Winter Moon

coppery late-afternoon sunlight slanted through west-facing windows,

and the air glowed like that in front of an open furnace door. It was

light without heat, and still Heather shivered.

Toby said, "This is great, this is terrific!" The room was more than

twice the size of the one in which the boy had slept in Los Angeles,

but Heather knew he was less excited by the dimensions than by the

almost whimsical architecture, which would have sparked the imagination

of any child. The twelve-foot-high ceiling was composed of four groin

vaults, and the shadows that lay across those concave surfaces were

complex and intriguing. "Neat," Toby said, staring up at the

ceiling.

"Like hanging under a parachute." In the wall to the left of the hall

door was a four-footdeep, six-foot-long, arched niche into which a

custom-built bed had been fitted. Behind the headboard on the left and

in the back wall of the niche were recessed bookshelves and deep

cabinets for the storage of model spaceships, action figures, games,

and the other possessions that a young boy cherished. Curtains were

drawn back from both sides of the niche and, when closed, could seal it

off like a berth on an old-fashioned railroad sleeping car.

"Can this be my room, can it, please?" Toby asked. "Looks to me like

it was made for you," Jack said. "Great!" Opening one of the two

other doors in the room, Paul said, "This walk-in closet is so deep you

could almost say it's a room itself."

The last door revealed the head of an uncarpeted staircase as tightly

curved as that in a lighthouse. The wooden treads squeaked as the four

of them descended.

Heather instantly disliked the stairs. Perhaps she was somewhat

claustrophobic in that cramped and windowless space, following Paul

Youngblood and Toby, with Jack close behind. Perhaps the inadequate

lighting--two widely spaced, bare bulbs in the ceiling--made her

uneasy. A mustiness and a vague underlying odor of decay didn't add

any charm. Neither did spiderwebs hung with dead moths and beetles.

Whatever the reason, her heart began to pound as if they were climbing

rather than descending. She was overcome by the bizarre fear-- similar

to the nameless dread in a nightmare--that something hostile and

infinitely strange was waiting for them below.

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