Fell.
The room went dark and spinny, shot through with white spots. Dancing white spots. Roaring white spots. He felt hands on him, small, shoving, trying to turn his bulk, giving up. Tranh? Back? He forced his eyes to focus.
No. The Haskell kid. Alice.
She laid her hands on his shoulders. The fire quieted in his back. He felt coolness in her touch, felt his heart slow, felt his breathing ease. Now he could hear her breathing, gasps, settling down to the steady rasping pant of a marathon runner digging deep for that last hill. Strength flowed through her hands, some Haskell magic she’d pulled out of witch-lore, she’d done it for the Swimmer. Said the strength came from her own body, called it chi, Chinese term, chi had to balance, can’t make something out of nothing. She could give or she could take. She could take it from another and pass it on. But the accounts had to balance.
Bullshit. But it worked. He could feel it. But how much did she have to give?
She slumped back against the bookcase, sweat matting her hair and trickling down her face, exhaustion written all over her body. Then she faded and vanished. Dennis felt that eyestrain headache start to build.
“Cut it out, dammit! You don’t have the strength for that!”
“Got to practice. Hurt bad, worn out, hiding might be my only chance. If I can’t do it when I feel like this, big problem. Need to be able to do it in my sleep.”
She faded in and out and in again, like the Cheshire Cat in cartoon Wonderland except she wasn’t smiling. Poor kid.
To hell with the poor kid bit. Bouchard had gone. No phone. Couldn’t put this on the CB radio, hundreds of ears out there. A cripple and a kid, each with about enough strength to swat a blackfly. How the hell were they going to hide the Swimmer before that Viet bitch got back?
He tried to push himself up to his hands and knees. He couldn’t. Alice had fed him enough chi to breathe, to keep his heart beating, to keep his eyes open. That was all she had in that tiny body.
Music flowed from the stereo, Westminster Cathedral Choir, those Palestrina Masses. They still sang the Kyrie. That whole blow-up had only taken a couple of minutes.
XVIII
Her skis dragged and then slipped, the wax magic she’d found swooping and soaring over the snow now vanished into the gap between coming in and heading out again. Dry snow in the shadows, wet snow in the sunshine, how could the surface change so much in the few minutes she’d spent inside?
Susan plodded along, sweating, her whole body shaking with the adrenaline zing of her discovery. She glanced up at the sky, sun dropping toward the west, clouds swallowing it, she’d spent more than a “few minutes.” She checked her watch. 2 o’clock, shadows already spreading out from under the trees this time of year, this far east. Time flies when you’re having fun.
She had to get to her car, to her trailer, to the phone and camera. Had to get there and back before Carlsson had a chance to hide Sasquatch.
Her right ski hooked a branch under the snow, a snare grabbing her by the foot and dumping her into wet stinging crust. She’d flown right over the damned thing, coming in. She floundered for a moment, getting her skis under her again, freeing the tip from the branch, levering herself upright with her poles. Her skis stuck to the track, the packed track of her own passage, and she lifted her right foot and found a line of snow six inches deep glued to the whole length from tip to tail.
Guard her. Keep her secrets.
She remembered that, remembered words riding on an eagle’s scream. She looked up, from nest to nest in the tall old pines, but Eagle wasn’t there. She wondered if he’d ever been there, they’d ever been there, eagles standing on those snowy mounded tangled sticks high overhead, nests they wouldn’t visit again until spring thawed this point of land. She couldn’t see marks of wing or talon up there—couldn’t see any sign that anything had touched that snow since the last storm. Spirit birds, Susan could hear young Alice saying. Eagle doesn’t leave marks on the snow unless he wants to.
And the soar and swoop of skiing was a gift from Eagle, that voice went on. Eagle had taken the gift away, leaving Susan to slog along with the wrong wax on her skis.
She couldn’t stop and scrape the old wax off and change. This kind of snow, no wax would be right. Cold snow, dry snow, alternated with warm wet slop in the sunshine, sun and shadow, sun and shadow, all the way out to the gatehouse and her car. Uphill, downhill, uphill some more, into the biting wind.
