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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 with the solace of good books, a lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep.
        The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie electronic oscillation. He'd not only heard it but felt it, vibrating in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it.
        When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster. sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier.
        But who?
        Or what?
        Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn't been merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that..He wasn't superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on his levelheadedness, common sense, and