Winter Moon

guns, Alma."
        "It's on the TV now, going to be all over the papers tomorrow-what happened at Arkadian's station. People are going to know you and Toby are alone, people who don't like cops or cops' wives. Some jackass reporter will probably even print your address. You've got to be ready for anything these days, anything."
        Alma's paranoia, which came as such a surprise and which seemed so out of character, chilled Heather. Even as she shivered at the icy glint in her friend's eyes, however, a part of her wondered if Alma's assessment of the situation was more rational than it sounded. That she could seriously consider such a paranoid view was enough to make her shiver again, harder than before.
        "You've got to prepare for the worst," Alma Bryson said, picking up the shotgun, turning it over in her hands. "It's not just your life on the line.
        You've got Toby to think about too."
        She stood there, a slender and pretty black woman, an aficionado of jazz and opera, a lover of museums, educated and refined, as warm and loving a person as anyone Heather had ever known, capable of a smile that would charm wild beasts and a musical laugh that angels might have envied, holding a shotgun that looked absurdly large and evil in the hands of someone so lovely and delicate, who had embraced rage because the only alternative to rage was suicidal despair. Alma was like a figure on a poster urging revolution, not a real person but a wildly romanticized symbol. Heather had the disquieting feeling that she was not looking at merely one troubled woman struggling to elude the grasp of bitter grief and disabling hopelessness but at the grim future of their entire troubled society, a harbinger of an all-obliterating storm.
        "Tearing it down brick by brick," Alma said solemnly, "but building nothing to replace it."

CHAPTER SEVEN.
        
        For twenty-nine uneventful nights, the Montana stillness was disturbed only by periodic fits of winter wind, the hoot of a hunting owl, and the distant forlorn howling of timber wolves. Gradually Eduardo Fernandez regained his usual confidence and ceased to regard each oncoming dusk with quiet dread.
        He might have recovered his equilibrium more quickly if he'd had more work to occupy him. Inclement weather prevented him from performing routine maintenance around the ranch, with electric heat and plenty of cord wood for the fireplaces, he had little to do during the winter months except hunker down and wait for spring.
        It had never been a working ranch since he had managed it. Thirty-four years ago, he and Margaret had: been hired by Stanley Quartermass, a wealthy film producer, who had fallen in love with Montana and wanted a second home there. No animals or crops were raised for profit, the ranch was strictly a secluded hideaway..Quartermass loved horses, so he built a comfortable,, heated stable with ten stalls a hundred yards south of the house. He spent about two months per year at the ranch, in one- and two-week visits, and it was Eduardo's duty, in the producer's absence, to ensure that the horses received first-rate care and plenty of exercise. Tending to the animals and keeping the property in good repair had constituted the largest part of his job, and Margaret had been the housekeeper.
        Until eight years ago, Eduardo and Margaret had lived in the cozy, two-bedroom, single-story caretaker's house. That fieldstone structure stood eighty or ninety yards behind-and due west of-the main house, cloistered among pines at the edge of the higher woods. Tommy, their only child, had been raised there until city life exerted its fatal attraction when he was eighteen.
        When Stanley Quartermass died in a private-plane crash, Eduardo and Margaret had been surprised to learn that the ranch had been left to them, along with sufficient funds to allow immediate retirement. The producer had taken care of his four ex-wives while he was alive and had fathered no children from any of his marriages, so he used the greater part of his estate to provide generously for key employees.
        They had sold the horses, closed up the caretaker's house, and moved into the Victorian-style main house, with its gables, decorative shutters, scalloped eaves, and wide porches. It felt strange to be a person of property, but the security was welcome even-or perhaps especially-when it came late in life.
        Now Eduardo was a widowed