by Dean Koontz
Dodging successfully, laughing, Toby said, “Like father, like son. Mr. Youngblood, did you know my dad says cows can do any tricks dogs can do—roll over and play dead and all that?”
“Well,” the attorney replied, leading them back through the stable toward the door by which they’d entered, “I know a steer that can walk on his hind feet.”
“Really?”
“More than that. He can do math as well as you or me.”
The claim was made with such calm conviction that the boy looked up wide-eyed at Youngblood. “You mean, like you ask him a problem, he can pound out the answer with his hoof?”
“He could do that, sure. Or just tell you the answer.”
“Huh?”
“This steer, he can talk.”
“No way,” Toby said, following Jack and Heather outside.
“Sure. He can talk, dance, drive a car, and he goes to church every Sunday,” Paul said, switching off the stable lights. “Name’s Lester Steer, and he owns the Main Street Diner in town.”
“He’s a man!”
“Well, of course he’s a man,” Paul said, rolling the big door shut. “Never said he wasn’t.”
The attorney winked at Heather, and she realized how much she had come to like him in such a short time.
“Oh, you’re tricky,” Toby told Paul. “Dad, he’s tricky.”
“Not me,” Paul said. “I only told you the truth, Scout. You tricked yourself.”
“Paul is an attorney, son,” Jack said. “You’ve always got to be careful of attorneys, or you’ll end up with no ponies or cows.”
Paul laughed. “Listen to your dad. He’s wise. Very wise.”
Only an orange rind of sun remained in view, and in seconds, the irregular blade of mountain peaks peeled it away. Shadows spread toward one another. The somber twilight, all deep blues and funereal purples, hinted at the unrelenting darkness of night in that largely unpeopled vastness.
Looking directly upslope from the stable, toward a knoll at the terminus of the western woods, Paul said, “No point showing you the cemetery in this poor light. Not that much to see even at noon.”
“Cemetery?” Jack said, frowning.
“You’ve got a state-certified private cemetery on your grounds,” the attorney said. “Twelve plots, though only four have been used.”
Staring toward the knoll, where she could vaguely see part of what might have been a low stone wall and a pair of gateposts in the plum-dark light, Heather said, “Who’s buried there?”
“Stan Quartermass, Ed Fernandez, Margarite, and Tommy.”
“Tommy, my old partner, he’s buried up there?” Jack asked.
“Private cemetery,” Heather said. She told herself that the only reason she shivered was because the air was growing colder by the minute. “That’s a little macabre.”
“Not so strange around here,” Paul assured her. “A lot of these ranches, the same family has been on the land for generations. It’s not only their home, it’s their hometown, the only place they love. Eagle’s Roost is just somewhere to shop. When it comes to being put to eternal rest, they want to be part of the land they’ve given their lives to.”
“Wow,” Toby said. “How cool can you get? We live in a graveyard.”
“Hardly that,” Paul said. “My grandfolks and my parents are buried over to our place, and there’s really nothing creepy about it. Comforting. Gives you a sense of heritage, continuity. Carolyn and I figure to be put to rest there too, though I can’t say what our kids want to do, now they’re off in medical school and law school, making new lives that don’t have anything to do with the ranch.”
“Darn it, we just missed Halloween,” Toby said, more to himself than to them. He stared toward the cemetery, caught up in a personal fantasy that no doubt involved the challenge of walking through a graveyard on All Hallows’ Eve.
They stood quietly for a moment.
The dusk was heavy, silent, still.
Uphill, the cemetery seemed to cast off the fading light and pull the night down like a shroud, covering itself with darkness faster than any of the land around it.
Heather glanced at Jack to see if he showed any sign of being troubled by having Tommy Fernandez’s remains buried nearby. Tommy had died at his side, after all, eleven months before Luther Bryson had been shot down. With Tommy’s grave so close, Jack couldn’t help but recall, perhaps too vividly, violent events best consigned forever to the deeper vaults of memory.
