“Where are the kids?”
“Out back getting more wood. They'll be back in a minute.”
As though to confirm her words, he heard the clink of the maul striking the wedge. He ventured, “Do you really want them to hear it?”
“Emery, they know. I couldn't have hidden all this from them if I tried. What was I going to say when they asked why you never came home anymore?”
“You could have told them I was deer-hunting.”
“That's for a few days, maybe a week. You left in August, remember? Well, anyway, I didn't. I told them the truth.” She paused, expectant. “Aren't you going to ask how they took it?”
He shook his head.
“The girls were hurt. I honestly think Brook's happy. Getting to live with you out here for a while and all that.”
“I've got him signed up for Culver,” Emery told her. “He starts in February.”
“That's best, I'm sure. Now listen, because we've got to get back. Here's a letter from your—”
“You're not going to sleep here? Stay overnight?”
“Tonight? Certainly not. We've got to start home before this storm gets serious. You always interrupt me. You always have. I suppose it's too late to say I wish you'd stop.”
He nodded. “I made up a bunk for you.”
“Brook can have it. Now right—”
The back door opened and Brook himself came in. “I showed them how you split the wood, and 'Layna split one. Didn't you, 'Layna?”
“Right here.” Behind him, Alayna held the pieces up.
“That's not ladylike,” Jan told her.
Emery said, “But it's quite something that a girl her age can swing that maul—I wouldn't have believed she could. Did Brook help you lift it?”
Alayna shook her head.
“I didn't want to,” Aileen declared virtuously.
“Right here,” Jan was pushing an envelope into his hands, “is a letter from your attorney. It's sealed, see? I haven't read it, but you'd better take a look at it first.”
“You know what's in it, though,” Emery said, “or you think you do.”
“He told me what he was going to write to you, yes.”
“Otherwise you would have saved it.” Emery got out his pocketknife and slit the flap. “Want to tell me?”
Jan shook her head, her lips as tight and ugly as he had imagined them earlier.
Brook put down his load of wood. “Can I see?”
“You can read it for me,” Emery told him. “I've got snow on my glasses.” He found a clean handkerchief and wiped them. “Don't read it out loud. Just tell me what it says.”
“Emery, you're doing this to get even!”
He shook his head. “This is Brook's inheritance that our lawyers are arguing about.”
Brook stared.
“I've lost my company,” Emery told him. “Basically, we're talking about the money and stock I got as a consolation prize. You're the only child I've got, probably the only one I'll ever have. So read it. What does it say?”
Brook unfolded the letter; it seemed quieter to Emery now, with all five of them in the cabin, than it ever had during all the months he had lived there alone.
Jan said, “What they did was perfectly legal, Brook. You should understand that. They bought up a controlling interest and merged our company with theirs. That's all that happened.”
The stiff, parchment-like paper rattled in Brook's hands. Unexpectedly Alayna whispered, “I'm sorry, Daddy.”
Emery grinned at her. “I'm still here, honey.”
Brook glanced from him to Jan, then back to him. “He says—it's Mister Gluckman. You introduced me one time.”
Emery nodded.
“He says this is the best arrangement he's been able to work out, and he thinks it would be in your best interest to take it.”
Jan said, “You keep this place and your Jeep, and all your personal belongings, naturally. I'll give you back my wedding and engagement rings—”
“You can keep them,” Emery told her.
“No, I want to be fair about this. I've always tried to be fair, even when you didn't come to the meetings between our attorneys. I'll give them back, but I get to keep all the rest of the gifts you've given me, including my car.”
Emery nodded.
“No alimony at all. Naturally no child support. Brook stays with you, Aileen and Alayna with me. My attorney says we can force Al to pay child support.”
Emery nodded again.
“And I get the house. Everything else we divide equally. That's the stock and any other investments, the money in my personal accounts, your account, and our joint account.” She had another paper. “I know you'll want to read it over, but that's what it is. You can follow me into Voylestown in your Jeep. There's a notary there who can witness your signature.”
“I had the company when we were married.”
“But you don't have it anymore. We're not talking about your company. It's not involved at all.”
He picked up the telephone, a diversion embraced at random that might serve until the pain ebbed. “Will you excuse me? This is liable to go on awhile, and I should report the break-in.” He entered the sheriff's number from the sticker on the telephone.
The distant clamor—it was not the actual ringing of the sheriff's telephone at all, he knew—sounded empty as well as artificial, as if it were not merely far away but high over the earth, a computer-generated instrument that jangled and buzzed for his ears alone upon some airless asteroid beyond the moon.
Brook laid Phil Gluckman's letter on the table where he could see it.
“Are you getting through?” Jan asked. “There's a lot of ice on the wires. Brook was talking about it on the way up.”
“I think so. It's ringing.”
Brook said, “They've probably got a lot of emergencies, because of the storm.” The twins stirred uncomfortably, and Alayna went to a window to look at the falling snow.
“I should warn you,” Jan said, “that if you won't sign, it's war. We spent hours and hours—”
A voice squeaked, “Sheriff Ron Wilber's Office.”
