mean he had a key with which he’d entered from the back stairs. In
that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house
top to bottom–with loaded guns.
The kitchen smelled fresh and clean. No crumbles of dry soil on the
floor, either. She was almost disappointed. She was loath to think
that she’d imagined everything, but the facts justified no other
interpretation. Imagination or not, she couldn’t rid herself of the
feeling that she was under observation. She closed the blinds over the
kitchen windows. Get a grip, Heather thought. You’re fifteen years
away from the change of life, lady, no excuse for these weird mood
swings. She had intended to spend the rest of the night reading, but
she was too agitated to concentrate on a book. She needed to keep
busy. While she brewed a pot of coffee, she inventoried the contents
of the freezer compartment in the side-by-side refrigerator.
There were half a dozen frozen dinners, a package of frankfurters, two
boxes of Green Giant white corn, one box of green beans, two of
carrots, and a package of Oregon blueberries, none of which Eduardo
Fernandez had opened and all of which they could use. On a lower
shelf, under a box of Eggo waffles and a pound of bacon, she found a
Ziploc bag that appeared to contain a legal-size tablet of yellow
paper. The plastic was opaque with frost, but she could vaguely see
that lines of handwriting filled the first page. She popped the
pressure seal on the bag–but then hesitated.
Storing the tablet in such a peculiar place was tantamount to hiding
it.
Fernandez must have considered the contents to be important and
extremely personal, and Heather was reluctant to invade his privacy.
Though dead and gone, he was the benefactor who had radically changed
their lives, he deserved her respect and discretion. She read the
first few words on the top page–My name is Eduardo Fernandez– and
thumbed through the tablet, confirming it had been written by Fernandez
and was a lengthy document. More than two thirds of the long yellow
pages were filled with neat handwriting. Stifling her curiosity,
Heather put the tablet on top of the refrigerator, intending to give it
to Paul Youngblood the next time she saw him. The attorney was the
closest thing to a friend that Fernandez had known and, in his
professional capacity, was privy to all the old man’s affairs. If the
contents of the tablet were important and private, only Paul had any
right to read them.
Finished with the inventory of frozen foods, she poured a cup of fresh
coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and began to make a list of needed
groceries and household supplies. Come morning, they would drive to
the supermarket in Eagle’s Roost and stock not only the refrigerator
but the half-empty shelves of the pantry. She wanted to be well
prepared if they were cut off by deep snow for any length of time
during the winter.
She paused in her listmaking to scribble a note, reminding Jack to
schedule an appointment next week with Parker’s Garage for the
installation of a plow on the front of the Explorer. Initially, as she
sipped her coffee and composed her list, she was alert for any peculiar
sound. However, the task before her was so mundane that it was
calming, after a while, she could not sustain a sense of the uncanny.
In his sleep, Toby moaned softly. He said, “Go away … go … go away
…”
After falling silent for a while, he pushed back the covers and got out
of bed.
In the ruddy glow of the night-light, his pale-yellow pajamas appeared
to be streaked with blood. He stood beside the bed, swaying as if
keeping time to music that only he could hear. “No,” he whispered, not
with alarm but in a flat voice devoid of emotion. “No . .. no .. . no
. . .” Lapsing into silence again, he walked to the window and gazed
into the night.
At the top of the yard, nestled among the pines at the edge of the
forest, the caretaker’s house was no longer dark and deserted. Strange