Two
Approaching Silver Ridge at midnight was a blind
drive along the edge of a cliff. The road dropped off steeply on the
left, opening onto a vast, moonlit Silver Ridge Valley. A glimmer paced
the car, a reflection from power lines dipping and rising between metal
towers running along the shallow, rock-bottomed Silver Ridge River.
Richard Welk glanced out over the picturesque valley
often as he drove. There was nothing at all to be seen of the dark
foothills of the Appalachians looming over the passenger’s side of the
road. The hills there were black against a star-dusted sky.
Sarah Trevor stirred beside him. Her lithe body
whispered beneath royal blue satin and released an aroma of expensive
perfume. “How much further, Richard?”
She had been sleeping since the turn-off at the
Silver Ridge Nuclear Power Facility thirty miles behind them. Richard
Welk nodded toward points of distant light visible from time to time on
the winding road. “That’s Silver Ridge just ahead, isn’t it?”
She sat up and studied the lights, her voice mellow
and seductive. “Yes, finally, thank God. You can see the house on the
hill. Look at it, thirty-five rooms lit up like a Christmas tree. I tell
you, Richard, it’s unnerving how eccentric Billy has become since the
accident.”
Richard scanned along the horizon dead ahead and
caught sight of the cluster of lights glimmering in the warm summer
night. “Reminiscent of a castle overlooking a feudal village.”
Sarah gave a studious nod of agreement. “Some of the
towns people do call it the castle. The Trevors were once known as the
Lords of Silver Ridge, back before the silver mines ran out in the late
eighteen hundreds and Howard Trevor Senior took his fortune to Boston.”
Eighteen ninety-four was the year that came to
Richard’s mind. Trevor Industries had built a die-casting plant in Silver
Ridge to maintain its presence in the county, and the plant had been
modernized and expanded at regular intervals down through the years.
Why? An explanation worked its way to consciousness. “The Trevors hail
from hereabouts, if I remember correctly.”
Sarah threw him a prim smile. “Howard’s side of the
family, not mine.”
“I’ve never had an opportunity to inquire on how one
Sarah Peters became an integral part of Trevor Industries.” It was a
question he had been wanting to ask for years. “I hear stories, but they
vary from source to source.”
Sarah sized up his request and shrugged off her
reluctance to confide in her chauffeur and private attorney. He had
become more than a mere employee in recent months. “We were partners at
Harvard, Howard and I.”
“Classmates?”
She laughed unabashedly. “That, too. We screwed
incessantly. Harold claimed that lots of sex helped keep his mind on
business. I just thought it was great fun. We graduated together, class
of nineteen seventy-two, and three months later, he contacted me with an
offer of marriage. We had become physically addicted to one another, was
his theory. It wasn’t a romantic notion, but close to the truth. By that
time, Howard was taking his father’s place at the helm without much
difficulty, and we shared a rather pleasant life together for the next
twenty years.”
“I take it that’s privileged information.”
“You had better believe it, buster.” Sarah’s
laughter was gentle music, but her sigh was unhappy. “It’s curious how
life works, how one can take decades of success and contentment for
granted, without ever truly believing that it can and will end someday.
Now he’s gone, and all I have left to show for all of those years is an
impossible burden of responsibility, forty years of fading memory, and a
nineteen year-old son who’s pushing commitment to a psychiatric ward.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t sell those decades of success
and contentment short. Nothing lasts forever.”
Her next sigh was one of exasperation. “The failing
was Howard’s in the beginning. Emotionally, he was a very cool man. It
became mine as I adapted to his ways. Twenty years is seventy-three
hundred days. When I was grieving after the funeral, I bought reams of
paper, one page for each of our days together. I stacked it in one big
pile and tried to see how many pages I could fill with memories of our
life.”
She shook her head and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“There were so few of any significance. There was no passion between us.
I should have kept my hands off the business. I should have spent more
time with Billy from the day he was born.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“I suppose. I don’t have anyone else to pick on.
You, perhaps.”
Richard drove in silence for a time, remembering his
own reaction to Howard Trevor’s death. Trevor had been forty-five, less
than a decade older than himself. The heart defect that had killed him
had escaped the attention of the best doctors medicine had to offer.
Howard Trevor had been an easy man to deal with considering the enormous
power he wielded. Life within the circle of that power had been likened
to a decades long cruise aboard a luxury liner that had sunk at sea and
had left them all floundering in dangerous waters.
“Richard, watch out!”
A pickup truck blocking the highway loomed to view.
Richard jerked the wheel of the limousine aside. Metal clipped metal
regardless. Simultaneously, the left tire struck something dark sprawled
on the shoulder of the highway.
Richard slammed on his brake with Sarah’s scream
ringing in his ears. He broad-slid to a safe stop, paused a moment to
collect his wits, then pulled to the shoulder of the road.
“Lock the doors,” he ordered.
“Richard, no! Don’t you dare go out there!”
He climbed from the car and locked his own door
behind him. He glanced back when she tapped at the window and rummaged in
the glove compartment. She rolled the window down halfway and handed him
a flashlight, and then offered a chrome-plated nine-millimeter pistol.
