Page 15 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Vida unfolds the five-by-six-inch piece of notepad paper and reads the eight words, which are not in José’s handwriting: “ ... two moon sun spirit below the smoking river.” She looks up at her visitor, whose face is still invisible behind the reflected sunset. “What does this mean?”

Anna says, “I’ve asked around. Discreetly. Rings no bells for anyone. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“No. It means something,” Vida says, for the words hearken back to some enigmatic advice she was given a long time ago.

“Maybe it would be better if you decided it doesn’t.”

The bloody light slides off the face shield as Anna Lagare swings aboard the motorcycle, yet still she seems to have no face. As she starts the engine, all that’s visible within the helmet are two pale crescents that partly define sockets that seem eyeless.

As she drives away, a single headlight guides her along the dirt lane, across the meadow, away into a world gone wrong.

20

THE BOX AND THE ATLAS

After Anna Lagare is gone, Vida takes the yellow gift-wrapped box from the closet and holds it as she sits on the edge of the bed.

Embossed in script, the wordsHappy Birthdayflow in ordered lines across the package.

It’s been in her possession two weeks. Intuition tells her that it’s not an ordinary gift. Now is not the time to open it. An inner voice not her own says,Every ending is a beginning, but this is a beginning on which you’re not yet prepared to embark.

She smooths one finger along the midnight-blue ribbon to where it ravels into a bow. Some days it seems her life isunraveling, but she refuses to pursue that indulgent line of thought. That is not the kind of woman she wants to be or has ever been.

José hadn’t fallen in love with a woman capable of wallowing in self-pity and victimhood. Dignity is a consequence of perseverance, persistence, endurance. She intends to remain the woman he loved, and avoid all temptations to become someone else.

She returns the package to the closet.

Smoking river.The collection in the library includes books of state history, a keen interest of her uncle. Among those volumes, a thick atlas contains hundreds of maps, each with an index. None of the handwritten words on the scrap of paper Anna found in José’s shirt pocket is capitalized. However, “smoking river”suggests a watercourse, and “two moons” might be a small town, a campground, something. However, hours of poring through the indexes fails to reward her with a revelation or even the faintest clue.

Long ago, a woman of strange power had warned her, “Moon, sun, and smoking river. To chase the meaning of those words will put you at great risk. Be patient, and the meaning will come to you, for that is who you are. All things come to you in their time.”

21

THE SUITOR

On this Wednesday eleven months following José’s death, less than twenty-four hours since Nash Deacon told Vida that he expects her submission, after she’s slept in the rocking chair while wolves shared the porch and has awakened to find them gone, she’s too tense to continue shaping the cat’s-eye chrysoberyl that she’d previously sawn flat. Such work requires focus and patience.

She isn’t going to sit waiting for Deacon’s return, because to do so would be a kind of submission. She doesn’t intend to submit to him in any way whatsoever. He might not come today, perhaps not even tomorrow. He’s Machiavellian enough to torment her by delaying. She won’t waste her days in the expectation of his return, while hour by hour her nerves grow as taut as violin strings. She must stay busy.

Although she wouldn’t usually return to the placer mine for two weeks, she sets out with a can of bear spray holstered on her hip and two bottles of cold water in a small cooler. The early-morning forest is full of birdsong, a tapestry of woven light and shadow.

On her approach, squirrels spring up the fissured bark of tree trunks, not to the safety of high perches, but only far enough to watch her with interest as she passes.

In this deep shade, knotted cranesbill thrives, as do Bethlehem sage and pulmonaria. Among the dark-green leaves and white flowers of wake-robin, a red fox is foraging. Alert to Vida, it follows her with grave curiosity, wending through beds of toadshade, white baneberry, and ferns, among the last of which it vanishes.

With a shovel at the alluvial field and with a seining pan at the river’s edge, she passes five hours. The first three reward her with nothing other than the benefits of exercise, but in the last two hours, she pans three important gemstones that, over centuries if not millennia, have weathered out of the rock that imprisoned them. Being crystals of corundum, which is natural aluminum oxide, they are therefore sapphires, but with one difference. Gem-quality corundum crystals come in a rainbow of colors; however, when a pink sapphire contains enough chromium to make it red, it is called a ruby. In the rough, these three rubies are so large that each might, when properly cut, provide a gem in excess of ten carats.

After cleaning up the excavation and burying her gear as usual, before heading home, she hunkers at water’s edge and wets each of her finds in the river and holds it in the palm of her hand to study it not merely for what can be seen, but also for what it makes herfeel. Her uncle used to call this “Vidanalysis.” At first he’d used the term teasingly, but later with wonder and respect. Even at this early stage, by some mysterious power of perception that even Vida can’t explain, she nearly always intuits the potential of any rough gemstone. In addition to the finished weight in carats, three things affect the value of a gem: color, clarity, and cut. She’s convinced that all three of these big beauties will prove to be rich in color and of purest clarity. She will not make an error in the cutting.

She’s been given great value for her work, and she’s grateful. If there are such things as signs and portents, then three large, bright rubies might be interpreted as a promise that for every dark figure who enters her life, such as Nash Deacon, light will be provided to her three times over.

When Vida arrives home and unlocks the two deadbolts and lets herself inside, she goes directly to her workroom. She places the three gemstones in a drawer where the compartments in the sorting grid are lined with white velvet.

A day of labor leaves her in need of a hot shower, but first she steps into the kitchen to get a bottle of tea from the fridge.

In the center of the dining table stands a white bowl holding a dozen red roses artfully arranged with delicate ferns, the product of a well-trained florist. Nash Deacon has been here.

22

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