Cold Heart (7 page)

“You don't know what it's like out there, honey,” said Terry. “They killed your father.”

Dawn didn't want to fight the same old battle. There was no argument that would convince her mother that there was no
they.
That her father had been killed by a crazy act of violence. He'd been an innocent bystander, shot in a holdup. It could have happened to anyone.

“When I'm eighteen I'm going to leave,” said Dawn.

“I can't stop you.”

“But you won't come,” said Dawn. She didn't want to leave her mother. She just wanted to get the hell out of McRay.

“No,” said Terry, looking around the small clearing, at the high peaks, at the azure sky that had no match anywhere else in the world. “No. This is where I live.”

“You can't hide from the world, Mom,” said Dawn.

“Yes, you can.” Terry bent to heave the soapy water out
onto the ground. Dawn watched it form a rivulet then seep into the soggy soil, like blood into a bandage.

“People die out here, too,” said Dawn. But she had no proof of that. No one had died in McRay in her lifetime.

A jay leaped from its perch in a dead spruce and screamed away, angry. Terry and Dawn watched it go. Boots crunched on the trail that led along the creek and Dawn knew immediately who it was. El Hoskins.

She turned away, acting as though she hadn't heard, and slipped behind the cabin. She didn't like El and didn't want to have to be polite to him. Terry had told her on numerous occasions that she needed to act friendlier. El was their neighbor and he had always treated both of them with respect. But there was just something about El that always gave Dawn the creeps. The way he insisted on being called
Eldred
for one thing even though everyone in town called him El behind his back. Everyone except for Dawn's mother.

She heard her mother say hi and, to Dawn's dismay, El replied. He wasn't continuing down the trail. He was stopping to talk.

Great.

Dawn slumped against the logs of the cabin, twisting the wet handkerchief in her hands. The rough bark jabbed her back and she scrunched around, getting comfortable.

“Going to the store?” asked Terry.

“Mmm,” said El. Dawn could hear his boots, closer now, crunching in the gravel outside the cabin door.

“Nice day for it,” said Terry.

“Mmm,” said El. That was another one of the things that drove Dawn crazy, the way he talked. You had to drag words out of him. That and those stupid sunglasses he wore all the time. He looked like a janitor trying to look like a movie star. He was skinny and tall and his shirts were always pulling out of the back of his pants.

Dawn knew without sneaking a peek that he had that big.44 magnum pistol on his hip. The gun looked like it would weigh him down enough to flip him over. He always walked with his hand on it as though he was ready to do a quick draw.

Dawn had overheard Stan Herbst and Marty Kiley making fun of El one day down at Cabels’ Store. But her mother
had shaken her head and pulled her away from the conversation.

“He's a nice man,” Terry had said. “But I wish he wouldn't carry that gun. It makes me nervous.”

“All guns make you nervous,” Dawn replied.

“You're right,” said Terry. “But I guess people need them here. Not like in the city.”

But Dawn didn't think El carried the gun for protection. She figured he carried it for show. She'd seen him down at the store, watching himself in the window when he didn't know anyone else was looking.

“Could I have a cup of coffee?”

El's question shook Dawn out of her reverie.

Coffee?

El had never been in their house before. Never been invited.

Now he's inviting himself in?

Terry took a minute answering.

“Sure, Eldred,” she said. “You all right?”

“Mmm,” said El.

Dawn peeked around the corner. Her mother peered at El curiously but he just stared through her with those stupid mirror glasses. Terry headed into the house. El glanced around and almost spotted Dawn, but she jerked back.

“Where's your daughter?” he said.

Terry's answer was muffled by the thick, bark-sided logs. A pot clanged on the stove. There was another stretch of silence and then the bang of another pot hitting the floor.

What the hell?

Terry's scream sliced the air like scissors slashing thick cloth. At the sound, Dawn raced around the corner of the house toward the door. It was darker inside and the figures seemed more silhouettes than real people.

Her mother screamed again.

Another pot hit the floor. Then another.

But they weren't falling from the cabinets.

They were being ripped out of them.

