Starch leaked out of her knees. She settled onto a rock, grateful for its gritty reality under her butt. She'd always thought little Mo's babble about wizards from Grandpa's Summer Country proved she was ready for the butterfly nets.
Black dots swirled across her eyes and she fought them down, continuing to breathe slowly against an urge to just give up and faint. She'd always hated those tight-corseted females who gave a theatrical groan and collapsed under a little strain.
Jo gritted her teeth and forced the world to settle on an even keel. Jesus H. Christ, Maureen, what have you gotten into now?
Jo scanned the forest edge, picking out oak and birch and a huge glossy holly that dominated the field's corner like a god. This forest was old, radiating age like Stonehenge or the Sphinx. That pasture oak, it had to be older than Columbus.
This was no place in Maine, with old-growth forest right up against a pasture wall. The oak would have been firewood sent up a chimney a century ago. And she'd never seen lush grassland like this. Maine pastures tended to look like a terminal case of mange: bald spots of granite mixed with drifts of scrub juniper too tough and prickly for grazing.
The field wasn't just grass. Jo plucked a three-lobed leaf. Shamrock. Grandpa gave each of them one in a silver locket, when they were kids. Another hallucination. Ireland? Bullshit. Ireland would be in the middle of winter, just like Maine. The sky glowed blue from horizon to horizon, and the breeze felt warm and dry.
Meanwhile, where was Maureen? That was the question that brought Jo here. Maybe Maureen had some answers, her or that man she was with.
Jo could use an answer or two about now.
She scanned again, looking for an echo. Eyes closed, she concentrated on calm and centering. Calm would help a few other things, things like the sweat forming on her palms and trickling down her armpits in a most un-lady-like display of gibbering terror.
Calm. Centering got her into this. It could get her out again. She concentrated on her breathing. Where was the sister? Maureen knew the way here, she knew the way back. Simple.
That way.
Her compass pointed through the woods, a line near the ancient holly. There was a stile over the fence, flat stones set into the wall to make a set of steps no cow or pig could follow. Goats sure as hell could but the Irish were never big on goats.
She decided to just go and call it Ireland, ignoring the sunshine. Having a name cut back on the terror.
A trail led away from the stile, back into the shadows under the trees. Jo followed it into a fairy-tale forest, dark and old and musty and watchful, full of ancient dangers. The trees wore faces crusted with lichen beards and split peelings of bark hair, drowsing faces with closed eyes and mouths. Jo thought she'd just as soon they never woke up. She remembered fairy-tale dangers and felt her fingernails digging into her palms.
Again, she forced herself to relax. After all, she wasn't big enough to be worth eating.
Well, she was bigger than the woodcutter's children. Fairy-tale forests had teeth. Big Bad Wolves, the Gingerbread Witch, the Black Dragon at the Ford--dangers lurked in the shadows and waited for lunch to walk into their jaws.
Stop it! I'm walking right into Maureen's paranoid dreams, not some storybook dragon's mouth. Next thing I know, the trees are going to start talking to me.
She scuffed her boots in the litter on the trail, rustling along through the dead leaves and branches, trying to substitute anger for fear. She was hot. Some of that sweat was earned, dressed as she was for winter in Maine. She stuffed her hat and gloves into a pocket.
What the hell was she going to do with this cold-weather crap? She'd need it again on the way home.
A hiss froze her in her tracks. Something large moved among the trees--something as big, as slow-moving, as confident as a bear or moose.
Bears don't hiss. Moose don't hiss.
Darkness filled the trail, a heavy glittering darkness that swirled and coiled like a twining anaconda in the Amazon jungle.
Oh, shit!
Chapter Thirteen
David thought that somebody sure had wrung a lot of mileage out of a single set of building plans. Maureen's new tenement looked like a clone of the one she had shared with Jo, and there had been five others just like them in the blocks between the two. Typical three-story wooden rat-palaces, all seemed to have been built within ten years of each other back around the 1920s. They were probably all owned by the same family of slumlords off in California.
He squinted against the sunlight, trying to see if the shades were up or down.
It looked as if somebody was awake. He hoped it was Maureen and not that freaky gangster of hers. Brian had never done anything hostile, but something about him reminded David of a police Doberman. Whether he was hurt or not, you moved carefully around him and kept your hands in plain sight.
Jo had said she was going to see Maureen, might be late. Noon was more than late. Noon was worry-time.
He took the stairs two at a time, muttering about the length of time that it took to get a phone installed. The apartment was wired already; he knew that from helping to move them in. It shouldn't be much more of a job than flipping electrons at the central office and assigning a number. So could Verizon do it in less than a week?
No. David knocked and waited.
He'd raised his hand to knock again when he heard the click and rattle of someone inside. Chains, bolts, shiny new dead-bolt lock--either Maureen or Brian didn't want surprise visitors, that's for sure. The little round eye of a spy-hole in the door also looked new.
Brian answered the door. Damn. The gangster wore a tee shirt, jeans, bare feet,
