“We’ve got to go in front and back at the same time,” he told Claire. “If there’s anybody in there, we need to distract them from both directions.”
“But we don’t know how to go in at the same time,” Claire said.
And she was right. It wasn’t any good. They would all need to go in together, him first. If they separated again, they might never find each other. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. There just wasn’t any way to take the risk from it. Pushing Sarah, running with her, he crossed the street, ran down the side street and around to the alley on the left, stopping just far enough away from the back door of the stable to give him a chance to check it. He motioned for them to stay behind him while he worked forward, crouching, studying the drifts in front of the door to see if there were footprints. There weren’t. And the drifts were deep enough that they looked as if the door hadn’t been opened since the storm began. He glanced down the alley, blinking in the snow, toward the fire. He glanced behind him at Claire and Sarah coming carefully. Taking a long breath, grabbing the wooden handle on the door to the stable, he kicked away the drifts and yanked it open, running in, diving toward the stall on his right. He came up rolling, aiming along the stalls, the horses scudding back and forth from the smell of the smoke and the sudden noise of his entrance. He glanced up at the loft and began working his way along the stalls, glancing up at the opposite loft, and if there’d been anybody, he would have been dead by now.
“Come on,” he said, hurrying to saddle the pinto. “We don’t have much time.”
They rushed across to the other horses, Claire saddling the bay, Sarah rubbing her hands by the ladder to the loft, stamping her feet to get them warm. His own hands were numb from the cold, and it was taking him too long to cinch the pinto’s saddle, slapping his hands against his thigh, slapping them again before he went back to working the straps through the buckles, tightening them, securing them.
He was just swinging around to the next stall where the buckskin was when Claire screamed, and looking up he saw the man standing up there in the opposite loft. He had a rifle pointed at them, and he must have been hiding back in a corner up there, waiting for the noise of them working with the horses to mute the sound of him walking over. He was young and dressed in white the same as the other guy, his hood thrown back, grinning, aiming.
He dove over the side of the stall, fumbling to draw his gun, but his hand was so numb that he dropped it, and looking helplessly up he saw the guy grinning even more as he snuggled the stock of his rifle in close to his shoulder and lowered his cheek to get the sights lined up perfectly, and the roar of the twin explosions was deafening as the man disintegrated up there, his face going one way, an arm flying another, his chest caving in, his rifle dropping as the man rose up toward the ceiling almost as if he’d been hoisted and then slammed down out of sight up there in the corner where he must have been hiding.
He didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t think Sarah would ever stop screaming. He looked, and Claire still had the shotgun in her arms, aiming it up toward the loft where the man had been. She wasn’t moving or blinking or breathing, just standing there aiming, and it was all he could do to pry her hands away before she started crying. He didn’t have time to comfort her, didn’t even know how he could be moving so efficiently, leading the bay and the pinto out of their stalls, forcing Claire and Sarah to take the horses out the back door, cursing, anything to get them moving. He rushed back to the buckskin, no time to saddle it properly, just cinch it and slip on a bridle and hope he wouldn’t fall off as he led it out the door and swung on, kicking it, flailing at the other horses as he rode past, yelling at Claire and Sarah to get moving. They galloped out of the alley, swinging to head down the side street across the main road toward the fields of grass and snow on the other side of town. There was a shot behind them from the main road, but he didn’t hear the bullet anywhere near them, kicking at his horse, clutching the reins and the saddle horn to keep from falling. Claire was now on one side of him, Sarah on the other as the storm cleared enough for him to see the fields ahead, and then they were into the long grass, crossing, when he heard the second shot behind him and heard it hit, and it was a good thing Sarah was on the other side of him because she never had a chance to turn and see as he did, already knowing what he would see but looking all the same, the last look he would ever have of her as Claire toppled forward, her gaping face leading her body down off the horse, the hole in the back of her head obscured by the several flopping tumbles her body took as it landed.
22
He was a long time getting control of himself. The shock of what had happened to Claire so stunned him that he just kept kicking his horse, urging it farther and farther on, faster and faster, Sarah beside him. He was well up into the trees before he knew it, riding higher, harder, yanking at his horse’s reins to twist around a wall of brush that was suddenly before him, yanking the other way to get around a blockade of fallen timber, kicking up through a break in the trees toward a clearing above him. But the clearing frightened him, and at the last moment he swerved to the left around it, skirting the edge, charging up another slope of trees, angling toward another, then another, kicking, and he might have kept on like that until his horse dropped from under him if he hadn’t realized that Sarah wasn’t with him any longer. He reined his horse back, head bent, yanking to turn, and she was down there at the bottom of the slope, her horse lying sideways in the snow. He galloped down, nearly falling, stopping, slipping off, tying his horse to a tree and running to her, afraid from the way her leg was pinned under the horse that she had broken it, realizing that the snow was so deep that her leg was only cushioned out of sight down there, wading in, easing her off, grabbing the pinto’s reins and tugging to get it out. The pinto came very slowly, and he stumbled tugging, and when at last he had it free, tying it to a fir branch, the struggle with it plus the shock of what had happened to Claire finally caught up to him. Legs shaking, he slumped against a fir trunk before he would have collapsed. The storm was easing, snowflakes sparse again, made even sparser by the shelter of the fir boughs shifting in the falling wind.
