Romanowski’s stone cabin on the bank of the river, when she lowered her gaze and saw the two forms on the ground near the mews.
“Dad, what’s that?”
Joe took it in quickly, saw it for what it was, yelled, “Hold on tight!” and jammed the accelerator into the floor.
Through the windshield, Joe saw Eric look up at the sound of the approaching pickup. Eric was wild looking and filthy, with shredded clothing, a scraggly beard, and stiff, tumbleweed hair. He was on top of Nate’s prone body with his knees on either side of Nate’s head. Joe saw blood and Nate’s lifeless, pale hand flung out to the side of him.
As Joe bore down on the mews, Eric stood up, looked quickly at his unfinished business on the ground, then turned and started running toward the river, loping toward it like some kind of heavy-limbed animal.
Sheridan braced herself on the dashboard of the truck, her eyes wide, as Joe drove by Nate and pursued Eric. The distance between Joe, Eric, and the river closed at once, and Joe saw Eric shoot a panicked glance back over his shoulder seconds before Joe hit him.
The collision dented the grille and buckled the hood of the pickup, and sent Eric flying toward the river where he hit the water with an ungainly, flailing splash. Joe slammed on his brakes, and the pickup fishtailed and stopped at the water’s edge.
Joe and Sheridan scrambled out, with Maxine bounding behind them. “Jeez, Dad . . .” Sheridan said, her face white. “I mean . . . wow.”
Joe concentrated on the surface of the river. The water was dark and deep, the surface blemished only by ringlets that spread from the center of the violent splash. Eric had sunk like a rock, but Joe wasn’t sure he had hit Eric hard enough to kill him outright. He wished Sheridan hadn’t been there to see it.
ate was breathing and his eyes were open when Joe and Sheridan got to him. The cut on the side of his face was deep, and bleeding profusely, and a flap of his skin was folded back and raw. Joe knelt and put it back, seeing that Eric had been interrupted before he could sever any arteries or do fatal damage. “Ouch,” Nate said weakly.
“Stay down,” Joe said, still shaky. “Don’t sit up. I’m calling the EMTs right now.”
Sheridan stripped off her hooded sweatshirt and dropped to her knees to compress the cloth against his wound.
Joe ran back to his truck and keyed the mike.
He completed the call and was told to expect the ambulance within twenty minutes.
“That’s a hell of a long time,” Joe said angrily.
“They’re on their way,” Wendy the dispatcher snapped back. “You are quite a ways out of town, you know.”
He looked back toward the mews. He could see Nate and Sheridan talking to each other. Nate was going to be okay, Joe thought, although he would have quite a scar on his face.
For the first time since they’d arrived, Joe took a deep breath. He realized that his hands were shaking and his mouth was dry.
He looked at the river, at its deceptive, muscular stillness. On the other side of the river, a high red rock face was dotted with tenacious clumps of sage. Then down river, where the channel began a slow bend away from him, he saw Eric Logue dragging himself out of the water on the other bank.
Eric pulled himself into a clump of willows, got to his hands and knees, and crawled out of sight into a small red rock fissure.
“Stay with him until the EMTs get here,” Joe told Sheridan, checking his loads and racking the pump on his shotgun. He had given her his first aid kit so she could use a sterile compress, as her sweatshirt was now heavy with Nate’s blood. “You’re doing a good job, honey.”
Sheridan looked up, concerned. “Where are you going?” “Down river.”
Nate was watching him warily. He started to sit up. “Nate, stay down,” Joe said.
“Joe, you should know something. We’ve been waiting for Eric Logue to show up. We knew he would.”
Joe hesitated.
“They’re both vessels,” Nate said. “Eric Logue and the bear. It’s not even their fight, but you have to let it play out. It has to end here.”
Joe looked at him, then at Sheridan.
“The next time you have a dream about bad things coming,” Joe said to his daughter, “I’ll listen.”
She nodded, her eyes wide. “It’s about time,” Nate said.
A quarter of a mile beyond where Joe had seen Eric emerge from the river, there was an old footbridge that had been built by a Hungarian hard rock miner named Scottie Balyo in the 1930s. Scottie had used the bridge to work a secret seam of gold somewhere in the foothills. The bridge was no longer safe, due to rotten and missing slats, but Joe labored his way across it by straddling the planks themselves and keeping his boots on the outside rails. The frame sagged and moaned as he went across, but it held. On the other side, he stepped down into soft, wet sand.
He kept to the sand as he crept downriver, walking as quietly as he could. As he neared the willows he had seen Eric crawl into, he turned and scrambled up the loose wall of the bank so he could see the fissure from above.
Never again, Joe thought, would he discount a dream Sheridan had. Like Nate, she was connected to this thing in a way that was real, if incomprehensible. Perhaps it was intuitiveness born of her age, that preteen angst that allowed her to tap into events that were occurring on another level, as Nate had described. Sheridan had seen the evil coming, and tracked it.
