“You’re not going to believe this,” Dillon said, “but I’m going to tell you anyway. There’s something happening to people.”
“What do you mean?” Flood said. The California State Prison system had marked him as a Class One Felon, which meant that if he was arrested again he would spend the rest of his life at the state’s infamous maximum-security prison at Pelican Bay. “People starting to like magazine salesmen?”
“I saw something in Elko. Your wife’s in Elko, isn’t she?” Dillon said to Kelloggs.
“Close, in the desert, about twenty miles away. Why?”
“Try calling her,” Dillon said. “Go ahead.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Go ahead. Try calling her.”
“Hey, is this a joke?” Kelloggs said. He went to the desk and sat down.
“No. There’s some kind of—I don’t know how to explain it, exactly,” Dillon said. He looked across the room at Flood. Flood had sat on the room’s ratty sunk-down-in-the-middle couch. “Just try and call her,” Dillon said.
“Are you saying something’s happened to my wife?”
“I’m saying that if you try and call on a land line you won’t get through, that’s what I’m saying. You’re not going to get through because they took over down there. The things took over. The Howlers,” Dillon said.
Flood smiled. It was the kind of smile cons get when someone bugged out in the yard, or some pretty eighteen-year-old punk said he wasn’t going to blow you. “White boy lost it,” he said. “White boy gone crazy.”
They watched Kelloggs dial the room’s phone. He ran his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. He had been born in East Texas; his father had been a Texas Ranger, no less. The room was quiet. Kelloggs looked at Dillon in a strange way while he dialed the phone. He held the old-school black receiver for a long time before he put it back down on its cradle.
“Lines are down, it says,” Kelloggs said. “They said to try later.”
“The lines are fine,” Dillon said. That’s not the problem.”
“Yeah? So what’s the problem, then?” Kelloggs asked.
Dillon sat down on the edge of the bed, opened a pint bottle of brandy he’d bought on Main Street and took a long pull. Then he told them what exactly he’d seen the day before.
CHAPTER 7
Lacy Collier looked up from her medical textbook. She was alone in the big knotty-pine living room at her family’s ranch. The morning had a stillness she had not experienced in years. She’d lost her cell phone on a horseback ride and didn’t miss it, she decided, putting the book down. It was liberating to go without it. There were dimensions to morning she’d forgotten existed. It was liberating not to be interrupted by a random text message. The idea of being cut off completely—from her friends at school, from her boyfriend, from everyone—was liberating.
A light was on by the couch where she’d been trying to read, but the decision she had to make distracted her. Go back to medical school—or not?
She got up and walked to the picture windows that looked out on the barn, and the Sierra Madre behind in the distance. It was snowing hard, the bad weather obscuring almost everything.
I couldn’t be happy living here in Timberline again.
She would go back to school in San Francisco. As soon as Robin came, she would tell him. As much as she loved Timberline, she loved San Francisco, too. The city was full of young people and exciting. Timberline would always be home, but the City would be where she’d make a life for herself.
And I want to be a doctor. Medical school has to come first.
She could see Mount Baldy in the distance through the white haze of snow. They’d gone up to the state park and camped as a family before her mother had been diagnosed, three years before. Lacy pulled her hair down, unhooking it from the clip, and turned toward the coat rack by the front door.
The coat rack, with its pile of coats and hats, was one of her earliest memories from childhood. The rack said more about the people who lived there than anything else about the house. It was piled with weather-beaten cowboy hats, yellow slickers, jean jackets, Patagonia vests, and one of her father’s extra black-leather service holsters. She smiled and walked to the rack. Fishing through the layers of heavy coats, slickers and sweaters, one of her grandfather’s sheepskin-lined jackets fell on the floor. Then Lacy found it: the simple white windbreaker her mother had worn on their last camping trip, near the bottom of the pile.
Her mother had worn it on that last trip to the hospital, too. Lacy had found it and brought it home after she’d died. Looking at it, she remembered her mother running along a creek on the camping trip with a fishing rod in her hand, so alive. It was a week before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, before the shadow of death stalked her mother and all of them, changing their lives forever. Her mother had talked to her from right there by the front door as she slid her jacket on, not saying that she was going to the hospital. Lacy, on her iPad, had missed what her mother had said—something about fixing dinner in case she was late.
Her father’s empty holster fell on the floor at her feet, startling her. She picked it up and hung it back on one of the crowded old-fashioned wooden pegs. She took her mother’s coat to the couch and sat with it on her lap. She watched the snow fall from the window on the paddock outside, holding the coat.
“Mom, I’m pregnant and I don’t want to be,” she said aloud. She wanted to cry but decided she couldn’t, that it wasn’t right to cry.
The doorbell rang while Lacy was carrying her suitcase out to her Volkswagen bug. She dropped the suitcase in the hall and opened the door.
Robin Wood was standing on the porch. His Chevy truck was parked up by the barn.
“Your dad called. Have you told him? He didn’t say a thing.” The young veterinarian was wearing blue jeans and a down coat. He was handsome, stocky, and boyish, with black hair cut very short. They’d known each other since he’d opened a practice in town four years ago. It had been one of those passionate affairs, all about sex, laughter, and weekend trips to visit her in the City, and not about getting married, until the problem had come up. Because of her mother’s illness they’d kept their affair a secret from everyone.
“No,” Lacy said. “I can’t tell him.”
“Well, I think he should know now that we’ve decided to get married.” Wood smiled. The young man stepped in the door. She’d continued to keep the affair a secret from her family because she didn’t think her father needed the stress. Since her mother’s death, she had tried to protect him from anything that might worry him. She hadn’t told him that Sharon was smoking pot or hanging out with a rough crowd. She hadn’t told her father any of her own problems: adjusting to a high-pressure graduate school, and living in the big city for the first time in her life away from her family.