by Dean Koontz
Jack blinked at her stupidly, as if the news had been a blunt instrument with which he’d been stunned. “How much?”
“He can’t be sure yet, not until he has the final tax figure, but after everything’s said and done…it’s going to be between three hundred fifty thousand and four hundred thousand dollars.”
Jack paled. “That can’t be right.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Plus the ranch?”
“Plus the ranch.”
“Tommy talked about the place in Montana, said his dad loved it but he hated it. Dull, Tommy said, nothing ever happening, the ass-end of nowhere. He loved his dad, told funny stories about him, but he never said he was rich.” Again he picked up the letter, which rattled in his hand. “Why would Tommy’s dad leave everything to me, for God’s sake?”
“That was one of the questions I asked Paul Youngblood. He says Tommy used to write to his dad about you, what a great guy you were. Talked about you like a brother. So with Tommy gone, his dad wanted you to have everything.”
“What do the other relatives have to say about that?”
“There aren’t any relatives.”
Jack shook his head. “But I never even met”—he consulted the letter—“Eduardo. This is crazy. I mean, Jesus, it’s wonderful, but it’s crazy. He gives everything to someone he hasn’t even met?”
Unable to remain seated, bursting with excitement, Heather got up and went to the refrigerator. “Paul Youngblood says the idea appealed to Eduardo because he inherited it eight years ago from his former boss, which was a total surprise to him too.”
“I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly.
She removed a bottle of champagne that she had hidden in the vegetable drawer, where Jack wouldn’t see it before he heard the news and knew what they were celebrating. “According to Youngblood, Eduardo thought that surprising you with it…well, he seemed to see it as the only way he’d ever be able to repay his boss’s kindness.”
When she returned to the table, Jack frowned at the bottle of champagne. “I’m like a balloon, I’m floating, bouncing off the ceiling, but…at the same time…”
“Tommy,” she said.
He nodded.
Peeling the foil off the champagne bottle, she said, “We can’t bring him back.”
“No, but…”
“He’d want us to be happy about this.”
“Yeah, I know. Tommy was a great guy.”
“So let’s be happy.”
He said nothing.
Untwisting the wire cage that restrained the cork, she said, “We’d be idiots if we weren’t.”
“I know.”
“It’s a miracle, and just when we need one.”
He stared at the champagne.
She said, “It’s not just our future. It’s Toby’s too.”
“He can keep his teeth now.”
Laughing, Heather said, “It’s a wonderful thing, Jack.”
At last his smile was broad and without reservation. “You’re damn right it’s a wonderful thing—now we won’t have to listen to him gumming his food.”
Removing the wire from the cork, she said, “Even if we don’t deserve so much good fortune, Toby does.”
“We all deserve it.” He got up, went to a nearby cabinet, and removed a clean dish towel from a drawer. “Here, let me.” He took the bottle from Heather, draped the cloth over it. “Might explode.” He twisted the cork, it popped, but the champagne did not foam out of the neck of the bottle.
She brought a couple of glasses, and he filled them.
“To Eduardo Fernandez,” she said by way of a toast.
“To Tommy.”
They drank, standing beside the table, and then he kissed her lightly. His quick tongue was sweet with champagne. “My God, Heather, do you know what this means?”
They sat down again as she said, “When we go out to dinner the next time, it can be someplace that serves the food on real plates instead of in paper containers.”
His eyes were shining, and she was thrilled to see him so happy. “We can pay the mortgage, all the bills, put money away for Toby to go to college one day, maybe even take a vacation—and that’s just from the cash. If we sell the farm—”
“Look at the photographs,” she urged, grabbing them, spreading them on the table in front of him.
“Very nice,” he said.
“Better than very nice. It’s gorgeous, Jack. Look at those mountains! And look at this one—look, from this angle, standing in front of the house, you can see forever!”
He looked up from the snapshots and met her eyes. “What am I hearing?”
“We don’t have to sell it.”
“Live there?”
“Why not?”
“We’re city people.”
“And we hate it.”
“Angelenos all our lives.”
“Isn’t what it once was.”
She could see that the idea intrigued him, and her own excitement grew as he began to come around to her point of view.
“We’ve wanted change for a long time,” he said. “But I was never thinking this much change.”
“Look at the photographs.”
“Okay, yeah, it’s gorgeous. But what would we do there? It’s a lot of money but not enough to last forever. Besides, we’re young—we can’t vegetate, we need to do something.”
“Maybe we can start a business in Eagle’s Roost.”
“What sort of business?”
“I don’t know. Anything,” she said. “We can go, see what it’s like, and maybe we’ll spot an opportunity right off the bat. And if not…well, we don’t have to live there forever. A year, two years, and if we don’t like it, we can sell.”
