White raised arms were waving ahead in the glare of the Buick’s headlights. A woman in a cowboy hat was flagging her down. Off to the side, turning now with huge, light-glazed eyes, stood a gray horse. Brenda slowed. The woman dropped her arms and came forward. Trotting at her feet were two dogs, tongues out. The ears belonged to Pembroke Corgis.
Brenda came to a stop and lowered the window. “What’s wrong?”
The woman bent and shook her head. “I ride over to say hello, she isn’t here. I ask Dad, ‘Where’s Mom?’ He’s watching TV, he has no idea. I go out, I’m looking.” The woman shook her head again and knocked the car with her cowboy hat. “She can’t be far.”
“Let me park.”
Brenda backed up until clear of an open-gated driveway. She turned in and put the car in Park. In the rearview, the woman was now tying her horse to the gate. Brenda got out and held still as the two Corgis bounded to her and began sniffing. The approaching woman was in her forties, dressed in cutoffs and a sleeveless blouse. She had lots of freckles and looked resigned. The hat was a Kenny Chesney special.
“Do you have a phone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Thank God. I didn’t bring mine, and of course they have just a land line. Critters sometimes eat the wires, and I can’t get a dial tone.”
“Where have you looked?”
“Hell, I don’t know, here and there. This isn’t the first time.” The woman looked up the drive.
“Get in.” The woman came quickly around and opened the back door.
“Okay if the dogs come?”
“Sure.”
“Go on, git, git—” The Corgis clamored in. The woman followed and slammed her door. Brenda drove slowly forward. “I haven’t got a clue,” the woman said. “Not a clue.”
The headlights now revealed the blank blue walls of a large house with a red metal roof. “You two behave, that food’s not yours…” The dogs whined—and now the house was fully visible. Corrugated hurricane shutters had been lowered to cover all the windows and the front entry. The place looked armored.
“She gets like this on Saturdays,” the woman said. “My mother. Not every week, maybe once a month. It’s some kind of anniversary thing, that’s what I think. I asked her, I asked Dad. Neither of them know what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s my theory. Something happened on some Saturday way-back-when. That’s when she remembers and goes looking.”
They were now outside an attached garage. Brenda switched off the ignition. “Why don’t you check inside?” she said. “Maybe she came back.”
“Good idea.”
They both got out. The woman and dogs hurried along the side of the garage and now disappeared. Brenda looked ahead, then to the right over the car’s roof, then to her left. On all sides of the property, coconut palms hung limp against moonlight. She saw no other houses or lights. In the new silence, the air came alive with insect sounds that she hadn’t heard at Donegal. An owl called. She heard what must be bats, wings battering.
She followed where the woman had gone. At the back, a two-story pool cage extended from the house. Except for a lighted entry, all was dark. More hurricane shutters covered the windows and door walls. Behind the cage spread a landscaped area that sloped down, with a path.
She took the path, smelling what might be jasmine. It was dark, the trees motionless but somehow sentient. Her feet were crunching on a path of crushed stone that ran between boxwood hedges. Something skittered, and she stopped. After a moment, Brenda continued along the path, divided between looking ahead for a silhouette and being careful where she stepped.
The path wove in a lazy S, but in seconds, what had been a half-visible garden of flower beds and hedges now fell behind her. Now she was walking between broad-leafed foliage that covered much of the path. The ground underfoot no longer crunched and must be mulch.
“Please, Allen—”
Brenda stopped. The words had come from a point just ahead. It was a woman’s voice, old and urgent. “You needed to listen to me.”
The voice gave her a sense of direction, and her eyes had adjusted. Brenda moved again over the sponge-like foot trail. She looked up and stopped again. Twenty feet ahead stood a woman, small and featureless in the dark, but a woman, in a nightgown. Spreading in a broad circle around her legs was a pond scored by streaks of moonlight. Her presence in the water was causing small disturbances, and here and there floated lily pads. Now came the odd, ratchet-like sound of tree frogs.
The water was up to the woman’s knees.
“Are you all right?” Brenda moved to the edge of the pond. “Please let me help you.”
The woman didn’t turn. “When he comes back, then we’ll all go,” she said. “Allen? Say something.” As Brenda moved into the water, the woman looked straight up. Brenda looked. Above her floated a near-perfect circle of night sky, formed by a spiky crown or wreath of palm fronds. “Please, Allen.”
“Wait!” The horsewoman was coming, running. “Hold on!” Moving toward the woman, Brenda slid but righted herself on the pond’s silt-slick bottom. She reached the woman and could see her now—eyes wide, vigilant, listening—
“Please get her out of there, that pond’s full of water moccasins.”
“He’ll follow us,” Brenda said. “Come on, we should start back, Allen will see us leaving and come after.” Terrified all her life of snakes, she put her arm around the woman’s shoulders, wondering what it would be like, what in the next second it would feel like to be bitten by pit vipers, and she managed now to turn the reluctant woman.
“Do you think he will?” she asked.
“Yes, I do—Look, here’s your daughter, here’s—” She didn’t know the woman’s name, the daughter waiting at the water’s edge in tall riding boots, but waiting at the edge until Brenda reached her with her mother.
“Come on, Mom, let’s go now, here we go, watch
