"Wellâthen I could go to the funeral, and not be hassled, right? Betts still isn't strong enough to be there. He'sâRiley's the only father I've ever known."
"Let's think about that," Sherard hedged.
"Meaning no?" Eden flared. "Sorry, Tom. I've known you for two days and I understand where you're coming from. My mother died an awful death, but that has nothing to do with who I am. I'm almost twenty-two and
nobody
runs my life for me."
"I'm only asking that you not make an emotional decision that could put your life at risk."
Eden stared speculatively at Bertie. "So that's you in all the head shots you showed me? Kirk and Wendell, they did those different looks with scissors and paint?"
"They're geniuses. You won't know yourself."
For a few moments the strain she'd been under returned to dull Eden's eyes. Then she smiled. "I don't anyway. So what the hell. We go for it."
B
uck Hannafin, newly barbered and well shod, arrived back at the ranch at nine-thirty from the office in Ivanhoe where he'd spent much of his day on the phone or video-conferencing, preparing for committee meetings, his return to Washington imminent. The others, except for Bertie, had gathered in Hannafin's game room, where there were tables for billiards, backgammon, and poker. Tiffany lampshades. Racked sporting guns, some of them more than a hundred years old but well cared for. Trophy headsâgrizzly, stag, Dall sheepâlined the knotty paneled walls with their mellow luster. There was whiskey and plenty of it in bold decanters. That air of yesteryear, strong booted men with impressive whiskers establishing dominion, creating empires out of range and timberland. Women seemed an impertinence in a room like this one. The lights were low.
As Bertie had requested, a large cut-crystal bowl had been placed in the center of the pool table, which was covered in rust-red baize. The bowl measured two feet in diameter. In the bottom of the bowl there was a white votive candle.
Buck looked twice at Eden when he came in, the second time with a perplexed smile. Only when she smiled back and he recognized a telltale dimple did he realize whom he was looking at.
"Scrape me off the sidewalk and call me sticky! With your poker face on, don't think I ever would've known you, Eden."
Eden had to laugh. Buck put his arm around her, looked at the crystal bowl on his pool table, looked at the other faces.
"So what are we up to here? Where's Miss Bertie?"
She came in with Portia Darkfeather's Persian cat cradled in her arms. Warhol, in spite of some patches where the vet had shaved away singed hair and treated burns, was looking fit. He was wearing a new rhinestone collar Bertie had bought for him.
"Sorry I'm late. Had to be sure Warhol was up for this."
"What do you have in mind? Some kind of psychic stuff, all of us gathered around the table here? Like a, what do you call it, a see-ance? I don't think I'll be much good at it, because I don't believeâ"
"It's just an experiment," Bertie said blithely. "Because Warhol may not be at his best, I thought we could use a boost in the mental energy in the room. Okay, Danny and Chien-Chi, why don't you stand about at the middle of the table on my left, Tom and Buck on my right, and Eden, you'll be opposite me at that end. Can we lower the lights a little more? Good. Don't you just love the drama?" She looked at Danny Cheng. "Not to worry. Nothing spooky is going to jump out at you. We hope. Why don't you take your shades off, Danny? They inhibit the empathy we're aiming for. Tom, light the candle please."
"What do you want me to do?" Eden asked with a game smile.
"You and I will concentrate on Warhol. And Warholâwell, he just may go to sleep, who knows? End of experiment, we'll play poker instead." She touched Warhol lightly on the top of his head with two fingers. Warhol's eyes narrowed peaceably. The candle flame in the crystal bowl was steady. The others watched it without having been told to watch. Above their heads the artificial eyes of bodiless animals acquired an interior glint of flame and menace.
They breathed. They watched. They were silent. Warhol's eyes widened. In the silence his purring had a motorized monotony, a sound of journey. Eyes widening, narrowing. Danny Cheng's weak eyes watered, and he rubbed them. Chien-Chi's face was a mask of noble serenity. Tom Sherard felt a certain weightlessness, a sense of transport. He saw through the candle flame to other fires, lonely, in places where he had been to hunt as a boy and would never return to. Buck Hannafin's stomach growled. His eyelids were heavy, as if he had gone to sleep on his feet.
