“Reason I’m telling you this is ’cause I wanna know about God’s punishment.”
“What about it in particular?”
“Something happened a year ago—”
“Ain’t gonna listen to this,” Ezekiel said, and he struggled to his feet and webbed a ways up the trail, where he stood with his back to them, smoking his pipe, watching the basin fill with snow.
“Go on, Gloria,” Stephen said.
“Last January, we were living up in Silver Plume. Had a son, name a Gus. Him and Zeke went out together one morning. They were waiting to cross the street, and somehow, Gus’s little hand slipped out a Zeke’s. Our boy walked in front of a hansom. . . .” Stephen reached over, touched Gloria’s arm. She wiped her eyes. “The horse stepped on Gus and one a them big wheels . . . rolled over his neck. Weren’t nobody’s fault. Not the driver’s. Not Zeke’s.”
“Not yours.”
“Gus died right there in the street.”
“I’m so sorry, Gloria.”
“Now I want you to tell me something, Stephen.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“I just told you how Zeke and I used to be a wicked pair a souls. There’s this little voice been whispering to me ever since he died, saying that God took Gus from us as punishment for all the bad things we done. That ain’t true, is it? He ain’t that kind a God?”
The preacher’s calm brown eyes seemed to darken. He looked away, and when he spoke again, his voice took on a harder, bitter aspect.
“You’re asking me if we worship a vengeful God?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’m the person to answer that for you.”
“Why not?”
“What if I were to say that that voice in your head is right? That it’s entirely possible He took your son from you?”
“If that’s the truth, I hate myself and Zeke for what we were. And I hate God for what He is.”
“Then perhaps we shouldn’t continue this conversation, Gloria. I’ll not be responsible for turning someone from their faith.” Stephen used his walking stick to boost himself onto his feet. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more comfort to you.”
“But just last week you preached about God’s unconditional love.”
Stephen reached down, extended a gloved hand to Gloria, helped her stand. “It’s what people need to hear. They want a version of God as benevolent father, ready to protect, eager to provide, but to hold no accounting. I don’t believe in that God anymore.”
“But you did last Sunday, so something changed your mind?”
“Not something, Gloria. God Himself.” And there were sparks in the preacher’s gentle eyes—deep loss and rage at that loss—as he turned away and trudged up the trail.
NINETEEN
E
merald Lake lay ten feet under the snow beneath their webs. The storm eased as they hiked across, and through a hole in the clouds, a shaft of sunlight passed, firing into blinding white a piece of the serrated ridge that enclosed the basin.
A mansion materialized in the distance, ensconced on the edge of the lake. “Ever time I see it,” Ezekiel said, “I can’t get past what a load a burro’s milk that thing is.”
“It does look misplaced in these environs,” Stephen said.
Packer had named his estate Emerald House—four symmetrical wings of opulence that met in a central block, crowned by a cupola. The top floors had been cedar-shingled, the ground level constructed of stone. Numerous brick chimneys soared from the gabled roof.
“Well, that’s strange,” Ezekiel said. “Ya’ll see even a whisper a smoke rising from a one a them chimneys? Why you reckon he’d let his fires go out in a storm?”
There were drifts to the second-floor windows, and a snow tunnel with fifteen-foot walls had been shoveled to the portico of unbarked Douglas fir trunks.
They arrived at a pair of oak doors and Stephen rapped the knocker three times. They untied their webs, waited. Stephen banged the knocker again.
Gloria glanced up at the long overhanging eaves, said, “You don’t think he forgot?”
The preacher speculated. “Perhaps he stayed in town last night, not wanting to chance getting trapped in a slide on the way home.”
“Well, we just hoofed it through a blizzard, and I’m gonna by God walk in there, find out if we’re gettin breakfast for our trouble.”
Ezekiel grabbed one of the large iron handles, tried the door. It opened.
“Think we should walk in unannounced, Zeke?” Gloria said.
