“Did you see him?” asked Neil, almost frantic. “Did you see him out there?”
Singing Rock said, “Yes, I saw him.”
“Thank God. Thank God for that. I was beginning to think I was imagining him.”
“I don’t know that his warnings can do anything to help us,” said Singing Rock. “It looks to me as though he’s just some disturbed spirit, vaguely manifesting himself around the fringe of all this astral activity.”
Neil didn’t take his eyes away from the grassy slope where Dunbar had vanished.
‘I’m not so sure,” he said softly. “I believe he helped me when the wooden man was after me, and I believe he’s going to try to help me now. Whenever he appears, I have this feeling of reassurance.”
Singing Rock looked briefly over at the hills beyond the fence. “Don’t rely too much on spirits,” he said. “Some of them are very treacherous. We have stories in South Dakota of demons who would take the shape of friendly dogs, and lead hunters into rivers and over the edge of cliffs.”
“Dunbar isn’t like that,” Neil said.
The kitchen door opened and Harry came out, holding a torn piece of brown envelope in his hand.
“Have they found them?” asked Neil. “Have they told you if Toby’s all right?”
Harry squinted at his scribbled notes. “They’ve found them. The bus is up at Lake Berryessa, where it was supposed to be. A Highway Patrol car spotted it parked on the bridge over Pope Creek.”
“Parked on the bridge? What was it doing there?” asked Neil. “Did they say where the children were?”
Harry nodded. “The children are inside the bus. When the Highway Patrol officers tried to drive up close to see what was wrong, their patrol car caught fire and exploded. One of the officers is suffering from serious burns.”
“Oh God,” said Neil. “It’s started.” “You’re damn right it’s started,” said Harry. “That must have been Master Andy Beaver at work. The automotive arsonist.”
Singing Rock said, “The boy called Andy Beaver is harboring the Paiute medicine man Broken Fire. I think so, anyway. He was the only child who referred to the day of the dark stars as the day of the mouth coming from the sky, which is an expression that only the Paiutes ever used. And, of course, he has Broken Fire’s talent for setting things ablaze at a distance.” “Broken Fire?” asked Harry. “Was he strong?”
Singing Rock laid a hand on his shoulder. “One of the strongest, I’m afraid. The only possible weaknesses he had were an inability to appease the demons of cholera and disease, and no talent for slaving the souls of his people who had been sent to the great outside by drinking too much whiskey, or by falling under iron horses. In other words, he was a master of every occult event except those which stemmed from things the white men had done-like spreading diseases, and building railroads, and distilling alcohol.”
Neil said, ‘Tor Christ’s sake don’t let’s stand here discussing the situation. Let’s get out there.”
“Neil’s right,” put in Harry. “If the Highway Patrol starts getting upset, they’re going to bring their guns out, and that’s going to be no fun for anyone. Especially them.”
“Very well,” nodded Singing Rock. “Can you bring my suitcase, Harry? And Neil-if you have any beer or soft drinks, and any cookies or cold cuts, then bring them along. It’s going to be the hardest night you ever went through.”
“Let’s just hope it isn’t the hardest and the last,” said Harry, pushing open the kitchen door.
Inland, as they drove in Neil’s pickup through the Valley of the Moon, the afternoon was densely hazy and hot. They negotiated the curved, cultivated hills that rose between Sonoma and Napa counties, past hillside farms of tan-colored cattle and furrowed fields, and then they were sloping down Into the broad flats of the southern Napa Valley. Ahead of them, blue and forested against dim sky, was the rugged outline of the Vaca Mountains. It was up there, beyond those peaks, that Lake Berryessa lay. A long rectangular sheet of ruffled water, twelve miles long and two miles across.
Singing Rock, steadily chewing tobacco, said, “In certain parts of New England, the Indians called rounded mountains uncanoonucks, which simply translated means
‘women’s breasts.’”
Harry, joggling up and down comfortably in his seat as Neil sped the pickup along the blacktop, commented, “What name do they have for medicine men who try to keep you amused by telling you trivial oddities of Indian lore?”
His elbow resting casually on the pickup’s window ledge, Singing Rock turned to Harry and smiled. “The same name they have for irritable paleface mystics.”
Neil leaned over and turned on the pickup’s radio. He twiddled the dial through blurts of country-and-western music, snatches of evangelism, burbles of laughing. He said,
“Maybe there’s some news about the school bus. The story should have gotten out by now.”
Singing Rock asked, “How long is it going to take us to get up to the lake from here?”
“Maybe another twenty minutes at most,” Neil told him. They were speeding along the freeway through Napa now, and he was switching lanes to leave the main road and head east through the city and up to the mountains.
He added, “I hope to God we’re not too late. If anything happened to Toby now, I tell you-”
Harry said reassuringly, “You heard what Singing Rock said. Nothing’s going to break until the moon goddess appears. It’s-what-four o’clock now. We’ve got six hours to go.”
They drove through the outskirts of Napa, along Lincoln Avenue. The traffic was heavy and flowing at a slow, sedate twenty miles an hour. There was nothing that Neil could do except hold his speed down and wait until they were clear of the city.
At each red traffic signal, he sat biting his lip and drumming his ringers on the steering wheel.
“Come on, come on, you bastard,” he muttered under his breath, as they finally crossed the city limit behind a rusting Matador. He put his foot down, and they pulled ahead, roaring along the eucalyptus-shaded avenue that led to the mountains.
A couple of miles east of Napa, the road began to rise sharply, and twist and turn itself between scrub and rocks. The pickup’s tires howled and whinnied as Neil kept his foot flat on the floor and spun them around one tight curve after another. They passed by fields of dry grasses, fences, and dusty roadside pull-offs. They crossed bridges and culverts. And up above them, the sky grew heavier and darker, thick with inky clouds. A branch of lightning flickered momentarily in the distance, and dried leaves rushed across the road in the draft of the oncoming storm.
Harry said, “The goddamn sky’s threatening enough, let alone the situation.”
Singing Rock raised a hand to hush him. “We’re getting close now. Very close. I’m going to need all my concentration.”
They drove around a curving downward grade, and the lake at last appeared. Its waters were almost black, even darker than the lowering clouds up above it. A surface wind lifted the waves in plumes of white spray, like the scattered feathers of a fallen bird. They looked sinister and unsettled, impenetrable depths that were waiting for the dead and the drowned.
“The Pope Creek bridge is around here,” said Neil, driving them along the rocky shoreline. Hardin and Maxwell and Burton creeks all run in together with Pope and they make quite an inlet.”
They rounded the corner toward the bridge, and they were confronted by a roadblock: half-a-dozen Highway Patrol cars, with their red lights flashing, a contingent of police from Napa, and a barricade of red-and-white sawhorses.