As if sensing her concern, Jack smiled. “Makes me feel better to know Tommy found rest in a place as beautiful as this.”
As they walked back to the house, the attorney invited them to dinner and to stay overnight with him and his wife. “One, you arrived too late today to get the place cleaned and livable. Two, you don’t have any fresh food here, only what might be in the freezer. And three, you don’t want to have to cook after putting in a long day on the road. Why not relax this evening, get a start on it first thing in the morning, when you’re rested?”
Heather was grateful for the invitation, not merely for the reasons Paul had enumerated but because she remained uneasy about the house and the isolation in which it stood. She had decided that her jumpiness was nothing other than a city person’s initial response to more wide open spaces than she’d ever seen or contemplated before. A mild phobic reaction. Temporary agoraphobia. It would pass. She simply needed a day or two—perhaps only a few hours—to acclimate herself to this new landscape and way of life. An evening with Paul Youngblood and his wife might be just the right medicine.
After setting the thermostats throughout the house, even in the basement, to be sure it would be warm in the morning, they locked up, got in the Explorer, and followed Paul’s Bronco to the county road. He turned east toward town, and so did they.
The brief twilight had vanished under the falling wall of night. The moon had not yet risen. The darkness on all sides was so deep that it seemed as if it could never be banished again even by the ascension of the sun.
The Youngblood ranch was named after the predominant tree within its boundaries. Spotlights at each end of the overhead entrance sign were directed inward to reveal green letters on a white background: PONDEROSA PINES. Under those two words, in small letters: Paul and Carolyn Youngblood.
The attorney’s spread, a working ranch, was considerably larger than their own. On both sides of the entrance lane, which was even longer than the one at Quartermass Ranch, lay extensive complexes of white-trimmed red stables, riding rings, exercise yards, and fenced pastures. The buildings were illuminated by the pearly glow of low-voltage night-lights. White fences divided the rising meadows: dimly phosphorescent geometric patterns that dwindled into the darkness, like lines of inscrutable hieroglyphics on tomb walls.
The main house, in front of which they parked, was a large, low ranch-style building of river rock and darkly stained pine. It seemed to be an almost organic extension of the land.
As he walked with them to the house, Paul answered Jack’s question about the business of Ponderosa Pines. “We have two basic enterprises, actually. We raise and race quarter horses, which is a popular sport throughout the West, from New Mexico to the Canadian border. Then we also breed and sell several types of show horses that never go out of style, mostly Arabians. We have one of the finest Arabian bloodlines in the country, specimens so perfect and pretty they can break your heart—or make you pull out your wallet if you’re obsessed with the breed.”
“No cows?” Toby said as they reached the foot of the steps that led up to the long, deep veranda at the front of the house.
“Sorry, Scout, no cows,” the attorney said. “Lots of ranches ’round here have cattle, but not us. Howsomever, we do have our share of cowboys.” He pointed to a cluster of lighted bungalows approximately a hundred twenty yards to the east of the house. “Eighteen wranglers currently live here on the ranch, with their wives if they’re married. A little town of our own, sort of.”
“Co
wboys,” Toby said in the awed tone of voice with which he had spoken of the private graveyard and of the prospect of having a pony. Montana was proving to be as exotic to him as any distant planet in the comic books and science fiction movies he liked. “Real cowboys.”
Carolyn Youngblood greeted them at the door and warmly welcomed them. To be the mother of Paul’s children, she must have been his age, fifty, but she looked and acted younger. She wore tight jeans and a decoratively stitched red-and-white Western shirt, revealing the lean, limber figure of an athletic thirty-year-old. Her snowy hair—cut short in an easy-care gamine style—wasn’t brittle, as white hair often was, but thick and soft and lustrous. Her face was far less lined than Paul’s, and her skin was silk-smooth.
Heather decided that if this was what life in the ranch country of Montana could do for a woman, she could overcome any aversion to the unnervingly large open spaces, to the immensity of the night, to the spookiness of the woods, and even to the novel experience of having four corpses interred in a far corner of her backyard.
