The Wolf Gift (48 page)

“Well, you’re one splendid boy wolf, I’ll tell you that,” Reuben said.

Silence.

“You’re going to be all right with us, Stuart,” said Laura. She never took her eyes off the road.

The boy was too stupefied and exhausted to answer. He kept staring at Reuben as though it was a miracle that Reuben looked like a perfectly ordinary man.

H
IS EYES SNAPPED OPEN
. By the digital clock it was just after 4:00 p.m. The blinds were drawn. He’d been sound asleep for hours. There were voices outside the house, voices in front and in back, voices on the sides.

He sat up.

Laura was nowhere around. He could see the landline blinking. He could hear it ringing far off somewhere in the house, perhaps in the kitchen or even in the library. On the night table, his iPhone throbbed.

The TV screen flickered and flared in silence, the news crawl recycling the news he’d been watching when he went to sleep: S
ANTA
R
OSA
P
ANIC
O
VER
M
AN
W
OLF
.

He’d watched as much as he could before he’d passed out.

There was a statewide search for Stuart McIntyre, who’d disappeared from St. Mark’s Hospital during the night. His stepfather had been murdered by the Man Wolf at 3:15 a.m. His mother had been hospitalized. Sightings of the Man Wolf were coming in from all over Northern California.

People were panicking up and down the coast. It was not fear of the Man Wolf, so much as it was utter confusion, helplessness, frustration. Why couldn’t the police solve the mystery of the werewolf avenger? He saw clips now from a governor’s news conference, flashes of the attorney general, the redwood-and-glass house in Santa Rosa on its knoll.

Voices out there, around the house. Scent of any number of human beings, moving along the western side of the property and the east.

He got out of bed, naked, barefoot, and crept to the front window, cracking the drapery just a tiny bit, letting in the dull afternoon light. He could see the police cars down there, three of them. No. One was a sheriff’s car. The other two were highway patrol. There was an ambulance there, too. Why an ambulance?

There came a booming knock on the front door. Then another. He narrowed his eyes because it helped him to hear. They were moving around the sides of the house, yes, both sides, and hovering at the back door.

Was the back door locked? Was the alarm on?

Where was Laura? He caught Laura’s scent. She was in the house, moving closer.

He pulled on his pants and crept into the hallway. He could hear Stuart’s breathing. Looking into the front bedroom beside his own, he saw Stuart across the bed, dead asleep as Reuben had been only moments ago.

He and Stuart had both given in to sleep because they had no choice. He’d tried to eat a little but hadn’t been able to. Stuart had devoured a porterhouse steak. But both of them had been glassy-eyed, slurry-voiced, weak.

Stuart had said he was almost sure that his stepfather had shot him twice. But there were no bullet wounds.

Then they’d both headed for the beds and gone out, Reuben like a light pinched out in the darkness. Just gone.

He listened. Another car was coming up the road.

Suddenly, he heard the soft slap of Laura’s bare feet on the stairs. She emerged out of the shadows and came towards him, slipping into his arms.

“This is the second time they’ve been here,” she whispered. “The alarm’s armed. If they break a window or push in a door, the sirens will blast us from all four corners of the house.”

He nodded. She was trembling. Her face was white.

“Your e-mail’s filled with messages, not just from your mother, but from your brother and your father, and from Celeste. From Billie. Something very bad is going down.”

“Did they see you through the windows?” he asked.

“No. The drapes are still drawn from last night.”

They were calling his name down there, “Mr. Golding, Mr. Golding!” Hammering on the door in the back as they had hammered on the door in front.

The wind sighed and threw the rain gently against the windows.

He took a few steps down the stairs.

He remembered that crash that had awakened him the night Marchent
had been killed. We’re living in a palace of glass, he thought, but how in the world can they justify breaking in here?

He glanced back at Stuart. Still barefoot, stripped to his shorts and shirt, sleeping like a baby.

Galton had just pulled up. He could hear Galton calling out to the sheriff.

He went back into the bedroom and drew near to the south-facing window again.

