The boy stepped through the front door. His blue eyes shone with excitement, but he was shy, standing there in the shade of the veranda, at the moment indifferent to the dogs with which he usually frolicked. She had seen him only once before in the past two months, and on that occasion—as seemed to be the case now—he had been half afraid to speak or to hurry to her, fearful that she might evaporate as she did in his dreams.
Only five, Travis was already the image of his father. Nick’s tousled hair. Nick’s fine nose, strong chin. The intensity of his presence and the aura of intelligence that, at least to his mother, radiated from his eyes were uncannily reminiscent of Nick.
He whispered, “It’s really you.”
Jane dropped to her knees, not merely to be at his level, but also because her legs suddenly grew weak and failed her. He came into her arms, and she held him as if someone might at any moment try to tear him from her. She couldn’t stop touching him, kissing his face. The smell of his hair was intoxicating, the softness of his sweet young skin.
When she had begun her search for the truth, she never imagined that she would find herself in conflict with people so powerful and merciless that the first threat they leveled at her would be to kill her only child, the only one she might ever have, this boy who was the living testament to the extraordinary love that she’d known with his special father.
She knew of nowhere else where she might have hidden him with as much hope and peace of mind as she had felt when she’d brought him here. Jessica and Gavin had been strangers to him two months earlier, but they were family now.
Passionate about clearing Nick’s name, about proving that he had not committed suicide in any meaningful interpretation of the word, she had unknowingly set out on a path from which there could be no retreat. Those she sought to expose would not allow her to walk away and live even in the deep humiliation of defeat. They had brought something new and terrible into the world, with what purpose she still didn’t understand, and they intended to see their plan, whatever it might be, fulfilled at any cost. There was already much murder in it; two more killings—a mother and her son—would be to them not even so much as an inconvenience. She knew little, but she knew too much, and she suspected more, and there would be no one to whom she could risk turning for help until she knew it all.
The boy held fast to her. “I love you, Mom.”
She said, “I love you, too. So much. You rock me, kid.”
1
* * *
IN THE GOLDEN LIGHT of late afternoon, under scattered white clouds with gilded edges, Travis took his mother to visit the horses.
The stable stood in the deep shade of live oaks that shed their small oval leaves all year.
The surrounding ground was raked clean a few times a week. The swirls of parallel lines scored into the soft soil by the tines of the leaf rake resembled patterns that certain ancient shamans carved in stone to represent the mysterious turnings of fate, the endless cycles of a universe inscrutable in spite of its apparent design.
Bella and Sampson, mare and stallion, were housed side by side, facing two empty stalls, one of which had been fitted with a lower door to accommodate a pony not yet in residence.
The horses craned their necks over their stall doors to watch their visitors approach, and nickered in welcome.
In a paper cup, Travis carried a quartered apple, two pieces for each horse. With their soft lips, the animals finessed the treats from his small fingers.
He said, “Gavin hasn’t found the right pony yet.”
A month earlier, Jane had approved her son’s desire to learn to ride and Gavin’s preference that the child begin with a small mount.
“I couldn’t ride Sampson yet, but I’m pretty sure I could ride Bella if you guys would let me. She’s real gentle.”
“And like fifteen times your size. Anyway, Sampson might be jealous if anyone but Jess rode her. He’s the only guy for Bella.”
“Do horses get jealous?”
“Oh, they do. Like Duke and Queenie get jealous if you pet the one a lot more than the other. Horses and dogs have shared their lives with people so long, they’ve come to have some of the same feelings we do.”
Bella lowered her head so far over the half door that Travis could reach high enough to stroke her cheeks, a ministration for which she had a special fondness.
“But I bet I could ride Bella if it was okay with Sampson.”
“Maybe you could, cowboy. But nobody becomes a master horseman if he’s not patient and willing to learn one step at a time.”
“Master horseman. That would be too cool.”
“Your dad was raised on a ranch, did some rodeo by the time he was seventeen. It’s in your blood. But so is common sense, so you be a good boy and listen to your common sense.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.”
She smoothed one hand along Sampson’s muscular neck, along that indentation called the jugular groove, and felt the power of his pulse against her palm.
The boy said, “Are you still looking for…the killer?”
“Yes. Every day.”
She hadn’t told him that his father committed suicide, and she never would. Anyone who ever repeated that lie to Travis would earn her enmity forever.
“Is it scary?” he asked.
“Not scary,” she lied. And then some truth: “A little dangerous sometimes, but you know I’ve been doing this for years and never even stubbed a toe.”
When not on leave, she provided investigation support for Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, specifically dealing with mass murderers and serial killers.
“Not even a toe?”
“Not even.”
“?’Cause you have common sense, huh?”
“That’s right.”
Sampson fixed her with his limpid, liquid gaze. Not for the first time, Jane felt that horses, like dogs, with their heightened five senses—or even with a sixth—could read people far better than people could read them. In the stallion’s dark and steady stare, there seemed to be an awareness of the fear she denied and of her double grief at the loss of a husband and the necessary separation from this child.
2
* * *
AFTER DINNER, after a play session in the early dark with a glowing Frisbee and the two dogs, after Jane read to Travis from the storybook that Jessica had started three days earlier, after he fell asleep, and after she stood over him for some time, enchanted by his face, in which she saw both Nick and herself, she went to the family room off the kitchen.
Jess and Gavin sat in armchairs and the dogs dozed near the hearth. The only light issued from the fireplace, in which logs crackled and popped and flared briefly each time the flames opened a new vein of sap.
There was an armchair for her, a glass of cabernet on the small table beside it. She was grateful for both.
The TV was off, and the music somewhat surprised Jane. Windham Hill did not seem to be a genre first in the heart of either Gavin or Jess. This was an anthology album featuring Liz Story and George Winston piano solos, Will Ackerman solos on acoustic guitar.
The elegant simplicity of the music worked a peace upon the room as surely as did the fireplace.
She realized why only the firelight, why the music, when the first thing she thought to say after sipping her wine was “What’s the latest from Philadelphia?”
“Three hundred and forty confirmed dead,” Gavin said.
Jess said, “It’ll go a hundred higher, maybe more. And so many injured, burned, disfigured.”
Gavin sat with one hand fisted on the arm of his chair, the other around a wineglass. “It’s all over the TV. If you try to watch anything else, you feel…like you’ve lost your humanity.”
“Damn if we’ll watch it,” Jess said. “It’s not tragedy, the way they report it, not horror, certainly not war reporting. It’s all spectacle, and once you let yourself see it that way, your soul begins to turn to dust.”
3
* * *