After dinner, when Jack and Paul were alone for a few minutes in the study, each of them with a glass of port, looking at the many framed photographs of prizewinning horses that nearly covered one of the knotty-pine walls, the attorney suddenly changed the subject from equestrian bloodlines and quarter-horse champions to Quartermass Ranch. “I’m sure you folks are going to be happy there, Jack.”
“I think so too.”
“It’s a great place for a boy like Toby to grow up.”
“A dog, a pony—it’s like a dream come true for him.”
“Beautiful land.”
“So peaceful compared to L.A. Hell, there is no comparison.”
Paul opened his mouth to say something, hesitated, and looked instead at the horse photo with which he’d broken off his colorful account of Ponderosa Pines’ racing triumphs. When the attorney did speak, Jack had the feeling that what he said was not what he had been about to say before the hesitation.
“And though we aren’t spitting-distance neighbors, Jack, I hope we’ll be close in other ways, get to know each other well.”
“I’d like that.”
The attorney hesitated again, sipping from his glass of port to cover his indecision.
After tasting his own port, Jack said, “Something wrong, Paul?”
“No, not wrong…just…What makes you say that?”
“I was a cop for a long time. I have a sort of sixth sense about people holding back something.”
“Guess you do. You’ll probably be a good businessman when you decide what it is you want to get into.”
“So what’s up?”
Sighing, Paul sat on a corner of his large desk. “Didn’t even know if I should mention this, ’cause I don’t want you to be concerned about it, don’t think there’s really any reason to be.”
“Yes?”
“It was a heart attack killed Ed Fernandez, like I told you. Massive heart attack took him down as sudden and complete as a bullet in the head. Coroner couldn’t find anything else, only the heart.”
“Coroner? Are you saying an autopsy was performed?”
“Yeah, sure was,” Paul said, and sipped his port.
Jack was certain that in Montana, as in California, autopsies were not performed every time someone died, especially not when the decedent was a man of Eduardo Fernandez’s age and all but certain to have expired of natural causes. The old man would have been cut open only under special circumstances, primarily if visible trauma indicated the possibility of death at the hands of another.
“But you said the coroner couldn’t find anything but a damaged heart, no wounds.”
Staring at the glimmering surface of the port in his glass, the attorney said, “Ed’s body was found across the threshold between his kitchen and the back porch, lying on his right side, blocking the door open. He was clutching a shotgun with both hands.”
“Ah. Could be suspicious enough circumstances to justify an autopsy. Or it could be he was just going out to do some hunting.”
“Wasn’t hunting season.”
“You telling me a little poaching is unheard of in these parts, especially when a man’s hunting out of season on his own land?”
The attorney shook his head. “Not at all. But Ed wasn’t a hunter. Never had been.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Stan Quartermass was the hunter, and Ed just inherited the guns. And another odd thing—wasn’t just a full magazine in that shotgun. He’d also pumped an extra round into the breach. No hunter with half a brain would traipse around with a shell ready to go. He trips and falls, he might blow off his own head.”
“Doesn’t make sense to carry it in the house that way, either.”
“Unless,” Paul said, “there was some immediate threat.”
“You mean, like an intruder or prowler.”
“Maybe. Though that’s rarer than steak tartare in these parts.”
“Any signs of burglary, house ransacked?”
“No. Nothing at all like that.”
“Who found the body?”
“Travis Potter, veterinarian from Eagle’s Roost. Which brings up another oddity. June tenth, more than three weeks before he died, Ed took some dead raccoons to Travis, asked him to examine them.”
The attorney told Jack as much about the raccoons as Eduardo had told Potter, then explained Potter’s findings.
“Brain swelling?” Jack asked uneasily.
“But no sign of infection, no disease,” Paul reassured him. “Travis asked Ed to keep a lookout for other animals acting peculiar. Then…when they talked again, on June seventeenth, he had the feeling Ed had seen something more but was holding out on him.”
