Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

was a pot, I think. It was partly covered, but I think it was an iron pot. And there were things in it.”

“What things?” His tone is suddenly grave.

“Horns,” she says. “The horns of some animal, a ram, perhaps. Links of chain. The limbs of certain trees. Harlan’s locket, too—the one I gave him as a wedding gift. A knife was driven through the hinge.”

He frowns and ponders. “Could you find the place again?”

“I don’t know. It was dark. I think I came from there.” She points, and Jarry searches till he finds her prints in the wet ground. Leading the horse, they backtrack, walking silently. After fifteen minutes, they reach the rise of ground, the fallen tree.

“There,” says Addie solemnly, pointing to the hollow.

Jarry peers inside and blinks. He shelves his eyes to see, then turns to her with a blank expression.

“What?”

“There’s nothing here.”

“That can’t be.” She joins him now to look. “It was here last night, Jarry. I know it was.”

With the nail of his index finger, Jarry picks up something small and shiny from the floor. He holds it to the light. It’s a dime, a silver dime, incised with Seated Liberty.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “I’m sure this was the place.”

“Come,” he says. “We need to tell my mother this.” Mounting, he reaches her a hand and swings her up behind.

For a moment, Addie feels the awkwardness of where to put her hands, but when the horse starts off, the motion throws her toward him and she puts her arms around his waist. As they ride in silence, the voice she knows but doesn’t know from where, the one she asked for help, which whispered yes, now tells her, as she lets her tired head fall on Jarry’s back, This is the help you’re to receive.

“But, Jarry,” she says as they reach the drive and slow down to a walk. “Jarry! It’s just occurred to me—you’re free!”

“No,” he says, “the will is gone. Mother searched the desk this morning. It isn’t there.”

“No, but, listen,” Addie says excitedly. “Listen, Jarry…”

He turns partway to face her in the saddle.

“Addie!”

At this moment, Harlan’s cry breaks in on them, and they turn toward the house as he steps onto the piazza. Seeing his glassy eyes and brooding face—he appears to have been waiting for some time—Addie never gets the chance to speak.

TWENTY-THREE

Marcel saw the silhouette reflected in the gleaming oils of Addie’s portrait and was the first to turn his head. “Hey, Ran.”

Ransom, from the doorway, answered, “Hey.”

Claire looked around. “The kids asleep?”

“Yeah, they are.”

“Is something the matter?”

“Actually, I don’t know.”

She studied him. “Well, are you going to stand there speaking koans, or are you coming in? We’re looking at this poem you found.”

“You guys go ahead.”

He turned away, but she came after him and caught his arm. “Ransom, come sit down. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just going to take a walk.”

“Where’s the Purdey? I saw it isn’t on the wall.”

This took him by surprise. His morning outing seemed like something from a prior era now. “I guess I left it in the yard.”

“What were you doing with it in the yard?”

“I wanted to see if it still worked.”

Claire frowned. “And does it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it works quite well.”

With that, he left the pair of them to puzzle out the terms of the old text and took the back way out. The air was like a humid, faintly cool caress. In no mood to be touched, Ran walked away from the illuminated house into a hoarse euphony of katydids and peepers, beneath a black sky smeared with stars.

Retracing his steps, he made a perfunctory search and failed to find the shotgun. But it was dark, and he was too disturbed to try that hard.

A waning gibbous moon was rising over the swamp. As he approached the hole he’d dug that afternoon, a coal-black silhouette materialized against a screen of shimmering light. It took Ran barely a second, maybe only half, to realize it was his reflection in a pool the thunderstorm had left, but for that second, that half of one, the figure staring up resembled someone else.

And what if it doesn’t happen, Hill? What if that happy future you’ve imagined doesn’t come to pass?

The questions were his own—Ran knew full well they were—yet it almost seemed the figure in the pool whispered or somehow insinuated them into his mind. His thoughts were becoming more and more abnormal—Ransom watched and knew the warning signs: chief among them, the fact that the further they deviated from normality the truer they began to seem, not in the common way, but with some harder, higher truth difficult to achieve, and once achieved, more difficult to stand. This dark other in the pool was not a stranger, nor a friend. He and Ransom were acquainted from way back, and Ran had been on the run from this encounter for some time.

And what happens when you find me?

“Sorry, bub,” Ran said aloud, “but what I’m interested in finding isn’t you.”

So what are you interested in finding—your “True Self”? the voice asked with a trace of hurtful scorn. Would you even know the thing to see it? And who’s to say that I’m not he?

“I guess I’ll have to go with my gut hunch.”

That’s really stood you in good stead so far.

“Fuck off,” said Ran halfheartedly, suddenly having trouble remembering which voice in the conversation was his own, and why it mattered, if indeed it did.

Entering the graveyard by the creaking gate, he sat down on a crypt, demoralized and out of gas. And now his sadness and his fears washed over him, and Ransom let them come. What if he lost Claire and the children? What if that sense of throbbing vividness she’d radiated at the airport yesterday came not from happiness at seeing him, not from being mistress of her own demesne again, but from loving someone else? What if however much