"Chin up, Ally. After Friday, it will all be over."
Ally rolled her eyes. "I'll tell you what's going to be over...Freddie Joe's dreams."
Danny laughed out loud.
"Atta girl. You tell 'em, sister." Then he yelled down the hallway at Porter. "Are you coming to town with me or not?"
"What for?" Porter yelled. "We got laid off."
"Yeah, but I heard the seed store's hiring down in Blue—"
"I don't care who's hiring where. I'm not in the mood," Porter said. "I'm going hunting."
"Whatever," Danny said. "See you later." He got in his truck and drove away, while Porter got his hat and gun and headed out the back door.
Once they were gone, Ally hurried through the dishes, then packed up the extra biscuits and ham, changed into her walking shoes and hurried out the door.
Wes woke up in a cold sweat with his hands around an Iraqi soldier's neck, only to realize it was a pillow he was strangling. He groaned, then shoved it aside as he willed the dream into hell. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and grunted in surprise when he almost bumped his chin on his knees. He'd forgotten the bed was so low.
He turned on the light, then made his way into the bathroom. Despite the lack of hot water, it felt wonderful to be clean all over. He took his time in the shower, but when he began to dry off, he found that he didn't like the face in the mirror. He tied his hair back with a shoelace, then went through the drawers in the house until he found a pair of scissors. It took another thirty minutes to get rid of his beard.
First he cut until he couldn't cut any closer, then he picked up his razor to finish the task. As he was shaving, the memory of Mikey's first and last shave nearly sent him to his knees. He choked back a sob, then gritted his teeth to finish the job.
Later, as he was digging through his bag for clean clothes, his stomach began to grumble. Although he'd eaten snacks on the road, the meal he'd had yesterday
at Ally Monroe's house had been his only real meal in two days. Now his belly was objecting to the sparse fare.
Once dressed, and feeling slightly light-headed at the lack of his beard, he started toward the kitchen. Even though he'd given the odd little house the onceover yesterday, in the light of day he saw dozens of things that he'd missed seeing before. There was a small shelf in the hallway with a carving of a dog. He thought he recognized it as the old hound from down the hill and marveled at the skill with which it had been carved. The shelves in the living room were stacked with books, including quite a few that identified flora and fauna native to the United States, as well as some bestsellers. It seemed that Uncle Doo had a fondness for Tom Clancy novels. But when Wes spied a stack of Spider-Man comic books stacked neatly beside them, he smiled. The old man must have been a treat.
His stomach rumbled again, so he abandoned the books for another time and headed into the kitchen. He was in the pantry looking for coffee when he heard a knock on the door. He started to panic, imagining some locals coming to accuse him of breaking and entering; then he heard a voice he recognized.
"Wes Holden? It's Ally Monroe."
His first instinct was that she had changed her mind and wanted him gone, and he was surprised by feeling regret. He backed out of the pantry and then hurried to the door.
The greeting Ally had planned died in her mind when she saw his face. The beard was gone. Before, all she'd seen were those clear blue eyes; now she had a face to go with them. Then she found her voice and thrust a small woven basket into his hands.
"Breakfast," she said briefly, and walked past him without an invitation to come in. "I was hoping you'd stay. I'll show you how some of the things work here, then you're on your own."
Wes stood there with the basket in his hand, smelling fresh biscuits and fried ham and watching the slight sway of her walk as she went into the kitchen. She paused in the archway, then turned around.
"Well...come on."
He followed because intuition told him that her agenda for the day was probably better than his own—and because he suddenly couldn't wait to sink his teeth into this food.
"There's a small can of coffee in the basket," she said. "You'd better like it black, because I didn't cart any milk or cream."
"Black is good," he said, somewhat leery of her presence. Then he set the basket on the table. "I didn't expect this," he said.
Ally filled the carafe on the coffeemaker with water, poured it into the machine, then pushed the On button before turning around.
"I know that," she said. "Just like you never expected a meal and a place to stay when you asked me for a drink of water." Then she pointed to the basket. "Dig in. The coffee will be ready soon."
Wes Holden was a tall man, but in here he looked immense and somewhat distrusting of her presence.
"Don't think you're going to get this kind of treatment again," she said, and then grinned. "Consider it your welcome-to-the-neighborhood visit. One is expected, but one is all you get. After that, it's up to you whether or not you want to return the kindness."
Wes nodded, took out a biscuit and ate it in three bites.
"That was phenomenal," he said as he reached for another.
"Thank you. Mother always said I had a light hand with bread-making. I'm glad you enjoyed it."
"Still am enjoying it," he said, and bit into the second one.
"Coffee is ready," she said, and poured him a cup, then began prowling through the pantry. She poked her head out long enough to ask, "Can you cook?"
"Enough," he said, talking around the mouthful of biscuit and ham.
She nodded, then showed him where and how to light the gas pilot on the water heater, and how to operate the washer and dryer.
"There's enough laundry detergent left to do a couple of loads. After that, you'll need to get more. Do you have any money?"
Taken aback by her lack of pretense, he answered before he thought to hide the fact that he was more or less broke.
"Not enough to brag about."
"Are you hindered in any way?"
"What?"