“Well, I don’t know where they are. You can see the same as I can that both cars are here. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe they’re sleeping in. They didn’t come rolling up the road till early this morning. You mind telling me what all this is about?”

The sheriff wasn’t saying, and neither were the highway patrolmen, and the paramedics from the ambulance were standing back with their arms folded looking up at the house.

“Well, why don’t I give you a call later on when they wake up?” asked Galton. “Well, yeah, I do know the code, but I have no authorization to let anybody in. Listen …”

Whispers. “All right, all right. We’ll just wait then.”

Wait for what?

“Wake up Stuart,” he told Laura. “Get him into the secret room. Fast.”

He dressed hurriedly putting on his blue blazer, and combing his hair. He wanted to look like the picture of respectability whatever happened.

He glanced at his cell phone: text from Jim.

“Landed. On our way.”

What in the world could that mean?

He could hear Stuart protesting in a drunken-sounding voice, but Laura was guiding him firmly into the linen closet and through the secret door.

He checked it behind them. Perfectly smooth wall. He put the shelves back in place against it, and hefted two loads of towels onto the shelves. And then he shut the door.

He crept down to the first floor, and made his way along the hallway towards the darkened front room. The only light came from the conservatory doors. Milky, dim. The rain teemed lightly on the glass dome. A gray mist sealed the glass walls.

Someone was trying the outside knobs one by one of the conservatory’s western French doors.

Another car had pulled up outside, and it sounded as though a truck had come with it. He didn’t want to disturb the draperies, even a little. Quietly, he listened. A woman’s voice this time. And then Galton—talking loudly into his phone.

“… just better get up here right now, Jerry, I mean this is happening here right now at the Nideck place and I don’t see any warrant here, and if somebody is going to break into the Nideck house without a warrant, well, I’m telling you, you ought to get up here right now.”

Silently moving to the desk, he stared at the stream of e-mail subject lines crawling down the screen.

“SOS,” said Celeste over and over again. Billie’s e-mails said, “Warning.” Phil’s e-mail “On the way.” The last one from Grace read: “Flying up with Simon now.” That had been sent two hours ago.

So that’s what Jim meant. They’d landed at the Sonoma County Airport, most likely, and were driving the rest of the way.

And just how long would that take? he wondered.

More cars were arriving out front.

Billie’s last e-mail had been an hour ago: “Tip off; they’re coming to put you away.”

He was furious, yet calculating. What could have triggered this? Had someone seen them early this morning with Stuart in the car? Surely Galton wouldn’t have breathed a word to anyone, but how on such a slender bit of evidence could a campaign like this have ever gained steam?

Ambulance. Why was there an ambulance? Had Dr. Cutler gotten custody of Stuart and was she coming to take him to the nuthouse or to jail? That was Dr. Cutler’s voice out there, wasn’t it? And the voice of another woman, a woman speaking with a distinct foreign accent.

He moved out of the library and over the soft Oriental carpets of the great room and stood just inside the door.

The woman with the foreign accent, possibly Russian, was explaining that she had had experience in these things before, and if the officers all cooperated this would go completely smoothly. Things like this usually did. There came a man’s voice underscoring hers with long ominous syllables of the same general meaning.
This was Jaska
. He could smell Jaska,
and he could pick up the scent of the woman.
Liar
. A deep unwholesome malice.

Reuben felt the spasms beginning; he rested his right hand against his abdomen. He could feel the heat. “Not yet,” he whispered. “Not yet.” The prickly icy feeling was traveling all over the backs of his arms and up his neck. “Not yet.”

It was getting dark already. Sunset would be in a few minutes, and on a wet overcast day like this it would be full dark very soon.

There must have been fifteen men out there now. And more cars were coming up the road. A car was pulling up right opposite the door.

He could make it to the hidden room, no question of that, but what if Galton knew about the hidden room and always had? And if Galton didn’t, if nobody did, how long could the three of them hide inside?