Then the wind was gone as well, and in the dusk and gloom from the storm clouds passing over, there was a muffled silence, occasional far-off clumps of snow rustling off branches and thudding down onto drifts.
“Where’s Mommy?” Sarah asked. She was crawling toward him, her voice flat and muffled in the sound-absorbing snow.
He couldn’t stop his arms and legs from shaking.
“Where’s Mommy?” she asked again.
“Back down there.”
“Why isn’t she coming?”
He didn’t answer.
“Will she be coming?”
“I don’t think so.”
The look of Claire’s face when the bullet had blown through, ripping it away. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He peered up at the cloud-scudded sky, peered down at his hands, couldn’t stop them from shaking, looked at Sarah and reached her.
“Your mother’s dead, sweetheart,” he said and drew her to him. She didn’t move all the time she was against him. When he held her away from him to see her face, it hadn’t changed, cold, gray, expressionless, the way it had been for too many days before.
“What happened to her?”
“She was shot.”
“Are you sure?”
“When we were crossing the field outside of town. I saw her just after she was hit.”
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
“I’m sure.”
He held Sarah to him again. But the questions had started something, and that night was the beginning of the doubt that would never leave him. The snow that had been blowing across the field down there, the frenzy of trying to get away, he had only seen her face for a moment as she fell. It had seemed much longer, but it could only have been a moment, and maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe she’d only been grazed and the blood on her face wasn’t from a bullet plowing t
hrough, but only from a cut at the side of her face, and if he’d turned and gone and picked her up, maybe he could have nursed her through.
Maybe nothing. That hadn’t been just blood on her face, it had been open flesh, and the hole in the back of her head had been like someone had knocked her skull in with a pickax. She’d been dead before she hit the ground, and no amount of second-guessing was ever going to bring her back.
But the sight of her face, of the gaping hole in her head, he couldn’t get them out of his mind, and clutching Sarah, holding her to him, he fought to clear it, scrunching his eyes shut, biting his lip, fists clenched, trembling, realizing how much his shock was really fear, how that blown-out face could have been his, how that could have been him toppling from the horse, flopping across the ground, the pain ripping through his head, his guilt became double, Claire dead, him worrying about himself. And with that, thinking how that body down there could have been his, imagining what they might do to it, remembering the old man’s story about the Indian girl, his guilt doubled again and he couldn’t stand it anymore. He shouldn’t have left Claire down there. No matter what, he shouldn’t have left her.
He drew Sarah away from him again. “Listen to me. I need to go back. With the snow stopped and the wind gone, it’s not so cold now. You’ll be safe to sleep. I’m going to fix the sleeping bag here so you’ll have some kind of shelter and the horses will be here so you won’t be alone. We’ll have something quick to eat and I’ll tuck you in. But I need to go back.”
She didn’t question him, just looked at him with the same blank gray emotionless face while he dug into his pockets to see what he had. Since the line shack, he had made it a rule to carry food on him, chocolate, some jerky, salt, and they ate in silence, the horses nickering, pawing at the snow to get at any grass.
“We don’t have our canteens,” he said. “But the snow isn’t safe to eat. It’ll only make you colder. If you get thirsty, you’re just going to have to wait. Now I don’t want to leave you here, but I’ve got to go down and I can’t take you with me. I promise I’ll be back. You’ll be lonely and in a while you’ll be afraid but try to sleep and the next thing you know I’ll be waking you. I promise I’ll be back.”
She was holding a chocolate bar, looking at him, nodding blankly, and he nestled the sleeping bag into the snow under the branches of the tree the way he’d said he would, snuggling her into it, zipping the bag shut, kissing her, looking at her once more, and then he was gone.
23
At first he thought he would try making it on foot. He didn’t want the horse to maybe whinny and draw attention to him going back, and working through the trees at night would be easier on foot than with a horse. But then he realized how numb his feet were in the snow, and he understood that he’d likely ridden several miles in blind panic before Sarah’s horse had foundered and he’d stopped, and he knew he’d never make it down there and back without the horse. So he took the horse, and as it was, night was well onto him before he reached the edge of the trees, the start of the grass, and the horse wound up following its earlier tracks down through the trees, so it turned out he had done the best.
He slipped off, his boots crunching in the snow as he tied the horse to a tree and looked off across the far field of snow and grass toward the town. The clouds still hadn’t lifted, but the town was in clear sight over there just the same, embers a bright orange glow, here and there flames shooting up to show that except for a few walls still on fire and a few unburned shacks the town had almost totally been destroyed.
He started across, following the tracks of the horses. Sometimes they were faint from where the wind had half obliterated them or the snow had continued falling into them, but always they were recognizable, a different gray from the gray of the snow in the dark on either side of them and the closer he got to the glow from the town the easier the tracks were to see.
