Albert flinched. “I… I didn’t know. They said they were with the Forest Service themselves.”
He was lying. Daniel crossed his arms and waited until Albert’s eyes slid away from his. “They’re coming up to wreck the greenhouse tonight. If you’re there, they might even kill you.”
“No.” Albert had gone white. “Maybe… maybe some of them are getting used… for the wrong purpose. But they’re getting planted. They’re growing. And I’ve made them… hardier. They’ll survive this time. Do you know how hard that was to do? I’m as good as your mother. I am. She wouldn’t run from me, now.”
Daniel looked at his angry, pleading face, and pitied him. You’ll never understand her, he thought sadly. “Keri has an old pickup that runs. You’ll have to buy gas, though.”
“I don’t believe any of this crap.”
Daniel shrugged and started to walk away.
“Wait.” Breathing hard, Albert ran after him. “All right. I’ll go with Keri. Taking her along is the price, right?”
“Uh-huh.” Daniel smiled.
Albert mumbled something under his breath, but he nodded once, jerkily. “All right,” he said. “I can probably get her a scholarship year at the school of art. If she doesn’t keep her grades up, I can’t help her.”
“She’ll keep her grades up,” Daniel said. “Her cabin is this way.”
He came back through the clearing just before dawn. Albert had gotten very quiet when he looked at Keri’s paintings. He wasn’t taking her along just because Daniel had coerced him. Not anymore. Maybe it would mean something to him, to have discovered a famous artist. It would give Keri the start she needed. He didn’t doubt that she would take it from there— even with a child. Keri had been reluctant, but not very.
In the graying light, the stallion scented the wind, testing for cougar. Daniel shed the daypack he was wearing, opened it and fished out the small plants it contained, cupping them lovingly.
People from town had destroyed the greenhouse during the night, but he had found these among the wrecked benches and broken equipment. Tiny green flowers peeped from among the leaves. The orchids his mother had showed him. They were nothing special to look at. As he scooped shallow holes beneath the horses and tucked the plants into the moist dirt around their hooves, he wondered briefly if Albert would ever find out that it was Daniel who had told people in town about his plants.
He didn’t care.
He straightened slowly. The horses were finished. Unexpected tears stung his eyes, because he wished they were his—that he had talent like Keri. As he stepped back, he felt his mother’s ghost. It surrounded him for an instant, brushing the edges of his mind with love and sorrow. “You felt them die, didn’t you?” Daniel murmured. The horses, wild tree species, all the plants and animals and people that couldn’t adapt. “Dad was like the horses, wasn’t he? Something from before—something that couldn’t change.” His tears spilled over and the horses blurred, seeming to shift restlessly, as if they would bolt into the woods at any second and vanish. “I’m not like you,” he whispered. “You knew that, too.”
Her ghost left him suddenly, the way they faded, dissipating on the wind. “Good-bye,” Daniel whispered. “I love you.”
The wind touched his cheek, drying the tears before they could fall. And he turned away, picking up the empty daypack, thinking of his tall powerful brother, who was built like a TV wrestler—thinking about Jess’s face—the way it had looked that last night beneath the porch light. Jess was Albert’s son. Unmistakably so.
He started home, tired, to tell Jess that Keri was gone. He and Dad would go out on the Wallowah contract, and maybe Jess really would go to work for a Preserve, because he wasn’t like Dad. He could change.
Clouds were boiling up in the west, and the first gusty breath of the coming storm riffled his hair as he reached the plantation trees. They swayed with the gust, and their singing filled his head. He knew, the way he knew things, that when he went back to the clearing, the horses would be gone. Scattered by the wind, you could say. Finished. “Good-bye,” Daniel said again, and felt the faintest brush of fingertips on his face.