Andy and Charlie McGee arrived at the cottage on Tashmore Pond two days after the burning at the Manders farm. The Willys hadn’t been in great shape to start with, and the muddy plunge over the woods roads that Irv had directed them onto had done little to improve it.
When dusk came on the endless day that had begun in Hastings Glen, they had been less then twenty yards from the end of the second-and worse-of the two woods roads. Below them, but screened off by a heavy growth of bushes, was Route 22. Although they couldn’t see the road, they could hear the occasional swish and whine of passing cars and trucks. They slept that night in the Willys, bundled up for warmth. They set out again the next morning-yesterday morning-at just past five A.M… with daylight nothing but a faint white tone in the east.
Charlie looked pallid and listless and used up. She hadn’t asked him what would happen to them if the roadblocks had been shifted east. It was just as well, because if the roadblocks had been shifted, they would be caught, and that was simply all there was to it. There was no question of ditching the Willys, either; Charlie was in no shape to walk, and for that matter, neither was he.
So Andy had pulled out onto the highway and all that day in October they had jigged and jogged along secondary roads under a white sky that promised rain but never quite delivered it. Charlie slept a great deal, and Andy worried about her-worried that she was using the sleep in an unhealthy way, using it to flee what had happened instead of trying to come to terms with it.
He stopped twice at roadside diners and picked up burgers and fries. The second time he used the five-dollar bill that the van driver, Jim Paulson, had laid on him. Most of the remaining phone change was gone. He must have lost some of it out of his pockets during that crazy time at the Manders place, but he didn’t recall it. Something else was gone as well; those frightening numb places on his face had faded away sometime during the night. Those he didn’t mind losing.
Most of Charlie’s share of the burgers and fries went uneaten.
Last night they had driven into a highway rest area about an hour after dark. The rest area was deserted. It was autumn, and the season of the Winnebagos had passed for another year. A rustic woodburned sign read: NO CAMPING NO FIRES LEASH YOUR DOG $500 FINE FOR LITTERING.
“They’re real sports around here,” Andy muttered, and drove the Willys down the slope beyond the far edge of the gravel parking lot and into a copse beside a small, chuckling stream. He and Charlie got out and went wordlessly down to the water. The overcast held, but it was mild; there were no stars visible and the night seemed extraordinarily dark. They sat down for a while and listened to the brook tell its tale. He took Charlie’s hand and that was when she began to cry-great, tearing sobs that seemed to be trying to rip her apart.
He took her in his arms and rocked her. “Charlie,” he murmured. “Charlie, Charlie, don’t. Don’t cry.”
“Please don’t make me do it again, Daddy,” she wept. “Because if you said to I’d do it and then I guess I’d kill myself, so please… please… never…”
“I love you,” he said. “Be quiet and stop talking about killing yourself. That’s crazy-talk.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t. Promise, Daddy.”
He thought for a long time and then said slowly: “I don’t know if I can, Charlie. But I promise to try. Will that be good enough?”
Her troubled silence was answer enough.
“I get scared, too,” he said softly. “Daddies get scared, too. You better believe it.”
They spent that night, too, in the cab of the Willys. They were back on the road by six o'clock in the morning. The clouds had broken up, and by ten o'clock it had become a flawless, Indian-summery day. Not long after they crossed the Vermont state line they saw men riding ladders like masts in tossing apple trees and trucks in the orchards filled with bushel baskets of Macs.
At eleven-thirty they turned off Route 34 and onto a narrow, rutted dirt road marked PRIVATE PROPERTY, and something in Andy’s chest loosened. They had made it to Granther McGee’s place. They were here.
They drove slowly down toward the pond, a distance of perhaps a mile and a half. October leaves, red and gold, swirled across the road in front of the Jeep’s blunt nose. Just as glints of water began to show through the trees, the road branched in two. A heavy steel chain hung across the smaller branch, and from the chain a rust-flecked yellow sign: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF COUNTY SHERIFF. Most of the rust flecks had formed around six or eight dimples in the metal, and Andy guessed that some summer kid had spent a few minutes working off his boredom by plinking at the sign with his.22. But that had been years ago.
He got out of the Willys and took his keyring out of his pocket. There was a leather tab on the ring with his initials. A.McG… almost obliterated. Vicky had given him that piece of leather for Christmas one year-a Christmas before Charlie had been born.
He stood by the chain for a moment, looking at the leather tab, then at the keys themselves. There were almost two dozen of them. Keys were funny things; you could index a life by the keys that had a way of collecting on your keyring. He supposed that some people, undoubtedly people who had realized a higher degree of organization than he had, simply threw their old keys away, just as those same organizational types made a habit of cleaning their wallets out every six months or so. Andy had never done either.