A terrible clamor erupted as Terry clawed the last of the pots and dishware out of the cupboards. She wasn't screaming now. The noise that made its way out of her mouth was a throaty gurgle that terrified Dawn.

Terry must have turned to get the coffee from the canister and El had pulled the big hunting knife that he wore in the sheath on his boot.

As Dawn watched, paralyzed, El brought the knife up again, and then again, plunging it down so deep between Terry's shoulder blades the hilt hit her bloody shirt. Each time he had to lean his elbow against her back to lever it out of her flesh.

Terry's head sagged forward and she slumped over the counter as he continued to stab her limp body, following it down until he was on his knees above her. The blood pooled so wide and thick on the floor that Dawn thought it would never stop. That it would run in a river past her feet and turn the Fork itself crimson.

Terry's face was twisted toward the door. Dawn was riveted by her mother's eyes and her strangely calm expression. Dawn had anticipated surprise. Something like this was surely the last thing her mother expected to happen in McRay.

No one ever died here.

El fumbled, trying to wrench the knife out again. Another horrible guttural noise bubbled from Terry's lips, and Dawn gasped. El spun. He was an alien, with a humanoid face and giant glassine eyes.

Dawn couldn't comprehend what was happening. Couldn't figure out how to get her body to listen to her mind. Her mind kept screaming for her to run. But she couldn't move.

El struggled to his feet, leaving the giant knife pinning her mother to the floor.

He whipped the huge black Ruger out of its holster and pointed it at her.

She backed away two steps but she was still looking down the barrel of the gun that seemed large enough for her to crawl into.

She wondered if she would see the huge gray bullet coming at her eyes.

M
ICKY
STOOD
ON
HER front stoop, staring at the trail that forked in her front yard. One path led directly through the woods to Cabels’ Store. The other followed the creek, from the store all the way up the valley to Aaron McRay's cabin.

Creek or woods?

She was in a hurry. Clive might be busy and she wanted to be certain he could make time to pick up the crate.

She chose the woods.

But she had hardly started down the trail when a highpitched screech stopped her. It sounded for all the world like a woman screaming. Micky listened for a moment but heard nothing more. She wrote the sound off to the crying of a jay.

Then the
pop pop
of two muted gunshots stopped her again. The shots had come from across the creek. She turned in that direction.

Either Stan or Marty had hit a find. They always fired their rifles when they did.

Their claims and Damon's ran along three hundred yards of the South Fork and they had four different sluices set up there, long washboard affairs where they had diverted part of the stream.

Damon's claim was just this side of Marty and Stan's. But it wasn't Damon shooting. He hadn't worked on his claim since the year before. And Damon hated guns. His experience with violence was mostly secondhand. But it had scared him, nonetheless.

In the four years since she'd moved to McRay, Damon had spoken less and less of the experiences that had driven him to leave his profession. But she understood the internal pressures that had forced him into the life change. And she understood why he didn't want to have anything to do with guns. Vegler had killed his victims with a.22 rifle.

Micky had spent a day with Damon and Marty and Stan the past summer. Marty tried to teach her the intricacies of placer mining. He looked like a Tolkien dwarf, with his tangled beard and bushy gray brows. His shoulders were broad from years of hard work. Stan always said that Marty should smoke a long thin pipe, like Gandalf. But Marty was strong as a horse.

“You shovel it up and you dump it in,” Marty had said, doing just that. “Why don't you show the lady?” He gave Stan a look that said maybe Stan could do more with his shovel than lean on it.

Stan stalked off toward the other sluice box.

The gravel skittered down the washboard bottom of the sluice. The heaviest rocks and debris dropped between the ridges.

“Gold is heavier than anything,” Marty told her, picking out the larger pebbles and tossing them aside. She leaned over to see. Bright specks of gold gleamed through the icy water.

Damon was across the stream, fiddling with a hose on Marty's old diesel-powered pump.

“What's he doing?” she'd asked Marty.

“We use that to wash the gravel downs off the slopes and into that sluice box over there.” Marty pointed to a spot along the stream below Damon. “But the damn pump breaks down all the time. Not worth the effort.”