“My name is Emery Bainbridge. I've got a cabin on Route Eighty-five, about five miles from the lake.”
The tinny voice spoke unintelligibly.
“Would you repeat that, please?”
“It might be better from the cellular phone in my car,” Jan suggested.
“What's the problem, Mister Bainbridge?”
“My cabin was robbed in my absence.” There was no way in which he could tell the sheriff's office that he had been shot at without telling Jan and the twins as well; he decided it was not essential. “They took a rifle and my ax. Those are the only things that seem to be missing.”
“Could you have mislaid them?”
This was the time to tell the sheriff about the boy on the hill; he found that he could not.
“Can you hear me, Mister Bainbridge?” There was chirping in the background, as if there were crickets on the party line.
He said, “Barely. No, I didn't mislay them. Somebody was in here while I was away—they left the door open, for one thing.” He described the rifle and admitted he did not have a record of its serial number, then described the ax and spelled his name.
“We can't send anyone out there now, Mister Bainbridge. I'm sorry.”
It was a woman. He had not realized until then that he had been talking to a woman. He said, “I just wanted to let you know, in case you picked somebody up.”
“We'll file a report. You can come here and look at the stolen goods whenever you want to, but I don't think there's any guns right now.”
“The theft just occurred. About three or a little later.” When the woman at the sheriff's office did not speak again, he said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
“You think they'll come back tonight, Dad?”
“I doubt very much that they'll come back at all.” Emery sat down, unconsciously pushing his chair a lit
tle farther from Jan's. “Since you kids went out and split that wood, don't you think you ought to put some of it on the fire?”
“I put mine on,” Aileen announced. “Didn't I, Momma?”
Brook picked up several of the large pieces he had carried and laid them on the feeble flames.
“I founded the company years before we got married,” Emery told Jan. “I lost control when Brook's mother and I broke up. I had to give her half of my stock, and she sold it.”
“It's not—”
“The stock you're talking about dividing now is the stock I got for mine. Most of the money in our joint account, and my personal account, came from the company before we were taken over. You can hang on to everything in your personal accounts. I don't want your money.”
“Well, that's kind of you! That's extremely kind of you, Emery!”
“You're worried about the snow, you say, and I think you should be. If you and the twins want to stay here until the weather clears up, you're welcome to. Maybe we can work out something.”
Jan shook her head, and for a moment Emery allowed himself to admire her clear skin and the clean lines of her profile. It was so easy to think of all that he wanted to say to her, so hard to say what he had to: “In that case, you'd better go.”
“I'm entitled to half our community property!”
Brook put in, “The house's worth ten times more than this place.”
Boys here, Emery thought. Girls over there. “You can have the house, Jan. I'm not disputing it—not now. Not yet. But I may, later, if you're stubborn. I'm willing to make a cash settlement…” Even as he said it, he realized that he was not.
“This is what we negotiated. Phil Gluckman represented you! He said so, and so did you. It's all settled.”
Emery leaned forward in his chair, holding his hands out to the rising flames. “If everything's settled, you don't need my signature. Go back to the city.”
“I—Oh, God! I should have known it was no use to come out here.”
“I'm willing to give you a cash settlement in the form of a trust fund for the twins. A generous settlement, and you can keep the house, your car, your money, and your personal things. That's as far as I'll go, and it's further than I ought to go. Otherwise, we fight it out in court.”
“We negotiated this!”
She shoved her paper at him, and he was tempted to throw it into the fire. Forcing himself to speak mildly, he said, “I know you did, and I know that you negotiated in good faith. So did we. I wanted to see what Phil Gluckman could come up with. And to tell you the truth, I was pretty sure that it would be something I could accept. I'm disappointed in him.”
“It's snowing harder,” Alayna told them.
“He didn't—” Emery stiffened. “Did you hear something?”
“I haven't heard a thing! I don't have listen to this!”
It had sounded like a shot, but had probably been no more than the noise of a large branch breaking beneath the weight of the snow. “I've lost my train of thought,” he admitted, “but I can make my position clear in three short affirmations. First, I won't sign that paper. Not here, not in Voylestown, and not in the city. Not anywhere. You might as well put it away.”
“This is completely unfair!”
“Second, I won't go back and haggle. That's Phil's job.”
“Mister high-tech himself, roughing it in the wilderness.”
Emery shook his head. “I was never the technical brains of the company, Jan. There were half a dozen people working for me who knew more about the equipment than I did.”
“Modest, too. I hope you realize that I'm going to have something to say after you're through.”
“Third, I'm willing to try again if you are.” He paused, hoping to see her glare soften. “I realize I'm not easy to live with. Neither are you. But I'm willing to try—hard—if you'll let me.”
“You really and truly think that you're a great lover, don't you?”
“You married a great lover the first time,” he told her.
She seethed. He watched her clench her perfect teeth and take three deep breaths as she forced herself to speak calmly. “Emery, you say that unless I settle for what you're willing to give we'll fight it out in open court. If we do, the public—every acquaintance and business contact you've got—will hear how you molested my girls.”
Unwilling to believe what he had heard, he stared at her.
