"Okay, okay. Sheeeesh, I'm not a baby."
"No," Jack said, as he fished cans out of a shopping bag. "But to a bear, you are a tasty-looking lunch."
"There's bears in the woods?" Toby asked. "Are there birds in the sky?" Jack asked. "Fish in the sea so stay in the yard," Heather reminded him. "Where I can find you easy, where I can see you." As he opened the back door, Toby turned to his father and said, "You better be careful too."
"Me?"
"That bird might come back and knock you on your 6s again." Jack pretended he was going to throw the can of beans that he was holding, and Toby ran from the house, giggling. The door banged shut behind him.
Later, after their purchases had been put away, Jack went into the study to examine Eduardo's book collection and select a novel to read, while Heather went upstairs to the guest bedroom where she was setting up — her array of computers.
They had taken the spare bed out and moved it to the cellar. The two six-foot folding tables, which had been among the goods delivered by the movers, now stood in place of the bed and formed an L-shaped work area. She'd unpacked her three computers, two printers, laser scanner, and associated equipment, but until now she'd had no chance to make connections and plug them in. As of that moment, she really had no use for such a high-tech array of computing power. She had worked on software and program design virtually all of her adult life, however, and she didn't feel complete with her machines disconnected and boxed up, regardless of whether or not she had an immediate project that required them.
She set to work, positioning the equipment, linking monitors to logic units, logic units to printers, one of the printers and logic units to the scanner, all the while happily humming old Elton John songs.
Eventually she and Jack would investigate business opportunities and decide what to do with the rest of their lives. By then the phone company would have installed another line, and the modem would be in operation. She could use data networks to research what population base and capitalization any given business required for success, as well as find answers to hundreds if not thousands of other questions that would influence their decisions and improve their chances for success in whatever enterprise they chose.
Rural Montana enjoyed as much access to knowledge as Los Angeles or.Manhattan or Oxford University. The only things needed were a telephone line, a modem, and a couple of good database subscriptions.
At three o'clock, after she'd been working about an hour-the equipment connected, everything working- Heather got up from her chair and stretched.
Flexing the muscles in her back, she went to the window to see if flurries had begun to fall ahead of schedule.
The November sky was low, a uniform shade of lead gray, like an immense plastic panel behind which glowed arrays of dull fluorescent tubes.
She fancied that she would have recognized it as a snow sky even if she hadn't heard the forecast. It looked as cold as ice. In that bleak light, the higher woods appeared to be more gray than green.
The backyard and, to the south, the brown fields seemed barren rather than merely dormant in anticipation of the spring.
Although the landscape was nearly as monochromatic as a charcoal drawing, it was beautiful. A different beauty from that which it offered under the warm caress of the sun. Stark, somber, broodingly majestic. She saw a small spot of color to the south, on the cemetery knoll not far from the perimeter of the western rest. Bright red. It was Toby in his new ski suit.
He was standing inside the foot-high fieldstone wall. I should have told him to stay away from there, Heather thought with a twinge of apprehension. Then she wondered at her uneasiness. Why should the cemetery seem any more dangerous to her than the yard immediately outside its boundaries? She didn't believe in ghosts or haunted places.
The boy stood at the grave markers, utterly still. She watched him for a minute, a minute and a half, but he didn't move. For an eight-year-old, who usually had more energy than a nuclear plant, that was an extraordinary period of inactivity. The gray sky settled lower while she watched. The land darkened subtly. Toby stood unmoving.
The arctic air didn't bother Jack-invigorated him, in fact-except that it penetrated especially deeply into the thighbones and scar tissue of his left leg. He did not have to limp, however, as he ascended the hill to the private graveyard. He passed between the four-foot-high stone posts that, gateless, marked the entrance to the burial ground. His breath puffed from his mouth in frosty plumes.
Toby was standing at the foot of the fourth grave in the line of four.
His arms hung straight at his sides, his head was bent, and his eyes were fixed on the headstone. The Frisbee was on the ground beside him.
He breathed so shallowly that he produced only a faint mustache of steam that repeatedly evaporated as each brief exhalation became a soft inhalation… "What's up?" Jack asked.
The boy did not respond.
The nearest headstone, at which Toby stared, was engraved with the name THOMAS FERNANDEZ and the dates of birth and death. Jack didn't need the marker to remind him of the date of death, it was carved on his own memory far deeper than the numbers were cut into the granite before him.
Since they'd arrived Tuesday morning, after staying the night with Paul and Carolyn Youngblood, Jack had been too busy to inspect the private cemetery.
Furthermore, he'd not been eager to stand in front of Tommy's grave, where memories of blood and loss and despair were certain to assail him.
To the left of Tommy's marker was a double stone. It bore the names of his parents-EDUARDO and MARGARITE. Though Eduardo had been in the ground only a few months, Tommy for a year, and Margaret for three years, all of their graves looked freshly dug. The dirt was mounded unevenly, and no grass grew on it, which seemed odd, because the fourth grave was flat and covered with silky brown grass. He could understand that gravediggers might have disturbed the surface of Margarite's plot in order to bury Eduardo's coffin beside hers, but that didn't explain the condition of Tommy's site. Jack made a mental note to ask Paul Youngblood about it.
The last monument, at the head of the only grassy llot, belonged to Stanley Quartermass, patron of them. An inscription in the weathered black stone surprised a chuckle out of Jack when he least expected it.
Here lies Stanley Quartermass dead before his time because he had to work with so damned many actors and writers.
Toby had not moved.
"What're you up to?" Jack asked.
No answer.
He put one hand on Toby's shoulder.
"Son?"
Without shifting his gaze from the tombstone, the boy said, "What're they doing down there?"
"Who? Where?"
"In the ground."
"You mean Tommy and his folks, Mr. Quartermass?"."What're they doing down there?"
There was nothing odd about a child wanting to fully understand death.
It was no less a mystery to the young than to the old. What seemed strange to Jack was the way the question had been phrased.
"Well," he said, "Tommy, his folks, Stanley Quartermass they aren't really here."
"Yes, they are."
"No, only their bodies are here," Jack said, gently massaging the boy's shoulder.
"Why?"
"Because they were finished with them."
The boy was silent, brooding.
Was he thinking about how close his own father had come to being planted under a similar stone? Maybe enough time had passed since the shooting for Toby to be able to confront things that he'd been repressing.
The mild breeze from out of the northwest stiffened slightly. Jack's hands were cold. He put them in his jacket pockets and said, "Their bodies weren't them, anyway, not the real them."