the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward John.
The dioramas teem with figures that were once alive and now, almost, seem to be living again. Greater Kudu stand alert, on guard for danger, their horns gently tapering and their beards full and pale. A black rhinoceros moves through the veld, one huge foot raised, mid-step. A pride of lions lounges in the savanna, watching a splendid female drag down a fleeing zebra. Hippopotami loiter in a lake while bongo and wildebeest and hartebeest and gnu race past. Water buffalo bathe; tapir drink; a leopard jumps from the jungle, tail trailing up and back, ears back and mouth open, feet extended and claws out, eyes focused on the startled axis deer in front of him. A grizzly bear towers and bares its teeth. A Marco Polo's ram stands at the highest point of Central Asia, his horns curled up, back and out in a spiral more stupendous than any John has ever seen or imagined. Many of the animals are beyond his experience. Tiny red antelope spring through a meadow; spotted, yellow-eyed cats lounge in an Asian treetop; a pure white buck with an eight-point rack peers over his shoulder with an indifferent, patriarchal majesty.
John moves within the world, a tourist. He meanders, walking sometimes forward and sometimes backward, lost in a state of amazement, unwilling to miss anything, eager to see it all at once. Standing in front of the Africa diorama, he begins reading the plaques.
He is even more astonished when the general introduction to Africa blurb instructs him to push the red button on the stand before him when he's finished with this scene. Though unfinished, he pushes the button anyway. His heart jumps as the entire ceiling-high display begins to rotate, smoothly and almost noiselessly disappearing into the wall as another tableau circles forward to take its place.
A bull elephant looms above him, trunk up and tusks hooking toward the sky. His ears are extended-each one, John thinks-the size of a bedsheet. He looks ready to charge, because the taxidermist has captured the huge shift of weight to the animals' columnar rear legs, leaving the front legs lighter, their flesh looser, one mammoth knee just now bending and one immense foot almost ready to leave the grass.
John pushes the red button again and the original diorama returns, like an alternate world gliding into place.
He stands there, heart thumping, ears buzzing, amazed. Then he tries more red buttons. He moves through the great shifting room, pushing one after another. The world is a kaleidoscope.
Australia becomes Montana.
China becomes Kodiak Island.
A wolfpack tears down an elk.
A Cape Buffalo tilts a Jeep.
And perhaps the most interesting thing of all are the little horizontal platforms beside each information plaque. They are tall and narrow as candleholders. And topping each, like a golden flame, is a rifle cartridge. In the light of the trophy room John can see that the casings contain written information. He leans forward to read the engraved brass that is displayed in front of the Cape Buffalo. . 458
Win.
Mag.
500 gr.
Silver tip
He notes that the engraving looks very much like the engraving on the shells Joshua showed him, with the cursive script so similar to the Declaration of Independence.
Leaning in with his camera, John shoots several of the gleaming, textual brass casings.
Finished and sweating harder now, he presses the red button again.
But when the last diorama rotates, he's not looking at wildlife at all.
Now, to John's continuing astonishment, he is staring at the front of what might be a pub. In fact, John can see a bar, a long mirror and a row of empty barstools through one of the mullioned windows. The front door is wooden also, with a large window in its center. Green curtains hang on brass rods inside. He thinks of the alcohol he's drunk this night and rubs his eyes. No, the pub remains, and it is inviting.
John steps up to the door and opens it. He feels as lost and curious as Alice herself. The lights go on automatically as he enters. It is indeed a little pub. There are three stools at the burnished bar, and plenty of bottles lined along the opposite wall mirror. There are three thick cardboard coasters on the counter and three clean ashtrays, each with a boxes of matches in it. John leans across the wood of the bar and sees the duckboard behind it, the small refrigerator, the ice bin with a folded hand towel on top of it, the little overhead glass rack. It is all genuine and real. It is neither facade nor mock-up. John feels almost dazed, pulled between the illusion of wildlife-animal and human-'outside' and the reality of the 'civilization' in which he now stands. He feels as if he is in some last outpost.
To his right and down a step is a comfortable little room arranged around a big screen television set in a cabinet along the far wall. There are half a dozen chairs set up, all facing the screen. In the midst of the chairs is an electronics control console so the viewer doesn't have to get up to change channel or volume, start or stop tape, etc.
John wonders why Holt has lavished so much attention on his home entertainment system. Somehow it disappoints him. He tries to image Wayfarer sitting around at night watching Seinfeld. Suddenly, though, John feels stupid, because he realizes that this pub and its big screen theater are not for commercial entertainment, but rather for something very different. A look at the bookshelves, built eye-high along two walls, confirms his idea.
This is where Vann Holt relives the hunt.
The hunts. Of course. Holt takes trophies, but he also records his hunts. John stands before one shelf and scans the titles: Afghanistan Ram, 1966; Africa Kudu, 1988; Africa Lion, 1990; Africa Lion, 1977;
Alaska Brown Bear 1989; Alaska Elk, Brown Bear, 197 Alaska Caribou 1993..
John wonders: where would Baum be?
Not under 'B', he sees. And not under 'S'.
Nowhere, he thinks, nowhere I would find it.
He goes to the end of the second shelf and studies the miscellany, but there is no indication on the labels that Holt might have recorded the death of Rebecca Harris in the Journal parking lot He backtracks to 'R' and 'H', but finds nothing. He tries 'C for columnist; 'W' for writer; 'J' for Journal. Nothing.
He wouldn't label it, John thinks, and he wouldn't leave it here.
Or would he? Where could it call less attention to itself? The needle in the haystack.
He looks at his watch now, and it is 5:20 a.m. Only forty minutes, he thinks, to get all this-and the sketch and photograph in his refrigerator-to the box.
There are drawers under the shelves of video tapes, six to each wall. In the first three he finds predictable odds and ends blank tapes, spare cases, pens for marking, instruction manual for the tape player, monitor, speaker system, remotes. There are dozens of photo albums.
Next time in, he thinks.
CHAPTER 24
John made his cottage in five minutes. He tried to walk with a casual, up-with-the-sun contentedness, but he could feel his deceit in every step. What he wanted to do was sprint, to outrun the feeling somehow.
He let out the dogs, brewed some coffee, poured a cup, and got his walking stick from the deck outside. With the penlight full of film in his pants pocket and the plastic bag inside his shirt, he set out with his dogs along the lake again. He headed for his box of toys, his tunnel, his reason for being.
As soon as the trail led off into the brush, John broke into a run. A few minutes later he stopped to listen and look, but the morning was quiet-just the songbirds in the bushes, the shuffling of Boomer, Bonnie and Belle out ahead of him and the cadence of Rebecca's name in his head.
Re-bec-ca-pause. Re-bec-ca-pause. Re-bec-ca.
Near the halfway point he stopped again. The sun was creeping over the eastern hilltops, round and bright as
