Her left leg shot up. Simultaneously Oliver pistoned out both arms, shoving her away.
Caught off balance, she tried to find her footing, failed, and thudded down on her side with a gasp.
Impact shocked all the breath out of her. She tried to rise, couldn’t. Her legs and arms wouldn’t work. For a long, helpless moment she just lay there, wheezing, until her lungs sucked air again.
Then slowly she looked up, and there he was-Oliver, looming over her, a yard away, the stun gun in his hand, the flashlight on the floor throwing his huge, distended shadow across the ceiling like a great black stain.
Sparring session’s over, Erin. Mr. Sanders sounded faintly disappointed. Better luck next time.
Dazed, she crawled blindly backward, away from the weapon, the chain rattle-clanking in her wake.
Brick walls bumped up against her shoulders. She had retreated into a corner. Nowhere to go.
Oliver took a step forward, closing the short distance between them. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and then he remembered speech.
“You filth,” he muttered. “Stinking filth.”
He switched on the stun gun. Electricity crackled between the prongs in a blue arc.
“Oliver.” She coughed, then found the strength to speak. “You don’t hate me enough to kill me. You know you don’t.”
“Wrong, Doc.” Still no emotion in his voice, no expression on his face. “I do hate you. You and your damn sister. I wish the two of you had never been born. I wish-”
He stopped himself.
“You wish Maureen had had us aborted,” Erin finished for him.
His eyes narrowed, the lids sliding shut as if with sleep. Slowly he nodded.
“But she didn’t,” Erin said, “because she was a Catholic, and it would have been a sin.”
“There are worse sins.”
“Like your sin.” Tick of silence in the room. “Incest.”
Oliver said nothing.
“Lincoln molested you for years. And when Maureen visited the ranch, you did the same to her. You raped her, because she was your mother’s sister, and incest was the only form of intimacy you’d ever known.”
From between frozen lips, a faint sleepwalker’s murmur: “Shut up.”
“And she got pregnant. With Annie and me.” Erin gazed up at his face, searching for a response. “You’re our father.”
Something flickered in his eyes. A hint of personality, of human consciousness.
He switched off the stun gun. The hiss of current was replaced by the labored rasp of his breathing.
“Yes,” he whispered. “God damn you, yes.”
52
At the eastern end of the side road where she’d lost Gund’s trail at nightfall, Annie found a ranch with a padlocked gate.
Brief excitement shook her. But the duplicate key marked GATE would not open the lock, and neither would any other key on the ring.
Disappointed, she doubled back to Houghton Road and continued south.
Already her quest was beginning to feel hopeless. It was one thing to assume that Gund had a ranch in this vicinity; it was quite another to search every side street, every dirt road, every unmarked lane intersecting with Houghton for miles.
For all she knew, Gund’s ranch was far south of here, perhaps south of Interstate 10 and the Pima County Fairgrounds. Or-a grimmer prospect-it might be nowhere in the area at all.
If Gund had known all along that she was following him, he might have driven out of his way deliberately, in order to give no clue to his true destination, before performing whatever mysterious maneuver had made him disappear.
There were so many possibilities, and the desert was so dark, so vast. She could very well be wasting her time.
Another side road passed by, this one on her left. Unmarked, barely visible. She nearly missed seeing it.
With a squeal of brakes she cut her speed and executed a skidding U-turn, then pulled onto the narrow dirt lane.
The Miata bounced lightly on the rutted surface. To the north, barbed-wire fencing glided by; beyond it lay the dim shapes of a house and barn.
She stiffened in her seat as a distant memory snapped into focus.
“Can’t be coincidence,” she whispered, unaware that she was voicing her thoughts. “Can’t be.”
Her headlights picked up an obstruction ahead.
A gate.
The Miata slowed to a halt. Annie sat in the driver’s seat, very still, barely breathing.
The twin circles of her halogen beams played on the gate. Unlocked, it creaked lazily on rusted hinges.
If the labels on the key ring meant anything, then the gate of Gund’s ranch was padlocked.
This couldn’t be it, then.
But she knew it was.
Because this was the old Connor place. The ranch she and Erin had tracked down on a spring day in 1985.
There had been no reason to think of that visit in years. She’d forgotten all about the ranch, forgotten its location, its very existence.
Until now.
Now she knew-she knew — that this was the place she was looking for.
Harold Gund owned the ranch… and Erin was inside.
Switching on her high beams, she scanned the grounds. Part of the fence, she noticed, had been torn apart as if by a speeding vehicle. She thought of the damage to Gund’s van.
His van. If he was here, it ought to be within view. Parked in the carport or on the gravel court at the front of the house.
It was nowhere. And the house was dark.
Apparently Gund hadn’t returned. Perhaps he really had fled, as she’d hoped.
Or perhaps he was on his way here right now.
She killed the high beams, using only her parking lights. Cautiously she eased the Miata forward and nosed open the gate. The car hummed over yards of stiff brown grass and came to a stop fifty feet from the house.
When she shut off the motor, the night’s sudden stillness pressed in on her, squeezing her chest, making it difficult to breathe.
She left her key in the ignition-her experience in Gund’s neighborhood had alerted her to the advantages of a quick getaway-and got out of the car, being careful not to slam the door. The warm night wrapped itself around her, dry and dark.
Her shoes crunched loudly on the gravel, an oddly hungry sound, like the grinding of some large animal’s jaws, as she walked to the house’s front door.
It was locked. Searching the key ring, squinting at each hand-labeled tag in the starlight, she found the key marked FRONT DOOR.
Even before inserting it in the keyhole, she was irrationally certain it would fit.
It did.
The door glided open under her hand. She stepped into a spacious living room, unfurnished, empty except for a potbelly stove bolted to the floor.
No light was apparent, other than shafts of feeble
Starlight lancing through the broken windows. No sound was audible save the hum and whistle of the wind.
Annie moved forward, into the dark, and found her voice. “Erin …?”
53
“It must have been the summer of 1965,” Erin said softly as the stun gun wavered in Oliver’s shaking hand. “You would have been fifteen.”
“Fifteen,” Oliver whispered, memory dulling his gaze.
“Maureen was twenty-one.”
“And beautiful.” The flashlight on the floor shined up at him, casting weird shadows over his face. The hollows of his eyes were deep wells of ink. “So beautiful.”
Erin squeezed more tightly into the corner. The floor under her was cold. The bricks at her back-cold. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine like an icy finger.
“How did it happen?” she asked, fighting to hear herself over the pounding of her heart.
He looked away, toward the open door, but she knew he wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t seeing anything around him.
“In July of ’65,” he said quietly, “Maureen came out from Sierra Springs, alone, to celebrate Lydia’s birthday. One afternoon she set up a lounge chair out back. I sneaked through the arroyo to where she was sunbathing. And spied on her.