Winter Moon

the shadow of the Big Orange, living conscious anticipation of sudden, senseless violence. Just a delayed case of Los Angeles jitters. "Better show you the rest of the property," Paul said."
        "We don't have much more than half an hour of day- light left."
        They followed him down the porch steps and up the sloping rear lawn toward a smaller, stone house tucked among the evergreens at the edge of the forest.
        Heather recognized it from the photographs Paul had sent: the caretaker's residence. As twilight stealthily approached, the sky far to the - east was a deep sapphire. It faded to a lighter blue in the west, where the sun hastened toward the mountains. The temperature had slipped out of the fifties. Heather walked with her hands jammed in jacket pockets and her shoulders hunched. She was pleased to see that Jack took the hill with vigor, not limping at all.
        Occasionally his left leg ached and he favored it, but not today. She found it hard to believe that only eight months ago, their lives seemed to have been changed for the worse, forever. No wonder she was still jumpy. Such a terrible eight months. But everything was fine now..Really fine.
        The rear lawn hadn't been maintained after Eduardo's death. The grass had grown six or eight inches before the aridity of late summer and the chill of early autumn had turned it brown and pinched off its growth until spring. It crackled faintly under their feet. "Ed and Margaret moved out of the caretaker's house when they inherited the ranch eight years ago," Paul said as they drew near the stone bungalow. "Sold the contents, nailed plywood over the windows. Don't think anyone's been in there since. Unless you plan to have a caretaker yourself, you probably won't have a use for it, either. But you ought to take a look just the same."
        Pine trees crowded three sides of the smaller house. The forest was so primeval that darkness dwelt in much of it even before the sun had set.
        The bristling green of heavy boughs, enfolded with purple-black shadows, was a lovely sight-but those wooded realms had an air of mystery that Heather found disturbing, even a little menacing. For the first time she wondered what animals might from time to time venture out of those wilds into the yard. Wolves? Bears?
        Mountain lions? Was Toby safe here? Oh, for God's sake, Heather She was thinking like a city dweller, always wary of danger, perceiving threats everywhere. In fact, wild animals avoided people and ran if approached. What do you expect? she asked herself sarcastically.
        That you'll be barricaded in the house while gangs of bears hammer on the doors and packs of snarling wolves throw themselves through windows like something out of a bad TV movie about ecological disaster?
        Instead of a porch, the caretaker's house had a large flagstone-paved area in front of the entrance. They stood there while Paul found the right key on the ring he carried. The north-east-south panorama from the perimeter of the high woods was stunning, better even than from the main house. Like a landscape in a Maxfield Parrish painting, the descending fields and forests receded into a distant violet haze under a darkly luminous sapphire sky. The fading afternoon was windless, and the silence was so deep she might have thought she'd gone deaf- except for the clinking of the attorney's keys. After a life in the city, such quiet was eerie.
        The door opened with much cracking and scraping, as if an ancient seal had been broken. Paul stepped across the threshold, into the dark living room, and flicked the light switch. Heather heard it click several times, but the lights didn't come on. Stepping outside again, Paul said, "Figures. Ed must've shut off all the power at the breaker box. I know where it is. You wait here, I'll be right back."
        They stood at the front door, staring at the gloom beyond the threshold, while the attorney disappeared around the corner of the house. His departure made Heather apprehensive, though she wasn't sure why. Perhaps because he had gone alone.
        "When I get a dog, can he sleep in my room?" Toby asked. "Sure," Jack.said, "but not on the bed."
        "Not on the bed? Then where would he sleep?"
        "Dogs usually make do with the floor."
        "That's not fair."
        "You'll never hear a dog complain."
        "But why not on the bed?"
        "Fleas."
        "I'll take good