The Snow Falcon by Stuart Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

window as if he hadn’t heard her.
     
    For a brief second she was angry, but it passed. The frustration got to her sometimes, but getting upset was pointless. She had been down that road before. She had been down every road. With a resigned sigh, she climbed out and walked back through the snow.
     
    The headstone was a simple granite marker, with his name and the dates of his birth and death carved into it. Underneath it read BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER. She often thought the words were inadequate, but at the time she hadn’t known what else to put. He’d been thirty-six years old when he’d been killed in a hunting accident, of the sort that happened regularly, if not in epidemic numbers, throughout the country. Just a moment’s carelessness, and the man she had loved for eleven years was dead. There had been a stage afterward when she’d felt bitter that he could have let it happen and left her all alone to deal with the aftermath. It hadn’t lasted, but sometimes she still felt a trace of it when she came to his grave. She looked back across the cemetery toward her car, where Jamie was still determinedly looking the other way.
     
    She remembered the morning she’d waved from the window as they’d left. Jamie had been alone to witness his father’s blood leaking away into the ground, his life ebbing with it into the forest floor. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, and as Jamie hadn’t spoken a word since, it had remained mostly a matter of conjecture. It seemed, though, that David had simply tripped, and somehow or other the gun had gone off, blowing a hole in his chest. When Jamie had been brought home, he’d been soaked in his father’s blood, as if he’d taken a bath in it. The sheer volume of it had shocked her deeply; the sight of her eight-year-old boy, red from head to foot, still came back to her sometimes at night and numbed her with horror.
     
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    She turned away, her eyes stinging. She wiped them and took a breath, blinking up at the sky. She missed David with a deep physical ache that gripped her inside. At night, sometimes, she still hugged a pillow to help her sleep, forming in her mind a picture of his face to carry her though her dreams.
    Overhead the cloud was clearing, revealing brief glimpses of blue sky. The ground around the church was covered with a few inches of white snow; the forest beyond rose up the mountain, a green canopy of spruce that in summer would be broken up with patches of dazzling green willow. Right now it appeared dark, above a gloomy interior. The country looked big and empty, as empty as the bare glacial slopes above the tree line high in the mountains. She wanted to put David behind her now and she knew she ought to, but with Jamie it was difficult. Perhaps, she thought again, a new start somewhere else, maybe in Vancouver or even in the East, might be the best thing for both of them.
    As she turned and started back toward her Ford, a vehicle came along the road from the direction of town, and as it got closer, she saw it was Coop. He pulled over, the engine of his RCMP Chevy cruiser idling with a throaty rumble. She always thought it incongruous that the Mounties kept the rider-on-horseback motif on their motorized vehicles. The big truck with its fancy yellow, red, and blue flashing on the sides was about as far removed from a horse as it was possible to get. Coop had the window down. The police lights on top of the roof bore a cap of frozen snow.
    “Going to Prince George today?” He looked over at Jamie and raised a hand, but got no response.
    Susan frowned. She hated the way Jamie simply blanked out anything he didn’t want to know about; but then, that was his whole problem.
    “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “You know how he is.”
    Coop flashed her a smile. “He’ll come around. Listen, how about when you get back I take you both out for supper at the hotel? What do you say? I bet Jamie’d like that.”
    She doubted