, you won’t be disappointed.”
 
 
She was suddenly in the clutches of anxiety. Although thrilled by the prospect of a career in art, she was also frightened by the big step she would be taking. Like walking off the edge of a cliff.
 
 
She said, “Not yet. In a week . . . or a month . . . we’ll load them in the truck and take them to a gallery. But not yet, Travis. I just can’t . . . I can’t handle it yet.”
 
 
He grinned at her. “Sensory overload again?”
 
 
Einstein came to her and rubbed against her leg, looking up with a sweet expression that made Nora smile.
 
 
Scratching behind the dog’s ears, she said, “So much has happened so fast. I can’t absorb it all. I keep having to fight off attacks of dizziness. I feel a little bit as if I’m on a carousel that’s whirling around faster and faster, out of control.”
 
 
What she said was true, to an extent, but that was not the only reason she wished to delay going public with her art. She also wanted to move slowly in order to have time to savor every glorious development. If she rushed into things, the transformation from reclusive spinster to a full-fledged participant in life would go too fast, and later it would be just a blur. She wanted to enjoy every moment of her metamorphosis.
 
 
As if she were an invalid who had been confined since birth to a single dark room full of life-support equipment, and as if she had just been miraculously cured, Nora Devon was coming cautiously out into a new world.
 
 
Travis was not solely responsible for Nora’s emergence from reclusion. Einstein had an equally large role in her transformation.
 
 
The retriever had obviously decided that Nora could be trusted with the secret of his extraordinary intelligence. After the
Modern Bride
and baby business in Solvang, the dog gave her glimpse after glimpse of his undoglike mind at work.
 
 
Taking his lead from Einstein, Travis told Nora how he had found the retriever in the woods and how something strange—and never seen—had been pursuing it. He recounted all the amazing things the dog had done since then. He also told her of Einstein’s occasional bouts with anxiety in the heart of the night, when he sometimes stood at a window and stared out at the darkness as if he believed the unknown creature in the woods would find him.
 
 
They sat for hours one evening in Nora’s kitchen, drinking pots of coffee and eating homemade pineapple cake and discussing explanations for the dog’s uncanny intelligence. When not cadging bits of cake, Einstein listened to them with interest, as if he understood what they were saying about him, and sometimes he whined and paced impatiently, as if frustrated that his canine vocal apparatus did not permit him to speak. But they were mostly spinning their wheels because they had no explanations
worth
discussing.
 
 
“I believe he could tell us where he comes from, why he’s so damn different from other dogs,” Nora said.
 
 
Einstein busily swept the air with his tail.
 
 
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Travis said. “He’s got a humanlike self-awareness. He
knows
he’s different, and I suspect he knows why, and I think he’d like to tell us about it if he could only find a way.”
 
 
The retriever barked once, ran to the far end of the kitchen, ran back, looked up at them, did a frantic little dance of purely human frustration, and finally slumped on the floor with his head on his paws, alternately chuffing and whining softly.
 
 
Nora was most intrigued by the story of the night that the dog had gotten excited over Travis’s book collection. “He recognizes that books are a means of communication,” she said. “And maybe he senses there’s a way to use books to bridge the communications gap between him and us.”
 
 
“How?” Travis asked as he lifted another forkful of pineapple cake.
 
 
Nora shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe the problem was that your books weren’t the right kind. Novels, you said?”
 
 
“Yeah. Fiction.”
 
 
She said, “Maybe what we need is books with pictures, images he can react to. Maybe if we gathered up a lot of picture books of all kinds, and magazines with pictures, and maybe if we spread them out on the floor and
worked
with Einstein, maybe we’d find some way to communicate with him.”
 
 
The retriever leaped to his feet and padded directly to Nora. From the expression on his face and from the intent look in his eyes, Nora knew that her proposal was a good one. Tomorrow, she would collect dozens of books and magazines, and put the scheme into operation.
 
 
“It’s going to take a lot of patience,” Travis warned her.
 
 
“I’ve got oceans of patience.”
 
