The Last Handful of Clover - Book 3: The Stone in the Stream

3.55 The Dread Anticipation of Release

June 16, 8:56 pm

Richard would never know what forced him into the body of Sutton Deary.

Perhaps it was his own subconscious need, far too strong to resist. Or perhaps it was Drouillard himself—staring death in the face, and reaching out to grasp Richard's soul like a lifeline. Or maybe it was Pil, now allowed to rise from the dark well, whose rage at Sutton pushed Richard out with equal fury. But however it had happened, Richard Pratt suddenly found himself transported—sucked out of Pil like a bubble through a straw.

Everything was silent. And time was suspended.

Richard was still in the desert, and still in this exact place. The landscape had not changed, but the time of day had. It was now bright sunlight, rather than early evening. The brush around the dry wash was much more lush, and there was a hint of spring in the air.

And horrifically, Richard found himself standing among a blood-stained and silent tableau.

The ground around him was covered with the dead bodies of a native tribe, and a posse of white settlers on horseback was standing around the edges of the wash, with their guns drawn, all still as sculptures. The wind whispered its secrets through the bodies of the living and the dead.

Standing next to Richard were two white men. One was a long-haired man with his gun drawn, and the other was shorter, heavier. But they, like everything else in the tableau, were frozen in time. The expressions on their faces were full of horror, their eyes gazing not on the dead bodies around them, but at the sky above, as if the very earth had just shaken them to their cores. Richard looked closely at the tall man. He had a face that Richard recognized from history.

Porter Rockwell, he thought. Brigham's avenger.

He followed the barrel of the man's rifle and saw that there, on the ground, a very old man lay dead. He had taken what looked like a shotgun blast to the chest and another bullet to the head. A dead baby, still swaddled in a blanket, lay beside him, and an old woman still cradled his broken body.

She too was dead, executed by two shots; one into her throat and a second into her brain.

"Tuilla," Richard said, recognizing the old woman who he had first met at the funeral home, and who had given him the Fourth Gift. His gaze traveled to the old man with his hand crushed under the stone. "And that must make you George Drouillard."

He became aware that the desperate silence of the scene was not complete. There was a sound of weeping, and it came from the far side of the rock. Someone was there that he could not see.

Cautiously, he walked past the dead old man and the dead old woman. He stepped over the body of the baby and looked behind the rock.

He expected to see Sutton Deary there. It was a name that he had not known seconds ago, but now that he was in the man's mind, he knew it all. He knew more, even, than George Drouillard himself knew. The whole tableau of Drouillard's life spanned before him; not only his life as a mountain man and explorer with the Lewis and Clark expeditions, but also his time as a trapper, how he had faked his own death, and his time with this tribe.

The Goshute, he whispered reverently.

And then there was the more recent history. How the ghost of George Drouillard had invaded and stolen the body of a young boy named Sutton Deary, and been trapped there when Sutton's young soul had been thrown into the beyond.

Somehow, he almost expected to see Sutton Deary as a young boy behind the rock. Or even the old body of Sutton Deary, as it had appeared to him seconds before, holding a gun to his head. But what he saw, after all, was none of those. What he saw was George Drouillard—a carbon copy of the dead man with his arm trapped under the rock. He was dressed in the same bloody rags, and he had the same white hair. But unlike the dead man, his features were untouched.