and wrote on it a long letter from the Man Wolf to the San Francisco Observer.
This letter was a great sprawling uncontrolled document and it was really an angry appeal to Felix Nideck to please come back and help him!
All he had to do to send it anonymously was drive into any city, park somewhere near a hotel or motel, beyond camera reach, and hook up to its Wi-Fi network, and hit SEND.
No way could the e-mail be traced back to him or to anyone.
But he didn,t send the letter. It was too full of pleading and rage and admissions of not knowing what he was doing. It was too full of self-pity that "there was no wise guardian of secrets" to guide him. It was his own fault, wasn,t it, that Stuart,s life was at risk? How could he blame Felix for this? One moment he wanted absolution and understanding. The next he was wanting to hit Felix.
He held on to the Man Wolf,s letter. He hid the computer in the old steamer trunk in the cellar. And he waited.
There were long dark times when he thought, If that boy dies, I will kill myself. But Laura cautioned him that he could not leave her, or leave himself, or leave the mystery - that if he meant to do something so brutal and terrible to himself, then he might as well give himself over to his mother and to the authorities. And when he thought of what that might mean to Felix, well, he backed off from all such ideas entirely.
"Wait for Felix," she said. "Keep that in your mind. When you become like this, think: I will not do anything until Felix comes. Promise me."
Jim called more than once, but Reuben could not bear the thought of telling him about Stuart. He got off the phone as quickly as possible.
As for Laura, she was battling her own demons. Every morning, she went down the long steep perilous trail to the beach and walked for hours near the cold banging surf. (Reuben found the path just about impossible. And the ocean wind turned him into a block of mean-spirited uncooperative ice.)
And for hours as well she walked in the woods, with or without Reuben, determined to conquer her new fear. Once, from the beach, she saw someone high on the cliffs, but that was to be expected.
Reuben was on edge whenever she went out, listening with the inner ear of the wolf to the world that surrounded her.
It crossed his mind more than once that there could be some other Morphenkind out there, some vagrant being of which Felix knew nothing, but he had no real evidence of such a thing. And he trusted that had it been possible, Felix would have warned him. Maybe he was romanticizing Felix. Maybe he had to romanticize him.
Laura brought back tender little sword ferns for the conservatory and nursed them in specially prepared pots, and collected beautiful rocks and pebbles for the basin of the fountain. She found interesting fossils in the gravel driveway beneath the kitchen windows. Then she pitched herself into work on the house, restoring the historic William Morris wallpaper in the old bedrooms, or directing the workmen who were repainting the crown molding and other woodwork. She ordered curtains and draperies, and began an inventory of the china and silver.
She also found a magnificent Fazioli grand piano for the music room.
She began to document the Nideck forest with her camera. By her calculation there were some seventy-five old-growth redwoods on Reuben,s land. She estimated their height at over two hundred fifty feet; there were Douglas firs that were almost as high, and countless young redwoods, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce.
She taught Reuben the names of all the trees, how to recognize the California bay tree, and the maple, and how to tell the fir from the redwood, and how to recognize a host of other plants and ferns.
In the evenings, she read Teilhard de Chardin, just as Reuben did. And other works of theology and philosophy, and sometimes poetry. She confessed that she did not believe in God. But she believed in the world, and she understood Teilhard,s love of the world and faith in the world. She wished she could believe in a personal God, a loving God who understood all this, but she didn,t.
One night she burst into tears as they talked of these things. She asked Reuben to bring about the change, and to take