Winter Moon

of the house, coppery late-afternoon sunlight slanted through west-facing windows, and the air glowed like that in front of an open furnace door. It was light without heat, and still Heather shivered.
        Toby said, "This is great, this is terrific!" The room was more than twice the size of the one in which the boy had slept in Los Angeles, but Heather knew he was less excited by the dimensions than by the almost whimsical architecture, which would have sparked the imagination of any child. The twelve-foot-high ceiling was composed of four groin vaults, and the shadows that lay across those concave surfaces were complex and intriguing. "Neat," Toby said, staring up at the ceiling.
        "Like hanging under a parachute." In the wall to the left of the hall door was a four-footdeep, six-foot-long, arched niche into which a custom-built bed had been fitted. Behind the headboard on the left and in the back wall of the niche were recessed bookshelves and deep cabinets for the storage of model spaceships, action figures, games, and the other possessions that a young boy cherished. Curtains were drawn back from both sides of the niche and, when closed, could seal it off like a berth on an old-fashioned railroad sleeping car.
        "Can this be my room, can it, please?" Toby asked. "Looks to me like it was made for you," Jack said. "Great!" Opening one of the two other doors in the room, Paul said, "This walk-in closet is so deep you could almost say it's a room itself."
        The last door revealed the head of an uncarpeted staircase as tightly curved as that in a lighthouse. The wooden treads squeaked as the four of them descended.
        Heather instantly disliked the stairs. Perhaps she was somewhat claustrophobic in that cramped and windowless space, following Paul Youngblood and Toby, with Jack close behind. Perhaps the inadequate lighting-two widely spaced, bare bulbs in the ceiling-made her uneasy. A mustiness and a vague underlying odor of decay didn't add any charm. Neither did spiderwebs hung with dead moths and beetles.
        Whatever the reason, her heart began to pound as if they were climbing rather than descending. She was overcome by the bizarre fear- similar to the nameless dread in a nightmare-that something hostile and infinitely strange was waiting for them below.
        The last step brought them into a windowless vestibule, where Paul had to use a key to unlock the first of two lower doors. "Kitchen," he said. Nothing fearful waited beyond, merely the room he had indicated.
        "We'll go this way," he said, turning to the second door, which didn't require a key from the inside. When the thumb-turn on the dead-bolt lock proved stiff from lack of use, the few seconds of delay were almost more than Heather could tolerate. Now she was convinced that something was coming down the steps behind them, the murderous phantom of a bad dream. She wanted out of that narrow place immediately, desperately..The door creaked open. They followed Paul through the second exit onto the back porch. They were twelve feet to the left of the house's main rear entrance, which led into the kitchen. Heather took several deep breaths, purging her lungs of the contaminated air from the stairwell.
        Her fear swiftly abated and her racing heart regained a normal pace.
        She looked back into the vestibule where the steps curved upward out of sight. Of course no denizen of a nightmare appeared, and her moment of panic seemed more foolish and inexplicable by the second.
        Jack, unaware of Heather's inner turmoil, put one hand on Toby's head and said, "Well, if that's going to be your room, I don't want to catch you sneaking girls up the back steps."
        "Girls?" Toby was astonished. "Yuck. Why would l want to have anything to do with girls?"
        "I suspect you figure that one out all on your own, given a little time," the attorney said, amused. "And too fast," Jack said.
        "Five years from now, we'll have to fill those stairs with concrete, seal them off forever."
        Heather found the will to turn her back on the door as the attorney closed it.
        She was baffled by the episode, and relieved that no one had been aware of her odd reaction. Los Angeles jitters. She hadn't shed the city.
        She was in rural Montana, where there probably hadn't been a murder in a decade, where most people left doors unlocked day and night- but psychologically, she remained in