Michael Prescott: Blind Pursuit

At the eastern end of the side road where she’d lost Gund’s trail at nightfall, Annie found a ranch with a padlocked gate.

Brief excitement shook her. But the duplicate key marked GATE would not open the lock, and neither would any other key on the ring.

Disappointed, she doubled back to Houghton Road and continued south.

Already her quest was beginning to feel hopeless. It was one thing to assume that Gund had a ranch in this vicinity; it was quite another to search every side street, every dirt road, every unmarked lane intersecting with Houghton for miles.

For all she knew, Gund’s ranch was far south of here, perhaps south of Interstate 10 and the Pima County Fairgrounds. Or-a grimmer prospect-it might be nowhere in the area at all.

If Gund had known all along that she was following him, he might have driven out of his way deliberately, in order to give no clue to his true destination, before performing whatever mysterious maneuver had made him disappear.

There were so many possibilities, and the desert was so dark, so vast. She could very well be wasting her time.

Another side road passed by, this one on her left. Unmarked, barely visible. She nearly missed seeing it.

With a squeal of brakes she cut her speed and executed a skidding U-turn, then pulled onto the narrow dirt lane.

The Miata bounced lightly on the rutted surface. To the north, barbed-wire fencing glided by; beyond it lay the dim shapes of a house and barn.

She stiffened in her seat as a distant memory snapped into focus.

“Can’t be coincidence,” she whispered, unaware that she was voicing her thoughts. “Can’t be.”

Her headlights picked up an obstruction ahead.

A gate.

The Miata slowed to a halt. Annie sat in the driver’s seat, very still, barely breathing.

The twin circles of her halogen beams played on the gate. Unlocked, it creaked lazily on rusted hinges.

If the labels on the key ring meant anything, then the gate of Gund’s ranch was padlocked.

This couldn’t be it, then.

But she knew it was.

Because this was the old Connor place. The ranch she and Erin had tracked down on a spring day in 1985.

There had been no reason to think of that visit in years. She’d forgotten all about the ranch, forgotten its location, its very existence.

Until now.

Now she knew-she knew — that this was the place she was looking for.

Harold Gund owned the ranch… and Erin was inside.

Switching on her high beams, she scanned the grounds. Part of the fence, she noticed, had been torn apart as if by a speeding vehicle. She thought of the damage to Gund’s van.

His van. If he was here, it ought to be within view. Parked in the carport or on the gravel court at the front of the house.

It was nowhere. And the house was dark.

Apparently Gund hadn’t returned. Perhaps he really had fled, as she’d hoped.

Or perhaps he was on his way here right now.

She killed the high beams, using only her parking lights. Cautiously she eased the Miata forward and nosed open the gate. The car hummed over yards of stiff brown grass and came to a stop fifty feet from the house.

When she shut off the motor, the night’s sudden stillness pressed in on her, squeezing her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

She left her key in the ignition-her experience in Gund’s neighborhood had alerted her to the advantages of a quick getaway-and got out of the car, being careful not to slam the door. The warm night wrapped itself around her, dry and dark.

Her shoes crunched loudly on the gravel, an oddly hungry sound, like the grinding of some large animal’s jaws, as she walked to the house’s front door.

It was locked. Searching the key ring, squinting at each hand-labeled tag in the starlight, she found the key marked FRONT DOOR.

Even before inserting it in the keyhole, she was irrationally certain it would fit.

It did.

The door glided open under her hand. She stepped into a spacious living room, unfurnished, empty except for a potbelly stove bolted to the floor.

No light was apparent, other than shafts of feeble

Starlight lancing through the broken windows. No sound was audible save the hum and whistle of the wind.

Annie moved forward, into the dark, and found her voice. “Erin …?”

“It must have been the summer of 1965,” Erin said softly as the stun gun wavered in Oliver’s shaking hand. “You would have been fifteen.”

“Fifteen,” Oliver whispered, memory dulling his gaze.

“Maureen was twenty-one.”

“And beautiful.” The flashlight on the floor shined up at him, casting weird shadows over his face. The hollows of his eyes were deep wells of ink. “So beautiful.”

Erin squeezed more tightly into the corner. The floor under her was cold. The bricks at her back-cold. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine like an icy finger.

“How did it happen?” she asked, fighting to hear herself over the pounding of her heart.

He looked away, toward the open door, but she knew he wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t seeing anything around him.

“In July of ’65,” he said quietly, “Maureen came out from Sierra Springs, alone, to celebrate Lydia’s birthday. One afternoon she set up a lounge chair out back. I sneaked through the arroyo to where she was sunbathing. And spied on her.

“She took off her shirt. Squeezed suntan oil onto her breasts. Touched herself. I heard her moan. Skin wet with oil, legs twisting

…”

Erin felt it was wrong somehow, a violation of some ancient taboo, to picture her mother touching herself so intimately.

She blinked the thought away. “How long did you watch?”

“Until she was finished. Then I returned to the house. Lincoln saw me as I entered. And he saw the stain. On my pants. A big, dark stain.

“I didn’t even know I’d… done that. Hadn’t felt it. Hadn’t felt anything at all.”

She understood. He must have survived the years of abuse by disconnecting himself from his emotions, even from physical sensations-and from sexual feelings most of all.

“Lincoln said he knew what I’d been up to. I’d been peeping at my Aunt Maureen. That kind of behavior demanded punishment. A boy needed to learn discipline.

“Lydia was in town, and Maureen was still outside. Nothing to stop him, so he did it right then, on the living room floor, near the potbelly stove.

“Afterward, I locked the bathroom door, scrubbed my pants and underwear. I didn’t think about Lincoln. I thought about Maureen.”

He lowered his head, the flashlight’s pale radiance brightening his face like a flush of shame.

“I wanted her. Before, it had been enough to just watch, but now I had to have… had to prove…”

Erin knew what he’d felt the need to prove.

“Next morning, Maureen was up before dawn; she liked to walk when it was cool. I found her by the barn. Said I’d hidden a birthday present for Lydia in the tack room.

“She went in with me. Trusted me. I was only a kid, after all. But I was taller than she was. And in my back pocket I had a knife.

“Her eyes got big when I popped the switchblade. I was going to stick something in her, I said-the knife or my cock. Her choice.

“She was crying, saying I couldn’t mean it. Good hard slap shut her up.

“We did it there, on the floor, with the knife at her throat and the horses restless in their stalls on the other side of the wall.”

On the floor. The same way Lincoln had abused Oliver. The same pattern of perfunctory violence, repeated.

The son had learned from the father, but it was not discipline that had been taught.

“Once you let her go,” Erin whispered, “she didn’t tell?”