59

The trail ends where the dunes curve back around and to the river. Morgan Wolfe had not wanted anyone to be able to drive right up to the house and therefore built it a couple of dune rows farther in from the end of the trail. The only way to get to the house from here is over those dunes, on foot. Some years ago the dunes had become too laborious for Aunt Christy, Harry’s wife, and rather than extend the trail to the house, Harry had bought a residence in town.

Parked at the trail’s end are a truck and an SUV. The girls’ vehicles? They both at home? They alone? With boyfriends? He clambers up a dune, the wet sand sticking to his hands, getting in his shoes. From its crest and beyond another row of dunes, he sees the house directly ahead, one of its front windows bright with light. The open area under the house is dark but for the vaguely lighted stairway off to his right.

She’s here. He knows she is, he can feel it.

Cat-foot it up the stairs, start checking windows, and you’ll see her. Really see her. And that’ll be that.

He slogs down the dune and starts up the next one.

Somebody’s here, Billy thinks, breathing hard when he comes trotting in sight of the two vehicles. He sticks the gun in his pants and scrabbles up the dune on all fours and sees the lit window of the piling house. And in the cast of its light sees the dark form of someone moving in a crouch over the top of the next dune. Him.

He pulls the .45, but Axel vanishes down the other side of the dune before he can take aim.

Shit.

Can wait right here till he comes back. Or by the vehicles. Pop him soon as he shows up.

And if he doesn’t come back till tomorrow sometime? Gonna stay awake out here till then? And what if he’s not alone when he comes back? These are somebody’s vehicles. Can’t be too many of them, though, and you can maybe do them all if you go up and take them by surprise. But if they catch you down here in the daylight …

He sticks the gun back in his pants and half-walks, half-slides down the dune and starts up the next one.

Axel arrives at the bottom of the dune, then sprints through the rain mist and into the deep shadow under the house, then makes his way to the stairs. They’re illuminated by an outer light just above a door at the landing at the top of the steps. He slowly ascends to the landing and pauses there, under the roof’s wide eave. There are two windows on this side of the house, a dark one to the right of the landing, near the rear corner of the house, and one midway ahead along the gallery, open to the breeze and showing bright light. He hears music.

He starts toward the window ahead and then flinches at the soft thunk of his foot glancing against an overturned plastic bucket in a shadow by the door. He holds stone-still. Seconds pass. The music persists. He hears muted voices. A low, brief laugh.

He moves up to the window and carefully leans and peers in with one eye. A kitchen. Nobody in it. Dishes in a sudsy sink. The music clearer here. He recognizes it. A Cuban song. “Siboney.” There’s a drone of voices in another room and then laughter. Women’s laughter. Probably just her and Rayo here.

Then one of them is approaching the kitchen as she asks the other if she wants another beer. Axel draws aside from the window because whoever’s coming will be facing it directly and might see him and if it’s not her, what then? The other voice says no thanks, and the voice in the kitchen says she’s going to take a bath. Axel ventures another one-eyed peek and glimpses a woman with short black hair and wearing a thin green robe just before she rounds the kitchen door and goes out of view. Rayo Luna. Then the window near the rear corner comes alight and the sash is raised. The bathroom.

From the top of the dune Billy sees Axel hurrying under the house and loses sight of him. He stares hard and barely discerns the poorly lighted stairway at the north side of the house. Then catches the shadowy movement of Axel’s dark figure just before it goes up the stairs and out of view. He scrambles down the dune and scurries under the house, halts, and listens hard. Then wends his way around the pilings and to the stairway. Gripping the .45 in both hands, he steps out from under the house, aiming upward and ready to shoot, but the stairway is bare. He starts up the steps.

Axel advances along the gallery to the front corner of the house, takes a peek, then goes around it and onto the porch. The door is flanked by large windows on both sides, the near one dimly lit, the farther one very bright and casting a rectangle of light on the porch floor. He eases up to the near one. It’s draped with a gauzy material through which the room within is a smeary vision of colors and shapes. He sees an indistinct form standing by the far wall and softly singing along with the Spanish song.

It’s her, he knows it is. He moves over to the other window and takes a look around the frame.

And sees her. At a CD player on a table by a bookcase. She’s in a white robe, her red-blonde hair in a ponytail. More beautiful than in any picture he has ever seen of her.

The song ends. She removes the disc and replaces it in its case. She moves to the center of the room and he sidles over a little further into the light of the window, the better to watch her as she gathers magazines off the sofa and arranges them in a neat stack on the coffee table, pausing at times to scrutinize a cover.

At the top of the stairs, Billy stops and listens hard. Faint music. He regards the closed door, the two windows on this side, both of them showing light. He’s in there. But there’s still the question of who else and how many.

He starts toward the forward window to have a look, lightly kicks the bucket by the door, and freezes. The only sound is the continuing music. He moves up to the window and looks into a deserted kitchen. Hears somebody singing along with the song. A woman. No one to worry about.

As he quickly moves up the gallery, the music stops. He pauses at the front corner and carefully peeks around it and sees Axel at the far window, no weapon in hand, staring at something inside, looking a little drunk.

Got you, he thinks.

He steps around the corner, thinking, Don’t hit the heart with the first one, and says, “Hey, Axel!”

Axel makes a flinching half-turn, stepping back into the full light of the window, seeing a dark figure pointing a gun at him, feeling his own holstered gun a distant world away. Jessie hears it distinctly—”Hey, Axel!”—and whips around to the window to see him standing there, her impulse to shriek stifled by his name, by her immediate and astonished recognition of him … the TV and newspaper pictures … the photos on Uncle Charlie’s walls … and the word is out of her mouth before she can think to say it. “Daddy!”

As he starts to turn to her, Billy’s .45 blasts with a yellow flare and the slug smacks him in the chest and knocks him flat.

Jessie screams.

Axel can’t breathe. Can’t raise his head.

Billy Capp walks up and stands over him in the light of the window, wanting Axel to see him clearly. He smiles down at him. “Come to kill me, huh?” He points the pistol at his face.

A gunshot disintegrates Billy’s forehead in an outward spray of bloody bone and brain, and he’s dead even as he pitches past Axel and falls.

Rayo Luna stands at the corner of the gallery, naked and dripping wet, a large revolver in her hands. She’d been in the tub and heard the thunk of the bucket and lunged out of the bath and to the towel closet and grabbed up the .44 Magnum she kept there. Then came out the back door and to the stairway side of the house and saw a man sneaking up to the front corner and going around it. She was racing down the gallery when she heard the shot and Jessie’s scream.

Jessie comes out, her face anguished, and looks down at her father. His eyes are open and moving over her, wide with desperation. He wants to tell her everything that he has wanted to tell her for so many years, but cannot now muster the breath. He can only behold her a moment more. Then die.