for the moment only because I was downwind of them.
Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my
hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from
the highest terrace to the second.
Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the
lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright
sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.
The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to
probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than
before.
I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or
a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land:
shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely
scattered and barely discernible black oaks.
The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I
dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting
from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.
Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter
of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was
eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived
at the fence.
I was heading farther from town, which wasn’t good. I wouldn’t find
help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation,
and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than
most.
Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of
summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as
golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been
marked by a swath of trampled stalks.
I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough
to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I
had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most
likely be able to track me.
Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the
slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough,
five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been
goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.
I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural
drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had
exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two
weeks, this rocky course was dry.
I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the
tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers
had descended.
Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams
slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly
at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.
They were unnervingly quick and agile.
Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?
Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps
they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear
me apart with their hands.
I wondered if they would take my eyes.
The drainage channel-and the wider declivity in which it lay-ran uphill
to the northeast and downhill to the southwest. As I was already at
the extreme northeast end of town, I could find no help if I went
uphill.
I headed southwest, following the brush-flanked swale, intending to
return to well-populated territory as quickly as possible.
In the shallowly cupped channel ahead of me, the moonburnished bedrock
glowed softly like the milky ice on a winter pond, dwindling into
obscurity. The embracing curtains of high, silvery cordgrass appeared
to be stiff with frost.
Suppressing all fear of falling on loose stones or of snapping an ankle
in a natural borehole, I gave myself to the night, allowing the
darkness to push me as wind pushes a sailing ship. I sprinted down the
gradual slope with no sensation of feet striking ground, as though I
actually were skating across the frozen rock.
Within two hundred yards, I came to a place where hills folded into one
another, resulting in a branching of the hollow. With barely any