Here was the key that opened the east-wing door of Prince Hall back in Harrison, where his office had been. His key to the office itself. To the English Department office. Here was the key to the house in Harrison that he had seen for the last time on the day the Shop killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter. Two or three more he couldn’t even identify. Keys were funny things, all right.
His vision blurred. Suddenly he missed Vicky, and needed her as he hadn’t needed her since those first black weeks on the road with Charlie. He was so tired, so scared, and so full of anger. In that moment, if he’d had every employee of the Shop lined up in front of him along Granther’s road, and it someone had handed him a Thompson submachine gun…
“Daddy?” It was Charlie’s voice, anxious. “Can’t you find the key?” “Yes, I’ve got it,” he said. It was among the rest, a small Yale key on which he had scratched T.P. for Tashmore Pond with his jackknife. The last time they had been here was the year Charlie was born, and now Andy had to wiggle the key a little before the stiff tumblers would turn. Then the lock popped open and he laid the chain down on the carpet of fall leaves.
He drove the Willys through and then re-padlocked the chain.
The road was in bad shape, Andy was glad to see. When they came up regularly every summer, they would stay three or four weeks and he would always find a couple of days to work on the road-get a load of gravel from Sam Moore’s gravel pit and put it down in the worst of the ruts, cut back the brush, and get Sam himself to come down with his old dragger and even it out. The camp road’s other, broader fork led down to almost two dozen camp homes and cottages strung along the shorefront, and those folks had their Road Association, annual dues. August business meeting and all (although the business meeting was really only an excuse to get really loaded before Labor Day came and put an end to another summer), but Granther’s place was the only one down this way, because Granther himself had bought all the land for a song back in the depths of the Depression.
In the old days they’d had a family car, a Ford wagon. He doubted if the old wagon would have made it down here now, and even the Willys, with its high axles, bottomed out once or twice. Andy didn’t mind at all. It meant that no one had been down here.
“Will there be electricity, Daddy?” Charlie asked.
“No,” he said, “and no phone, either. We don’t dare get the electricity turned on, kiddo. It’d be like holding up a sign saying HERE WE ARE. But there are kerosene lamps and two range-oil drums. If the stuff hasn’t been ripped off, that is.” That worried him a little. Since the last time they’d been down here, the price of range oil had gone up enough to make the theft worthwhile, he supposed.
“Will there be-“Charlie began.
“Holy shit,” Andy said. He jammed on the brakes. A tree had fallen across the road up ahead, a big old birch pushed down by some winter storm. “I guess we walk from here. It’s only a mile or so anyway. We’ll hike it.” Later he would have to come back with Granther’s one-handed buck and cut the tree up. He didn’t want to leave Irv’s Willys parked here. It was too open.
He ruffled her hair. “Come on.”
They got out of the Willys, and Charlie scooted effortlessly under the birch while Andy clambered carefully over, trying not to skewer himself anywhere important. The leaves crunched agreeably under their feet as they walked on, and the woods were aromatic with fall. A squirrel looked down at them from a tree, watching their progress closely. And now they began to see bright slashes of blue again through the trees.
“What did you start to say back there when we came to the tree?” Andy asked her. “If there would be enough oil for a long time. In case we stay the winter.” “No, but there’s enough to start with. And I’m going to cut a lot of wood. You’ll haul plenty of it, too.”
Ten minutes later the road widened into a clearing on the shore of Tashmore Pond and they were there. They both stood quietly for a moment. Andy didn’t know what Charlie was feeling, but for him there was a rush of remembrance too total to be called anything so mild as nostalgia. Mixed up in the memories was his dream of three mornings ago-the boat, the squirming nightcrawler, even the tire patches on Granther’s boots.
The cottage was five rooms, wood over fieldstone base. A deck jutted out toward the lake, and a stone pier poked out into the water itself. Except for the drifts of leaves and the blowdowns of three winters, the place hadn’t changed a bit. He almost expected Granther himself to come strolling out, wearing one of those green and black checked shirts, waving and bellowing for him to come on up, asking him if he’d got his fishing license yet, because the brown trout were still biting good around dusk.
It had been a good place, a safe place. Far across Tashmore Pond, the pines glimmered gray-green in the sunshine. Stupid trees, Granther had said once, don’t even know the difference between summer and winter. The only sign of civilization on the far side was still the Bradford Town Landing. No one had put up a shopping centre or an amusement park. The wind still talked in the trees here. The green shingles still had a mossy, woodsy look, and pine needles still drifted in the roof angles and in the cup of the wooden gutter. He had been a boy here, and Granther had shown him how to bait a hook. He had had his own bedroom here, paneled in good maple, and he had dreamed a boy’s dreams in a narrow bed and had awakened to the sound of water lapping the pier. He had been a man here as well, making love to his wife in the double bed that had once belonged to Granther and his wife-that silent and somehow baleful woman who was a member of the American Society of Atheists and would explain to you, should you ask, the Thirty Greatest Inconsistencies in the King James Bible, or, should you prefer, the Laughable Fallacy of the Clockspring Theory of the Universe, all with the thudding, irrevocable logic of a dedicated preacher.
