Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

The last step brought them into a windowless vestibule, where Paul had to use a key to unlock the first of two lower doors. "Kitchen," he said. Nothing fearful waited beyond, merely the room he had indicated.

"We'll go this way," he said, turning to the second door, which didn't require a key from the inside. When the thumb-turn on the dead-bolt lock proved stiff from lack of use, the few seconds of delay were almost more than Heather could tolerate. Now she was convinced that something was coming down the steps behind them, the murderous phantom of a bad dream. She wanted out of that narrow place immediately, desperately… The door creaked open. They followed Paul through the second exit onto the back porch. They were twelve feet to the left of the house's main rear entrance, which led into the kitchen. Heather took several deep breaths, purging her lungs of the contaminated air from the stairwell.

Her fear swiftly abated and her racing heart regained a normal pace.

She looked back into the vestibule where the steps curved upward out of sight. Of course no denizen of a nightmare appeared, and her moment of panic seemed more foolish and inexplicable by the second.

Jack, unaware of Heather's inner turmoil, put one hand on Toby's head and said, "Well, if that's going to be your room, I don't want to catch you sneaking girls up the back steps."

"Girls?" Toby was astonished. "Yuck. Why would l want to have anything to do with girls?"

"I suspect you figure that one out all on your own, given a little time," the attorney said, amused. "And too fast," Jack said.

"Five years from now, we'll have to fill those stairs with concrete, seal them off forever."

Heather found the will to turn her back on the door as the attorney closed it.

She was baffled by the episode, and relieved that no one had been aware of her odd reaction. Los Angeles jitters. She hadn't shed the city.

She was in rural Montana, where there probably hadn't been a murder in a decade, where most people left doors unlocked day and night- but psychologically, she remained in the shadow of the Big Orange, living conscious anticipation of sudden, senseless violence. Just a delayed case of Los Angeles jitters. "Better show you the rest of the property," Paul said."

"We don't have much more than half an hour of day- light left."

They followed him down the porch steps and up the sloping rear lawn toward a smaller, stone house tucked among the evergreens at the edge of the forest.

Heather recognized it from the photographs Paul had sent: the caretaker's residence. As twilight stealthily approached, the sky far to the — east was a deep sapphire. It faded to a lighter blue in the west, where the sun hastened toward the mountains. The temperature had slipped out of the fifties. Heather walked with her hands jammed in jacket pockets and her shoulders hunched. She was pleased to see that Jack took the hill with vigor, not limping at all.

Occasionally his left leg ached and he favored it, but not today. She found it hard to believe that only eight months ago, their lives seemed to have been changed for the worse, forever. No wonder she was still jumpy. Such a terrible eight months. But everything was fine now… Really fine.

The rear lawn hadn't been maintained after Eduardo's death. The grass had grown six or eight inches before the aridity of late summer and the chill of early autumn had turned it brown and pinched off its growth until spring. It crackled faintly under their feet. "Ed and Margaret moved out of the caretaker's house when they inherited the ranch eight years ago," Paul said as they drew near the stone bungalow. "Sold the contents, nailed plywood over the windows. Don't think anyone's been in there since. Unless you plan to have a caretaker yourself, you probably won't have a use for it, either. But you ought to take a look just the same."

Pine trees crowded three sides of the smaller house. The forest was so primeval that darkness dwelt in much of it even before the sun had set.

The bristling green of heavy boughs, enfolded with purple-black shadows, was a lovely sight-but those wooded realms had an air of mystery that Heather found disturbing, even a little menacing. For the first time she wondered what animals might from time to time venture out of those wilds into the yard. Wolves? Bears?

Mountain lions? Was Toby safe here? Oh, for God's sake, Heather She was thinking like a city dweller, always wary of danger, perceiving threats everywhere. In fact, wild animals avoided people and ran if approached. What do you expect? she asked herself sarcastically.

That you'll be barricaded in the house while gangs of bears hammer on the doors and packs of snarling wolves throw themselves through windows like something out of a bad TV movie about ecological disaster?

Instead of a porch, the caretaker's house had a large flagstone-paved area in front of the entrance. They stood there while Paul found the right key on the ring he carried. The north-east-south panorama from the perimeter of the high woods was stunning, better even than from the main house. Like a landscape in a Maxfield Parrish painting, the descending fields and forests receded into a distant violet haze under a darkly luminous sapphire sky. The fading afternoon was windless, and the silence was so deep she might have thought she'd gone deaf- except for the clinking of the attorney's keys. After a life in the city, such quiet was eerie.

The door opened with much cracking and scraping, as if an ancient seal had been broken. Paul stepped across the threshold, into the dark living room, and flicked the light switch. Heather heard it click several times, but the lights didn't come on. Stepping outside again, Paul said, "Figures. Ed must've shut off all the power at the breaker box. I know where it is. You wait here, I'll be right back."

They stood at the front door, staring at the gloom beyond the threshold, while the attorney disappeared around the corner of the house. His departure made Heather apprehensive, though she wasn't sure why. Perhaps because he had gone alone.

"When I get a dog, can he sleep in my room?" Toby asked. "Sure," Jack.said, "but not on the bed."

"Not on the bed? Then where would he sleep?"

"Dogs usually make do with the floor."

"That's not fair."

"You'll never hear a dog complain."

"But why not on the bed?"

"Fleas."

"I'll take good care of him. He won't have fleas."

"Dog hairs in the sheets."

"That won't be a problem, Dad."

"What-you're going to shave him, have a bald dog?"

"I'll just brush him every day."

Listening to her husband and son, Heather watched the corner of the house, increasingly certain that Paul Youngblood was never going to return. Something terrible had happened to him. Something- He reappeared. "All the breakers were off. We should be in business now." What's wrong with me? Heather wondered. Got to shake this damn L.A. attitude.

Standing inside the front door, Paul flipped the wall switch repeatedly, without success. The dimly visible ceiling fixture in the empty living room remained dark. The carriage lamp outside, next to the door, didn't come on, either.

"Maybe he had electric service discontinued," Jack suggested. The attorney shook his head. "Don't see how that could be. This is on the same line as the main house and the stable."

"Bulbs might be dead, sockets corroded after all this me." '- Pushing his cowboy hat back on his head, scratching his brow, frowning, Paul said, "Not like Ed to let things deteriorate. I'd expect him to do routine maintenance, keep the place in good working order in case the next owner had a need for it. That's just how he was. Good man, Ed.

Not much of a socializer, but a good man."

"Well," Heather said, "we can investigate the problem in a couple of days, once we're settled down at the main place." Paul retreated from the house, pulled the door shut, and locked it. "You might want to have an electrician out to check the wiring."