Winter Moon

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.

CHAPTER FOUR.

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.

Eduardo Fernandez stood on the front porch of the ranch house, staring

across the down-sloping, snowcovered fields to the woods a hundred

yards to the east.

Sugar pines and yellow pines crowded close to one another and pinned

inky shadows to the ground, as if the night never quite escaped their

needled grasp even with the rising of a bright sun in a cloudless

sky.

The silence was deep. Eduardo lived alone, and his nearest neighbor

was two miles away. The wind was still abed, and nothing moved across

that vast panorama except for two birds of prey--hawks,

perhaps--circling soundlessly high overhead.

Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, when the night usually would