assessment of the situation was more rational than it sounded. That
she could seriously consider such a paranoid view was enough to make
her shiver again, harder than before.
'You've got to prepare for the worst,' Alma Bryson said, picking up the
shotgun, turning it over in her hands. 'It's not just your life on the
line.
You've got Toby to think about too.'
She stood there, a slender and pretty black woman, an aficionado of
jazz and opera, a lover of museums, educated and refined, as warm and
loving a person as anyone Heather had ever known, capable of a smile
that would charm wild beasts and a musical laugh that angels might have
envied, holding a shotgun that looked absurdly large and evil in the
hands of someone so lovely and delicate, who had embraced rage because
the only alternative to rage was suicidal despair. Alma was like a
figure on a poster urging revolution, not a real person but a wildly
romanticized symbol. Heather had the disquieting feeling that she was
not looking at merely one troubled woman struggling to elude the grasp
of bitter grief and disabling hopelessness but at the grim future of
their entire troubled society, a harbinger of an all-obliterating
storm.
'Tearing it down brick by brick,' Alma said solemnly, 'but building
nothing to replace it.'
CHAPTER SEVEN.
For twenty-nine uneventful nights, the Montana stillness was disturbed
only by periodic fits of winter wind, the hoot of a hunting owl, and
the distant forlorn howling of timber wolves. Gradually Eduardo
Fernandez regained his usual confidence and ceased to regard each
oncoming dusk with quiet dread.
He might have recovered his equilibrium more quickly if he'd had more
work to occupy him. Inclement weather prevented him from performing
routine maintenance around the ranch, with electric heat and plenty of
cord wood for the fireplaces, he had little to do during the winter
months except hunker down and wait for spring.
It had never been a working ranch since he had managed it. Thirty-four
years ago, he and Margaret had : been hired by Stanley Quartermass, a
wealthy film producer, who had fallen in love with Montana and wanted a
second home there. No animals or crops were raised for profit, the
ranch was strictly a secluded hideaway.
Quartermass loved horses, so he built a comfortable, , heated stable
with ten stalls a hundred yards south of the house. He spent about two
months per year at the ranch, in one- and two-week visits, and it was
Eduardo's duty, in the producer's absence, to ensure that the horses
received first-rate care and plenty of exercise. Tending to the
animals and keeping the property in good repair had constituted the
largest part of his job, and Margaret had been the housekeeper.
Until eight years ago, Eduardo and Margaret had lived in the cozy,
two-bedroom, single-story caretaker's house. That fieldstone structure
stood eighty or ninety yards behind--and due west of--the main house,
cloistered among pines at the edge of the higher woods. Tommy, their
only child, had been raised there until city life exerted its fatal