“You miss Mom, don’t you?” Charlie said in a forlorn voice.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”
“Me too,” Charlie said. “You had fun here, didn’t you?”
“We did,” he agreed. “Come on, Charlie.”
She held back, looking at him.
“Daddy, will things ever be all right for us again? Will I be able to go to school and things?”
He considered a lie, but a lie was a poor answer. “I don’t know,” he said. He tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come; he found he could not even stretch his lips convincingly. “I don’t know, Charlie.”
Granther’s tools were all still neatly racked in the toolshed portion of the boathouse, and Andy found a bonus he had hoped for but had told himself not to hope for too much: nearly two cords of wood, neatly split and time-seasoned in the bay beneath the boathouse. Most of it he had split himself, and it was still under the sheet of ragged, dirty canvas he had thrown over it. Two cords wouldn’t take them through the winter, but by the time he finished carving up the blowdowns around the camp and the birch back on the road, they would be well set.
He took the bucksaw back up to the fallen tree and cut it up enough to get the Willys through. By then it was nearly dark, and he was tired and hungry. No one had bothered to rip off the well stocked pantry, either; if there had been vandals or thieves or snowmobiles over the last six winters, they had stuck to the more populous southern end of the lake. There were five shelves packed with Campbell’s soups and Wyman’s sardines and Dinty Moore beef stew and all sorts of canned vegetables. There was also still half a case of Rival dog food on the floor-a legacy of Granther’s good old dog Bimbo-but Andy didn’t think it would come to that.
While Charlie looked at the books on the shelves in the big living room, Andy went into the small root cellar that was three steps down from the pantry, scratched a wooden match on one of the beams, stuck his finger into the knothole in one of the boards that lined the sides of the little dirt floored room, and pulled. The board came out and Andy looked inside. After a moment he grinned. Inside the cobweb-festooned little bolt-hole were four mason jars filled with a clear, slightly oily looking liquid that was one-hundred-percent pure white lightning-what Granther called “father’s mule-kick.”
The match burned Andy’s fingers. He shook it out and lit a second. Like the dour New England preachers of old (from whom she had been a direct descendant), Hulda McGee had no liking, understanding, or tolerance for the simple and slightly stupid male pleasures. She had been a Puritan atheist, and this had been Granther’s little secret, which he had shared with Andy the year before he died.
Besides the white lightning, there was a caddy for poker chips. Andy pulled it out and felt in the slot at the top. There was a crackling sound, and he pulled out a thin sheaf of bills-a few tens and fives and some ones. Maybe eighty dollars all told. Granther’s weakness had been seven-card stud, and this was what he called his “struttin money.”
The second match burned his fingers, and Andy shook it out. Working in the dark, he put the poker chips back, money and all. It was good to know it was there. He replaced the board and went back through the pantry.
“Tomato soup do you?” he asked Charlie. Wonder of wonders, she had found all the Pooh books on one of the shelves and was currently some where in the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and Eeyore.
“Sure,” she said, not looking up.
He made a big pot of tomato soup and opened them each a tin of sardines. He lit one of the kerosene lamps after carefully drawing the drapes and put it in the middle of the dining table. They sat down and ate, neither of them talking much. Afterward he smoked a cigarette, lighting it over the chimney of the lamp. Charlie discovered the card drawer in Grandma’s Welsh dresser; there were eight or nine decks in there, each of them missing a jack or a deuce or something, and she spent the rest of the evening sorting them and playing with them while Andy prowled through the camp.
Later, tucking her into bed, he asked her how she felt.
“Safe,” she said with no hesitation at all. “Goodnight, Daddy.”
If it was good enough for Charlie, it was good enough for him. He sat with her awhile, but she dropped off to sleep quickly and with no trouble, and he left after propping her door open so he would hear her if she became restless in the night.
Before turning in, Andy went back down to the root cellar, got one of the jars of white lightning, poured himself a small knock in a juice glass, and went out through the sliding door and onto the deck. He sat in one of the canvas director’s chairs (mildewy smell; he wondered briefly if something could be done about that) and looked out at the dark, moving bulk of the lake. It was a trifle chilly, but a couple of small sips at Granther’s mule-kick took care of the chill quite nicely. For the first time since that terrible chase up Third Avenue, he too felt safe and at rest.
He smoked and looked out across Tashmore Pond.
