Driving slowly now, Dale headed west on the rutted lane that ran along the south boundary of Calvary Cemetery. At County 6, he got out, opened the gate, drove through, and closed it behind him. He knew that the skinheads would be walking this way soon—although not that soon, given the mud they had to wade through—but he doubted if they’d be pulling their vehicles out of the mud all that soon.
They don’t have to,came the unbidden thought. All they have to do is turn north here and walk to The Jolly Corner.
Dale mentally shrugged. The anger was stronger than the post-adrenaline shaking now, and he felt the fury crystallizing in his chest like a clenched fist. He had his shotgun at the farm. And new shells. Let them come.
The Jolly Corner was dark when he arrived. Icicles from the day’s thaw and freeze hung like cold teeth in front of the side door. Dale went from room to room, turning on lights as he went. No one was waiting for him. The Savage over-and-under was in the basement where he had left it, unloaded, propped against the wall. Dale took the box of.410 shells, loaded one, and carried the weapon back up to the kitchen. He made sure the door was bolted with the chain lock on. Let them come.
He walked into the small study. A message glowed on the dark screen. It was not the bit of poem he had last seen there, or his challenge for the unknown e-mailer to identify himself or else, but a verbatim repeat of the earlier message:
>I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellowed, grafted onto daylight. Maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripple of mysterious meaning. Everything dies, unwanted and neglected—everything.
When Dale had first seen it, it had made no sense, but now it stirred a dim recollection of something written by Vladimir Nabokov. Now he remembered the story in question—“The Vane Sisters”—and immediately recognized this text as a riff on a playful acrostic in the last paragraph of that story. Treating the computer message now as an acrostic, Dale could read it easily, jumping from first letter to first letter of each word—
>Icicles by God. Meter from me, Duane.
TWENTY
DURINGthe last months that Clare Hart was a student at the University of Montana—before she left for Princeton and her real doctoral program—she and Dale spent most weekends at his ranch and found themselves snowed in for five days and nights that final April.
He had left Anne and the girls. Everyone on campus seemed to know what was going on. The head of Dale’s English department seemed amused by it all, his colleagues were obviously either interested or repelled or both, and the dean let it be known that she was mildly annoyed. Affairs with students happened and affairs between faculty and graduate students were common enough, but Missoula was still a small enough and rural enough town that no one liked to advertise the fact of such liaisons on campus.
Dale and Clare had gone up to the ranch on a Friday—he from the small apartment he had rented in town after leaving home, Clare from the apartment she still leased—and by late morning Saturday the county highway was impassable, the half mile of driveway was under four feet of blowing snow, the phone wires were down, and the electricity was out in the ranch house. It was perfect.
They chopped wood and sat close to the wide fireplace in order to stay warm. They crawled under the down coverlet on the bed and made love to stay warm. The kitchen stove worked off the large propane tank, so there was no problem cooking. Dale had stocked months’ worth of canned goods and the large freezer was out in the utility shed between the ranch house and the barn, so they just opened the freezer doors—the temperatures plummeted below zero every night—to keep the frozen food from spoiling. Dale actually used a snow shovel to clear the propane grill on the ranch house deck to barbecue steaks their second evening there.
During the day they cross-country skiied or snowshoed along the ridges and valleys. The sunlight was brilliant between sudden snow squalls, the sky cerulean when glimpsed between shifting clouds. The wind blew almost constantly, whipping snow off the branches of Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines, drifting snow higher along the west wall of the ranch house, and burying the access road under undulating white dunes. On the third day Dale and Clare snowshoed down to the county highway, but it was immediately obvious that although plows had come along the day before, the wind and fresh snow the night before had closed the road again. They went back to the ranch house and built a fire—it took Dale ten matches to get it going—and took off their clothes and made love on a Hudson’s Bay blanket in front of the hearth. Dale said later that he had calculated that they had only enough firewood to last until the following December.
It was on the last night before the roads were cleared that Clare told Dale that he seemed haunted. That day the county highway had been opened, the phones were working again, and a neighbor with a snowplow had promised to clear Dale’s access road as soon as he finished a dozen other jobs nearby, probably early the next morning. Dale had told him that there was no hurry.
It was long after dark and Dale and Clare were lying in front of the dying fire, a thick quilt beneath them, the red Hudson’s Bay blanket above them. The rest of the ranch house was dark and cold. Clare was closest to the fire and had turned away, toward the failing fire, propping herself up on her right elbow, so that her buttocks and hips were all that touched him. Her left arm, shoulder, and rib cage were outlined in red from the embers beyond and seemed to pulse from some internal heat of their own. Dale had been half dozing, too lazy to stoke the fire and get the room warm enough for them to retreat to the bedroom, when he heard her speaking softly to him.
“Do you know why I chose to be with you?”
He blinked at the coolness of her tone, but quickly realized that it must be the prelude to either a joke or a compliment. “No,” he said, rubbing his palm down the red-limned curve of her shoulder and arm. “Why did you choose to be with me?”
“Because you’re haunted,” whispered Clare Two Hearts.
Dale waited for the punch line. After a long moment of silence broken only by the settling of embered logs, he said, “What do you mean? Haunted?”
It was dark enough now that he did not see her shrug, but felt the slight motion under the curve of his palm. “Haunted,” she said. “Touched by something dark. Something from your childhood, I think. Something not completely of this world.”
The wind rattled the high window ten feet from them. In daylight, the view looked through the trees into the long meadow going down past the barn toward the lake. Now it was just darkness pressing against glass with the wind as its fingers. “You’re joking,” said Dale. He had to fight the urge to remove his hand from her cool skin.
“No.”
“Is this the Blackfoot mystic talking?” said Dale. He kept his tone light. But he remembered their camping trip that first weekend on the ridge near the reservation. “Or the descendant of some Italian witch?”
“Both,” said Clare. She did not turn toward him.
“I thought that houses were haunted, not people,” said Dale. He tried to banter, but his tone was straining around the edges.
Clare said nothing. She no longer propped herself on her elbow but lay on her side, her arm crooked over her head as if in sleep. The embers had dimmed so thoroughly that all he could see of her was the pale glow of her skin in the starlight reflected from the snow piled outside the window.