Eagle doesn’t want you to leave.
Screw that. Naskeag mystical bullshit, no place for it in a scientist’s world. Sasquatch was a fact, she’d touched that fur damp and sour with fever-sweat and the reek of fish, felt the racing heartbeat in that pulse, drawn blood hot from a vein in that arm.
Sasquatch is huge. I’ve spent my whole life clawing from the bottom up, even after the PhD. Little brown girl in a big white male world. Sasquatch resets the game. That’s my hammer to smash the glass ceiling, revenge on all those sneering tenured professors that told me I could maybe get a job as a fucking secretary in wildlife research. Type up the goddamn field reports. If I’m a good girl and don’t get married and pregnant.
Little Gook girl makes it big.
Aunt Jean’s voice whispered from the trees. “You must not think that word. ‘Gook’ is your enemy’s word.”
She plodded on, one foot after another, walking on skis rather than skiing. Hell, she’d probably walk faster, except that without the skis floating her on the surface she’d sink past her waist in damned clingy wet muck that wouldn’t even let her swim.
Swim. He saved your life, last time you were out here. Waded through broken ice and pulled your little brown ass out of that pond and carried you back into the boathouse. Even if you’d crawled out of that pond without his help, wet clothing would have killed you. Your jacket was already freezing before he got to you. He carried you to warmth and safety, after losing a foot to your cousins off in Vietnam.
What was it, a landmine, a pungi pit, a mortar attack? Some VC girl with an AK-47? That’s why your face shook him up? He ought to hate you, but he even waded back in and fetched your skis and poles. These skis and poles.
She caught sight of the gate between the spruces, caught sight of the gatehouse and the garage doors that hid her Dart and a flash of white and black overhead, Eagle swooping in to land on the topmost snag of a battered salt-burned pine. He landed with his back to her, lifted his tail, and shot a stream of white in her direction before snapping those huge wings out and dropping into a silent glide away to vanish between the trees. No words, this time.
Yeah, shit on you too, you hallucination.
And then her skis nosed down onto plowed gravel and she popped the bindings and could walk, steaming and bedraggled with the sweat of her slog, the melting snow and ice of her falls. She dumped her skis and poles against the garage and followed Alice’s tracks around behind the gatehouse to a rear porch and a bay window looking out on the bay. Reaching underneath the weathered sill, Susan fumbled to right and left and found two nails holding two keys. House and garage, most likely. She took them both.
The first one fit the garage side door. She unlocked it, opened it, returned the keys to where she’d found them. The whole place sat silent around her, no wind in the spruces and pines, no creak and groan of mythical Maine beasts like the tree-squeak to stalk and devour strangers wandering lost in the forest. Still, the place seemed to be glowering at her and then turning its back to her like that eagle. Shunning, like the Amish. It felt hostile.
Outsider. Spy. Traitor, claiming a place in this land and people and then betraying their trust.
Susan shivered. She could see Aunt Jean in her mind, reading-glasses pushed down on her nose so she could study Susan over them, that old round wrinkled brown face calm but disapproving, shaking her head in silence.
To hell with that. Car. Trailer. Camera. Telephone. You can’t keep science secret. Sasquatch belongs to the world, not Carlsson, not Aunt Jean and Alice and Bouchar
d. Susan clipped her skis into the rack, tossed the poles in the back seat, pulled her car out, and locked the garage up after her.
Out on the road, the defroster started to work and thaw the frozen steam of her sweat from the windows. A dark mud-splashed pickup truck passed her going the other way and she felt a sudden chill of memory. She checked her mirrors but the truck kept on going out of sight. It wasn’t that pickup she’d heard in the 2 AM darkness or any other predator who thought she was a narc. Damn Bouchard, dragging her ass into his shooting war with The French Connection or whatever bunch of goons he hunted.
But spooked or not, she had to keep to the main roads rather than the tangle of moose trails Alice had guided her through. Susan knew that if she tried that, she’d end up stuck in a snowbank somewhere ten miles deep in the puckerbrush, a frozen corpse found some time next April.