He walked straight up at the start, unafraid of showing himself, knowing that from the viewpoint of the town he would blend into the black of the woods behind him. Coming closer, he crouched, depending now on the glow from the fires ruining the night sight of anybody who might be watching from a remaining window.
They might have someone out here hidden in the snow, although he doubted it. They wouldn’t expect him to come back. That wouldn’t make any sense. Unless they counted on Claire’s body drawing him, and suddenly afraid again, he bent even lower, eventually crawling.
He tried to remember where Claire had fallen. They had been out of town, already in the middle of the field of long grass. No, he could be wrong about that. He might have just thought they were in the field, projecting himself that far in anticipation of getting farther away, and she had fallen to his left, what was now his right, so she would be some distance away from the tracks and he would need to crawl away from the tracks soon, heading that way.
The glow was closer. He heard something, he didn’t know what, some kind of scratching sound to his left, and he stopped, listening. He crawled a little farther, and stopped again. Nothing. An animal maybe, a rabbit coming out of its hole. Maybe he had only imagined it. He crawled farther on.
The glow tinted the snow. He could see a figure over there in the town, or what was left of the town, walking outlined against the glow. He put his hand in his pocket, clenching it, warming it, bringing it out and clutching his gun. He looked around, listening, then crawling to his right toward where Claire might have fallen. He imagined reaching out, touching her without knowing, coming face up against her own. He shook his head.
She wasn’t where he thought she would be. That didn’t surprise him. He had expected to make several mistakes in direction before he found her. He heard the scratching noise to his left again and stopped. He stayed motionless for what seemed a half-hour before he started again, the cold of the snow sinking into him, putting his hand back in his pocket again and trying to warm it.
Claire wasn’t the next place either, and by now he was so close to town that he was certain that the figure walking around the embers over there would see him. He’d come too far. She was somewhere in back of him. He turned, crawling back, thinking of Sarah alone up in the woods, wanting to hurry and find Claire and get her body up where he could find a way to bury it, stack wood over it or stones, anything to keep them from finding her in the morning. But he couldn’t let himself hurry. To find her he had to do this right, check every possibility, cover every piece of ground where she might be, crossing back and forth over this stretch of ground on this side of the tracks, peering up, staring, crawling. Keep moving. Need to keep moving.
He’d gone too far the other way. He was sure of it. He was sure they had not gone this far into the field before Claire was hit. She had to be back where he’d just come from, closer to town, likely very near where he’d stopped, and if only he’d gone a few more feet he would have found her. So he turned around again, checking farther away from the tracks, crawling closer to town again, going past where he’d earlier stopped, moving so close to town that he knew she couldn’t be there. Back the other way again, stopping, listening, crawling, and he didn’t know when he started crying, he just felt the trickle of tears going down both sides of his face, warm just for a moment, then cold in the night, freezing on him, and he did his best to wipe them away, to clear his eyes, but they just kept coming, trickling, freezing, and in the end he simply let them come—there wasn’t anything he could do to stop them. The attackers had found her. There wasn’t any question that they’d found her. He thought of Kess wanting some kind of proof. He thought of the old man’s story about the guy assaulting the Indian girl. He groped to his feet, stumbling, running all along the stretch of ground where Claire might have been, running across the field toward the trees, anything to get it out of him, sobbing, the crack of the tree against his face slamming him flat.
He didn’t know if he lost consciousness. He might have. He wasn’t sure. All he did know was that he was suddenly lying there in the snow, fighting to clear h
is nose and breathe, touching himself, feeling the warm-cold, sticky blood coming from his nose, and in the dark he stumbled to find his horse, then realized that he had gone in the wrong direction,. Finding it at last, he managed to remember to untie it, slipping on, clutching the mane, nudging the horse gently as it started up through the trees.
They’d found her.
There was nothing more he could do.
It was only when the air began turning gray that he understood the clouds had lifted, that he’d been down there most of the night searching for Claire, and his only blessing was that Sarah was fast asleep in her sleeping bag in the snow when he got back to her. Mechanically he tied his horse to a tree, noticed that another horse, the bay that Claire had fallen from, had somehow found its way up here and stayed, tied it to a tree as well, and slumping down beside Sarah to give her extra warmth, careful not to wake her, rubbing snow on his face to clean the blood, he dozed, waiting for the dawn.
PART THREE
1
Time lost all significance for him. At the start, when the three men had come looking for them at the cabin and they had been forced to ride up into the hills, he had kept a careful mental record of the days. Friday the twenty-fourth of October, that was when they had started up, that much he was sure of. Saturday they had camped near the long deep pool at the base of the wide rushing stream. Sunday Sarah had gotten sick and they had found the line shack. Monday they had found the town. No, that was wrong. They had found the town late Sunday afternoon. Or had they? So much had happened in so little time that he had the feeling he had maybe added a day or even taken one away, and he was never able to tell for sure the day or date when Claire had died, Monday or Tuesday, even Wednesday, and as the days drew on, one after the other, almost imperceptibly, turning into weeks, he finally gave up trying. Tuesday the twenty-eighth, that’s when Claire died, he decided, and he measured all the days from that until at last those days became a blur also and he didn’t even know what month it was.