“Owlsden,” Katherine said to the owl.
It blinked.
She laughed just a trifle nervously, then shone the beam of the light around the room again. The ceiling here was open-beamed, taking advantage of the magnificent, polished oak rafters. Two places in those rafters, owls sat looking down at her, chinless as their white chests puffed up over the straight columns of their necks.
They cried out in unison, the great, empty room giving their voices an echo-chamber effect that explained how they had carried to her so well and had pulled her out of sleep.
One of the things she had meant to ask Lydia, but had forgotten, was why the house was so curiously named. Now she would not have to ask. It was a haven for owls, providing in its abandoned third floor a place of refuge from foul weather.
She left the room, closed the door behind her, went to the stairs and descended to the second floor. In a few moments, she was in her room again, tucked beneath the covers.
The owls hooted, as if sending her a special message of their friendship.
As sleep crept up on Katherine once more, she speculated that this small event was representative of the larger conflict of two main approaches to life — her optimism for which she had now and then been chided by other students in college, and Yuri's pessimism which easily made possible the silly superstitions he said he believed. There was nothing in Owlsden to harm anyone. Yes, there were Satanists in Roxburgh or somewhere in the outlying districts, holding their rituals of blood and hate, but one only had to think of them and deal with them as one would with spoiled, nasty children, and there would be nothing whatsoever to worry about.
She was not going to worry about demons, devils, and ceremonial dances of evil.
The owls hooted.
She realized, as she drifted into sleep, that she had already become accustomed to them and that she found the sound of their nocturnal cries somewhat comforting…
CHAPTER 5
In the morning, the storm was gone, leaving more than twenty inches of fresh, blindingly white snow dumped on Roxburgh and the surrounding countryside. The trees were hung with it, the pines bent under their hoary load, a few of the birches even snapped in two under the tremendous weight. The drifts on the west side of the house were swept up over most of the first floor windows, while the lawn behind was nearly scraped barren of its share of whiteness. The sky was bright and blue, cut through here and there by gray remnants of the storm, or by cloudy premonitions of another snow.
Katherine took breakfast in her own room, some fruit juice and a sweet roll. She had never been one for eating heavily in the morning, preferring to skimp even through lunch so that, at dinner, she could indulge herself and still not overeat. Though slim, she knew she had a tendancy to add weight quickly if she didn't watch herself.
When she got downstairs, she found Lydia Boland in the library which also served as her “office.” The room was lined with bookshelves that ran clear to the ceiling, all packed tightly with an unbelievable number of paperback and hardbound volumes. There was even a stool for reaching the titles on the middle shelf and a rolling ladder whose wheels fit into a tiny track in the ceiling, making it possible to move the ladder wherever one wanted it and then to climb up and easily obtain any volume in the room.
“Good morning!” Lydia said.
She was sitting at a large, pine desk with a massive slab top at least three inches thick, with legs as sturdy as bedposts. It was so huge and masculine that it dwarfed her and made her seem much smaller than she was, smaller than Katherine. This did not, however, make her look more aged, but rather younger, almost like a little girl in her bright yellow dress.
“Good morning,” Katherine said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Fine, thank you. And how was your first night in Owlsden?”
“I found out how it got it's name,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yes.” She told Lydia about her middle-of-the-night adventure.
“How wonderful!” Lydia said. “I forgot to mention them to you. Most girls would have locked their door and pulled up the sheets and forgotten about the noise.”
“Maybe my curiosity will kill me some day,” Katherine said.
“Don't believe it. Only those people with curiosity ever amount to anything in this life.”
There was more pleasant conversation, and then the dictation of a few letters which Katherine took in shorthand and typed on rich, embossed vellum stationery, using the IBM electric that was the only modern thing in the library.
As she was finishing the last letter — Lydia was looking over something in a book she had taken from the shelves — Alex Boland poked his head in the door. “I think I'll be going into town, Mother. Still want Katherine to go with me?”
“Yes,” Lydia said. She put her book down and turned to Katherine. “I believe your records say you ski.”
“There's a run into town?” Katherine asked.
“An excellent one,” Alex said. “About a two mile winding slope that leads gently through the pines and feeds almost directly into Costerfeld Avenue.”
“I'd like you to accompany Alex,” Lydia said. “Let him show you the town. Roxburgh has been my life, or most of it, and I want you to become thoroughly familiar with it.”
“I'll have to change,” Katherine said. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“Right,” Alex said. “I'll meet you outside the kitchen door.”
The day was cold but, without the wind, she found it far more endurable than the day before. She was dressed in blue insulated ski slacks, black sweater, thermal jacket, sturdy boots and toboggan hat. When she came out the kitchen door, she saw Alex standing far off to the south, at the edge of the mountain slope where the first downward angling of the land began. She went to him, kicking at the snow as she did.
He said, “How much have you skied before?”
“Quite a bit,” she said. “The orphanage where I grew up was near a resort that used to let us kids in free if we were interested. I was one of the few who were interested, and I spent a lot of my free time there.”
He nodded. “This shouldn't be any trouble. Look.”
A wide swath of clean snow, guarded by towering pines, lead down the mountainside, cut at one edge by what appeared to be power pylons carrying two thick cables.
“It looks easy enough,” she said.
They put on their skis, and Alex went over the edge first, swishing through the clean snow, cutting two shallow runners as he went. She followed close behind, watching him, letting his movements dictate hers as they swept down the snaking trail.
The wind bit at her, whined off her vinyl slacks and jacket, snapped her yellow hair out behind her and tried to tug away the toboggan cap which was strapped beneath her chin.
Snow thrown up behind Alex spattered her goggles. She wiped them off and dropped back fifty feet until she was not bothered by his wake.
The trees flashed by so fast that, if she looked to either side, they almost seemed like a continuous rail fence of gargantuan proportions.
She felt gloriously free and renewed. One day on the job, and already she knew that she would be happy to be Lydia Boland's secretary and companion for the next fifty years if Lydia happened to live to be over a hundred.
Suddenly, the trail twisted and swept directly down toward the village of Roxburgh, the slope grading into a gentle run at the bottom of which, two hundred feet away, Alex waited beside the last of the tall, gray pylons. She brought herself to a stop beside him, showering snow over his head.
“Like it?” he asked.
“Wonderful!”
