Dean Koontz: Winter Moon

"Why do cats always want to kill mice?"

Marking her place in the book with her thumb, she glanced at the television, where a different cat and mouse were involved in another slapstick chase, the former pursuing the latter this time.

"Why can't they be friends with mice," the boy asked, "instead of wanting to kill them all the time?"

"It's just a cat's nature," she said.

"But why?"

"It's the way God made cats."

"Doesn't God like mice?"

"Well, He must, because He made mice too."

"Then why make cats to kill them?"

"If mice didn't have natural enemies like cats and owls and coyotes, they'd overrun the world."

"Why would they overrun the world?"

"Because they give birth to litters, not single babies."

"So?"

"So if they didn't have natural enemies to control their numbers, there'd be a trillion billion mice eating up all the food in the world, with nothing left for cats or us."

"If God didn't want mice to overrun the world, why didn't He just make them so they have single babies at a time?"

Adults always lost the Why Game, because eventually the train of questions led to a dead-end track with no answer… Heather said, "You got me there, kiddo."

"I think it's mean to make mice have a lot of babies and then make cats to kill them."

"You'll have to discuss that with God, I'm afraid."

"You mean when I go to bed tonight and say my prayers?"

"Best time," she said, freshening the coffee in her mug with the supply in the thermos.

Toby said, "I always ask Him questions, then I always fall asleep before He answers me. Why does He let me fall asleep before I can get the answer?"

"That's the way God works. He only talks to you in your sleep. If you listen, then you wake up with the answer."

She was proud of that one. She seemed to be holding her own.

Frowning, Toby said, "But usually I still don't know the answer when I wake up. Why don't I know it if He told me?"

Heather took a few sips of coffee to gain time. Then she said, "Well, see, God doesn't want to just give you all the answers. The reason we're here on this world is to find the answers ourselves, to learn and gain understanding by our own efforts."

Good. Very good. She felt modestly exhilarated, as if she'd held on longer than she'd any right to expect in a tennis match with a world-class player.

Toby said, "Mice aren't the only things get chased and killed. For every animal, there's another animal wants to tear it to pieces." He glanced at the TV. "See, there, like dogs want to murder cats."

The cat that had been chasing the mouse was now, in turn, being pursued by a fierce-looking bulldog in a spiked collar.

Looking at his mother again, Toby said, "Why does every animal have another animal that wants to kill it? Would cats overrun the world without their natural enemies?"

The Why Game train had come to another dead end in the track. Oh, yes, she could have discussed the concept of original sin, told him how the world had been a serene realm of peace and plenty until Eve and Adam had fallen from grace and let death into the world. But all of that seemed to be heavy stuff for an eight-year-old. Besides, she wasn't sure she believed any of it, though it was the explanation for evil, violence, and death with which she herself had grown up.

Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no answer.

"If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind.of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father golden retriever and one puppy."

He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they'd been delaying because their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog.

"Nothing would ever die or grow old," Toby said, continuing to describe the world he would have made, "so the puppy would always be a puppy, and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world, and then nothing would have to kill anything else."

That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been.

"I wouldn't make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes," he said, wrinkling his face in disgust. "That never made any sense. God musta been in a really weird mood that day."

Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces.

"Well, He musta been," Toby insisted, turning his attention to the television again.

He looked so like Jack. He had Jack's beautiful gray-blue eyes and open guileless face. Jack's nose. But he had her blond hair, and he was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and solidly built, Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed miraculous.

He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack's love for her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of procreation, then perhaps the bargain made in Eden wasn't as lopsided as it sometimes seemed.

On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering feline.

The telephone rang.

Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside, and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen.

The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on the counter and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Heather?"

"Speaking."

"It's Lyle Crawford."

Crawford was the captain of Jack's division, the man to whom he answered… Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the instincts of a cop's wife, — but she knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and expelling the same word with each exhalation: "No, no, no, no."

Crawford was saying something, but Heather couldn't make herself listen to him, as if whatever had happened to Jack would not really have happened as long as she refused to hear the ugly facts put into words.

Someone was knocking at the back door.

She turned, looked. Through the window in the door, she saw a man in uniform, dripping rain, Louie Silverman, another cop from Jack's division, a good friend for eight years, nine years, maybe longer, Louie with the rubbery face and unruly red hair. Because he was a friend, he had come around to the back door in stead of knocking at the front, not so formal that way, not so damn cold and horribly formal, just a friend at the back door, oh God, just a friend at the back door with some news.

Louie said her name. Muffled by the glass. So forlorn, the way he said her name.

"Wait, wait," she told Lyle Crawford, and she took the receiver away from her ear, held it against her breast.

She closed her eyes too, so she wouldn't have to look at poor Louie's face pressed to the window in the door. So gray, his face, so drawn and gray. He loved Jack too. Poor Louie.

She chewed on her lower lip and squeezed her eyes tightly shut and held the phone in both hands against her chest, searching for the strength she was going to need, praying for the strength.

She heard a key in the back door. Louie knew where they hid the spare on the porch.

The door opened. He came inside with the sound of rain swelling behind him.

"Heather," he said.

The sound of the rain. The rain. The cold merciless sound of the rain.

The Montana morning was high and blue, pierced by mountains with peaks as white as angels' robes, graced by forests green and by the smooth contours of lower meadows still asleep under winter's mantle. The air was pure and so clear it seemed possible to look all the way to China if not for the obstructing terrain.