“Damon will get it running.”

Marty laughed, running a hand across his bald scalp. “He would. But he don't put in the time up here he used to.”

“Why not?”

“Damon's getting the bug.”

“The bug?”

“Starting to look for
The Mine.”

“Not Aaron's mine?”

“The same.”

“Damon told me it was a myth.”

“He don't believe that anymore. He thinks it's real.”

“You're kidding.”

“You know Damon.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered.

“He'll get over it,” said Marty.

“You haven't known him long enough.”

“Maybe you're right,” agreed Marty, grinning.

Suddenly a loud cursing rattled out from beneath Stan's sluice. Micky and Marty rushed over and leaned under the support braces to give Stan a hand. He'd slipped on the loose gravel and slid down the slope and managed to snap the shovel handle at the same time. Marty shook his head as Stan dusted himself off.

“Damn shovels are made in Taiwan,” muttered Stan.

“I never seen anyone break more tools than you,” said Marty, spitting.

“I think I got another one in my shed,” said Stan.

“Like hell you do. You're just going to go sit on your ass.”

“You got no call to talk to me like that.”

“Stan, you're the laziest bastard I know,” said Marty, winking at Micky, who had begun to get a little nervous. “You stay here and try to make yourself useful if that's possible. I have another shovel in the cache down by the Fork.”

Marty hiked off downtrail and Stan made a ceremony of filling his pipe. When he finally got it lit great puffs of smoke billowed around him.

“You like it here?” asked Stan.

“Yes,” said Micky.

Stan chewed the pipe and nodded knowingly. “Nice place to ruminate.”

“Ruminate?”

“That means to cogitate. Or muse.”

“I knew that,” said Micky.

“Nice place to do it.”

“I suppose it is.” Unlike Marty, who was a what you see is what you get type, Stan bewildered her. Was he trying to impress her with his vocabulary? Or was he serious?

“Sometimes I can stand for hours and stare at the mountains,” he said.

“They're pretty.”

“Drives Marty crazy.”

“I guess it would.”

“That's part of the beauty,” said Stan.

Damon had laid the hose parts down between his thighs and was staring up into the mountains himself. He had his hands on his hips. Silhouetted by the sun, he looked like a bronze statue.

“Damon told me that hard-rock mining wasn't worth a person's time,” she said.

Stan picked up Marty's shovel and tossed a half spadeful of gravel into the sluice. “It ain't, mostly. Not unless you're a big company. Takes a lot of heavy equipment.”

“Then why waste your time looking for a gold mine?”

“Well, if you find the mother lode, it's worth a fortune. I've seen a slice of gold as thick as your little finger wedged between two pieces of quartz. A man finds a vein like that, the equipment cost don't really matter. But it isn't the gold.”

“What do you mean?”

“People like Damon. And Aaron. When they get it into their head to find that vein, it isn't the money. It's the
finding.
”

Micky stared at Damon's back, his body set against the mountains, every bit as unyielding. And she knew exactly what Stan meant.

She smiled, remembering Stan's pleasure when he'd pulled a dime-sized nugget out of Marty's sluice. He wouldn't admit it.

But it was the finding with him and Marty too.

She hiked on. Away from the sound of the gun.

C
OME ON, DAWN, SAID EL
.

He was standing on Terry's clean laundry. Blood splotched his shirt and his pants and there was enough on his boots that he left partial red footprints on the damp sheets.

“You can't run through the bushes. There's nowhere to go.”

He strode across the laundry, kicking it away as a towel stuck to his foot. He stood in the center of the path, staring down into the alders on both sides of the stream. There was just enough of an opening in the trees there to allow Terry and Dawn to gather water.

Dawn had raced straightaway from the cabin door and instinctively dived into the thick foliage. Now she peeked out at El, not daring to move or breathe. Her thoughts raced. The rough gravel bit into her knees and elbows.

“There's nowhere for you to go!” he repeated, nodding to his right. “That way's my house.” He looked down the other direction, around the cabin and across the bridge. “And that way you have to go through me. You can't get away, Dawn.”