said lived in the woods. A bear could gut you and bite your head off
so quick you wouldn’t have a chance to scream, crunch your skull up
like hard candy, pick its teeth with your armbone, and all they’d find
in the morning was a bloody scrap of pajamas and maybe a toe that the
bear had overlooked. He was scaring himself.
He checked the crack between the door and the jamb to be sure the
deadbolt was actually in place. He could see the dull brass shine of
it in there. Good. Safe.
Of course, Falstaff had been afraid of the door above too, curious but
afraid.
He hadn’t wanted to open it. Hadn’t wanted to come down here,
really.
But nobody had been waiting for them on the steps. No bear, for
sure.
Maybe this was just a dog who spooked easy. “My dad’s a hero,” Toby
whispered. Falstaff cocked his head. “He’s a hero cop. He’s not
afraid of nothin’, and I’m not afraid of nothin’, either.” The dog
stared at him as if to say, Yeah? So what next? Toby looked again at
the door in front of him. He could just open it a crack. Take a quick
look. If a bear was on the porch, slam the door fast. “If I wanted to
go out there and pet a bear, I would.” Falstaff waited. “But it’s
late. I’m tired.
If there’s a bear out there, he’ll just have to wait till tomorrow.”
Together, he and Falstaff climbed back to his room.
Dirt was scattered on the stairs. He’d felt it under his bare feet on
the way down, now he felt it going up. On the high landing, he stood
on his right leg and brushed the bottom of his left foot, stood on his
left foot and ushed off his right. Crossed the threshold. Closed the
-door. Locked it. Switched off the stair light. Falstaff was at the
window, gazing out at the backyard, and Toby joined him.
The snow was coming down so hard there would probably be nine feet of
it by morning, maybe sixteen. The porch roof below was white. The
ground was white everywhere, as far as he could see, but he couldn’t
see all that far because the snow was really coming down. He couldn’t
even see the woods. The caretaker’s house was swallowed by whipping
white clouds of snow. Incredible. The dog dropped to the floor and
trotted away, but Toby watched the snow awhile longer.
When he began to get sleepy, he turned and saw that Falstaff was
sitting – in the bed, waiting for him. Toby slipped under the
blankets, keeping the retriever on top of them. Letting the dog under
the blankets was going one step too far. Infallible eight-year-old-boy
instinct told him as much. If Mom or Dad found them like that–boy
head on one pillow, dog head on the other pillow, covers pulled up to
their chins–there would be big trouble.
He reached for the draw cord to shut the drapes, so he and Falstaff
could go to sleep on a train, crossing Alaska in the dead of winter to
get to the gold rush country and stake a claim, after which they’d
change Falstaffs name to White Fang. But as soon as the drapes began
to close, the dog sprang to its feet on the mattress, ready to leap to
the floor. “Okay, all right, pleez,” Toby said, and he pulled the
drapes wide open. The retriever settled beside him again, lying so he
was facing the door at the head of the back stairs. “Dumb dog,” Toby
muttered from the edge of sleep. “Bears don’t have door keys.”
In the darkness, when Heather slid against him, smelling faintly of
soap from her hot bath, Jack knew he’d have to disappoint her. He
wanted her, needed her, God knew, but he remained obsessed with his
experience in the cemetery. As the memory grew rapidly less vivid, as
it became increasingly difficult to recall the precise nature and
intensity of the emotions that had been part of the encounter, he
turned it over and over more desperately in his mind, examining it