Perhaps May was right. Perhaps they could help Miles. "Wait here!"
Claire ordered the old woman, and May nodded in acquiescence, mumbling something unintelligible to herself.
Claire hurried inside and used the cordless phone to dial Miles' firm.
She asked to talk to Hal, keeping track all the while of the woman in her front yard. She gave her name to the receptionist and, after a few seconds' silence, was put through to Hal.
"Claire!"
"Hi, Hal."
"It's great to hear your voice again! How the hell're you doing?"
"I'm fine."
"Glad to hear it, glad to hear it. I was so happy for Miles when he told me you'd gotten back together--" Hal broke off in mid-sentence, clearing his throat embarrassedly, suddenly aware that he may have said more than he should. She smiled. "Yeah, well..."
He sounded worded. "You' really not back together? That was just wishful thinking?"
"No, we are."
"Whew! Scared me for a minute. You know Miles; I thought that maybe his plans were rushing ahead of the
|
"No. We're. I don't know what we are, to be honest with you. But we're together again."
"Well, I'm glad you're back," Hal said.
'l'hanks," Claire told him.
"So what can I do for you? Miles isn't here--"
"I know. That's why I'm calling. He took two weeks' leave in order to go to Arizona and find out what happened to his dad."
'l'hey found Bob's body? Howbme he didn't tell me?"
"No," she said. "It's not that." She paused, sighed. "Some i thing's going on. And the reason he didn't talk to you about it was probably because he was afraid you wouldn't believe him."
"Try me"
"All right." She dc bed for Hal the events as Miles had told her and as she herself had seen--Bob and Liam Connor and the woman in Utah---ending with May's mysterious visit and their intended trip to Wolf Canyon. She looked outside, saw the homeless woman grinning at her through the window, palms against the glass.
Hal whistled. "Heavy shit."
"Yeah. I know you probably don't believe any of it--" "Don't count me out. Miles was asking me my feelings about the supernatural a few weeks ago, and I told him then and I'll tell you now: my mind is open.
I don't automatically disbelieve anything."
Claire hesitated. "I don't know exactly how to bring this up, but do you think you could come with me?" She lowered her voice. "I don't want to travel by myself with that woman. She's crazy and she scares me. She said she's a witch, and she obviously has mental problems besides.
"I'll pay," she added quickly. "Whatever your going rate is. I'll hire you to-"
"Fuck that shit. What do you think I am, a stranger?
have enough sick leave built up. I can take a few days. How long do you think it'll be?"
"One day there, one day back. Two days, probably. Three at the most."
"No problem. I'll get myself together and come right over. Where are you? Miles' place?"
"Don't you have to clear it with someone first? ......
"NO"
"What about Perkins? Isn't he going to be ticked?"
"Are you kidding? His head's a fecal-containment sys term. He will not even notice I'm gone. Besides, if worse comes to worst, Tran'll cover for me."
"I'm at my house," Claire said. She gave him the ad dress. "Do you have a cellular phone you could bring?"
"It's my American Express," Hal told her. "I don't leave home without it."
Or' See you in an hour, then?" much sooner. I don't imagine you want to spend too time alone with that fruitcake."
"No," Claire admitted, looking out the window.
"I'm on my way."
Then
Isabella was not forgotten.
Leland Huerdeen stood in his yard at the edge of town and looked north toward the flat buttes that defined the east west boundaries of the canyon. It had been nearly twenty five years since Isabella had been entombed, and she still cast a long shadow over life in town. Not a day went by that one of her misdeeds was not remembered by the older men, that children did not scare each other with the possibility of her return, that all of them did not tread warily past the abandoned house which had been hers and William's.
Somewhere up there, Leland knew, was Isabella's sealed cave, and though he was not sure of its exact location, like everyone else in town he knew the cliff in which it was situated, and he always sped past the spot on the rare occasions that he passed through that area.
His father, Grover, had been one of the early settlers in Wolf Canyon and the only haberdasher the community had ever known. Leland had taken up the family business several years ago, and though his father was still alive and still managed to block occasional hats for close friends, he had effectively turned everything over to his son.
Hats and Isabella.
Those were the two things his father talked about these days.
Times had changed. Hardly anyone in town used magic anymore, and people kept the-k powers private, secret.
Though it wasn't official, had probably never even been discussed, the decision had been made to disavow the past, to pretend as though this was an ordinary community filled with ordinary people where nothing unusual ever occurred. That was all Isabella's doing.
As his father had told him many times, the woman had corrupted the paradise that they had all come together to build. "I was one of the first to see old Jeb Freeman after she'd drained the life out of him, and that's a sight I'll never forget," Grover had been saying as long as Leland could re member. "Jeb was a powerful man, and someone that could do that to him, leave him nothing more than an empty shell, was someone to be feared indeed. We didn't like Isabella, none of us did, but after that we were afraid of her. She still had William hornswoggled, too, and some of the others eventually went in with her.
But I never did. I knew what she was."
There was a litany of sins that his father never failed to recite, and Leland had grown up with a fear of Isabella and her seemingly unstoppable powers. Now he had a son, Robert, and his father wanted to indoctrinate the boy as soon as he was old enough to speak, to instill in him the same fear of Isabella's revenge with which he himself had been filled.
"Why didn't we ever leave?" he'd asked when he'd grown old enough to think on his own. "How come we're still here? Other people left. Why don't we?"
"Because this is our home," his father always said fiercely. "We carved this home from the wilderness, and I'm not about to let any monster drive us away."
There were rumors that some had seen her: visions in the canyon late at night that terrified horses into running and sent the roughest ranchers into paroxysms of fear. They all knew where the cave was, and a special effort was made by all to avoid that area. It was one of the wider sections of the canyon, several miles across, and though the route was
longer, people these days traveled on the other side of the marsh, near the west bluffs, rather than take the old path past the blocked cave entrance.
Leland moved away from the fence, looked down at Hattie's sunflowers, just beginning to poke their heads up toward their namesake after staring at the ground all through the early weeks of their existence.
He was supposed to travel to Randall tomorrow for material, a hard hundred miles that covered a lot of diverse territory, not all of it nice. But the truth was that the only part of the journey which concerned him was the trip out of the canyon.
The trip past Isabella's cave.
It was foolish and childish, but he still had the sense that she waited in there, watching, that she could somehow see through the rocks that covered the cave entrance to where he passed by--even though the new trail was miles away. It was as if there were a line across the width of the canyon, and anytime anyone crossed it, she knew.