Breathless Read online

  Five years younger than Jim, she had married him only twelve years ago, according to the author’s bio on the poetry books. Henry had never met her or seen a photograph of her.

  She called him Claude, but he quickly corrected her. He never used his first name, but instead answered to his middle.

  When she kissed his cheek, her breath smelled cinnamony. She said she’d been nibbling a sweetroll when she heard the Land Rover.

  Inside, on the kitchen table, beside the sweetroll plate were what Henry assumed to be five utility knives, useful for farm tasks.

  As Nora poured coffee, she said nothing about the knives. Neither did Jim as he moved them—and two slotted sharpening stones—from the table to a nearby counter.

  Nora insisted that Henry stay with them, though she warned him that a sofa bed was all they had by way of accommodations, in the claustrophobic room that Jim called an office.

  “Haven’t had a houseguest in nine years,” Jim said, and it seemed to Henry that a knowing look passed between husband and wife.

  The three of them fell into easy conversation around the kitchen table, over homemade cinnamon rolls and coffee.

  Nora proved charming, and her laugh was infectious. Her hands were strong and rough from work, yet feminine and beautifully shaped.

  She had nothing in common with the sharky women who cruised in Henry’s circle in the city. He was happy for his brother.

  Even as he marveled at how warmly they welcomed him, at how they made him feel at home and among family, as he had never felt with Jim before, Henry was not entirely at ease.

  His vague disquiet arose in part from his perception that Jim and Nora were in a private conversation, one conducted without words, with furtive looks, nuanced gestures, and subtle body language.

  Jim expressed surprise that someone had drawn Henry’s attention to his poetry. “Why would they think we were related?”

  They didn’t share the name Rouvroy. Following their parents’ divorce, Jim had legally taken his mother’s maiden name, Carlyle.

  “Well,” Henry said drily, “maybe it was your photo on the book.”

  Jim laughed at his thickheadedness, and although he seemed to be embarrassed by his brother’s praise, they talked about his poems. Henry’s favorite, “The Barn,” described the humble interior of that structure with such rich images and feeling that it sounded no less beautiful than a cathedral.

  “The greatest beauty always is in everyday things,” Jim said. “Would you like to see the barn?”

  “Yes, I would.” Henry admired his brother’s poetry more than he had yet been able to say. Jim’s verses had an ineffable quality so haunting it was not easy to discuss. “I’d like to see the barn.”

  Clearly in love with this piece of the world that he and Nora had made their own, Jim grinned, nodded, and rose from the table.

  Nora said, “I’ll put linens on the sofa bed and start thinking about what’s for dinner.”

  Following Jim from the kitchen, Henry glanced at the knives on the counter. On second consideration, they looked less like ordinary task knives than like thrust-and-cut weapons. The four- and five-inch blades had nonreflective finishes. Two seemed to feature assisted-opening mechanisms for quick blade release.

  Then again, Henry knew nothing about farming. These knives might be standard stock at any farm-supply store.

  Outside, the afternoon air remained mild. From the split cords of pine came the scent of raw wood.

  Overhead, two magnificent birds with four-foot wingspans glided in intersecting gyres. The ventral feathers of the first were white with black wing tips. The second was boldly barred in white and brown.

  “Northern harriers,” Jim said. “The white one with the black tips is the male. Harriers are raptors. When they’re hunting, they fly low over the fields and kill with a sudden pounce.”

  He worked the axe loose from the tree-stump chopping block.

  “Better put this away in the barn,” he said, “before I forget and leave it overnight.”

  “Harriers,” Henry said. “They’re so beautiful, you don’t think of them as killing anything.”

  “They eat mostly mice,” Jim said. “But also smaller birds.”

  Henry grimaced. “Cannibalism?”

  “They don’t eat other harriers. Their feeding on smaller birds is no more cannibalism than us feeding on other mammals—pigs, cows.”

  “Living in the city, I guess we idealize nature,” Henry said.

  “Well, when you accept the way of things, there’s a stark kind of beauty in the dance of predators and prey.”

  Heading to the barn, Jim carried the axe in both hands, as if to raise and swing it should he see something that needed to be chopped.

  The harriers had fled the sky.

  When Henry glanced back toward the house, he saw Nora watching them from a window. With her pale hair and white blouse, she looked like a ghost behind the glass. She turned away.