Looking at the placid cat, Eden felt a mild wind in her face and smelled prairie on the wind, a scent of sage and sun-warmed grassland. The small flame rose between her and Warhol, growing in the shape of a pillar, but a twister of a pillar filling her conscious mind like a firestorm. Fascinated, Eden lost awareness of everyone around her. The cunning blue eyes of the Persian cat were like a magnetic center of the whirling, unearthly beautiful pillar. She felt as if she could fall headlong into the melding pupils of those attractive eyes, fall unscathed through surrounding fire, fall like a hawk with folded wings, wind rushing in a torrent around her, into bottomless blue. Her body was jolted. Her lungs emptied, a long sigh ending in plummeting weightless tranquility, an abiding sense of peace. Then there was another slight jolt. Eden looked up, startled, as if she had been given a poke in the midst of forty winks.
H
ot where she now is. Very hot. The racy wind tugging at her newly-styled moussed hair. A scent of horses on the wind. She looks out from a modest hilltop at limitless prairie, sun-crisped razory graze. No roads up here, to this place. Some small dusted-over trees, not enough of them to be called a grove. Hot fly-specked horses whipping their tails across twitching flanks in scarce shade. In the distance, old mountains, creased and pale as faded denim, with a single heavenly dark cloud above.
Stones like a dry riverbed surround the burial plot, gleam of mica in newly shoveled earth. The open grave, sun striking deeply into the ground where the new, varnished coffin rests, hardware glinting, too hot to touch. There is no shade for this funeral. The shovel standing up with a westerner's tattered black hat hanging jaunty from the handle, a mock-mourner.
Eden hears someone singing: a high-pitched, staccato Indian death chant.
Portia Darkfeather is there, half hidden behind one of the horses, her stallion Dark Valiant. Having taken off her blouse, she is wringing out her sweat in streams as she continues her mourning song.
She drapes the wrung-out blouse across the saddle, reaches up to unpin her hair, letting it down like a dark river falls. The wind whips strands here and there, across her face. Hawklike nose, heavy brows, reddish-bronze skin tone, unmistakably the face of a Plains Indian woman. Her lonely lament ends abruptly. Eden has claimed her attention.
Darkfeather comes out from behind Dark Valiant, who gives her a nudge with his nose. Long-waisted, nude down to the silver-and-tooled-leather belt of her leggy Wranglers, she walks straight to Eden, giving her head a couple of flourishing aftershakes to facilitate the drying of that raven's wing of shimmering hair. Her gaze dense with the wild life, eyes as white as diamonds. She smiles.
"Hello. I'm Portia: I wasn't expecting anyone else. Sorry, but I don't have another shirt to put on."
"That's okay. I'm Eden. It's hot, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Hot. I'm used to it. Grew up out thisaway. But we may have rain once the Pardoner gets here."
Eden looks around at the burial plot.
"Do you want me to help?"
"Thanks. But there's only one shovel. And dying is, in the end, it's just down to your ownself, right? I mean, nobody else can do it for you."
"I guess not. How did it happen?"
"Plane crash. But you know about that."
In a flash, but without distress, Eden relives the events of her graduation day. She nods.
"Yeah. I do. Who else did you say was coming?"
"The Pardoner."
"Oh. Sure. Then you'll be on your way."
"Right. We have a little more time, though. Come on, let's hunker down in the shade a while. There's stuff you probably want to know. Tell me, how's Warhol?"
"Doing great. He misses you."
"Miss my kitty too," Portia Darkfeather says, with the suspicion of a tear in her eye. "Sorry I can't offer you refreshments. But as I was saying, didn't count on company today. Doesn't mean that I'm not happy to see you, Eden." Darkfeather looks around with a slight shrug of uneasiness as a cloud, or a shadow, momentarily dims the sun. She won't look up. "I only have a few minutes. What do you need to know?"