She kept checking the mirrors. She’d forgotten about that shadow breaking the lock on her door and the shots she’d fired at the dark hole in the moonlight. She’d forgotten why she was hiding out at Aunt Jean’s house, why Alice had made her park the Dart inside Carlsson’s garage. Sasquatch had wiped that from her mind.
What did she owe Aunt Jean, giving a stranger a safe roof over her head and fortress walls to guard her? What did she owe Alice for bodyguard service, or Carlsson for pulling her ass out of a frozen swimming-pool? What did she owe him for giving blood and bone to his country, her country, an America that shunned him for that gift?
And what did she owe Eagle for his gifts?
Susan shivered, still cold and wet and strung out on the thrill of Sasquatch. The Dart’s heater barely made a dent in her chill. Her car skidded for a moment, black ice forming across the pavement as the afternoon shadows reclaimed the day’s snow-melt. Then those studded tires whined and bit and held and she straightened the wheel and drove on. Those new snow tires, the Naskeag Tribal Council’s apology for its People’s disgrace.
Outsider. Spy. Traitor.
They’d let her inside the walls, protected her like one of their own, and now she was going to betray their trust. Publish their secrets across the land and around the world.
Then she turned off the highway into the rough plowed ice of her fire road and saw yellow across her path and slowed and stopped. Yellow tape. Black letters. “POLICE LINE. DO NOT CROSS.” Repeated, endlessly. And beyond it, tumbled ice and black stubs and lumps. No trailer.
She’d turned onto the wrong road. Had to be. She backed up and checked. And then rolled the car forward again, until the hood just nosed up against the plastic tape and stopped. She set the parking brake, shut off the engine, stepped out of the car, moving in a trance as if this bleak scene had nothing to do with her. She ducked under the police-line tape, into forbidden territory. Her feet crunched across rough ice and brought her to the edge of a skating rink surrounding a black mound dotted with charred lumps.
That lump in the black waste, that had been the stove. The one a few feet over, the refrigerator. The third, that had been the furnace. She couldn’t see any sign of the bathroom, the porcelain toilet, that couldn’t have burned, but maybe it had cracked into shards with the heat and sudden torrent of cold water from the fire hoses. The tub had been fiberglass, melted, vanished. Vanished. She kept ticking off items on her checklist, fighting the shivers that now had nothing to do with melted snow and the sweat of her skiing.
She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and fumbled for her lighter. She stood, staring at the wreckage, hands shaking enough that she needed two tries to light the goddamned coffin-nail. Cold, that was it.
Her home had vanished in smoke, short charred stubs of 2x4s where the walls had stood, draped with melted aluminum from the siding, a tangle of springs already rusting to show the bedroom at one end. And around it all, smooth glare ice made a skating rink where the water had pooled and frozen after the fire was out and the firemen’s boots had tromped back to the firehouse for their clean-up. The clearing stank of cold char and scorched wool and kerosene from the tank buckled and ruptured at the far end of the mess. It all seemed remote, film on the evening news.
It was an old fire, days old—no wisps of smoke rising from embers deep in the black heap of charcoal. The water of the melting and the fire hoses had frozen solid, not just a skin over puddles. No furniture under tarps in the yard, nothing saved. Ruts of truck tires, heavy trucks, fire trucks, frozen into canyons.
In insurance terms, a total loss. Old trailers were firebombs, must have been nearly flat before the volunteer department even turned off the highway.
Her teeth were chattering.
She’d spent two days at Aunt Jean’s, two days since she drove away from the trailer and the break-in and the shooting. Two days, never a word about this. No newspapers. No radio news, no TV in the house. Aunt Jean had said they had a scanner but they’d never turned it on. Phone calls in and out, but always in another room, murmurs on the far side of thick walls. Fortress walls.
Why hadn’t Aunt Jean said anything? Why hadn’t the police come to tell Susan, ask more questions, take her to the fire scene to poke through the wreckage and try to salvage anything that hadn’t burned?
Why, why, why?
She ducked under the yellow tape, walked back and climbed into the Dart. She started the engine, released the brake, lurched back out over ridges and canyons of ice crunching under her car. She ran on autopilot.
