She’d been an odd-looking youngster, with big aqua eyes, a high forehead, and a narrow chin. The boys in the first grade called her “alien.” As she grew older that oddness evolved into “exotic.” Even when teenage boys suddenly found her attractive, she had still felt like an odd duck. She had dated several boys in high school, gone steady twice, but she had never fallen in love but once. She knew that there was only one Walter Dockery, and anyone coming into her life after him would be less.
For three months after the accident, Lucy had lain in bed in the darkened bedroom she had once shared with Walter, crying and taking pills to make her sleep. For the year since, Lucy’s depression had taken the form of apathy, chronic fatigue, and difficulty making decisions. Her doctor said her depression would run its course as her grief lessened. He even had a list of the steps she could expect to pass through, like it was a disease with a progression of symptoms and even medicines to make it bearable.
Modern people took a pill to combat grief. Indians suffering the same pain took off a finger. Lucy didn’t take mood-altering pills because Elijah was her most effective medication.
Since he had been an infant when Walter died, Elijah wouldn’t remember anything about his father except what he was told.
At seventeen months her baby was walking and talking a blue streak. He used recognizable words, but mostly they came out embedded in a string of nonsense, which Lucy knew was his attempt to mimic conversation.
Elijah was a beautiful child, curious, affable, even-tempered, and, it seemed to Lucy, better coordinated than most of the children his age. He loved being read to, which Lucy did when she felt up to it. He watched more TV than he should-something Lucy had always sworn that her children would never do. But it was just easier to let the TV babysit. Some days, after Walter died, even little Elijah seemed too heavy a weight for her to lift.
Lucy rubbed her eyes and considered watching a late-night talk show.
Night, after Eli was asleep, was when she missed Walter the most. Sleeping alone was a problem because she had grown accustomed to having his warm, familiar body beside her. She missed having him to hold on to as the darkness closed in-to press her back against, or to spoon with, or to nudge when his snoring awakened her. She missed playing with him before they went to sleep and waking up to his fingertips tracing the line of her leg, stomach, and her breasts. Familiar lips nibbling on her shoulder, kissing her neck, her nose. .
Lucy wasn’t suicidal, but she fantasized often about waking up in paradise wrapped in Walter’s embrace. Together for eternity. . But that would mean that Elijah would be an orphan, a young man raised by his grandfather. Sometimes Lucy thought that might be best for him.
If a sitter was spending the night, Lucy could take a tablet to put her to sleep. Otherwise she lay in bed all night thinking, berating herself, longing for something she’d never have again. What if she took a pill to sleep and Elijah woke up and she didn’t hear him cry out for her?
Life was fragile.
People could die.
It happened all the time.
Throwing back the covers, Lucy left her bed to look in on her son, to reassure herself that he was breathing. Since Walter’s passing, she’d had a terror that she might go into the boy’s room to find his little body wrapped in cold blue death.
The carpeting silenced Lucy’s approach as she opened his door wider and slipped inside. At the side of the crib she reached down and rested the backs of her fingers on his forehead. The night-light allowed her to study his chubby pink cheeks, his perfect lips, and the chin with the beginnings of Walter’s cleft. His little fingers were curled tightly into his palms. His chest rose and sank slowly with the precision of a Swiss watch. Eli’s fat little feet would grow narrower as they lengthened. His squat frame would stretch to six feet or better. His curly locks would straighten. Imagining him as an adult was easy since she was familiar with the genetic models he was constructed from.
She leaned over and kissed him gently, whereupon he shifted his legs and opened and closed his hands. She was tempted to pick him up and carry him to her bed, but she resisted, remembering Walter’s admonition that such an action was to be avoided for the child’s sake. It had something to do with building a healthy self-image, a solid foundation for later independence. Walter had been raised in a large family of fierce competitors. Her husband had been the youngest of seven overachievers. Walter was the best of the brood, and he’d achieved without seeming to try very hard, or allowing a drive to succeed to consume him in the way it had his siblings and parents.
Lucy went to her bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. When she turned off the water, she heard the sound of a floorboard or a ceiling beam creaking. The house, built in 1880, made plenty of odd noises as it settled, or from changes in the weather. She heard Elijah fussing, and wondered if she had wakened him after all. She would have to stand beside the crib and rub his back to get him back to sleep.
She left the bathroom and went through her bedroom into the hallway. The night-light seemed to have burned out again. She walked into Elijah’s bedroom and looked down into the crib. To her shock, his crumpled blanket was there, but he wasn’t. She heard him say “Momou” behind her and was wondering how he had climbed out of his bed, when she turned to see that her son was in the arms of a giant of a man who stood there in the doorway.
Lucy cried out in horror.
The huge man rushed from the room and Lucy raced after him.
“No!” she yelled out. “Stop! Give him back!”
She ran through the doorway. The man carrying her son was thundering down the stairs.
As Lucy passed the guest room there was a bang of the door hitting the wall as it was flung open, and a powerful arm grabbed her around the chest and constricted her lungs. She was aware of Elijah screaming downstairs and the fetid breath of her captor on her neck. She screamed, clawed, and writhed until a powerful hand holding a cold cloth covered her mouth and nose.
Chloroform!
Within seconds, Lucy Dockery fell into a silent darkness.
3
Across the expanse of bright green meadow, two men in a Ford 250 pickup watched three riders on horseback. The passenger, Hank Trammel, took off his Lyndon Johnson-style Stetson, set it on his lap, and ran his hand over the stubble that covered his head like the bristles of a hog’s-hair brush. Taking a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, he removed his wire-rimmed glasses and, after fogging the round lenses with his breath, cleaned them. Once he put the glasses back on, he twisted the ends of his gray handlebar mustache.
The Rhodesian Ridgeback in the center of the rear bench stared out through the windshield, intently watching the riders. Seated beside the dog, an infant dressed in a one-piece pajama suit waved her chubby little arms in the air.
“Red Man’s a nice piece of horseflesh,” Hank Trammel observed. “Faith Ann’s done a hell of a job with him. She’s a Porter all right.”
Winter Massey, the driver, lifted a pair of Steiner field glasses and focused them to better see the horse and rider in the trio’s center, noting the smile on the blond boy’s face. His son, Rush, had never looked happier. Shifting the glasses slightly, Winter watched his wife, Sean, who rode alongside her fourteen-year-old stepson. The rider on Rush Massey’s left side was Hank’s fourteen-year-old niece, Faith Ann Porter. All three were smiling. Faith Ann’s red-blond hair was growing back from the trim she had given herself a year earlier to make herself look like a boy-an intelligent, lifesaving measure.