Richard eyed the weapon gleaming in the moonlight and
shook his head. The pickup they had clipped had met with an accident. A
deer sprawled across the pavement, its belly burst open by the force of a
collision with the pickup and its hindquarters crushed by the wheels of
the limousine. The situation did not warrant venturing into the night
armed to the teeth.
He turned to face the tragedy. “Damn,” he murmured,
bothered by the violence of the animal’s death.
Dark shapes converged on him. Richard swung the
flashlight to bear and pegged three men in its halogen glare, one old and
bearded and two scrawny teenagers, all wearing suspenders, baggy pants and
badly-stained shirts. One held a rag to a bloodied nose. All three
scowled at him in anger.
The elder spoke. “Going to a fire somewhere,
Mister?”
“We were driving at the speed limit,” Richard said
evenly. “Does anyone need a doctor?”
“You a doctor?”
“I can call for one.”
One of the younger men roared laughter. “Don’t that
beat all! They got a phone in that fancy car of theirs! Maybe they got a
john, too!”
Richard narrowed his focus of attention to the
elder. “How about if I give the highway patrol a call?”
“Try Sheriff Krueger in Silver Ridge,” the man said,
his voice broken and unsteady. He sounded drunk.
“You gonna pay for hitting our truck and scaring the
daylights out of our pa?” The younger man’s voice was shrill.
“And look at what you did to the hindquarter of that
perfectly good venison you busted up,” the other ventured. “Krueger’s
gonna nail you for screwing with the Fender boys, ain’t he, Pa?”
But the elder Fender was sizing Richard up for a more
calculated kill. “Might at that. What do you say, Mister? Wanna settle
out of court, seeing as how you almost nailed the three of us speeding
like you was?”
Movement behind the windshield of the limo caught the
attention of the youngest man. He ventured closer, peering with narrowed
eyes through the dark glass. “Pa! Ben! Look at we got here!”
Sarah opened the door and rose into view with her
diamond necklace glittering in the dim light and starlight highlighting
the satin curves of her well-endowed body.
“Holy shit,” the one called Ben called out. “Will
you look at that!”
“Back inside,” Richard said to Sarah.
Ben casually advanced on him. Richard took two
deliberate steps forward in the hope that he could be as equally
intimidating. “I’d advise keeping a healthy distance from the lady.
She’s armed.”
Ben paused and looked doubtful. “Yeah, and you know
karate and kung fu and a half dozen other Japanese words.”
“Wouldn’t Jessica look pretty in that dress, Pa?” the
young one said.
“Go ahead and take it off her, Sidney,” Ben called
out laughing, “but me and Pa get sloppy seconds!”
Richard had little experience dealing with threats of
physical violence. He sensed he or Sarah would be easy pickings if they
panicked. The three men inched their way into position, two to cut him
off from the car, one to make a grab for Sarah. Richard turned slowly to
keep Ben in view, hoping the man would misinterpret the twisted expression
on his face as something more sinister than simple fear.
A tire on the stalled pickup exploded. The noise was
like a cannon shot in the night, and for a moment, Richard thought that
Sarah had indeed opened fire. The truck lurched. Dust settled from the
undercarriage.
“Damn,” the elder Fender muttered after a bout of
puzzled silence. “What the hell was that all about?”
Another tire popped, followed in rapid succession by
the surviving two. Even Richard found himself backing away from the
inexplicable phenomenon with a chill of apprehension.
A high-pitched whine sounded from the darkness near
the fallen deer. All eyes turned to the animal.
The dead animal’s head rose a few inches off the
ground, wobbling on the end of an obviously shattered spinal column.
The three locals reacted first. They turned in
unison. With little more than the sound of their shoes shuffling on the
concrete, they vanished into the darkness at a dead run.
Richard resisted the impulse to follow, his heart
pounding in panic. Sarah called out a window. “Richard, please get in
the car. It’s just Billy toying with those horrible men.”
Richard glanced back at the carcass in time to see
something metallic move into the underbrush.
“Richard, please! I can explain!”
Richard returned to the car. Once locked safely away
inside the air-conditioned limo, some of his tension drained away. He
looked to the woman for her promised explanation.
“You’ll be able to judge for yourself soon enough.
Please, drive on. I would prefer not to associate with vile men on dark
highways at two o’clock in the morning.”
Richard started the car and continued down the
highway. He had driven less than a mile when a ruddy glow of light in the
rear view mirror caught his eye. At first, he attributed the light to a
stray reflection in the windshield. He felt his second chill of
apprehension of the night when an object the size and shape of an inline
roller skate pulled into view behind him.
“Sarah?”
Sarah twisted about in her seat to identify their
companion on the dark highway. “It’s just one of Billy’s infernal toys.
I warned you he was into that sort of thing.”
“Robotics and remote control.” Sudden insight took
his fear away as abruptly as the punctured tires of the pickup had lost
air. “I thought you were talking about toy robots and model airplanes.”
“Well, they are!”
Richard eyed the speedometer needle pegged at sixty
miles an hour. The toy just off his rear bumper had little difficulty
keeping up with him.
“Richard, I told you Billy was a genius. His I.Q. is
completely off the scales. His doctors aren’t even certain it’s a normal
condition, and the accident only made things worse.”
Sarah’s fingernails dug painfully into his arm. “I
warned you about a number of things, Richard Welk. I suggest you keep
them all in mind when we reach the house.”