That wasn’t her home. It was a roof to keep the rain off, walls to hold the frost at arm’s length. Didn’t even do much of a job of that. She didn’t actually have a home. Her car held more of her than the trailer had. She’d lost some clothing, some gear, her camera and lenses. A few thousand bucks, at most, and she had renter’s insurance. The governor took most of the hit, good old DIFW, the slumlord.
And then it hit her, square between the eyes. Sasquatch. No camera. No little black book of PhD wildlife biologist peers to call in to witness my find and help with the taxonomy and description.
My notes.
My data from the eagle studies, my logs, transcriptions of my taped field notes. Nothing left but the fresh raw stuff here in the car. A month since I last mailed the digests and clean copies off to Augusta. A month’s data lost.
How could the place have burned? That cop, Sommers, he’d said he had to stay and watch the crime scene. Wait for the mobile lab, the forensics guys. Was this after they’d been and gone, carrying off whatever evidence they’d found? Carrying off her gun?
Someone had been watching the watcher, waiting to come back?
Had that someone followed her to Aunt Jean’s? She checked her rear-view mirrors again. Nothing but Maine winter in the dusk gathering under the trees. Would they hold back, hiding from her? No turnoffs for miles except for unplowed logging roads, they didn’t have to perch on her bumper to follow her. Locals knew these roads, knew them better than Alice did. Hell, the kid wasn’t even old enough to drive.
She’d left Alice alone, out there with Carlsson and Sasquatch. Not a good thing, not an adult thing to do, leaving a man alone with a young teen girl. Not that he was in any condition to turn nasty. Not that Alice would let him live, if he tried. That kid made her own safe zone, out to the maximum effective range of a 9mm automatic.
Not that he’s given me any reason to think he is that kind of slime. I’ve been an asshole.
And she shouldn’t have left Alice alone to handle things out there on the point. Animals. Susan had been supposed to help care for the animals. Including Sasquatch. Probably including Carlsson.
Autopilot took her across the high-tide causeway and the salt-marsh bridge and into the woods again, Stonefort, first the island and then the town. Her Dart crested the last ridge and dropped its nose down the slope, that sleepy Currier and Ives Christmas village arrayed in white snowdrifts around the village green. It should have one-horse open sleighs dotting the streets instead of rusted-out pickup trucks.
Her brain was gibbering, spinning like old bald tires on ice. Ba
ck on the streets, she’d run into low-lifes who would have killed her for the loose change in her jeans. She knew how to avoid them. There’d been macho goons and bullies, but their idea of tough-guy meant a backhand slap that knocked her on her ass. Nobody cared enough about the little Gook brat to do anything more dangerous.
This . . . this was cold calculated fucking malevolence. Someone was stalking her, ripping away everything she cared for in her life. Bitch. The eagles. Even that state-owned slum and all the gear she didn’t carry in her car. She’d bet the car was next, preferably with her in it.
So what was she doing in Stonefort? Why the hell wasn’t she halfway to Naskeag Falls by now?
Aunt Jean, obviously. Damned subconscious has decided to fly back to the nest, head for the only place in a hundred miles you know is safe. That fortress pulled her like a magnet, autopilot making the turns. If Susan believed what Aunt Jean and Alice said, believed in magic and the spirits of earth and sky and water, the House wouldn’t even burn. Damn sure those oak log walls would stop a bullet. Would stop cannonballs. Had stopped them.
And Jeanne Alouette Haskell had answers. Alice’s voice again, in memory: “Sometimes Aunt Jean keeps her left eye closed so’s it won’t find out whatever her right eye’s seeing.” Had the kid known? Or was she left off the “need to know” list? What you don’t know, you can’t tell? Even by acting strange?
How the hell would I know if anyone was acting strange? Stranger than usual? This place makes my head spin.
And with that she pulled into the side yard of the House, noticing again the cedar hedge that blocked any view of her car from passing snoops on the road. Now she understood what that meant. Not just the House—the land and gardens and views—defense, all of it. Hidden. Guarding. Clear fields of fire, with at least one window watching every angle. No way to sneak up on it, no cover for attackers.
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