“Private? Oh, sure, sure! Private, Señor.”
“Good. Because if, by any chance, you repeated something that you know you shouldn’t, that could be very bad. Very bad for you.”
“Andfor your family,” Tully added, accentuating the point.
The domestic servant looked at Tully with clear brown eyes that conveyed both her understanding and fear.
Twenty
THE LION IN WINTER
The next morning, Thursday, December 3rd, was Goldie’s ninth day in 1942. It had started snowing about 6:00 a.m., and fat flakes had been blowing by the windows at a twenty-degree angle ever since. Combined with the two inches of snow that were already on the ground, Sparkledove was now snuggled in a solid four-inch blanket of white while most of its residents were still sleeping. But Goldie wasn’t one of them. By 7:30, she had already walked across the covered bridge, trudged up the road that led to the Maynard Mining operation in her new rubber boots, and had slipped through the gap in the chained gate. She rounded the bend in the road, then looked around at the old mining operation. She had returned partly to see if there were any further signs of activity at the camp, which there weren’t, and partly to see if she could run into the barefoot woman in the white nightgown again.
While she looked around and waited, keeping close to the road in front of the director of operations’ old house, she thought about her unexplained circumstances. It was always there in the back of her mind, but some moments were more prominent than others. Right now, with the color of the morning being a whitish-gray, dilapidated buildings surrounding her, and tilting snowflakes crashing and melting onto her face, the queries of her predicament were particularly loud: Was she dead? Asleep? If so, how could she be feeling the snowflakes? How much time had passed in New York City? Why was she in 1942? Was her discovery about what Charles Banyan was doing her true mission? Was Harriette Noise’s life in danger? What was she supposed to do about it? Did the spirits of Claude Bolton and the woman in the white nightgown connect to any of this? Or should she put them in separate mental compartments? And then there was Peter. What was she going to do about Peter? What was Evie Hines going to do about her father? She thought about these questions and reshuffled them again and again in her head as if that might provide some form of order.
After what seemed like a long time, she looked up and finally saw the woman in the nightgown coming toward her. Like the first time she’d seen her, her long blonde hair was messy and tangled, her feet were bare, and she carried a rope with a noose. Also like before, her body didn’t seem to react to the cold, and the blowing snow did not affect her nightgown or hair. Goldie noticed that as the woman came toward her, her feet left no imprints in the snow. Her stare was a combination of blank and forlorn, and since they appeared to be about the same age, Goldie couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
“Oh, honey. What the hell happened to you?” she asked. “What brought you to this?”
She stood there quietly as the woman walked by, seemingly oblivious to her presence. As she passed, Goldie tried to run a sympathetic gloved hand down the woman’s bare arm, but it was like the glove was passing through fog. She touched nothing, although she shuddered from a sudden cold chill that shot through her head, but since she barely touched the woman, it wasn’t as bad as when Claude Bolton’s entire body had passed through her.
“God, why don’t you help these poor souls?” she asked. She watched as the apparition turned, walked up the pathway to the director’s house, then slipped through its partially opened door and disappeared inside. If nothing else, at least she now knew that this unidentified woman, like Claude Bolton, was recreating her death every day at apparently the same time as her original death.
She shook her head with sadness and frustration, then turned to go back into town. She walked around the bend in the road in silence, then continued for about another half-minute before she heard a low growl. Stopping and looking to her right, she saw a maple-brown mountain lion standing on a fallen tree trunk in the snowy woods, about one hundred and sixty pounds, staring at her threateningly. Instantly, Goldie realized this must’ve been the same animal she heard the evening she walked up the road with a flashlight and discovered the gate and fence. She quickly calculated she was closer to the gate than the director’s house. Maybe she could run to the gate, slip through the chained opening, then hold it tightly shut, keeping the animal on the opposite side.
While this thought raced through her head, the mountain lion screeched at her, baring its three-inch fangs.
“Hey!”she called defiantly. “I ain’t no Meow Mix!”
The cat jumped off the tree trunk and rushed toward her.
“Oh, shit!”Goldie yelled, breaking out in a full run toward the gate.
As she ran, she thought:Find a branch! A rock! Something to fight back with!But she could either look for a weapon or do her best Usain Bolt impression. She couldn’t do both. Then she told herself:Don’t look around! Keep your eyes on the gate!After ten seconds, however, she couldn’t help it. Realizing the snow was slowing her down and she wasn’t going to reach the gate, she thought:It’s better to face the animal head on.I’ll go down, but at least I’ll have my arms infront of me to fight back.She stopped, turned, and crouched slightly, preparing for the impact of the lion about to pounce onto her.
“C’mon, you fucker!”she screamed.
But just as she did, a loud crack pierced the quiet of the morning, and the mountain lion tumbled over itself, then slid to a stop in the snow at Goldie’s black rubber boots, dead.
She looked down at the animal. Its eyes and mouth were still open, but blood was coming out of the back of its head, staining the snow. Looking around through the falling flakes, she finally spotted Eli Johnson pointing a bolt-action rifle about sixty yards away. After waiting a moment to make sure the lion wasn’t moving, he lowered the gun and started to come toward her.
Goldie patiently waited until the lawman limped over, which gave her adrenaline and heart time to return to normal. She was obviously relieved and grateful, but she also knew she was going to get chewed out for trespassing.
“Hi, Sheriff,” she meekly greeted as he came within earshot.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” he asked. “I told you not to come here! This is exactly why!”
“Because there are mountain lions?” she asked.
“Because it’s dangerous!” he reiterated. “What if I hadn’t been here?”
“Howdidyou get here?” she asked, looking down the road. “There aren’t any footsteps in the snow except mine.”
“There’s another bridge besides the covered bridge about a quarter of a mile downriver and a few houses on the south side of the water,” he explained. “A family named Nelson has a backyard that backs up to the woods and fence. They keep chickens that were disappearing. Mrs. Nelson finally figured out that a mountain lion was probably living in an old tunnel access, and when it was out hunting, it would use one tree to get over the fence and into her yard, then use another on her property to get back over the fence again. I went over the fence at the Nelsons’ with a ladder and was following fresh tracks that led to guess where?”
Goldie nodded, understanding. “Well… I’m sure glad you were armed today.”
“Wouldn’t make much sense to go after a mountain lion if I wasn’t,” he observed. “So, what’re you doing out here?”
