But he doesn’t think that she will try to harm him, at least not soon. If harming him was her primary intention, she would have gone after him already.
Strange.
“Why? What now?” he says aloud, enjoying the drama of his peculiar situation. “What now? What next? What ho? Surprise, surprise.”
He drinks more coffee. The aroma reminds him of the crisp texture of burned toast.
Outside, the elk are gone.
A night of mysteries.
The mounting wind lashes the long fronds of the ferns. Like evidence of violence, bright wet rhododendron blossoms spray through the night.
The forest stands untouched. The power of time is stored in those massive, dark, vertical forms.
Mr. Vess shifts the motor home out of park and releases the emergency brake. Onward.
After he cruises past the damaged Honda, he glances at the rearview mirror. The bedroom door remains closed. The woman is in hiding.
With the motor home rolling again, perhaps the stowaway will risk turning on a light and will take this opportunity to meet her roommates.
Mr. Vess smiles.
Of all the expeditions that he has conducted, this is the most interesting and exciting. And it isn’t over yet.
*
Chyna sat on the floor in the darkness. Her back was against the wall. The revolver lay at her side.
She was untouched and alive.
“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she whispered, and this was both a prayer and a joke.
Throughout her childhood, she frequently prayed earnestly for that double blessing—her virtue and her life—and her prayers were often as rambling and incoherent as they were frantic. Eventually she had worried that God was growing weary of her endless desperate pleas for deliverance, that He was sick of her inability to take care of herself and stay out of trouble, and that He might decide that she had used up all of the divine mercy allotted to her. God was busy, after all, running the entire universe, watching over so many drunks and fools, with the devil working mischief everywhere, volcanoes erupting, sailors lost in storms, sparrows falling. By the time Chyna was ten or eleven, in consideration of God’s hectic schedule, she had condensed her rambling pleas, in times of terror, to this: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd, here in”—fill the blank with the name of the current place—”and I’m begging you, please, please, please, just let me get through this untouched and alive.” Soon, realizing that God, being God, would know precisely where she was, she reduced her entreaty further to: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd. Please get me through this untouched and alive.” Finally, certain that God was exasperatedly familiar with her panicky presumptions on His time and grace, she had shortened her plea to a telegraphic minimum: “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.” In crises—under beds or lost in closets behind concealing clothes or in cobwebbed attics smelling of dust and raw wood or, once, flattened against the ground in a mire of rat shit in the crawl space under a moldering old house—she had whispered those five words or chanted them silently, over and over, indefatigably, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, ceaselessly reciting them not because she was afraid that God might be distracted by other business and fail to hear her but to remind herself that He was out there, had received her message, and would take care of her if she was patient. And when each crisis passed, when the black flood of terror receded, when her stuttering heart finally began to speak each beat clearly and calmly again, she had repeated the five words once more but with a different inflection than she had used previously, not as a plea for deliverance this time but as a dutiful report, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, much as a sailor in wartime might report to his captain after the ship had survived a vigorous strafing by enemy planes—”All present and accounted for, sir.” She was present; she was accounted for; and she let God know of her gratitude with the same five words, figuring that He would hear the difference in her inflection and would understand. It had become a little joke with young Chyna, and sometimes she had even accompanied the report with a salute, which seemed all right because she had figured that God, being God, must have a sense of humor.