He finished his champagne, poured refreshers for both of them. “Toby starts school in two weeks….”
“They have schools in Montana,” she said, though she knew that was not what concerned him.
He was no doubt thinking about the eleven-year-old girl who’d been shot to death one block from the elementary school that Toby would be attending.
She nudged him: “He’ll have six hundred acres to play on, Jack. How long has he wanted a dog, a golden retriever, and it just seemed like this place was too small for one?”
Staring at one of the snapshots, Jack said, “At work today, we were talking about all the names this city has, more than other places. Like New York is the Big Apple, and that’s it. But L.A. has lots of names—and none of them fit any more, none of them mean anything. Like the Big Orange. But there aren’t any orange groves any more, all gone to tract houses and mini-malls and car lots. You can call it the City of Angels, but not much angelic happens here any more, not the way it once did, too many devils on the streets.”
“The City Where Stars Are Born,” she said.
“And nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand kids who come here to be movie stars—what happens to them? Wind up used, abused, broke, and hooked on drugs.”
“The City Where the Sun Goes Down.”
“Well, it still does set in the west,” he acknowledged, picking up another photo from Montana. “City Where the Sun Goes Down…That makes you think of the thirties and forties, swing music, men tipping their hats to one another and holding doors open for ladies in black cocktail dresses, elegant nightclubs overlooking the ocean, Bogart and Bacall, Gable and Lombard, people sipping martinis and watching golden sunsets. All gone. Mostly gone. These days, call it the City of the Dying Day.”
He fell silent. Shuffling the photographs, studying them.
She waited.
At last he looked up and said, “Let’s do it.”
PART TWO
The Land of the Winter Moon
Under the winter moon’s pale light,
across the cold and starry night,
from snowy mountains soaring high
to ocean shores echoes the cry.
From barren sands to verdant fields,
from city streets to lonely wealds,
cries the tortured human heart,
seeking solace, wisdom, a chart
by which to understand its plight
under the winter moon’s pale light.
Dawn is unable to fade the night.
Must we live ever in the blight
under the winter moon’s cold light,
lost in loneliness, hate, and fright,
last night, tonight, tomorrow night
under the winter moon’s bleak light?
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the distant age of the dinosaurs, fearful creatures as mighty as the Tyrannosaurus rex had perished in treacherous tar pits upon which the visionary builders of Los Angeles later erected freeways, shopping centers, houses, office buildings, theaters, topless bars, restaurants shaped like hot dogs and derby hats, churches, automated car washes, and so much more. Deep beneath parts of the metropolis, those fossilized monsters lay in eternal sleep.
Through September and October, Jack felt the city was still a pit in which he was mired. He believed he was obligated to give Lyle Crawford a thirty-day notice. And at the advice of their Realtor, before listing the house for sale, they painted it inside and out, installed new carpet, and made minor repairs. The moment Jack made the decision to leave the city, he’d mentally packed and decamped. Now his heart was in the Montana highlands east of the Rockies, while he was still trying to pull his feet out of the L.A. tar.
Because they no longer needed every dollar of equity in the house, they priced it below market value. In spite of poor economic conditions, it moved quickly. By the twenty-eighth of October, they were in a sixty-day escrow with a buyer who appeared qualified, and they felt reasonably confident about embarking upon a new life and leaving the finalization of the sale to their Realtor.
On November fourth, they set out for their new home in a Ford Explorer purchased with some of their inheritance. Jack insisted on leaving at six in the morning, determined that his last day in the city would not include the frustrating crawl of rush-hour traffic.
They took only suitcases and a few boxes of personal effects, and shipped little more than books. Additional photographs sent by Paul Youngblood had revealed that their new house was already furnished in a style to which they could easily adjust. They might have to replace a few upholstered pieces, but many items were antiques of high quality and considerable beauty.
Departing the city on Interstate 5, they never looked back as they crested the Hollywood Hills and went north past Burbank, San Fernando, Valencia, Castaic, far out of the suburbs, into the Angeles National Forest, across Pyramid Lake, and up through the Tejon Pass between the Sierra Madre and the Tehachapi Mountains.
Mile by mile, Jack felt himself rising out of an emotional and mental darkness. He was like a swimmer who had been weighed down with iron shackles and blocks, drowning in oceanic depths, now freed and soaring toward the surface, light, air.
Toby was amazed by the vast farmlands flanking the highway, so Heather quoted figures from a travel book. The San Joaquin Valley was more than a hundred fifty miles long, defined by the Diablo Range on the west and Sierra foothills to the distant east. Those thousands of square miles were the most fertile in the world, producing eighty percent of the entire country’s fresh vegetables and melons, half its fresh fruit and almonds, and much more.
