The Big Dark Sky (29)
The swarm led him to a dock, where the comet coalesced again into a cloud above the man-size door to a boathouse of weathered mahogany. Upon Wyatt’s arrival, the fireflies dispersed, cascading away into the darkness like the fading sparks from Independence Day pyrotechnics, and were gone as if they had been an apparition.
When he lowered his gaze, the moonlight revealed that the boathouse door stood ajar. He was certain it had been closed tight when he arrived.
From Liam O’Hara, he’d learned the history of the property. For twenty-three years, it had been in the possession of Roy and Ivy Kornbluth, from whom the billionaire acquired it. The Kornbluths had sustained a successful horse-breeding operation. During their time at Rustling Willows, evidently nothing outré or even particularly dramatic had happened. Prior to Roy and Ivy, the owners were Emelia and Samuel Chase. Emelia drowned in Lake Sapphire. Only two weeks later, Samuel had been mauled and killed by a bear.
In spite of the fact that those deaths were far in the past, some potential buyers might have had a superstitious aversion to buying a place where two such tragedies occurred, one especially horrific. Liam and Lyndsey didn’t believe in curses. To them, this history was colorful, not problematic.
The long stillness of the day suddenly relented to a breeze out of the forested mountains to the north, rippling the image of the moon on the dark water and ruffling Wyatt’s hair. Under the soft wind’s gentle hand, the boathouse door eased inward on creaking hinges, revealing nothing other than darkness deeper than the night.
Emelia Chase came here on the last day of her young life and launched the skiff, never to return. Her body had washed ashore. Her spirit didn’t haunt this place twenty-four years later.
Yet as the water lapped at the pilings under the dock planks, Wyatt had the curious feeling that the door wasn’t opening under the influence of the breeze, but was being drawn open by someone inside, in a wordless invitation to . . . To what?
Within the boathouse, something thumped softly and after a few seconds thumped again. Maybe a skiff or small motorboat was moored in there, left in the water, knocking against the rubber bumpers that protected it, as the lake rhythmically swelled and receded under the craft.
He hadn’t brought a flashlight. But inside, to the right of the door, would be a switch. He could feel for it and flip it up without stepping across the threshold.
For a long moment, his hesitation surprised and disturbed him, for his apprehension had no valid cause. But intuition, the primary knowledge born in the mind before all teaching and all reasoning, had served him well before, and if it previously had been a trickle charge, it was now a high-tension wire buzzing insistently in the back of his mind. The fireflies had gone elsewhere, so whatever the explanation behind the phenomenon might be, it wouldn’t be found in the boathouse. Nothing in there warranted investigation at this late hour—and would still be there in the morning.
As he returned to the house, he glanced back only once. In the kitchen, after rinsing out his coffee mug, he poured a cold beer into it and spiked the brew with a shot of whiskey.
At 11:10, he retreated to the guest room, where he’d left his luggage. From a suitcase, he retrieved a Heckler & Koch Combat Competition Mark 23 chambered for .45 ACP. He inserted the magazine and put the pistol on a nightstand.
Although their experiences had been unsettling, Liam and his family hadn’t needed a weapon to defend against a threat or ensure that they could leave at will. However, as events at the ranch had taken a strange turn, the seeming malice behind them had at one point rapidly escalated. If they had delayed another hour or two, they might have found that even the pistol Liam was licensed to carry would have been inadequate.
A pair of French doors led to a deck that overlooked the lake, and there were two bedroom windows. He pulled the draperies shut at all of them.
His intention had been to turn off the lamps throughout the house before going to bed, but he changed his mind. He didn’t have a flashlight. If during the night something unsettling occurred, he didn’t relish making his way through the dark house, fumbling with light switches.
21
Numerous thin shafts of afternoon sunshine pierced the branches of the pines and the boughs of other evergreens, scattering treasure on the trail, a wealth of gold coins that didn’t clink or clatter under young Joanna’s feet as she chased the bear. Where no low branches obstructed the way, the immense grizzly ran on its hind legs, towering eight feet tall, but otherwise it loped on all four, lumbering but as fast as a cat. She followed, laughing and calling out to the bruin—“Mr. Smokey”—although of course it wasn’t the cartoon brown bear from the forest-service commercials on TV. They came into a sun-splashed clearing, a meadow where green grass and wildflowers seemed to leap out of the earth to greet them. Two deer grazed there, an antlered buck and a doe. Chewing contentedly, they raised their beautiful heads, regarding Joanna and Mr. Smokey with interest, though not with fear. The grizzly led the girl to the deer and stopped short of them lest they misunderstand its intent. Joanna dashed ahead, and as she approached, the deer gamboled away from her, not in fear but as her guides for the next phase of the game.
Buck led doe and doe led girl out of the meadow, into another arm of the forest, along a continuation of the deer path. Flocks of rock doves winged through the woods, jubilantly singing their p-p-p-proo flight call, and red foxes ran to both sides of her, their thickly furred tails streaming behind them like long, wooly scarves. They hurried past a grown-up Joanna asleep in a bed among the trees, in the pale light of a TV turned to a dead channel, onward and now down through a forest that thinned enough to allow undergrowth of Kesselringii and tatarian honeysuckle and lush emerald carpet with its urn-shaped blossoms. Onward, still onward, they ran, past a rock formation on which stood a Lincoln Aviator, past masses of Farrer’s potentilla with cascades of white flowers, lowbush blueberry with red leaves and blue fruit, maidenhair spleenwort and licorice fern, all plants whose names she knew because her mother had taught her about them. Buck, doe, girl raced past goat’s beard with its plumes of creamy flowers, past white mugwort, past a pair of suitcases packed and ready, out of the trees, through wild grass, where the deer stopped to graze again.