Winter Moon

kill Tweetie the canary, but unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering feline.
        The telephone rang.
        Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside, and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen.
        The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on the counter and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
        "Heather?"
        "Speaking."
        "It's Lyle Crawford."
        Crawford was the captain of Jack's division, the man to whom he answered..Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the instincts of a cop's wife, -but she knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and expelling the same word with each exhalation: "No, no, no, no."
        Crawford was saying something, but Heather couldn't make herself listen to him, as if whatever had happened to Jack would not really have happened as long as she refused to hear the ugly facts put into words.
        Someone was knocking at the back door.
        She turned, looked. Through the window in the door, she saw a man in uniform, dripping rain, Louie Silverman, another cop from Jack's division, a good friend for eight years, nine years, maybe longer, Louie with the rubbery face and unruly red hair. Because he was a friend, he had come around to the back door in stead of knocking at the front, not so formal that way, not so damn cold and horribly formal, just a friend at the back door, oh God, just a friend at the back door with some news.
        Louie said her name. Muffled by the glass. So forlorn, the way he said her name.
        "Wait, wait," she told Lyle Crawford, and she took the receiver away from her ear, held it against her breast.
        She closed her eyes too, so she wouldn't have to look at poor Louie's face pressed to the window in the door. So gray, his face, so drawn and gray. He loved Jack too. Poor Louie.
        She chewed on her lower lip and squeezed her eyes tightly shut and held the phone in both hands against her chest, searching for the strength she was going to need, praying for the strength.
        She heard a key in the back door. Louie knew where they hid the spare on the porch.
        The door opened. He came inside with the sound of rain swelling behind him.
        "Heather," he said.
        The sound of the rain. The rain. The cold merciless sound of the rain.

CHAPTER FOUR.
        
        The Montana morning was high and blue, pierced by mountains with peaks as white as angels' robes, graced by forests green and by the smooth contours of lower meadows still asleep under winter's mantle. The air was pure and so clear it seemed possible to look all the way to China if not for the obstructing terrain.
        Eduardo Fernandez stood on the front porch of the ranch house, staring.across the down-sloping, snowcovered fields to the woods a hundred yards to the east.
        Sugar pines and yellow pines crowded close to one another and pinned inky shadows to the ground, as if the night never quite escaped their needled grasp even with the rising of a bright sun in a cloudless sky.
        The silence was deep. Eduardo lived alone, and his nearest neighbor was two miles away. The wind was still abed, and nothing moved across that vast panorama except for two birds of prey-hawks, perhaps-circling soundlessly high overhead.
        Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, when the night usually would have been equally steeped in silence, Eduardo had been awakened by a strange sound.
        The longer he had listened, the stranger it had seemed. As he had gotten out of bed to seek the source, he had been surprised to find he was afraid. After seven decades of taking what life threw at him, having attained spiritual peace and an acceptance of the inevitability of death, he'd not been frightened of anything in a long time. He was unnerved, therefore, when last night he had felt his heart thudding furiously and his gut clenching with dread merely because of a queer sound.
        Unlike many seventy-year-old men, Eduardo rarely had difficulty attaining plumbless sleep for a full eight hours. His days were filled with physical activity, his evenings