Storm's Thunder by Brandon Boyce

Author:Brandon Boyce [Boyce, Brandon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hannah guides me out the side door and into the smothering gold of afternoon sun. Her small hand squeezes mine, every tiny bone in perfect union beneath the silk of her skin. She banks a hard right and we slink along the rear of the building, hugging close to the adobe wall. We come up on a spot where the two sloping roofs that divide the house east and west converge in a low dip, just a few feet off the ground.

“What are you up to?” But she doesn’t answer, quieting me with a finger to her lips. I am struggling to determine her plan when all at once a flash of mischief fires behind those eyes. She plants one foot on an upturned bucket and, rising upward, her other upon the lip of a rain barrel. She falters a moment—wavering—and quickly regains her balance, but I have already stepped in and lifted her up onto the lowest point of the roof. She accepts my help without looking back and launches into a series of carefully orchestrated maneuvers that carry her up past the first gabled window. She ascends in silence, that concentration from earlier returning in full effect, but the rote precision of her motions conveys a high familiarity with not only this particular gauntlet, but the complexities of climbing in general. Every feline has its hiding places and a mastery of how to get to them. She pauses, her head turning toward me with a baffled frown. I feel the dagger of her disappointment pierce my heart. She wants me to follow, of course, and in all of three movements I forgo the barrel entirely and swing myself up onto the roof. Her eyes go wide with fear that I will crash in a thunderous clang, but when my feet find their lightness and deposit me upright upon the undulating red tiles with hardly more than a soft tap, her smile reappears, broad as ever.

I follow her up the roof, the clay roof tiles baking beneath our feet. She wears strapped, blockish work shoes—another indignity of Harvey’s required dress code—but travels light, served by practice and slight frame. She reaches the apex of the roof and stops, peering over the edge toward the front of the building. The Santa Fe stretches out before us on an endless ribbon of road, and beyond that, a snow-covered peak that I figure to be Mount Powell, but can’t say for sure, on account of now having ventured beyond the boundary of my lifelong travels. The foreground behind shows the clotheslines and work sheds of the kitchen, leading out to gardens of tended crops, a corral for sheep, and a gleaming new barn. A green valley meanders back for miles, around some unseen water source, but is soon swallowed up by the towering rock slabs of the Malpais.

“That Bluewater Lake out yonder?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Heck of a view up here.”

“I know, but we can’t stay. All somebody has to do is look up and I’m cooked.

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