They stopped at a roadside produce stand and bought a one-pound bag of roasted almonds for a quarter of what the cost would have been in a supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts, staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was blessedly quiet, and the air was clean.
Residing in the city, it was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for reality.
In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night, Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle’s Roost, Montana, at three o’clock in the afternoon on the sixth of November.
To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack’s favorite novels, and Atticus Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in Paul Youngblood’s office on the top floor of the only three-story building in Eagle’s Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from midcentury. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history and philosophy as well as lawbooks.
The attorney actually greeted them with, “Howdy, neighbors! What a pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure.” He had a firm handshake and a smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags.
Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A., and he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with close-cropped iron-gray hair. His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big, leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots, tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the form of a bucking bronco. In L.A., people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or executives, costumed for an evening at a Country-Western bar, and could not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and raised on horseback.
Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and take on a mob of machine wranglers, the attorney was soft-spoken and so polite that Jack was aware of how badly his own manners had deteriorated under the constant abrasion of daily life in the city.
Youngblood won Toby’s heart by calling him “Scout” and offering to teach him horseback riding “come spring, starting with a pony, of course…and assuming that’s okay with your folks.” When the lawyer put on a suede jacket and a cowboy hat before leading them out to Quartermass Ranch, Toby regarded him with wide-eyed awe.
They followed Youngblood’s white Bronco across sixteen miles of country more beautiful than it had appeared to be in photographs. Two stone columns, surmounted by a weathered wooden arch, marked the entrance to their property. Burned into the arch, rustic lettering spelled QUARTERMASS RANCH. They turned off the county route, under the sign, and headed uphill.
“Wow! This all belongs to us?” Toby asked from the back seat, enraptured by the sprawl of fields and forests. Before either Jack or Heather could answer him, he posed the question that he no doubt had been wanting to ask for weeks: “Can I have a dog?”
“Just a dog?” Jack asked.
“Huh?”
“With this much land, you could have a pet cow.”
Toby laughed. “Cows aren’t pets.”
“You’re wrong,” Jack said, striving for a serious tone. “They’re darned good pets.”
“Cows!” Toby said incredulously.
“No, really. You can teach a cow to fetch, roll over, beg for its dinner, shake hands, all the usual dog stuff—plus they make milk for your breakfast cereal.”
“You’re putting me on. Mom, is he serious?”
“The only problem is,” Heather said, “you might get a cow that likes to chase cars—in which case it can do a lot more damage than a dog.”
“That’s silly,” the boy said, and giggled.
“Not if you’re in the car being chased,” Heather assured him.
“Then it’s terrifying,” Jack agreed.
“I’ll stick with a dog.”
“Well, if that’s what you want,” Jack said.
“You mean it? I can have a dog?”
Heather said, “I don’t see why not.”
Toby whooped with delight.
The private lane led to the main residence, which overlooked a meadow of golden-brown grass. In the last hour of its journey toward the western mountains, the sun backlit the proper
ty, and the house cast a long purple shadow. They parked in that shade behind Paul Youngblood’s Bronco.
They began their tour in the basement. Although windowless and entirely beneath ground level, it was cold. The first room contained a washer, a dryer, a double sink, and a set of pine cabinets. The corners of the ceiling were enlivened by the architecture of spiders and a few cocooning moths. In the second room stood an electric forced-air furnace and a water heater.
A Japanese-made electric generator, as large as a washing machine, was also provided. It looked capable of producing enough power to light a small town.
“Why do we need this?” Jack wondered, indicating the generator.
Paul Youngblood said, “Bad storm can knock out the public power supply for a couple of days in some of these rural areas. Since we don’t have natural-gas service, and the price of being supplied by a fuel-oil company in this territory can be high, we have to rely on electricity for heating, cooking, everything. It goes out, we have fireplaces, but that’s not ideal. And Stan Quartermass was a man who never wanted to be without the comforts of civilization.”
“But this is a monster,” Jack said, patting the dust-sheathed generator.
“Supplies the main house, caretaker’s house, and the stables. Doesn’t just provide backup power to run a few lights, either. As long as you’ve got gasoline, you can go on living with all the amenities, just as if you were still on public power.”
“Might be fun to rough it a couple of days now and then,” Jack suggested.
The attorney frowned and shook his head. “Not when the real temperature is below zero and the windchill factor pushes it down to minus thirty or forty degrees.”
“Ouch,” Heather said. She hugged herself at the very thought of such arctic cold.
“I’d call that more than ‘roughing it,’” Youngblood said.
Jack agreed. “I’d call it ‘suicide.’ I’ll make sure we have a good gasoline supply.”