by John Saul
Greg turned on his best reassuring grin. “Would I leave a scar on a girl as pretty as you?”
Heather blushed with embarrassment at the compliment, and shook her head.
Greg carefully began cleaning away the dried blood, and was pleased to see that the cut was healing nicely There was none of the puffiness that might have indicated an infection setting in, and the raw edges of skin were knitting perfectly. In another week there would be nothing left except a hairline, and that too would be gone within a month.
“What do you say we get the stitches out?” he asked.
Heather shrugged, but her face screwed up with anticipation as Greg carefully clipped the threads, then worked them loose with a pair of tweezers. When he was done, he re-covered the cut with a piece of surgical tape, then replaced the old bandage with a new one.
“How about your head?” he asked when he was finished. “That was a pretty nasty bump you got. Any headaches? Blurring of your vision?”
Once again Heather shook her head. “I took aspirin for a couple of days, but there was hardly even any swelling.”
“Okay,” Greg said, making a couple of notes on Heather’s chart. “Then I guess that’s it till next week, when you should be able to get rid of that bandage.”
Heather made a sour face. “Who cares about the bandage? My mom won’t let me go out for two more weeks anyway. And none of it was even my fault.”
Greg leaned back in his chair and gave Heather a speculative look. Perhaps, in this case at least, Heather was right. She’d been in the backseat of Jed Arnold’s car, and hadn’t been drinking. But then he remembered the two six-packs of beer that had been found in Jeff Hankins’s car. “And I suppose you weren’t going to drink any of the beer either, were you?” he asked.
Heather’s expression tightened into a pout. “Maybe I didn’t even know it was there.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Greg agreed. “But I’ll give odds you did, and I’ll give even better odds you would have had more than your share of it if you’d all gotten up to the canyon.” He leaned forward and the lightness disappeared from his voice. “It hasn’t occurred to any of you kids how lucky you were, has it?” he asked.
Heather shrugged sulkily as she realized she wasn’t going to be able to con Dr. Moreland into talking her mother out of grounding her. “Can I go now?” she asked.
Greg opened his mouth as though to say something else, then changed his mind. He nodded, told Heather to make an appointment for the following week, then watched as she left the room.
A girl, he thought, who was heading for trouble.
Just like so many of the kids in Borrego.
Not much to do, and not much to look forward to.
For the most part they’d wind up like their parents, getting married too young, having too many kids, then living out their lives in trailer houses, or ugly little concrete blocks, like the ones they’d grown up in.
Every day Greg saw it—saw the discontent and unhappiness of the parents, saw the boredom and disinterest of the children.
That, perhaps, was why he’d returned to Borrego.
He wanted to change what he saw there.
But some days, like today when he tried to talk some sense into kids like Heather Fredericks, he wondered whether he was simply wasting his time.
Kids like Heather and her friends just never seemed to listen to him, never seemed to learn.
Still, he couldn’t stop trying.
He sighed, glanced up at the clock, then began clearing off his desk. In another hour he was due at his aunt and uncle’s house. If he hurried, he’d have time for a quick shower, and maybe even half an hour of sleep.
Even if Judith Sheffield was still as pretty as he remembered her from ten years ago, it was going to be a long night.
Chapter 3
Judith sat quietly in one of the large leather-upholstered club chairs that flanked the fireplace in the Morelands’ living room. She was finally feeling the exhaustion of the long day on the road, and though she supposed she should have excused herself an hour ago and gone upstairs to bed, she’d lingered on, listening to the talk between Max and Greg.
It was apparent to her that Max was proud of his nephew, and Judith could understand why. Greg seemed to her to have lost the hard edge of sophistication he’d affected in his college days, and the almost artificial perfection of his features had softened slightly as he’d matured. Now, in his thirties, his darkening hair was no longer as perfectly combed as it had once been, and his dark eyes had taken on a new depth. Though he was still remarkably handsome, he no longer seemed to be either conscious of his good looks, or impressed by them. Rather, he seemed far more interested in his work than in anything else, although she noticed he had listened intently when she’d asked Max about his own plans for the future.
Max, she reflected sadly, had not aged as gracefully as his wife over the last decade. His brow was deeply furrowed, and the flesh of his face seemed to have lost its tone—folds of loose skin hung at his jowls, and his eyes had sunk deep within their sockets. And, beneath his obvious pleasure in seeing her, she thought she could detect a certain strain, as if he were worried about something but didn’t want to dwell on it, or cause anyone else to share his concerns. She’d pressed him, though, after dinner, and finally he’d admitted that there were some problems at the refinery. Though he’d done his best to make light of the situation, she gathered that the last few years, when oil prices had suddenly dropped, had been difficult for his company. There was a large debt load to support, and the refinery itself was becoming more obsolete each year.
“But it’ll be all right,” he’d finally assured her. “The oil business has always had ups and downs, and it always will. Hell, if everything ran smoothly for a couple of years, I’d probably start feeling useless and go do something else.” Then, as if to emphasize his wish to change the subject, he’d waved toward Greg. “Now, if you want to hear something really interesting, ask him about what he’s doing up in the canyon.”
