Dark Rivers of the Heart

the child he had been.
        He was about six or seven years old in the first photo, a skinny kid in swimming trunks, dripping wet, standing by the edge of a pool.
        'The woman was in a one-piece bathing suit beside him, playing a silly practical joke for the camera: one hand behind Grant's head, two of her fingers secretly raised and spread to make it appear as though he had a small pair of horns or antennae.
        In the second photograph, the woman and the boy were sitting at a picnic table. The kid was a year or two older than in the first picture, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. She had one arm around him, pulling him against her side, knocking his cap askew.
        In both snapshots, the woman's smile was as radiant as in all those without the boy, but her face was also brightened by affection and love.
        Roy felt confident that he'd found Spencer Grant's mother.
        He remained baffled, however, as to why the woman was familiar to him.
        Eerily familiar. The longer he stared at the pictures of her, with or without the boy at her side, the more certain he became that he knew her-and that the context in which he had previously seen her was deeply disturbing, dark, and strange.
        He turned his attention again to the snapshot in which mother and son stood beside the swimming pool. In the background, at some distance, was a large barn; even in the faded photograph, traces of red paint were visible on its high, blank walls.
        The woman, the boy, the barn.
        On a deep subconscious level, a memory must have stirred, for suddenly the skin prickled across Roy's scalp.
        The woman. The boy. The barn.
        A chill quivered through him.
        He looked up from the photographs on the kitchen table, at the window above the sink, at the crowded grove of trees beyond the window, at the meager coins of noontime sunlight tumbling through the wealth of shadows, and he willed memory to glimmer forth, as well, from the eucalyptic dark.
        The woman. The boy. The barn.
        For all his straining, enlightenment eluded him, although another chill walked through his bones.
        The barn.
        Through residential streets of stucco homes, where cacti and yucca plants and hardy olive trees were featured in low-maintenance desert landscaping, through a shopping center parking lot, through an industrial area, through the maze of a self-storage yard filled with corrugated-steel sheds, off the pavement and through a sprawling park, where the fronds of the palms tossed and lashed in a frenzied welcome to the oncoming storm, Spencer sought without success to shake off the pursuing Chevrolet.
        Sooner or later, they were going to cross the path of a police patrol.
        I find it As soon as one unit of local cops became involved, Spencer would even more difficult to get away.
        Disoriented by the twisting route taken to elude his pursuers, Spencer was surprised to be flashing past one of the newest resort hotels, on the right. Las Vegas Boulevard South was only a few hundred yards ahead.
        The traffic light was red, but he decided to bet everything that it would change by the time he got there.
        The Chevy remained close behind him. If he stopped, the bastards would be out of their car and all over the Explorer, bristling with more guns than a porcupine had quills.
        Three hundred yards to the intersection. Two hundred fifty.
        The signal was still red. Cross traffic wasn't as heavy as it could get farther north along the Strip, but it was not light, either.
        Running out of time, Spencer slowed slightly, enough to allow himself more maneuverability at the moment of decision but not enough to encourage the driver of the Chevy to try to pull alongside him.
        A hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty.
        Lady Luck wasn't with him. He was still playing the green, but the red kept turning up. A gasoline tanker truck was approaching the intersection from the left, taking advantage of the rare chance to make a little speed on the Strip, going faster than the legal limit.
        Rocky began bobbing his head up and down again.
        Finally the driver of the tanker saw the Explorer coming and tried to brake quickly without jackknifing.
        "All right, okay, okay, gonna make it," Spencer heard himself saying, almost chanting, as if he were crazily determined to shape reality with