Without the dog, he knew the men had no hope even of following him, let alone of catching up with him.
He breathed deeply of the night air and his lungs filled with scents he'd never experienced before, all the subtle odors the human nose can never respond to but which lead an animal through the night.
Then he was out of the maze of boulders, finding himself on a gentle slope of grass-covered earth dotted with pine trees and clumps of aspen. He ran through the night then, his powerful legs once more taking on the easy rhythm that he felt could carry him forever.
He began moving up the mountain, upward into the vast reaches of forests and meadows where he could almost smell the rarefied scent of true freedom that only a wild animal ever knows…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It had been nearly two weeks since the funeral at which they'd buried her family. Every morning since then, when she'd awakened, totally disoriented, in the unfamiliar surroundings of the small bedroom next to Linda's that theHarrises had moved her into the day her family had died, Kelly Tanner felt the dampness on her pillow and knew she'd been crying. But this morning-a Saturday-Kelly knew where she was from the moment she came awake.
And the pillowcase was dry, which meant she hadn't been crying that night at all. Or at least not enough to get the pillow wet.
She lay in her bed for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of theHarrises's house. It wasn't really much different from the way her own house had sounded in the morning, and if she closed her eyes and concentrated very hard, she could almost imagine that nothing had changed, that she was back in her own room in the house on Telluride Drive.
The shower going on would mean that her father was already up, and the clatter of pans in the kitchen meant that her mother was making pancakes. She could even imagine that thethumpings from down the hall were coming from Mark's room; that he was doing the exercises he'd started a month ago.
But it wasn't Mark, and it wasn't her mother and father. It was just theHarrises, and even though she knew they were trying to be very nice to her, she always had a niggling feeling at the back of her mind that they didn't really care about her, that they thought they had to be nice to her because she was an orphan now.
An orphan.
She turned the word over in her mind, kept examining it, until suddenly it had no meaning at all. It was a game she played sometimes with herself-taking the simplest word and repeating it over and over and over, until instead of meaning something, it wasn't anything but a sound.
For the first time that morning she was able to think about the funeral without crying. She didn't know whether it had been like other funerals, because she'd never been to one before. There hadn't been very many people there, and it hadn't taken very long, and as she sat in the front pew of the little church, listening to a man she'd never seen before talking about her family-and she knew he'd never even met her family, so how could he talk about them?-she tried to convince herself that it really was her father and mother and brother in the three coffins lined up in front of the altar.
But the tops of the coffins were closed, and nobody had let her see the bodies at all, and it had been hard for her to accept that any of it was real. In fact, when she'd heard the door open at one point, she looked back, almost expecting to see Mark walking down the aisle toward her. But it hadn't been Mark at all. It had just been another stranger, so she turned back and faced the front again. And then, when they'd gone out to the little cemetery behind the church, she had the strangest feeling as they put Mark's coffin into the grave.
He's not in there!
The thought had come into her mind out of nowhere. She tried to tell herself that it was dumb-that if Mark wasn't in the coffin, they wouldn't be burying it.
But the thought stayed with her. Several times since the funeral-she wasn't sure how many-she'd come awake in the middle of the night, the memory of a dream fresh in her mind.
It was like she was in the grave, too, and Mark was with her, and they were both pounding on the sides of the coffin, but nobody could hear them. They knew they were buried and that they weren't going to be able to get free, but they weren't dead.
She remembered crying those nights.
The other nights she must have had other dreams that had made her cry, but she didn't remember them.
Only the one of Mark, struggling to get them both out of the terrible prison of the coffin. When she awakened from the dream and found she wasn't in the coffin at all, she'd known that Mark wasn't, either.
Tears threatened to overcome her, and she put the thought out of her mind, determined not to start crying again. She got out of bed and dressed, pulling a clean pair of jeans out of the bottom drawer of the dresser they'd brought over from the house on Telluride Drive. Then she put on one of Mark's old flannel shirts and pulled a sweater over that.
She liked the feel of Mark's shirt against her skin, even though it was much too big for her, and even though it had been washed last week, she imagined she could still smell Mark in the shirt. When she wore it, she felt close to him.
It was as she left her room that she decided what she was going to do that morning.
Today, she would go and visit her parents.
TheHarrises were already at the breakfast table when Kelly came out and silently took her place next to Linda. Mrs. Harris, whom she still hadn't managed to call Aunt Elaine-even though Mrs. Harris had told her she ought to-was looking at her. She finally managed a polite smile.
"Did you sleep all right, Kelly?"
She nodded, then her gaze returned to the stack of pancakes on the plate. She really wasn't very hungry, but she remembered her mother telling her that it wasn't polite not to eat whatever was put in front of you.
She began forking the heavy cakes into her mouth.
Twenty minutes later, when her plate was empty, Kelly looked up shyly. "May I be excused?" she asked.
"Of course," Elaine Harris told her.
She scuttled out of her chair and went back to her room, where she dug in the bottom drawer of her dresser until she found the little bank she had kept her allowance in for as long as she could remember.
She pried the bottom of the little brass box open and pulled out five dollars. She wasn't certain how much flowers cost, but it seemed like five dollars should be enough. She hid the bank away again, pulled on her jacket, then walked quietly to the front door. She'd just pulled it open when she heard a voice behind her.
"Where are you going, Kelly?"
It was Linda, and Kelly looked shyly up at her. "The- The cemetery," she admitted, and felt herself blush. "I just wanted to go visit my family."
Linda smiled at her. "Can I go with you?"
Kelly hesitated, then bobbed her head. "All right."
Half an hour later they walked into the little graveyard behind the church and slowly approached the three graves that were lined up next to each other, a single wide slab of marble marking the spot. In Kelly's hand were two red roses. At the flower shop, when she'd bought them, Linda had asked if she didn't want three, but Kelly had shaken her head, and Linda, frowning thoughtfully, had said nothing. Now, as they stood in front of the graves, Linda watched as Kelly carefully placed one of the roses on her mother's grave and the other on her father's. Only when the little girl finally straightened up did Linda speak.
"Why didn't you get one for Mark?" she asked.
Kelly was silent for several seconds, then her brows knit thoughtfully. "B-Because he's not here," she said, her voice barely audible.
Linda felt her heart skip a beat and her breath catch in her throat. "Not here?" she echoed.
Kelly shook her head.
"He's not dead," she said. Her eyes drifted toward the mountains to the east. "I think he's up there," she said. "I think he's up there, and he's going to come back someday." Her eyes met Linda's, and there was a pleading quality to them that made Linda want to cry. "If he were really dead, I'd know it, wouldn't I? I mean, wouldn't I feel it, like I do about Mom and Dad?"