“It’s not much,” Greg said. “Uncle Max tries to make it sound like I’m the best thing since Mother Teresa, but I’m afraid it doesn’t compare at all.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Well, you remember the old farm up there?”
Judith nodded, remembering it clearly. When she’d been a little girl, it had been one of the most popular haunts around for her and her friends. Far up the canyon, only half a mile below the dam, there had been an abandoned farmhouse, with a few outbuildings including an old barn and a bunkhouse. Legends about the farm abounded, old ghost stories that she and her friends had never tired of telling. The farm, long uninhabited and nearly in ruins, was off limits on the grounds that it was unsafe, and therefore a favorite spot for adventurous ten-year-olds.
Judith could still remember the delicious feeling of forbidden adventure that creeping up into the creaking hayloft in the barn brought—praying the floorboards wouldn’t collapse under your weight, shuddering as you heard small unseen creatures scurrying about, and later bragging about your exploits to the younger kids, as you told them what a terrifying place it was. “So what have you done with it?” Judith asked.
“He’s turned it into a sanitarium,” Max announced proudly.
Judith cocked her head uncertainly. “A sanitarium?” she echoed uncertainly. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Greg shook his head. “It isn’t really a sanitarium at all,” he said. “It’s more of a hospice, but since I also take a few rehab patients who have no place else to go, everyone around here has started calling it a sanitarium. Even,” he added, feigning a glare at his uncle, “Uncle Max, who should know better. It’s just a place for people who need some medical care—nothing too major, of course—but don’t have much money or insurance.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more than that,” Max declared, turning away from his nephew to face Judith. He was fairly beaming, and as he talked, all the old zest and enthusiasm Judith remembere
d came back to his voice. “That old place was just sitting there rotting away, and Greg figured out what to do with it. He’s got some nurses and physical therapists up there, but if you just wandered into the place, you’d swear you were in a resort. Everybody has private cabins, and they bring you your meals if you need it. But he figured out how to do it without making it too expensive It’s a great place for people who are too sick to stay home but can’t afford a hospital or a nursing home.”
“It just seemed that there was a need for something in the middle,” Greg said, his expression serious now. “A nice environment for people who were either going to get better pretty fast or were really beyond treatment and just needed a comfortable place to live out their last few days or weeks. So I set it up as a foundation, and conned Uncle Max into donating the land and the buildings.”
“And you put in a lot of your own money too,” Rita Moreland said, her voice reflecting the same pride in Greg as her husband’s had a moment earlier.
“Not all that much,” Greg replied. “Actually, I’ve been spending a lot of time rustling up grants, and it’s working out pretty well. I guess,” he added, suddenly sounding shy, “what I’ve really done is build the kind of place I’d like to be in myself.”
Judith sat silently for a few moments, then a thought came to her. “Is that where Mrs. Tucker is?” she asked.
It was Rita who nodded, her expression somber.
“What happened to her?” Judith asked Greg.
He spread his hands helplessly. “It was one of those things you can never predict. She had a stroke. It surprised me—I’d been treating her for arthritis, and monitoring her pretty closely. Her blood pressure was fine, and except for the arthritis, she seemed to be in great condition.” He looked at his uncle, his features taking on an exaggerated cast of disapproval. “She wasn’t like some people I could mention, whose blood pressure is far higher than it should be, and whose arteries are totally clogged up from eating the wrong things for seventy-five years, and who are stroke victims waiting to happen.”
“Doesn’t sound like anyone I know,” Max growled, and poured himself another shot of bourbon from the bottle sitting open on the coffee table in front of him. He held the glass up and grinned at his nephew. “Thins the blood, right?” he asked, and drained the slug of whiskey in one gulp.
Greg rolled his eyes in mock horror. “Anyway, Mrs. Tucker seemed to be doing fine, and then one day last month she had a massive stroke. It happened during one of her classes, and I guess it was pretty bad for the kids. They didn’t know what had happened, and there was nothing they could do. She was teaching them one minute, and the next she was on the floor, caught up in a seizure. Now …” His voice trailed off and his hands spread in a bleak gesture of helplessness. “There just doesn’t seem to be anything I can do for her except make her comfortable.”
The conversation had drifted on, but Judith was only half listening, most of her attention focused on the plight of her former teacher. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be trapped the way Reba Tucker now was, unable to take care of herself, unable even to communicate.
Her whole life reduced to a small cabin, in which she waited to die.
In such circumstances, Judith imagined, a person must pray for death every moment of every day. Long ago she had come to realize that sometimes it was easier to die than to go on living.
Heather Fredericks lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been awake, wasn’t even certain what it was that had awakened her.
All she knew was that she felt perfectly relaxed—even the pain in her arm, a lingering throbbing that had been bothering her when she’d gone to bed earlier that night, seemed to be gone.
