Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(44)
Somewhere in the distance he hears a siren. A police cruiser, he feels certain, though really he has no idea how to tell the difference between the wail of one compared to that of an ambulance or fire truck. Regardless, someone is in trouble.
“Some of you might remember there was a time when the billboards at our state’s border read WELCOME TO OREGON. NOW GO HOME.” Many in the audience smile. “It was a joke, but not really. Oregon is a treasure. And we did not want it spoiled by outsiders. Which is exactly what has happened. We’ve become a haven—especially those liberal enclaves of Eugene and Portland—for lycans. We have compromised our borders and our safety. One thing I know as a rancher, you’ve got to build good fences.
“I am introducing legislation that I hope will be approved by year’s end.” He pauses when the cameras flash again and the reporters whisper among each other, the sound like a gathering wind. “Initiatives include stricter testing, criminal penalties, and lifetime supervision as well as a public registry containing names, photographs, and addresses, accessible online. We will also reconstitute the Lycan Advisory Board—dissolved in the 1970s—and I have asked Chief of Staff Augustus Remington to serve as chair.”
For the moment no one speaks—no one looks up—all of them bent over their notebooks and laptops, writing furiously. A cell phone rings and goes unanswered. He spots the red eye of a video camera blinking at him. He stares into it. “There should be absolutely no mercy shown to any lycan offenders in our state, and our legislation serves to impose the strictest standards of supervision to ensure that we are protected. Our old way of worrying about who might be offended must be radically altered to account for keeping people safe. New policies will require open minds, a willingness to do things differently, more strictly. The expense to some will be to the benefit of many. This state can benchmark the nation’s policies. And to those who think my goals are too high, too extreme, I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
He ends the speech by facing the flag, placing a hand over his heart, and offering a somber rendition of “America the Beautiful.”
He doesn’t field questions, but they ask them anyway. When he escapes up the stairs, he can hear every one of their voices calling after him. But as Buffalo predicted, not one of them wants to know about job growth or corporate income taxes or commercial property taxes or whether it’s true he’s taken ill.
*
The chopping block is a scarred, ancient stump. Next to it sits a pile of freshly chainsawed logs that smell of pine resin. They heft the logs, one by one, onto the stump to split twice over. Then they carry the armful of sticks to the woodpile stacked the length of the cabin.
This was her favorite fall chore. Her father would buy a permit and the two of them would drive along Forest Service roads and buzz down a few tagged trees and shave away the branches and load the logs into the bed of the truck to take home and spend the next few weeks splitting.
She thinks of him now, the pain in her heart matching the pain in her wrist, which she tries to ignore when she hefts the splitting maul. The two women sweat, despite the day’s chill. They take off their sweatshirts, and their forearms rash over from carrying the wood. Miriam keeps her eyes on the forest and occasionally touches the Glock holstered at her belt for reassurance.
The ax’s wooden handle is polished to a hard gloss from the hands that have constantly gripped it. Claire swings it in an arc and it catches, with a sound like a cough, in the log, which hasn’t been properly seasoned, its wood hard to split, as white and wet as an apple’s core. Some of the logs are so tight grained they must use a sledgehammer and a wedge. Her arms ache pleasantly.
They work in a comfortable silence that Miriam finally breaks. “How much do you know about your parents?”
Claire has been waiting for this moment, has been waiting for what she doesn’t know how to ask. Her swing falters and the ax blade catches in the log and she wobbles it back and forth and then kicks the log to release it. “My mother likes to quilt. She doesn’t wear makeup. She cans beets and pickles and tomatoes. She reads a book a week, usually something historical or political. Her favorite color is yellow.” She realizes she is talking in the present tense and doesn’t bother correcting herself. “My father—”
Miriam steals the ax from Claire and lifts it over her head. “You’re saying you don’t know anything.”
“They’re the most boring people in the world. What’s there to know?”
Miriam steps forward and drops the ax and the wood splinters and the blade buries itself in the anchor log. “You have no f*cking idea.”
*
The sky is closing down and dark is coming. It’s that time when the day isn’t really gone but isn’t really here. Augustus escorts Chase to his home in Keizer, a white neocolonial with black shutters. He does not entertain visitors, so the walls are as white and bare now as they were the day he moved in, the rooms mostly empty except for an IKEA table and chairs in the dinette, a couch set before a wide-screen television in the living room, a mattress and box spring in the master suite upstairs. The office is the only room that matters to him, and it is busy with file cabinets, crowded bookshelves, and two desks arranged in the shape of an L.
The basement remains unfinished, the ceiling bare studs, the walls cinder block, the floor a sloping concrete with a central drain. Three naked lightbulbs offer meager light. Augustus stuffed the recessed windows with insulation and covered them with plywood to muffle the sound and prevent anyone from peering inside. He hired a security firm to install a steel cage, its panels built out of heavy-duty six-gauge wire welded at every wire contact point. The swinging door is hinged with flanged head bolts and fitted with an industrial padlock made with a case-hardened alloy steel shackle.