  “Life and death,” Jim said as they drew near the barn.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Predators and prey. The necessity of death, if life is to have meaning and proportion. Death as a part of life. I’m working on a series of poems with those themes.”

  Jim opened the man-size entrance beside the pair of larger barn doors. Henry followed his brother into the wedge of sunshine that the door admitted to this windowless and otherwise dark space.

  Inside, in the instant before the lights came on, Henry was gripped by the expectation that before him would be some sight for which Jim’s poem had not prepared him, that the poem was a lie, that the truck farming and the quilting and the simple-folks image were all lies, that the reality of this place and these people was more terrible than anything he could imagine.

  When Jim threw a switch, a string of bare light bulbs brightened the length of that cavernous space, revealing the barn to be nothing more than a barn. A tractor and a backhoe were garaged on the left. Two horses occupied stalls on the right. The air was fragrant with the scents of hay and feed grain.

  Although Henry’s alarming premonition had proved false, and although he knew that fearing his brother was as absurd as fearing the tractor or the horses, or the smell of hay, his sense of a nameless impending horror did not abate.

  Behind him, the barn door swung shut of its own weight.

  Jim turned to him with the axe, and Henry shrank back, and Jim stepped past him to hang the axe on a rack of tools.

  Heart racing, breath suddenly ragged, Henry drew the SIG P245 from the snugly fit shoulder rig under his jacket and shot his twin point-blank, twice in the chest and once in the face.

  Henry had come here with the hope that his relationship with his brother would change, and his hope had been fulfilled. Claude Henry Rouvroy was in the process of becoming James Carlyle.

  The pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and the shots were no louder than a horse cutting wind. Indeed, neither of the horses had been spooked by the gunfire.

  Standing over the corpse, Henry strove to quiet his breathing. His tremors forced him to holster the pistol to avoid accidentally squeezing off another round.

  He had worried that his brother would grow suspicious of him, and he had feared that he would not be able to pull the trigger when the time came. In the process of assiduously repressing those fears so that he could carry out his plan, he projected his motivations onto Jim, imagining a conspiracy between him and Nora, finding in everyday objects—the knives, the axe—proof of sinister intentions. He had misread menace in innocent actions: Nora watching them from the window, Jim talking about the harriers, about predators and prey.

  After a couple of minutes, when his breathing returned to normal and the tremors abated, Henry was able to laugh at himself. Although his laughter was soft, something about it disturbed the horses. They whinnied nervously and pawed the stall floors with their hooves.

  Grady Adams lived in a two-story house with silvered cedar siding and a black slate roof, the
last of ten residences on a county road. The two-lane blacktop had no official name, only a number, but locals called it Cracker’s Drive, after Cracker Conley, who built—and for forty years occupied—the house in which Grady now lived.

  No one remembered what Cracker’s first name had been or why he was called Cracker. Evidently he was an eccentric and certainly a recluse, because to the locals, Cracker was more of a legend than he was a real neighbor with whom they had interacted.

  In their minds, Conley’s addiction to solitude forever affected the character of the house itself. They rarely called it the Conley place or Cracker’s place, never the Adams house or even the house at the end of the lane. It was known as the hermit’s house, and in respect of the name, they tended to keep their distance.

  Most of the time, their reticence suited Grady just fine. He was not a misanthrope. But in recent years, he had enough experience—too much—of people, which was why he returned to these sparsely populated mountains. For at least a while, perhaps a long while, he preferred the solitude that Cracker Conley apparently had cherished.

  In the kitchen, after returning from the hike on which the intriguing animals had been encountered, Grady prepared Merlin’s four o’clock meal. Preparation took longer than consumption.

  “You were well named, the way you make food vanish.”

  The dog licked his chops and ambled to the door to be let out.

  Half of the three-acre property lay behind the house. After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin’s newspaper.

  On the back porch, with an icy bottle of beer, Grady sat in one of two teak rockers with wine-red cushions.

  A low table with a black-marble top stood beside the chair. Stacked on the table were three reference books from his library.

  As intent as a detective at a crime scene, nose to the grass, Merlin vacuumed every clue to the identities of all trespassers.

  A large paper birch overhung the north side of the house, and three others graced the yard, their white bark tinted gold in places by the late-afternoon sun. At times, Merlin seemed to be following the intricate patterns the trees cast upon the lawn, as if their shadows were cryptography that he intended to read and decode.

  No fence was needed to contain him. He never rebelled against the rule to stay within his master’s sight.