 
“You may think you have, but sometimes dealing with Einstein gives a whole new meaning to the word.”
 
 
Turning to Travis, the dog blew air out of his nostrils.
 
 
The prospects for more direct communication looked bleak during the first few sessions with the dog on Wednesday and Thursday, but the big breakthrough was not long in coming. Friday evening, June 4, they found the way, and after that their lives could never be the same.
 
 
2
 
 
“
. . .
reports of screaming in an unfinished housing tract, Bordeaux Ridge—”
 
 
Friday evening, June 4, less than an hour before nightfall, the sun cast gold and copper light on Orange County. It was the second day of blistering temperatures in the mid-nineties, and the stored heat of the long summer day radiated off the pavement and buildings. Trees seemed to droop wearily. The air was motionless. On the freeways and surface streets, the sound of traffic was muffled, as if the thick air filtered the roar of engines and blaring of horns.
 
 
“—repeat, Bordeaux Ridge, under construction at the east end—”
 
 
In the gently rolling foothills to the northeast, in an unincorporated area of the county adjacent to Yorba Linda, where the suburban sprawl had only recently begun to reach, there was little traffic. The occasional blast of a horn or squeal of brakes was not merely muffled but curiously mournful, melancholy in the humid stillness.
 
 
Sheriff’s Deputies Teel Porter and Ken Dimes were in a patrol car—Teel driving, Ken riding shotgun—with a broken ventilation system: no air-conditioning, not even forced air coming out of the vents. The windows were open, but the sedan was an oven.
 
 
“You stink like a dead hog,” Teel Porter told his partner.
 
 
“Yeah?” Ken Dimes said. “Well, you not only stink like a dead hog, you
look
like a dead hog.”
 
 
“Yeah? Well, you
date
dead hogs.”
 
 
Ken smiled in spite of the heat. “That so? Well, I hear from your women that you make
love
like a dead hog.”
 
 
Their tired humor could not mask the fact that they were weary and uncomfortable. And they were answering a call that didn’t promise much excitement: probably kids playing games; kids loved to play on construction sites. Both deputies were thirty-two, husky former high school football players. They weren’t brothers—but, as partners for six years, they were
brothers.
 
 
Teel turned off the county road onto a lightly oiled dirt lane that led into the Bordeaux Ridge development. About forty houses were in various stages of construction. Most were still being framed, but a few had already been stuccoed.
 
 
“Now there,” Ken said, “is the kind of shit I just can’t believe people fall for. I mean, hell, what kind of name is ‘Bordeaux’ for a housing tract in Southern California? Are they trying to make you believe there’s going to be vineyards here one day? And they call it ‘Ridge,’ but the whole tract’s in this stretch of flatland between the hills. Their sign promises serenity. Maybe now. But what about when they pitch up another three thousand houses out here in the next five years?”
 
 
Teel said, “Yeah, but the part that gets me is ‘miniestates.’ What the fuck is a
mini
estate. Nobody in his right mind would think these are estates—except maybe Russians who’ve spent their lives living twelve to an apartment. These are tract homes.”
 
 
The concrete curbs and gutters had been poured along the streets of Bordeaux Ridge, but the pavement had not yet been put down. Teel drove slowly, trying not to raise a lot of dust, raising it anyway. He and Ken looked left and right at the skeletal forms of unfinished houses, searching for kids who were up to no good.
 
 
To the west, at the edge of the city of Yorba Linda and adjacent to Bordeaux Ridge, were finished tracts where people already lived. From those residents, the Yorba Linda Police had received calls about screaming somewhere in this embryonic development. Because the area had not yet been annexed into the city, the complaint fell into the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department.
 
 
At the end of the street, the deputies saw a white pickup that belonged to the company that owned Bordeaux: Tulemann Brothers. It was parked in front of three almost-completed display models.
 
 
“Looks like there’s a foreman still here,” Ken said.
 
 
“Or maybe it’s the night watchman on duty a little early,” Teel said.
 
 

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