"Portland. Why, and who, and all that. And the next time. That's more important. It's soon, isn't it?"
"'Fraid so."
"Do you know where?"
"Madison, Wisconsin."
"Is there time to stop it?"
"That I don't know. Rona didn'tâ"
"Rona
Harvester
?"
"A very bad person. But not a Bad Soul. Neither am I." She blinks a teardrop. "The Pardoner won't see Bad Souls. They're pure evil, no hope for them." More tears fall, and she sobs. "I don't know what he'll say to me.
"It's okay, Portia. But what does Mrs. Harvester want?"
Darkfeather wipes her eyes and after a last tremulous sob recovers her voice.
"One word, five letters.
Power
. She's taking over from Clint after the next nuking. She'll have him assassinated, not that it wouldn't be a blessing, he's totally brain-locked. I don't know how they did it. There's a place called Plenty Coups, west of here. Put your forehead against mine, I'll show it to you. And everything else that's going on there."
Their foreheads touch. Temple to temple, and Eden slips inside Darkfeather's receptive mind. Eden swallows hard, her senses amuck. Then flashings, mind-numbing images.
Flash, flash
. She withdraws in dismay.
"Oh, no. Oh . . . no!"
And she closes her eyes momentarily. The wind is stronger beneath the trees, buffeting her. Eden feels the heat of the day like a weight on her lungs. But the sky has darkened. There is a fist of thunder in her brain. The stallion and packhorse mutter and shy nervously. When Eden looks up Portia Darkfeather is gone.
"Portia!"
Oh . . . she's just over there. At the burial ground. Kneeling penitently at the feet of the Pardoner, hair down over her naked breasts. He places his hand briefly on the crown of her head. She lifts her eyes, speaks to him. Eden can't hear what she is saying. The Pardoner smiles, but his smile is fierce. His blond hair is a little straggly on his shoulders. But his snakeskin suit is immaculate, so too the gold tooth in his smile. The spurs of his boots are made of silver, and sharp as talons.
Darkfeather trembles.
Eden gets to her feet to go to Darkfeathar's defense, even though they have just met. A hand gently pulls her back.
Eden looks around, at the face of the Good Lady.
"I thought I'd lost you!"
"Of course you haven't," Gillian Bellaver says to her daughter.
"Don't hold me like that. Why can't I help Darkfeather? I saw her life. I know everything that was done to her.
Somebody
has to speak up for her!"
"No, Eden. It's too late. There's nothing to be said for her now."
The cloud is furious, dark and low over the burial ground, like multiplying wasps brutal with buzz-tone.
"I don't want to see this," Eden moans, but she watches anyway with Gillian's arm comfortingly around her. The Pardoner's horses are black and neatly trimmed and have small silver hooves; the silver hooves and the patient cunning heads of the black horses make Eden feel giddy. The chariot behind the horses glows as if it is made of moonlight.
"You'll never get
me
up in that thing," she says as the Pardoner takes Darkfeather by the hand, raises her from her knees, and leads her away.
"Now you're being foolish. And forgetful. There's no eternal reward and there's no eternal punishment. There are just lessons to be learned. Or relearned."
"What about the Bad Souls?"
"Slow learners," Gillian says with a wry smile. "Very slow."
"There's a couple I have to deal with. Quickly. Help me."
"Can't do it, Eden. That's just not the way things happen. Here, there. Wherever."
"I hate the way things happen! I've
missed
you. Always. They deliberately kept me from you. How fair is that?"
"Life doesn't have to be fair. Or understandable. Only useful. Lessons, Eden. And now you've overstayed. Kick some butt, darling."
Eden blinks away tears, feeling Gillian's grip loosen. There is a trail of fire out there beyond the burial ground, rim-wrinkles on the dry land, a meadowlark-yellow wake in the darkened air, ascending, somewhere. Or perhaps descendingâthe dark is closing in and Eden has vertigo, can't tell which end is up, her right hand from her left. Strong winds try to lift her off her feet. Eden feels fragile, incomplete. Abandoned.