A batty old man of the cloth had once described the Hobbs boy as a joke of God's: an archangel of the warrior cast and a beacon for women with carnal intentions.
An angel.
Would that he had wings.
Oren Hobbs, now a man full grown, opened his eyes in the dark and took deep breaths to quell the panic. Every time he dreamed, he died. Neither awake nor asleep, he was caught, for a second or two, between the nightmare of going home again and the solid world, where he had arrived-where a dog was barking in the yard.
He lay sprawled upon the old horsehair sofa. The upholstery smelled of tobacco and spilt whiskey, the best-loved vices of his father and the housekeeper. These stale odors were cut with a slice of a cool, sweet air from the open porch window. He had forgotten to lower the sash after climbing inside, and now Oren recalled that the door to the house had been locked against him for the first time in memory. Still drowsing, his eyes were slow to pick out the surrounding shadows of furniture that took on familiar form but no detail.
What the hell?
One of the shadows scuttled across the carpet, agitated and flapping its wings like a gray moth-a moth that could skin its shin on the coffee table and whisper curse words.
Memory guided Oren's hand to a lamp, and he switched it on the better to see a woman wrapped in a purple robe with great floppy sleeves. "Hannah?"
Nearing sixty, the housekeeper was a small, slight figure beneath that oversized garment-the same old bathrobe. She might be as tall as a ten-year-old, but only if she stood on her toes. The long braid of black hair had gone to iron gray, and her smile lines had deepened, but she seemed otherwise unaltered by the past twenty years. Her heart-shaped face had no sag to it.
Pixies aged so well.
"Oh, damn it." Her wide-set hazel eyes blinked in the lamplight as she leaned down to rub her wounded shinbone.
He followed her lead of a whisper that would not wake the old man, who was near death. "Hannah, it's me-Oren. Sorry if I scared you." Rising from the couch, he stood barefoot in his sweatshirt and blue jeans. At thirty-seven years of age, he might be the one more changed by time. She looked him up and down, and shook her head, as if she could not reconcile him with the longhaired boy who had left this house when he was seventeen. His dark brown hair was shorter now, and a strand of it covered one blue eye.
He nodded toward the open window, the evidence of his housebreaking. "I got in late, and I didn't want to-"
"Hush." Hannah held a veined hand in the air, frozen there, and he fancied that her ears were attenuating, straining to hear something. Her attention was rewarded with the bark of a dog very close to the house-and then the sound of something dropped, an object clattering to the floorboards of the front porch.
The housekeeper jumped as if a cannon had sounded.
Oren walked toward the foyer, one hand outstretched to grab the doorknob.
"Don't go out there!" Hannah switched off the lamp in the front room. He had a feeling that she had played out this little drama before. "What's going on?"
More barking came from the yard.
The front door would not open. In the dark of the foyer, he found a bolt by touch, but he could not undo the lock. Oren returned to the predawn gloom of the parlor. He found his duffel bag and pulled out a gun. This was reflex, and he thought better of it. Best not to shoot somebody's pet on his first day back in town. He put the weapon away and closed up the bag. Zip-gone. "It's okay, Hannah. Go back to bed. It's just a dog."
"That's not our dog," she whispered, creeping closer. "Horatio died ages ago."
As he moved toward the open porch window, Hannah reached out with both hands to catch him and snatch him back. Too late.
Oren climbed outside. The sky was early-morning gray, and the tall trees had no colors yet. Smooth, worn boards were cool beneath his bare feet as he hunkered down before the gift that had been left at the edge of the porch-a lower jawbone, bare of flesh and laced with teeth.
Even without the evidence of a silver filling in one molar, he would have known that this bone belonged to the skeleton of a human being. He was well acquainted with human remains in every stage of decay.