  Grady’s property ended where mown lawn gave way to tall grass. The forest loomed, the land rose under the forest, the foothills broke in green waves against the mountains, and the mountains soared.

  From time to time, Merlin marked his territory. For the more substantive half of his toilet, he waded into the tall grass, where there would be no need to pick up after him. Even then he remained within sight, for the grass didn’t rise above his brisket.

  When he returned to the yard, he raced in great circles and figure eights, chasing nothing, running for the delight of running. His long legs were made for galloping, his heart for joy.

  The dog’s beauty was not just that of a well-bred breed, but also the more profound beauty that confirms its source and inspires hope. Two things that most comforted Grady were making Craftsman-style furniture—which was his trade—and watching Merlin.

  When the wolfhound returned to the porch, drank from his water bowl, and lay in happy exhaustion beside the rocking chair, Grady picked up the first of the books on the table. Like the other two, this one was a reference guide to the wildlife in these mountains.

  He had traded bustle for rustic, power for peace, and glamor for the honesty of this artless landscape. Artless it was, because nature stood above mere art, with none of art’s pretensions.

  Having made this trade, he wanted to know the names of the things he loved about this land. Taking the trouble to know the names of things was a way of paying them respect.

  His library contained dozens of volumes about the flora, the fauna, the geology, and the natural history of these mountains. This trio offered more photographs than the others.

  None of the three books contained a picture of any animal remotely like the pair in the meadow.

  As the sun descended toward the peaks, Merlin rose and moved to the head of the porch steps. He stood as if serving as a sentinel, gazing across the backyard toward the tall grass, the woods beyond.

  The wolfhound made a sound that was half purr and half growl, not as if warning of danger, but as if something puzzled him.

  “What is it? Smell something, big guy?”

  Merlin did not look at Grady but remained intent upon the deepening shadows among the distant trees.

  Walls of shimmering gold and a treasure of gold cascading along the blacktop: The private lane that led to High Meadows Farm was flanked by quaking aspens in their autumn dress, which lent value to the late-afternoon sunshine and paid out rich patterns of light and shadow across the windshield of Cammy’s Explorer.

  She drove past the grand house, to the equestrian facilities, and parked at the end of a line of horse trailers. Carrying her medical bag, she walked to the exercise yard, which was flanked by two stables painted emerald-green with white trim.

  A promising yearling had come down with urticaria—nettle rash, as the older grooms called it. This allergic reaction would eventually clear up naturally, but for the comfort of the horse, Cammy could relieve the urticaria with an antihistamine injection.

  At the end of the yard, a third building housed the tack room and the office of the trainer, Nash Franklin. Living quarters for the grooms were on the second floor.

  Lights glowed in Nash’s office. The door stood open, but Cammy could find no one. The enormous tack room also proved to be deserted.

  In the first stable, Cammy discovered the stall doors open on both sides of the central aisle. The horses were gone.

  Stepping outside once more, she heard voices and followed them to the fenced meadow on the north side of the building.

  The Thoroughbreds were in the pasture: the yearlings, the colts and fillies, the broodmares, the studhorses, the current racers, at least forty of them in all. She’d never seen them gathered in one place before, and she couldn’t imagine for what purpose they had been brought together.

  Many of the horses were accompanied by their pets. High-strung, sensitive creatures, Thoroughbreds tended to be happier and calmer when they had a companion animal that hung with them and even shared their stalls. Goats were successful in this role, and to a lesser extent, dogs. But the meadow also contained a few cats, even a duck.

  The fact of this assembly, the herd and its menagerie, was not the most curious thing about the scene. As Cammy passed through the gate and into the pasture, she noted that every one of the animals faced west, toward the mountains. They were extraordinarily still.

  Heads raised, eyes fixed, they seemed less to be staring at something than to be … listening.

  Suddenly she realized that she was witnessing a scene similar to what Ben Aikens had described when, in her absence, the rescued golden retrievers had gotten to their feet to listen to something that none of the people present had been able to hear.

  The eastward-slanting light brightened the equine faces. Black shadows flowed backward from their heads, like continuations of their manes, flowed off their rumps and tails, reaching eastward across the grass even as the horses yearned toward the west.

  Also in the pasture were half a dozen grooms. And the owners of High Meadows Farm, Helen and Tom Vironi.

  Clearly perplexed, the people moved among the herd, gently touching the Thoroughbreds, speaking softly. But the animals appeared to be oblivious of them.