Outside, Dr. Cutler was arguing with the Russian doctor. She did not want Stuart committed. She didn’t even know for certain that Stuart was here, but the Russian doctor said she knew, that she’d been tipped off, that Stuart was most certainly here.

Suddenly his mother’s voice cut through the argument, and he could hear the low rumbling voice of Simon Oliver under her voice.… “Writ of habeas corpus if you so much as attempt to take my son anywhere against his will!”

Never had he been so happy to hear that voice. Phil and Jim were murmuring together right on the other side of the door, calculating the peace officers to be around twenty in number, trying to figure a plan of what to do.

A noise within the house startled him.

The spasms grew stronger. He could feel his pores opening, every hair follicle tingling. With all his will he held back.

The noise was coming from the hallway; it sounded for all the world like someone coming up those bare wooden cellar steps. He heard the creak that he knew to be that door.

Slowly out of the shadows a tall figure materialized before him, and another figure stood to his left. Against the light of the conservatory he could not make out the faces.

“How did you get into my house!” Reuben demanded. He walked boldly towards them, his stomach churning, his skin on fire. “Unless you have a warrant to be in this house, get out.”

“Down, little wolf,” came the soft voice of one of the two figures.

The other who stood nearest the hallway snapped on the light.

It was Felix, and the man beside him was Margon Sperver. Margon Sperver had spoken those words.

Reuben all but cried out in shock.

Both men were dressed in heavy tweed jackets and boots. The scent of rain and earth came from their clothes and their boots; they were windblown and ruddy from the cold.

A wash of relief weakened Reuben. He gasped. Then he put his hands up to make a steeple before his face.

Felix stepped forward out of the light of the hallway.

“I want you to let them in,” he said.

“But there’s so much you don’t know!” Reuben confessed. “There’s this boy here, Stuart—.”

“I know,” said Felix comfortingly. “I know everything.” His face softened with a protective smile. He clamped a firm hand on Reuben’s shoulder. “I am going upstairs to get Stuart now, and bring him down here. Now you light the fires. Turn on the lamps. And as soon as Stuart is ready for them, I want you to let them in.”

Margon was already attending to these things, turning on one lamp after another. And the room was springing to life out of the gloom.

Reuben didn’t think twice about obeying. He felt the spasms loosening, and the sweat flooding his chest under his shirt.

He quickly lighted the oak fire.

Margon moved as if he knew the place. Soon fires were going in the library, and the dining room and the conservatory as well.

Margon’s hair was long, as it had been in the picture, only tied back with a leather thong. There were leather patches on the elbows of his jacket, and his boots looked ancient, heavily creased and crazed over the toes. His face was weathered, but youthful. He appeared to be a man of forty at most.

Finishing with the lamps of the conservatory, he drew up beside Reuben and looked into his eyes. There was an arresting warmth emanating from him, the same kind of warmth Reuben had sensed from Felix when first they met. And there was a hint of good humor in Margon as well.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” said Margon. His voice was easy, smooth. “I wish we could have made all this easier for you. But that wasn’t possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll understand all in time. Now, listen, as soon as Stuart gets here, I want you to step out under the arch, and welcome the doctors inside, and ask that the lawmen remain where they are for the time being. Offer to talk. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes,” said Reuben.

The argument outside was going fast and furious. Grace’s voice rang out over the imbroglio. “Not valid, not valid. You paid for this! Either produce the paramedic who signed it or it’s not valid—.”

Something quickened in Margon’s face. He reached out and placed his hands on Reuben’s shoulders.

“You have it in check?” he asked. There was no hint of judgment, only the simple question.

“Yes,” said Reuben. “I can keep it down.”

“Good,” he said.

“But I don’t know about Stuart.”

“If he starts to change, we’ll get him out of sight,” he explained. “It is important that he be here. You leave matters to us.”

Stuart appeared, suitably dressed now in polo shirt and jeans. He was clearly alarmed and looked to Reuben silently but desperately. Laura, too, was now dressed in her usual sweater and slacks and took her place resolutely by Reuben’s side.