toward a smaller, stone house tucked among the evergreens at the edge
of the forest.
Heather recognized it from the photographs Paul had sent: the
caretaker's residence. As twilight stealthily approached, the sky far
to the - east was a deep sapphire. It faded to a lighter blue in the
west, where the sun hastened toward the mountains. The temperature had
slipped out of the fifties. Heather walked with her hands jammed in
jacket pockets and her shoulders hunched. She was pleased to see that
Jack took the hill with vigor, not limping at all.
Occasionally his left leg ached and he favored it, but not today. She
found it hard to believe that only eight months ago, their lives seemed
to have been changed for the worse, forever. No wonder she was still
jumpy. Such a terrible eight months. But everything was fine now.
Really fine.
The rear lawn hadn't been maintained after Eduardo's death. The grass
had grown six or eight inches before the aridity of late summer and the
chill of early autumn had turned it brown and pinched off its growth
until spring. It crackled faintly under their feet. 'Ed and Margaret
moved out of the caretaker's house when they inherited the ranch eight
years ago,' Paul said as they drew near the stone bungalow. 'Sold the
contents, nailed plywood over the windows. Don't think anyone's been
in there since. Unless you plan to have a caretaker yourself, you
probably won't have a use for it, either. But you ought to take a look
just the same.'
Pine trees crowded three sides of the smaller house. The forest was so
primeval that darkness dwelt in much of it even before the sun had
set.
The bristling green of heavy boughs, enfolded with purple-black
shadows, was a lovely sight--but those wooded realms had an air of
mystery that Heather found disturbing, even a little menacing. For the
first time she wondered what animals might from time to time venture
out of those wilds into the yard. Wolves? Bears?
Mountain lions? Was Toby safe here? Oh, for God's sake, Heather She
was thinking like a city dweller, always wary of danger, perceiving
threats everywhere. In fact, wild animals avoided people and ran if
approached. What do you expect? she asked herself sarcastically.
That you'll be barricaded in the house while gangs of bears hammer on
the doors and packs of snarling wolves throw themselves through windows
like something out of a bad TV movie about ecological disaster?
Instead of a porch, the caretaker's house had a large flagstone-paved
area in front of the entrance. They stood there while Paul found the
right key on the ring he carried. The north-east-south panorama from
the perimeter of the high woods was stunning, better even than from the
main house. Like a landscape in a Maxfield Parrish painting, the
descending fields and forests receded into a distant violet haze under
a darkly luminous sapphire sky. The fading afternoon was windless, and
the silence was so deep she might have thought she'd gone deaf-- except
for the clinking of the attorney's keys. After a life in the city,
such quiet was eerie.
The door opened with much cracking and scraping, as if an ancient seal