“Why would he hold out on Potter? Fernandez was the one who got Potter involved in the first place.”
The attorney shrugged. “Anyway, on the morning of July sixth, Travis was still curious, so he went out to Quartermass Ranch to talk to Ed—and found his body instead. Coroner says Ed had been dead no less than twenty-four hours, probably no more than thirty-six.”
Jack paced along the wall of horse photographs and along another wall of bookshelves and then back again, slowly turning the glass of port around in his hand. “So you think—what? Fernandez saw some animal behaving really strangely, doing something that spooked him enough to go load up the shotgun?”
“Maybe.”
“Could he have been going outside to shoot this animal because it was acting rabid or crazy in some other way?”
“That’s occurred to us, yes. And maybe he was so worked up, so excited, that’s what brought on the heart attack.”
At the study window, Jack stared at the lights of the cowboys’ bungalows, which were unable to press back the densely clotted night. He finished the port. “I assume, from what you’ve said, Fernandez wasn’t a particularly excitable man, not an hysteric.”
“The opposite. Ed was about as excitable as a tree stump.”
Turning away from the window, Jack said, “So then what could he have seen that would’ve gotten his heart pumping so hard? How bizarre would an animal have had to be acting—how much of a threat would it have to’ve seemed—before Fernandez would’ve worked himself up to a heart attack?”
“There you put your finger on it,” the attorney said, finishing his own port. “Just doesn’t make sense.”
“Seems like we have a mystery here.”
“Fortunate that you were a detective.”
“Not me. I was a patrol officer.”
“Well, now you’ve been promoted by circumstances.” Paul got up from the corner of his desk. “Listen, I’m sure there’s nothing to be worried about. We know those raccoons weren’t diseased. And there’s probably a reasonable explanation for what Ed was going to do with that gun. This is peaceful country. Damned if I can see what kind of danger could be out there.”
“I suspect you’re right,” Jack agreed.
“I brought it up only because�
�well, it seemed odd. I thought if you did see something peculiar, you ought to know not just to dismiss it. Call Travis. Or me.”
Jack put his empty glass on the desk beside Paul’s. “I’ll do that. Meanwhile…I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention this to Heather. We’ve had a real bad year down there in L.A. This is a new start for us in a lot of ways, and I don’t want a shadow on it. We’re a little shaky. We need this to work, need to stay positive.”
“That’s why I chose this moment to tell you.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
“And don’t you worry about it.”
“I won’t.”
“’Cause I’m sure there’s nothing to it. Just one of life’s many little mysteries. People new to this country sometimes get the heebie jeebies ’cause of all the open space, the wilderness. I don’t mean to get you on edge like that.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack assured him. “After you’ve played bullet billiards with some of the crazies loose in L.A., there’s nothing any raccoon can do to spoil your mood.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
During their first four days at Quartermass Ranch—Tuesday through Friday—Heather, Jack, and Toby cleaned the house from top to bottom. They wiped down walls and woodwork, polished furniture, vacuumed upholstery and carpets, washed all the dishes and utensils, put new shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets, disposed of Eduardo’s clothes through a church in town that distributed to the needy, and in general made the place their own.
They didn’t intend to register Toby for school until the following week, giving him time to adjust to their new life. He was thrilled to be free while other boys his age were trapped in third-grade classrooms.
On Wednesday the moving company arrived with the small shipment from Los Angeles: the rest of their clothes, their books, Heather’s computers and related equipment, Toby’s toys and games, and the other items they hadn’t been willing to give away or sell. The presence of a greater number of their familiar possessions made the new house seem more like home.
Although the days became chillier and more overcast as the week waned, Heather’s mood remained bright and cheerful. She was not troubled by anxiety attacks like the one she’d experienced when Paul Youngblood had first shown them around the property Monday evening; day by day that paranoid episode faded from her thoughts.