Pemberton looked back at the camp, the blackened absence where the house had been. The chimney had crumbled but the steps remained intact, looking not so much like the last remnant of a house but instead steps constructed for a gallows. The ladderback chair where McDowell had sat still faced the steps.
Serena reined her horse closer to Pemberton, her leg brushing against his. He reached out his hand and caressed Serena's upper leg. Serena placed her hand on his and pressed firmly, as if wishing Pemberton's hand to leave its impression on her flesh.
"What shall we do about our former sheriff?" she asked.
"Kill him," Pemberton said. "I can do it if you want me to."
"No, Galloway can do it," Serena said, "as soon as he gets back from Tennessee."
Pemberton looked up and saw the eagle's circle had tightened. It had spotted something.
"What will it hunt in South America?"
"A snake the natives call a fer de lance," Serena said. "It's far more deadly than a rattlesnake."
"As for my hunting, it doesn't seem I'll get my mountain lion," Pemberton mused, "but a jaguar will surely be an equal challenge."
"One even more worthy of you," Serena said.
Pemberton gazed into Serena's pewter-gray irises, the specks of gold within them, then the pupils themselves. How long, Pemberton wondered, since he'd looked there, had the courage to accept such clarity.
"You're more the man I married than you've been for quite a while," Serena said.
"The fire reminded me about what matters."
"And what is that?"
"Only you," Pemberton said.
The eagle's shadow passed over them, then the bird flung itself earthward, landing fifty yards below. The bird jousted with its prey, the snake's rattles buzzing furiously at first but soon intermittent.
"That's forty-two it's killed since early April," Serena said. "I should take it over to Jackson County, let it kill some there before cold weather drives the snakes into their dens."
Serena took the metal whistle from the saddle pocket and blew, then swung the lure overhead. The bird ascended and with two great wing flaps glided up the ridge to land next to the horses, the dust-colored rattlesnake set down like a piece of slash. Pemberton's horse neighed and cantered backward and he had to jerk the reins, but the Arabian was so used to the bird and its prey that it did not even turn its head. The snake twisted onto its belly, and Pemberton saw where the bird's beak had opened the snake's midsection, tugged free strands of purple guts. The snake's tail rattled feebly a few moments more, then was still.
IT was two afternoons later when Pemberton heard the sound of Galloway's car as it bumped and rattled into camp. He went to the office window and watched Galloway rise stiffly from the car, a plum-colored stain darkening the left side of his face. The left eye socket was blackened, the eye just a slit. Galloway walked into the slash and stumps and searched with his good eye until he saw Serena. She was riding toward camp, the day over. Galloway hobbled up the ridge to meet her. With his gone hand and damaged face, he appeared a man who'd fallen sideways into some dangerous machine.
Pemberton sat back down. He told himself not to think about what Galloway's face might betoken of the child's fate. He made himself think instead about the fire, those moments flames had enclosed him and Serena, and how he did not know if they would live or die, but nothing else mattered except they'd live or die together. In a few minutes Galloway's car started up and drove off out of the valley. Serena came into the office.
"Galloway's going to visit our ex-sheriff," she said, but offered no explanation of Galloway's injuries, nor did Pemberton ask.
Serena paused and looked at the boxes of files stacked in the corner for the coming move.
"We've done well here," Serena said.
Thirty-four
AT LEAST THERE ARE MOUNTAINS. THAT WAS what Rachel told herself as she and Jacob left the boarding house and walked up Madison Street. She stepped around a puddle. The rain that had fallen all day continued to fall as evening settled over the city. A gap in the buildings allowed Rachel a glimpse at the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier. She lingered a few moments, took in the vista as she might a mouthful of cold spring water on a hot day.
She remembered the flat vastness of the midwest, particularly a depot in Kearney, Nebraska, where they'd waited two hours to change trains. She had taken Jacob for a walk down the town's one street. The houses quickly thinned out, then only fields of harvested wheat and corn beneath a wide sky. A landscape where no mountains rose to harbor you, give you shelter. She'd wondered how people could live in such a place. How could you not feel that everything, even your own heart, was laid bare?
Rachel walked toward the café where from five to midnight she was paid twenty cents an hour to wash dishes and clean off tables. Mr. and Mrs. Bjorkland let her lay Jacob on a quilt in the kitchen corner, and each night Mrs. Bjorkland gave Rachel big helpings of food to take home. Rachel passed enough destitute men and women on the streets every day to know how lucky she was to have a job, not to be hungry and in rags, especially after being in Seattle less than a month.
A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life she'd never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something was always had a noise. Not soothing like the sound of a creek or rain on a tin roof or a mourning dove's call, but harsh and grating, no pattern to it, nothing to settle the mind upon. Except in the early morning, those moments before the city waked with all its grime and noise. She could look out the window at the mountains, and their stillness settled inside her like a healing balm.
Rachel crossed the street. On the other side, a policeman with a nightstick walked his beat. Farther down the block, a group of dispirited men lined up outside the Salvation Army building, waiting to go inside for a meal of beans and white bread, a soiled tick mattress to lay on the building's basement floor. A shock of curly red hair caught her eye at the front of the line. Rachel looked closer and saw the tall gangly body, no gray golf cap but the blue and black mackinaw coat. She hoisted Jacob in her arms and walked quickly down the street, but by the time she got there he was already inside. If it was him, because Rachel was already beginning to doubt what her eyes had seen, or thought they'd seen. She considered trying to get inside, but as she stepped closer to the entrance several of the men in line stared hard at her.