Chapter 1
Joe did not move away from the glass.
"Imogen. Take them to the cellar."
"Joe."
"Now."
She turned on the stairs without another word. Hazel went ahead of her. Zachary said something that ended in a sob and was cut off by the cellar door closing.
Joe took the rifle off the pegs above the door.
It was a bolt action thirty aught six with a worn stock and no electronics anywhere on it, and he had chosen it for exactly that reason two years ago in a shop in Provo while Imogen stood in the parking lot pretending she was not there.
He worked the bolt. He did not chamber a round.
Mack stayed rigid at the door, that low engine sound still running in his chest.
"Easy," Joe said.
The headlights kept coming. Slow. Too slow.
They were swinging wide on the switchback the way headlights do when a driver does not know the road, and then they steadied, and Joe realized they were not headlights at all.
They were one headlight and something else. Something handheld, moving alongside.
He reached up and pulled the lever on the shutter over the door window, dropping the plate down over the glass, and then he went out the back through the mudroom instead.
The cold hit him like water.
Above him the sky was still doing that thing. Red at the top, green underneath, the whole northern half of the world moving like a curtain in a draft, and the light of it lay across the yard so bright he could see the individual gravel stones.
He went along the woodpile and around the corner of the shed and took a knee behind the splitting stump.
The vehicle came through the gate.
The gate was open. Joe had chained it at four that afternoon and he had checked the chain twice.
The truck stopped forty yards out. An old Ford, square body, primer gray on the fender.
The one working headlight died. The engine kept running, and that told Joe something immediately, because a running engine after what had just happened in the sky was not a small detail.
A man got out on the driver's side with his hands already up.
"Henfry," he shouted. "Joe Henfry. It's Bill Tandy. Don't shoot me, son."
Joe closed his eyes for one second.
Bill Tandy ran cattle on the bench two miles down the county road and had, over the last nine months, given Joe more free advice than any man alive.
"Bill," Joe called. "Who's with you."
"Nobody but Delores and she's not getting out of the truck. She's got a thing about dogs."
"Stay right there."
"I'm not going anywhere. My legs are eighty one years old."
Joe came out from behind the stump and crossed the yard with the rifle held low and across his body.
Bill Tandy was standing in the strange red light with his hands up and a battery lantern hanging from one of them.
He looked exactly the same as always. Canvas coat, seed company cap, a face like a topographic map.
"Put your hands down."
"I'd rather not till your dog knows me."
"He knows you."
"He knew me yesterday," Bill said. "Today might be different."
Joe let out a breath that was almost a laugh and whistled once, and Mack came around the corner of the house at a dead run and then stopped six feet from Bill and sat down and started thumping his tail against the gravel.
Bill lowered his hands.
"Your gate was open," Joe said.
"I know. That's part of why I came."
"Say the rest."
Bill looked up at the sky first. He looked at it for a long moment, the way a man looks at weather he has never seen before and will never see again.
"My truck runs," he said. "Every truck I own runs, because they're all older than my marriage. But my house is dark and my phone is a brick and my landline is dead and the radio's got nothing on it but a sound like frying bacon."
"Yeah."
"Dave Kessick's place is dark. The Ostermans are dark. I drove down to the highway turnoff and there's two cars sitting in the middle of the road with their doors open."
Joe felt something drop in his stomach.
"Sitting," he repeated.
"Stopped where they were. Nobody hurt that I could see. One fella walking back toward town with his kid on his shoulders."
"Did he say anything."
"He asked me for a ride and I gave him one. Took him three miles and he cried the whole way."
Bill shifted the lantern to his other hand.
"About your gate," he said. "It was already open when I got here."
Joe went very still.
"Open how."
"Chain's cut. It's laying in the weeds on the left post. I didn't touch it because I figured you'd want to see it how it was."
"What time did you come through."
"Twenty minutes ago, maybe. Went slow because I didn't want to come up on you fast in the dark."
Joe turned and looked down the driveway, down the long black slope of gravel toward the county road, and the aurora poured its light over all of it and showed him nothing at all.
"Bill," he said. "Can Delores stay here tonight."
"She'd like that."
"Then bring her in. And then I need you to sit in my kitchen with a shotgun across your knees while I go look at something."
Bill nodded once, like a man being asked to pass the salt.
"Figured it'd be something like that," he said.
