Page 13 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“A hypodermic needle?”

“Yeah. The wound had self-sealed. It could easily have been overlooked, except that the impact had enough velocity to rupture capillaries, which immediately bled into surrounding tissue. There was a bruise as big as a dime, with a little dot at the center.”

This news implies a conspiracy so grotesque that Vida might not believe it if the messenger were anyone other than this soft-voiced woman whose distress is evident but tightly controlled. At the same time, in the deepest turning of the nautilus that is her mind, she has suspected his death wasn’t the freak accident it had seemed to be. José was charismatic, an effective organizer, a born leader, with the hard truth on his side—and therefore a threat to certain powerful individuals. “You’re saying a tranquilizer dart, like they use with wild animals.”

“Like that but different. If they meant to kill him, it won’t have been a tranquilizer. A toxin of some kind, maybe a fast-acting nerve agent.”

“Do you hear yourself?”

Anna meets Vida’s eyes. “Yeah. And I scare myself. I know so little, and yet I know too much.”

“If there was a hypodermic dart, does your father have it?”

“Probably not. It penetrated the muscles that surround the cervical vertebrae. José probably lost the use of his legs in a paraplegic spasm. The dart maybe came loose when he fell. Came loose, was trampled, broken, swept aside in the chaos.”

“Or snatched up and pocketed by someone in the know,” Vida says. “By another speaker on the stage.”

“Anything is possible now,” Anna says, and it seems that her fluorite eyes are growing less blue, becoming a darker purple.

No longer able to sit still, Vida thrusts up from the rocking chair. She has nowhere to go. She stands by the railing, staring toward her uncle’s gravestone. “I was there. I didn’t hear a shot.”

“An air rifle is very quiet.”

“Where was the shooter?”

“Had to be behind José. But if it was someone on the steps, others would have seen who did it.”

Vida agrees. “So it was someone in the courthouse.”

“It wasn’t anyone from Kettleton,” Anna says. “With an adapted air rifle of that kind, one shot so precisely placed—the shooter had to be a professional and one hell of a marksman.”

Another thought occurs to Vida. “The shot was timed to make it appear that José lost his balance when he was hit by the bottles of water those kids threw. They were part of it. Or were used without knowing they were being used.”

That realization leads to another more terrible. Before Vida can voice it, her visitor rises from the rocking chair. “Oh, God.”

As darkness slowly suffuses the eastern sky, as sunset paints the waning day coral pink and gamboge gold, the white mountain lion, she whom they call Azrael, comes out of the tall grass to the south and pauses on the driveway to assess the meadow, the house, and the women on the porch.

19

NEWS OF THE DEAD

Here in this dismal July, with José not yet gone a full month, as Vida stands on her porch with Anna Lagare, she can’t help but think that, if the manifestation of the albino mountain lion is an omen of death impending, the warning has come too late. José is in his grave, and no massive rock will be rolled from it, nor will a fiercely radiant celestial being announce a resurrection.

The big cat’s body is sleek, her legs muscular, face flat, ears cupped alertly. Her long tail has thick fur and is heavy and serves to balance her when she’s stalking, running, leaping, climbing. Her sharp, hooked claws are retracted into her soft, padded paws, but they can spring forth and gut her prey in an instant, though her kind tend to kill with one well-aimed bite of their powerful jaws. Her glossy white fur seems luminescent in the gathering twilight.

Vida’s uncle taught her much about mountain lions and cats in general, that she might have the proper respect for them. She does not worship Nature itself or any creature in it, as the Egyptians, four thousand years earlier, worshipped a cat goddess among other deities. In that far place and time, when a house cat died, the family members sheared off their hair to express their grief. They usually mummified the cat, and often mummified mice to entomb with it, so that it might have food in the next life.

Vida is in such awe of the massive albino creature that she understands how people can attribute supernatural powers to such a being, especially in a time when they feel the institutions they rely on are failing them. It’s human and sane to want peace and to yearn for transcendence in this world of war and insistent nihilism.

“She’s just a mountain lion,” Anna says. “For all the stories about her, she’s just a mountain lion.”

From the tone in which that statement is made, Vida concludes that Anna won’t feel safe until she is on the road. In fact, she might suspect that even the sweet town in Texas might not be far enough to ensure her safety from the forces at work in Kettleton. Whether she wants to or not, she sees before her an omen.

The great beast proceeds to the center of the lawn and peers along the path toward Uncle Ogden’s grave. Following a hesitation, with no further interest in this property, she continues northward, into meadow that has not been mowed. As the previously coral-and-gold sky now likens itself to a blazing furnace, as the summer-paled grass appears to burn with a fire that fails to consume it, Azrael doesn’t just recede into the distance but seems to deliquesce into the twilight, a shape of white mist that evaporates into the gloom.

Vida returns to the realization that occurred to her after she concluded that the bottle-throwing kids were enlisted in the assault on José whether they knew it or not. “Did he really break his neck?”

Still looking after the vanished mountain lion, Anna says, “When I saw the puncture wound, I didn’t examine him anyfurther. The EMT who got to him first said his neck was at an impossible angle, but that’s just something he said.”

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