74
Rachel placed the pillow tenderly over his face, leaning all her weight on top of it, whispering as she did so of how Harvey had murdered Morgan and how he had planned to kill Ryan, but the brat had escaped.
She felt the struggles against the suffocating pressure becoming weaker until, with a final jerking convulsion, Baron Titus Cawdor went to join his ancestors.
ryan and krysty picked their way down the twisting path through the woods, taking care as the light was fad-ing fast.
“And they have a son?”
Ryan nodded. “That’s what I heard. Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Must be around the same sort of age as Whitey down there.”
Krysty sniffed the air. “Gaia, but that fish makes my mouth water! You feeling hungry now, lover? After all your exercise?”
Ryan checked in midstride, turning to look at her, his face a pale blur in the half-light. The patch over his ru-ined eye seemed blacker than it usually did. He reached out and took Krysty by the hand.
“I’m sure.”
“What? That you’re hungry?”
Ryan didn’t smile. “No.”
“What, then?”
“That crazy old bastard Bochco. I’ve been thinking on the last thing he said.”
“What was that?”
Ryan’s voice was so quiet that the pounding waterfall nearly drowned it out. Even with her mutie hearing, Krysty could barely hear him.
“The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Return and claim what should be yours.”
75
“I remember.”
“It was a scar that had been healed, I thought, for twenty years. Now I know that I was wrong. Now I know where I’m going.”
“Where?” But she knew.
“I’m going home, lover. Home.”
They walked back to the beach and rejoined the oth-ers.
Chapter Eight
Doc tanner was straining at his memory. “Front Royal’s in Virginia. There used to be a saying.”
“What?” Lori asked.
“Something about the state. They said it in the nine-ties. Nineteens, not eighteens.”
Jak Lauren was leaning against the short trunk of the mast, listening to the old man. “What did they say, Doc?”
“Ah, yes.” Confidently he said, “Virginia is for…” Then he lost the thread. “Virginia is for… for… I don’t rightly recall.”
Jak grinned. “Guess must have been Virginia is for killers.”
Doc nodded. “Quite possibly, my white-haired young companion. Quite possibly.”
Ryan had told them over the supper of fresh trout that he was determined to go on to Virginia.
“Chill brother?” Jak asked.
“Just might,” Ryan replied.
“See your home. I liked that,” Lori said, recovered now from the blow to her head.
Doc Tanner smiled at the news. “Sibling rivalry was always an overwhelming motivation, was it not, my dear Ryan?”
Ryan nodded, even though he had no idea what the old man was talking about.
77
Only J.B. didn’t say anything, busying himself with picking bits of fish from between his back teeth with a long, narrow bone. His eyes behind the round lenses of his spectacles gave nothing away.
“You don’t seem surprised,” Ryan said. “I know I sort of said I would before. But this is for real. I’ll go. Even if I go on my own, I’m going back to see my brother.”
“Hell, I knew that all along,” J.B. said.
during the next day, the Hudson River flowed ever more slowly and became wider, the banks shelving away a good quarter mile. As they rolled gently toward the sea, they saw more and more evidence of the devastation wrought by the century-old nuking of the northeast.
They passed the weed-softened remains of what Doc swore must have been a town he called Poughkeepsie. Jak Lauren, for some reason, found that name hilariously amusing, and he rolled around on the damp timbers, holding his sides, laughing uncontrollably. His merri-ment was contagious, and everyone on the raft began to laugh with him. Even J.B. cracked his cheeks at the sound of the name.
Doc cackled like a rusty hinge. “Guess it always was a funny name.”
About four hours later they found themselves drifting toward the wreck of what had once been a gigantic bridge. Ryan spotted it first.
He was standing on the right side of the unwieldy craft, urinating to leeward, shielding himself from the others as best he could. On the raft there was no time or space for any of the niceties of hygiene. As he pissed, it was carried away in a great amber arc, splashing into the flat surface of the river.