Page 59 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“That’s so . . .”

“So 1950s,” he says.

“But love is love, no matter what.”

“She loved them, too. Maybe not more than she loved me, but she had loved them longer. They conceived her in love, and she couldn’t imagine life without them. But that was the choice they gave her.”

“How could she imagine life withoutyou?”

“Don’t blame her. I never did. She was grace personified, and she gave me back a life that the war had taken from me.”

Sharper lightning and harder thunder than before crack the shell of the promised storm. Across the slate roof, rushing rain sizzles like oil in a hot skillet.

How odd it seems to Vida that she never asked—and he never explained—why he’s lived alone for so many decades, until a niece he had never seen needed a home. Could it really be that two years of the Cheyenne woman’s love was so profound that it established in him peace and contentment for the duration of his life?

He says, “I think it matters you know about her and me, how it was and how it could have been, so ...”

When her uncle doesn’t continue, Vida says, “So?”

“So you’ll keep in mind that we don’t get a thousand chances in this life. When one of the best kind comes along, it’s rarer than you might know at the time.”

The candlelight reveals tears pooled but unshed in her uncle’s eyes, and her feelings for him are so tender that she’s loath to ask why he chose a life alone. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, in a moment less emotional than this, she’ll pose that question.

In the morning, he doesn’t come to the kitchen for breakfast. Vida knocks on his door. When he fails to respond, she enters his room and finds he has moved on from this world during the night.

After Herbert Lagare has come in his mortuary van and collected the body and gone, Vida is inconsolable. As she circles through the small house obsessively, every item inspires memories, and though all of them are good, they don’t assuage her grief.

Soon she realizes that, the previous day, her uncle must have sensed his death impending. That was why, after keeping the storyof Eternal Fawn locked in his heart for so long, he finally spoke of her.

Vida goes to the library and reaches across the turntable and takes the framed portrait down from the wall. She sits with it in an armchair. In youth as in old age, her uncle’s face was benevolence made flesh, as if kindness were the very substance of which he had been created; in her experience of him, appearance and reality were one and the same.

The pencil portrait is on a page from an art-paper tablet and supported with pressboard. Vida turns the frame over. On the back, she finds a message in the artist’s elegant hand:If I live to a hundred, I will never forget your face.Under those words is the stylized fawn.

49

FIND HER, GRILL HER, KILL HER

The night air smells of raw earth. Four flashlight beams travel the site of the excavation, where the infill has been compacted. The tread patterns of the backhoe tires have not yet weathered away.

“What the holy hell am I lookin’ at?” Frank Trott asks. “You tellin’ me she done buried Nash Deaconandhis Trans Am?”

“Come daylight,” says Galen Vector, “we might find where Belden Bead has wasted away to nothing but hair and bones in his Plymouth Superbird Hemi.”

In the backwash of beams, Trott’s face marshals itself from astonishment to indignation, to something that might be admiration for the woman’s boldly executed solution to an urgent problem.

In Vector’s experience, the heavy facial features of Monger and Rackman are never configured in other than one of two arrangements. The first is a deadpan, cementitious aspect that conveys no emotion or attitude whatsoever, their dark eyes as depthless as ceramic discs. The second is a vague, dreamy smile reminiscent of those on certain carved-stone gods that wait to be worshipped in crumbling vine-entangled temples, deep in the jungles of the South Pacific. Of the two expressions, the second is more disturbing because it always seems unrelated to present circumstances, as if what amuses Monger and Rackman is nothing thathas amusement value for other people. In this instance, as never before, the smiles are accompanied by brief spates of tittering that cause the fine hairs to prickle on the nape of Vector’s neck.

Trott says, “So where is the bitch? Where’d she go? She ain’t taken her pickup. Buried Deacon’s Trans Am, for Chrissake. She got no wheels.”

“We’re dealing with a mountain girl. She went to hide in the mountains.”

“Can’t hide for long.”

“Maybe longer than you think,” Vector says.

“This ain’t no Jamaica. Winter in a few months.”

“She knows that.”

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