At the moment, the machinery stood silent: circular-saw bench, surface planer, band saw, drill press, hollow-chisel mortiser …
Four large reclining chairs, from a Gustav Stickley design, were in production for a client in Los Angeles. With broad canted arms, square-baluster sides, through-tenon construction, and exposed pegs, the handsome chairs would be comfortable, too, once a leather-covered pillow and spring-supported seat were installed.
The air smelled of freshly sawn oak.
At the back of the large room, a short but double-wide hallway separated the lavatory from the simple kiln in which air-dried lumber was further seasoned to carefully reduce its moisture content.
The lavatory door stood open, and the only reflection in the above-sink mirror was Grady’s.
Neither he nor Merlin was startled when a hiss issued from behind the door of the walk-in kiln. To slow the drying process and avoid warping and buckling the lumber, from time to time live steam was injected into the kiln by a tightly calibrated humidifier.
The hook latch on the door hung loose. Either someone lurked in the kiln – or glanced in earlier and then failed to secure the latch.
The latter proved to be the case. The incandescent lamps, under which the wood dried, revealed no one in the kiln.
At the end of the short hallway, Grady opened a heavy door with soft rubber weather-stripping around all four edges. Beyond lay the finishing room, which he kept as free of dust as possible.
He stained and finished his furniture by hand. A dining table, mahogany with ebony inlays, in the style of Greene and Greene, was in the final month of curing after receiving a meticulous French polish with garnet shellac dissolved in industrial alcohol.
To Grady, the aromas of shellac, beeswax, turpentine, and pure copal varnish were no less pleasing than the fragrance of wild roses or the pine-scented crystalline air of a high-altitude forest.
In his best dreams, he drifted through vast houses without residents, through room after deserted room of ever more beautiful furniture, rooms in which no human being would ever betray another or raise a hand in violence, or speak a lie, or out of envy scheme to destroy his neighbor. These were the only dreams of his that featured scent, and waking from them, he was always happy, savoring the lingering memory of the fragrances of the finishing room.
Like the front door, the back stood open, unlocked from inside. Neither he nor the wolfhound detected anyone in the night beyond.
Grady locked the door, and as they returned to the front of the workshop, he opened a few cabinets and drawers, conducting a cursory inventory. No tools or supplies were missing.
After switching off the lights and closing the front door, as he turned his key, he said, “Which is it, big guy – just curious and well-meaning elves or nasty gremlins?”
The dog’s answering chuff seemed noncommittal.
The escort moon guided them across ground that would have been black without the pale celestial light.
When Grady thought he heard the thrum of wings, he looked up but saw only stars.
As they approached the back porch, Merlin quickened from an amble to a trot. He leaped up the steps, bounded across the porch, and disappeared through the kitchen door, which Grady had not closed when they left the house.
While they were out, an intruder had taken advantage of the unguarded entrance. Although Grady had been interrupted halfway through his dinner, his plate on the kitchen table was now empty.
He had baked three extra chicken breasts, one for his lunch the next day and two for the dog. They had been cooling in a pan atop the stove. The covering aluminum foil had been torn aside and thrown on the floor. The pan and the chicken were missing.
Half an hour after dinner, too excited to sleep, eager to make the house his own, Henry Rouvroy found himself in the bedroom, where Nora Carlyle’s garments occupied half the drawers in the dresser and in the highboy, as well as half the closet space. Her clothes weren’t likely to fit whatever girl he chose for the potato cellar, and he had other uses for the drawers and the closet.
Henry possessed numerous firearms and a supply of ammunition that he intended to distribute throughout the house and the barn. The highboy drawers were wide enough to take a shotgun or a rifle.
Stuffing Nora’s clothes into plastic garbage bags took longer than he expected. No matter what dire days might lie ahead for the nation, regardless of the necessity for him to prepare this retreat in a timely fashion, Henry repeatedly found himself distracted by the silky feel of his sister-in-law’s underwear.
When at last he filled four bulging trash bags with her wardrobe, he carried them two at a time to the front porch. Initially intending to take the bags to the barn in the morning, he remained so energetic that he decided to finish the task before bed.
At the corner of the house, near the tree-stump chopping block, stood a deep wheelbarrow that Jim had meant to fill with the split cordwood that now lay scattered on the grass. Henry pushed the barrow to the porch steps, where he loaded it with the bags of clothing.
Under the swollen moon, he didn’t need a flashlight to follow the driveway to the barn. The traffic associated with the September harvest had worn the dirt lane, leaving a half-inch of soft dust that wind had not yet scoured away. His feet and the wheel of the barrow made little noise.
Henry had expected this countryside and the surrounding woods to be noisier than they were, not as drenched in sound as the city, of course, but full of buzz and hum, tick and click, rustle, murmur, sibilation. Instead, the night was quiet, almost eerily so, as if all that slithered and crawled and walked and flew had suffered a sudden extinction, leaving him as the only living thing that wasn’t rooted to the earth.
At the barn, he parked the wheelbarrow near the man-size door, stepped inside, felt for the switch, turned on the lights. He carried two bags of clothes inside before he realized that the bodies of Jim and Nora were not where he had left them.
Dropping the sacks, he stepped to the spot where he had shot his brother and to which he had dragged Nora’s corpse. Some blood on the carpet of straw was still moist, sticky.
Bewildered, Henry crossed to the tractor, circled it, and made his way around the backhoe, as well, seeking the deceased. He was certain they had been dead, both of them, not merely wounded and unconscious.
Bewilderment thickened into confusion when he looked up and saw the horses, Samson and Beauty, watching him over the half-doors of their stalls. Both were chewing mouthfuls of hay and appeared not to have been in the least disturbed by whatever had happened here after he had returned to the house to dress in his brother’s clothes and to have dinner.
Henry checked the first horse stall, then the second, expecting to find the dead lying beside the steeds they had once ridden, though he could not imagine how they would have gotten there. Each horse stood alone in its enclosure, no fallen rider with either of them.
Confusion sharpened into perplexity as Henry turned in a circle, surveying the barn. Worry drew his stare up the rungs of the ladder to the dark loft. But that made no sense: If the dead couldn’t crawl, they certainly couldn’t climb.
Half a minute passed from the discovery that the bodies were missing to the belated realization that he must not be alone on the farm, that someone must have found the murdered pair and moved them.
Henry had left the pistol and the shoulder holster on the bed. Suddenly he was a sheep, shorn and shaking, tender flesh exposed, suspecting every shadow of harboring a wolf.