“You didn't think I'd do it, did you? You didn't think I'd expose them to that, and I don't want to. But—”
“It's not true!”
“Your precious Phil Gluckman has questioned them, in my presence and my attorney's. Call him up right now. Ask him what he thinks.”
Emery looked at the twins; neither would meet his eyes.
“Do you want to see what a court will give me when the judge hears that? There are a lot of women judges. Do you want to find out?”
“Yes.” He spoke slowly. “Yes, Jan. I do.”
“It'll ruin you!”
“I'm ruined already.” He stood up. “That's what you're refusing to understand. I think you'd better leave now. You and the twins.”
She stood too, jumping to her feet with energy he envied. “You set up one company. You could start another one, but not when this gets around.”
He wanted to say that he had seen a unique opportunity and taken it—that he'd had his chance in life and made the best of it, and finished here. All that he could manage was, “I'm terribly sorry it's come to this. I never wanted it to, or…” His throat shut, and he felt the sick hopelessness of a fighter whose worst enemies are his own instincts. How would it feel and taste, how would it look, the cold, oiled steel muzzle in his mouth? He could cut a stick in the woods, or even use the red pen to press the trigger.
“Come on, girls, we're going. Goodbye, Brook.”
Brook muttered something.
For a brief moment Emery felt Alayna's hand in his; then she was gone. The cabin door slammed behind her.
Brook said, “Don't freak out. She's got it coming.”
“I know she does,” Emery told him. “So do I, and we're both going to get it. I don't mind for my sake, but I mind terribly for hers. It was my job—my duty—to—”
On the front porch Jan exclaimed, “Hey!” Presumably she was speaking to one of the twins.
“I thought you handled yourself really well,” Brook said.
Emery managed to smile. “That's another thing. It's my job to teach you how that sort of thing's done, and I didn't. Don't you see that I let her leave—practically made her go—before she'd agreed to what I wanted? I should have moved heaven and earth to keep her here until she did, but I pushed her out the door instead. That's not how you win, that's how you lose.”
“You think the sheriff might get your gun back?”
“I hope not.” Emery took off his coat and hung it on the peg nearest the front door. For Brook's sake he added, “I like to shoot, but I've never liked shooting animals.”
Outside, the sound diminished by distance and the snow, Jan screamed.
Emery was first out of the door, but was nearly knocked off the porch by Brook. Beyond the porch's meager shelter, half obscured by blowing snow, the black Lincoln's hood was up. Jan sprawled in the snow, screaming. One of the twins grappled a small, dark figure; the other was not in sight.
Brook charged into the swirling snow, snow so thick that for a moment he vanished completely. Emery floundered through shin-high snow after him, saw a second small stranger appear—as it seemed—from the Lincoln's engine compartment, and a third emerge from the interior with his rifle in its hand, the dome light oddly spectral in the deepening gloom. For a moment he received the fleeting impression of a smooth, almond-shaped brown face.
The rifle came up. The diminutive figure (shorter than Brook, hardly larger than the twins) jerked at its trigger. Brook grabbed it and staggered backward, falling in the snow. The struggling twin cried out, a childish shriek of pain and rage.
Then their attackers fled—fled preposterously slowly through snow that was for them knee high, but fled nonetheless, the three running clumsily together in a dark, packed mass that almost vanished before they had gone twenty feet. One turned, wrestled the rifle's lever, jerked the rifle like an unruly dog, and ran again.
Emery knelt in the snow beside Jan. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head, sobbing like a child.
The twin embraced him, gasping, “She hit me, she hit me.” He tried to comfort both, an arm for each.
Later—though it seemed to him not much later—Brook draped his shoulders with his double mackinaw, and he realized how cold he was. He stood, lifting the twin, and pulled Jan to her feet. “We'd better get back inside.”
“No!”
He dragged her after him, hearing Brook shut the Lincoln's passenger's-side door behind them.
By the time they reached the cabin, Jan was weeping again. Emery put her back in the chair she had occupied a few minutes before. “Listen! Listen here, even if you can't stop bawling. One of the twins is gone. Do you know where she is?”
Sobbing, Jan shook her head.
“That girl with the hood? She hit Mama, and Aileen ran away.” The remaining twin pointed.
Brook gasped, “They didn't hurt her, 'Layna?”
“They hurt me. They hit my arm.” She pushed back her sleeve, wincing.
Emery turned to Brook. “What happened to you?”
“Got it in the belly.” Brook managed a sick smile. “He had a gun. Was it the one they stole from you?”
“I think so.”
“Well—I grabbed the barrel,” Brook paused, struggling to draw breath, “and I tried to push it up,” he demonstrated, “so he couldn't shoot. I guess he hit me with the other end. Knocked my wind out.”
Emery nodded.
“It happened one time when I was a little kid. We were playing kick-ball. I fell down and another kid kicked me.”
The image glimpsed through falling snow returned: Brook floundering toward the small hooded figure with the leveled rifle. Emery felt weak, half sick with fright. “You damned fool kid,” he blurted, “you could've been killed!” It sounded angry and almost vicious, although he had not thought himself angry.
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