She pointed to his body. "You know...weak back...hard of hearing...that sort of thing."
He wondered if being on the verge of insanity counted, then decided not to ask.
"No. Nothing like that," he said.
"I heard they're needing help at the feed store in Blue Creek."
"Blue Creek?"
She frowned. "Didn't you come through town on your way up the mountain?"
"No."
Her eyes widened. "Then how did you get here?"
"I don't know. I was on a highway, and I just walked off it and started up into the trees. Your house was the first place I'd come to."
"You came up the steep side."
"I guess," Wes said.
"Lord have mercy," Ally said softly.
"That would be a first," Wes countered, then turned his back on her and reached for his coffee.
Ally's heart went out to him, even as she frowned. That wasn't the first time that he'd indicated a huge lack of faith in a higher power.
"Anyway," she continued, as if the conversation hadn't taken a detour, "the feed store down in Blue Creek needs help. I heard Danny talking about it to Porter at breakfast, only Porter wasn't interested."
"Danny is your brother?"
"Yes. So's Porter. Gideon is my father. He works at a lumber mill."
"So don't you think Danny has already applied for the job?"
"No. He's worked there before. He and the owner didn't get along."
"Then what makes you think I would be any different?" Wes asked.
Ally shrugged. "Well, for starters, you're a whole lot bigger than Harold James, who owns the store. Harold is sort of bossy, and Danny is quick to anger, but you look like a man with a long fuse."
Her reference to not being quick-tempered almost made Wes laugh. He choked back what had started out as a chuckle, again shocked at himself for even entertaining joy.
"So you don't think I'm the type of man to fight back?"
Ally looked at his face, then down at his hands.
"I think if you wanted to, you could do a whole lot more than hit him," she said, and then headed for the door.
Wes followed her in spite of himself.
"Uh...hey...where are you going?" he asked.
"Home."
He stopped. "Just like that?"
She paused, then turned around.
"Did you have something else you wanted to say to me?" she asked.
Put on the spot, he immediately shook his head no.
"Okay, then. Neither do I. Have a nice day, Wes Holden."
"Yeah...uh...you, too...and, uh, thank you for the food."
"You're welcome," she said, and walked out onto the stoop.
Wes followed. "Hey...about Blue Creek."
"What?"
"How far is it from here?"
She pointed down the road from which she'd come.
"Five miles. Population eight hundred and forty-six until Georgia Lee gives birth to her seventh, at which time there will be eight hundred and forty-seven. Tell Harold I sent you."
"All right, and...thanks."
"You're welcome," she said, and kept on walking.
There was a moment when Wes thought about going with her, just following her down the mountain and into that sweet-smelling house. The way her mind worked was fascinating, and he thought he might like to just sit and listen to her talk.
Then reality surfaced. He went back into the toadstool house and headed for the kitchen. There were four more biscuits and some ham that needed his undivided attention. After that, he was going to do a little gardening, then take a walk—maybe down to Blue Creek, maybe to see a man named Harold James about a job.
Eight
Roland Storm had known the day the lab rats tried to gnaw through the cages to get to the leaves on the other side of the wire that he was on to something big. That was six months ago. Today, when he'd come into the lab to run the tests, he'd realized that there might be a big drawback to his experiment. Eleven of twelve rats were belly-up in their cages.
Dead.
Odd injuries were also evident on the bodies, injuries that made no sense. The rat cages had been side-by-side along the wall, although none of the rats had been caged together. He stared intently at the bodies, trying to figure out why the two front paws of nearly every rat were bloody—some horribly mutilated and one missing a paw completely. When Roland found the paw in the adjoining cage, he inadvertently shuddered. What in hell had happened here?
His shock turned to horror as the twelfth rat suddenly fell over on its side, its body racked with spasms. A white froth appeared at its mouth, and a few agonizing seconds later, it was dead.
"Shit," Roland muttered. "What just happened?"
Roland had a master's degree in biology, a Ph.D. in genetic engineering and a Ph.D. in chemistry. He was no novice at research, but nothing about this particular project had prepared him for one-hundred-percent failure.
After years of experimentation and dead ends, he had been certain he had created the perfect hallucinogenic drug. More addictive than heroin, so as to keep users in need, easy to grow, harvest and ingest, and a genetic hybrid, which made it impossible to identify, since the plants grew in naturally irregular heights and shades of green, and could not be duplicated without his notes, which meant he would control the entire market.
From the air, the field would appear as one that had been left fallow by a farmer with more land than time and overgrown by weeds. On foot, a dozen DEA agents could come upon a field of the stuff and never see it as something other than grayish-green weeds with thick stalks. He called it Triple H for "heaven and hell of a high," because that was what a user would get, at least if his analyses were correct.
None of it might ever have happened if not for the unexpected inheritance of this house and land from a distant uncle. It had been a godsend in more ways than one. Not only did he now have a home, but also the perfect setup for his work. He had the isolation he needed to conduct experiments without interruptions, and once he'd developed the hybrid, he had the fifty acres of land on which to grow his genetically altered crops.
He lived alone, worked alone, slept alone, content to be the last house at the end of the road that began eight miles away down in Blue Creek. No one but the mailman ever came this far.