Her mind drifted, her thoughts floating lazily, vague images appearing now and then, then fading away again.
And then, from somewhere outside, she heard a voice.
“Heather.”
Just the single word; nothing else.
She lay still, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, waiting.
A few seconds later she heard the voice again:
“Heather, come outside.”
Without thinking about it, Heather pushed the covers aside and stood up. She was wearing nothing except a pair of flannel pajamas, but she didn’t stop to dress or even put on a robe before obeying the voice she’d heard. She simply left her room, padded barefoot down the hall and through the kitchen, then went out the back door, leaving it standing open behind her.
When she was outside she stopped, waiting.
A few moments later the voice came again, as though from nowhere.
“Follow me.”
Heather gazed around, not questioning the command, only looking for the person who might have spoken the words.
The moon was high, and nearly full, and the desert was illuminated with a pale silvery light. For a moment Heather saw nothing, but then a form appeared out of the deep shadows behind the garage. It stood watching her silently, and a moment later turned and walked away, crossing the backyard and opening the gate in the Fredericks’s back fence.
The house, on the very edge of the town, was separated from the desert only by the fence, so as Heather crossed the lawn and stepped through the gate herself, she immediately left the village behind.
She was alone in the desert, following a shadowy form.
Yet she was not afraid.
The figure ahead of her kept a steady pace, moving quickly, and Heather had to struggle to keep up, but in her mind she didn’t question what she was doing, didn’t wonder why she was doing it.
She only knew she had to obey the instructions she’d been given. Indeed, obeying those instructions was all she wanted to do.
She walked for nearly an hour, her bare feet moving steadily across the sand and rocks of the desert.
She stepped on a broken bottle, the sharp fragment of glass slashing at her foot, but she neither felt the pain of the cut nor noticed the blood that oozed from it. Her attention remained focused on the dark figure ahead as it led her steadily across the desert.
The path they walked began rising, then turned into a series of switchbacks as it led up to the top of the mesa. But even as she climbed, Heather felt no tiredness in her muscles, no shortness of breath. Even her heartbeat remained steady.
They came eventually to the top of the mesa, but still the figure moved onward, not speaking, not pausing, not even looking back.
And Heather followed.
At last the figure stood motionless.
“Stop.”
The word was uttered softly, but its effect on Heather was no less profound than if it had been shouted directly into her ear.
Instantly, she too came to a halt, then remained perfectly still, waiting to be told what to do next.
“Turn left,” the voice said.
Heather turned.
“Walk forward ten steps.”
Heather began to move, silently counting. When she reached ten, she stopped again.
“Look down.”
Heather’s gaze shifted, and she peered downward.
Only a step ahead of her the wall of the canyon dropped away, falling nearly a thousand feet straight down. At the bottom of the canyon, barely visible, she could see the stream glinting faintly in the moonlight.
“Jump,” the voice commanded.
Without thinking about it, without hesitating, Heather Fredericks stepped off the edge of the abyss and plunged silently into the depths of the chasm.
The shadowy figure waited a few moments, staring down after her until she disappeared, then silently began retracing its steps, moving steadily back toward the town.
At last, after all the years of preparation, the time had come.
* * *
Jed Arnold was sprawled out on the worn Naugahyde couch in the living room of the house he shared with his father. The television was tuned to a rerun of a show Jed had already seen and hadn’t much liked in the first place. Not that
he was watching it; more than anything else, it simply served as background noise, filling the silence.
He’d been grounded for two weeks, and he still had a week to go—seven more long evenings, with nothing to do and no one to talk to.
A car pulled up in front, its engine racing noisily for a moment before suddenly dying. Jed heard two car doors slam, then a loud pounding on the front door. Rolling off the sofa, he opened the door to find Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins grinning at him.
“Come on,” Randy said. “Jeff’s got some beer, and we’re going up to the canyon. We’ll do some skinny-dipping and get smashed.”
Jed started to shake his head, then changed his mind After all, it was only eleven-thirty. His father had gone to work an hour ago, and wouldn’t be home until a little after seven-thirty in the morning. By then he’d be back home. And even if he went ahead and had a few beers, his father would never know.
But what if his dad called to check up on him, as he had last night?
There was an easy answer to that one, Jed thought—with the phone off the hook, he could say he’d been talking to friends, and his father would never know the difference.
His mind made up, he went into the kitchen, removed the receiver and laid it on the counter. Then he went to his own room and pulled his leather jacket out of the pile of clothes on his chair.
Leaving the television and the lights on, he glanced guiltily at the house next door, but was almost sure the neighbors had gone to bed an hour ago.
By the time he was in the backseat of Jeff’s Plymouth, crouched down for the first few blocks so no one would see him, he was certain he was going to get away with it.
“It’s okay,” Randy said from the front seat a few minutes later. “We’re out of town.”
Jed sat up, peered quickly out the back window, then relaxed. There were no other cars in sight, and even the glowing lights of the A&W stand were barely visible in the distance.