Imogen came up out of the cellar with a headlamp on her forehead and her jaw set in a line Joe knew well.
She took one look at Delores Tandy shivering in the doorway in a housecoat and a barn coat and immediately became a different person, warm and quick and moving, and inside of four minutes there was a fire in the stove and a kettle on the propane ring and a quilt around the old woman's shoulders.
Hazel came up next. She stood at the bottom of the stairs holding a flashlight she had not turned on, saving the battery without anyone telling her to, and Joe wanted to sit down on the floor and put his head in his hands about it.
"Is it them," Hazel said quietly. "The people you said would come."
"No. It's neighbors."
"But somebody cut the gate."
Joe looked at her.
"How did you hear that."
"The cellar's under the kitchen, Dad. I can hear everything down there. That's the whole reason I like it."
He crouched so they were level.
"Somebody cut the gate," he said. "Yes."
"Are you going out there."
"Yes."
"Then take Mack."
"I need Mack in here."
"Dad." Her chin came up. "You don't need Mack in here. There's a dog in here already. It's Mom."
Joe stared at his eleven year old daughter.
Then he laughed, one short surprised bark of it, and he stood up and kissed the top of her blonde head.
"Take Mack," he said to himself. "Okay."
He was gone forty minutes.
He walked the drive to the gate with the rifle slung and the dog quartering ahead of him, and he found the chain exactly where Bill had said it would be.
It was cut clean. Not sawed. Snipped, by something with real leverage.
There were boot prints in the soft dirt where the culvert had washed out the edge of the drive. Two sets. Both coming in. Neither going back out.
Joe stood and looked at them in the beam of his flashlight for a long time, and then he switched the light off and let his eyes come back and stood there in the red dark listening to the mountain.
Mack did not alert. That was the only good news he had.
He walked the fence line east for three hundred yards and found nothing. He walked back west past the gate and up the slope and found nothing.
He did not go up to the spring house, because the spring house was a quarter mile up a trail with timber on both sides and he was one man with a flashlight and a dog, and going up there at midnight would have been the kind of decision a man makes in a story and not the kind he makes at home.
He went back to the house and chained the gate with a different chain and a different lock and he told himself he would go up the hill at first light.
Nobody slept much.
Bill and Delores took the couch and the chair by the stove. Zachary ended up in the big bed between his parents at some point around two, and Hazel came in at three and lay down crosswise at the foot of it like a cat, and Mack stretched across the doorway and sighed enormously.
Joe lay in the dark with his eyes open and listened to five people breathing.
The aurora faded sometime before dawn. He watched it go from the window, red to green to a pale wash to nothing, and by the time the sun came up over the notch in the ridge the sky was an ordinary, insulting, perfect blue.
Morning was work.
He went up the hill to the spring house at six thirty with Bill and found nothing wrong. The door was latched. The intake was clear. The line ran.
He came back down and got the woodstove hot and Imogen cooked eggs on it, real eggs, eleven of them, because the chickens did not know anything had happened.
Bill Tandy ate four of them and pronounced them the best eggs in the state of Utah, and that was the moment the conversation went sideways in a way Joe did not see coming.
"State of Utah," Imogen said, cutting into her toast. "God help us."
Bill's eyebrows went up. "Ma'am?"
"Don't get him started."
"Too late," Joe said.
"Joe."
"No, it's a fair topic. It's a very fair topic for this particular morning."
"It is not a fair topic, it's a lecture, and I've heard it nine times."
"Eleven," Hazel said, not looking up from her plate.
"Eleven," Imogen said. "Thank you, sweetheart."
Joe set his fork down.
He looked around the table at his wife and his kids and an eighty one year old cattleman and a woman in a housecoat, and outside the window the whole world was broken, and he felt something rise up in him that had been waiting a long time to get out.
"I want to say something," he said.
"Here we go," said Imogen.
"Two years ago we sat at a different table and you told me if we were going to do this we were going to do it all the way. Do you remember that."
"I remember."
"And then you spent four months trying to move us to Wyoming."
"It was two months."
"It was four. You had a folder."
"Everyone has a folder."
"You had a folder with tabs."
Imogen put her chin in her hand and looked at him with an expression that was mostly affection and slightly warning.
"Say it," she said. "Get it out of your system."
Joe stood up.
"Dad," Hazel said. "You're standing up."
"I'm aware."