  The goats, the dogs, the cats, the single duck were likewise entranced, seeming to hearken to something only animals could hear.

  Tall enough to look into a horse’s eyes even when it stood proud with its head raised, Nash Franklin spotted Cammy. She and the trainer made their way toward each other.

  “They’ve been
like this for almost fifteen minutes,” Nash said. “It started with a few in the exercise yard, a few in the pasture.”

  According to her vet tech Ben Aiken, the golden retrievers had stood in their trance for only a minute or so.

  Nash said, “Those in the stables began to kick the walls around them so violently, we worried they’d injure themselves.”

  “They were afraid of something?”

  “That isn’t how it seemed. More just … determined to be let out. We didn’t know what was happening. We still don’t.”

  “You released them?”

  “Felt we had to. They came right to the pasture to be with the others. And they won’t be led away. What’s happening here, Cammy?”

  She approached the nearest horse, Gallahad. A deep mahogany, almost black, the magnificent three-year-old weighed perhaps twelve hundred pounds.

  Like the other horses, in his perfect stillness, Gallahad appeared to be tense, stiff. But when Cammy stroked his loin, his flank, and forward to his shoulder, she found that he was at ease.

  She pressed her hand against his jugular groove and traced it along his muscular neck. The horse neither moved nor even so much as rolled an eye to consider her.

  Cammy stood five feet four, and Gallahad towered, immense. Great Thoroughbreds were usually tractable, and some might be docile with the right trainer, but few were entirely submissive. Yet in this peculiar moment, Gallahad seemed lamblike. Nothing in the intensity of his concentration on the western mountains suggested fierceness or even willfulness.

  His nostrils didn’t flare, neither did his ears twitch. His forelock fluttered against his poll as a faint breeze disturbed it, and his mane stirred along his crest, but otherwise Gallahad remained motionless. Even when she stroked his cheek, his nearer eye did not favor her.

  Following his gaze, she saw nothing unusual in the foreground, only the next wave of foothills and the mountains in the background, and ultimately the sun swollen by the lens of atmosphere as Earth resolutely turned away from the light.

  At her side, Nash Franklin said, “Well?”

  Before she could reply, the horses stirred from their trance. They shook their heads, snorted, looked around. A few lowered their muzzles to graze upon the sweet grass, while others cantered in looping patterns as if taking pure pleasure from movement, from the cool air, from the orange light that seemed to burst through the pasture. The Thoroughbreds’ pets became animated as well, the goats and the dogs, the cats, the duck.

  All the animals were behaving only as they ordinarily would, no longer spellbound. Yet here in the aftermath of the event, when all was normal, all seemed magical: the whispering grass, the soft incantatory thud of cantering hooves, the canticle of nickering horses and panting dogs, the season’s last lingering fireflies suddenly bearing their wishing lamps through the pre-dusk air, the sable shadows and the gilding of all things by the descending sun, the sky electric-purple in the east and becoming a cauldron of fire in the west.

  The grooms and the exercise boys, the trainer and his assistant, Helen and Tom Vironi, and Cammy Rivers all turned to one another with the same unasked and unanswerable questions: Why did the animals seem enchanted? What did they hear if they heard anything at all? What happened here? What is still happening? What is this I feel, this wonder without apparent cause, this expectancy of I-know-not-what, this sense that something momentous passed through the day without my seeing it?

  Cammy’s vision blurred. She did not know why tears filled her eyes. She blotted them on her shirtsleeve and blinked, blinked for clarity.

  The harrier glided out of the east, into the autumnal light of the declining sun, less than ten feet above the harvested fields, its elongated shadow rippling over the furrowed earth behind it. The bird dropped abruptly and snared something from the ground while remaining in flight. An oarsman in a sea of air, it sculled into the westering sun, passing over Henry Rouvroy as he crossed from the barn toward the clapboard house.

  Henry looked up and glimpsed a rodent squirming in the harrier’s clenched talons. He thrilled to the sight, which confirmed for him that he was no more and no less than this winged predator, a free agent in a world with no presiding presence.

  During his years in public service, he had come to realize that he was a beast whose cruelest instincts were barely governed by the few tools of repression with which his upbringing and his culture provided him. Not long ago, he had decided to unchain himself and to be what he truly was. A monster. Not yet a monster fully realized, but certainly now a monster in the making.

  In the house, he found Nora at the kitchen sink, deftly skinning potatoes