Safe and at rest, but not for the first time since New York City. For the first time since the Shop had come back into their lives on that terrible August day fourteen months ago. Since then they had either been running or hunkering down, and either way there was no rest.
He remembered talking to Quincey on the telephone with the smell of burned carpeting in his nostrils. He in Ohio, Quincey out there in California, which in his few letters he always called the Magic Earthquake Kingdom. Yes, it’s a good thing, Quincey had said. Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free… I bet they’d just want to take that child and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except… keep your head down.
He thought he had been scared then. He hadn’t known what scared was. Scared was coming home and finding your wife dead with her fingernails pulled out. They had pulled out her nails to find out where Charlie was. Charlie had been spending two days and two nights at her friend Terri Dugan’s house. A month or so later they had been planning to have Terri over to their house for a similar length of time. Vicky had called it the Great Swap of 1980.
Now, sitting on the deck and smoking, Andy could reconstruct what had happened, although then he had existed in nothing but a blur of grief and panic and rage: it had been the blindest good luck (or perhaps a little more than luck) that had enabled him to catch up with them at all.
They had been under surveillance, the whole family. Must have been for some time. And when Charlie hadn’t come home from summer daycamp that Wednesday afternoon, and didn’t show up on Thursday or Thursday evening either, they must have decided that Andy and Vicky had tumbled to the surveillance. Instead of discovering that Charlie was doing no more than staying at a friend’s house not two miles away, they must have decided that they had taken their daughter and gone underground.
It was a crazy, stupid mistake, but it hadn’t been the first such on the Shop’s part-according to an article Andy had read in Rolling Stone, the Shop had been involved and heavily influential in precipitating a bloodbath over an airplane hijacking by Red Army terrorists (the hijack had been aborted-at the cost of sixty lives), in selling heroin to the Organization in return for information on mostly harmless Cuban-American groups in Miami, and in the communist takeover of a Caribbean island that had once been known for its multimillion-dollar beachfront hotels and its voodoo-practicing population.
With such a series of colossal gaffes under the Shop’s belt, it became less difficult to understand how the agents employed to keep watch on the McGee family could mistake a child’s two nights at a friend’s house as a run for the tall timber. As Quincey would have said (and maybe he had), if the most efficient of the Shop’s thousand or more employees had to go to work in the private sector, they would have been drawing unemployment benefits before their probationary periods were up.
But there had been crazy mistakes on both sides, Andy reflected-and if the bitterness in that thought had become slightly vague and diffuse with the passage of time, it had once been sharp enough to draw blood, a many-tined bitterness, with each sharp point tipped with the curare of guilt. He had been scared by the things Quincey implied on the phone that day Charlie tripped and fell down the stairs, but apparently he hadn’t been scared enough. If he had been, perhaps they would have gone underground.
He had discovered too late that the human mind can become hypnotized when a life, or the life of a family, begins to drift out of the normal range of things and into a fervid fantasy-land that you are usually asked to accept only in sixty-minute bursts on TV or maybe for one-hundred-ten-minute sittings in the local Cinema I.
In the wake of his conversation with Quincey, a peculiar feeling had gradually crept over him: it began to seem that he was constantly stoned. A tap on his phone? People watching them? A possibility that they might all be scooped up and dropped into the basement rooms of some government complex? There was such a tendency to smile a silly smile and just watch these things loom up, such a tendency to do the civilized thing and pooh-pooh your own instincts…
Out on Tashmore Pond there was a sudden dark flurry and a number of ducks took off into the night, headed west. A half-moon was rising, casting a dull silver glow across their wings as they went. Andy lit another cigarette. He was smoking too much, but he would get a chance to go cold turkey soon enough; he had only four or five left.
Yes, he had suspected there was a tap on the phone. Sometimes there would be an odd double click after you picked it up and said hello. Once or twice, when he had been talking to a student who had called to ask about an assignment or to one of his colleagues, the connection had been mysteriously broken. He had suspected that there might be bugs in the house, but he had never torn the place apart looking for them (had he suspected he might find them?). And several times he had suspected-no, had been almost sure-that they were being watched.
They had lived in the Lakeland district of Harrison, and Lakeland was the sublime archetype of suburbia. On a drunk night you could circle six or eight blocks for hours, just looking for your own house. The people who were their neighbors worked for the IBM plant outside town, Ohio Semi Conductor in town, or taught at the college. You could have drawn two ruler-straight lines across an average family-income sheet, the lower line at eighteen and a half thousand and the upper one at, maybe thirty thousand, and almost everyone in Lakeland would have fallen in the area between.
You got to know people. You nodded on the street to Mrs. Bacon, who had lost her husband and had since been remarried to vodka-and she looked it; the honeymoon with that particular gentleman was playing hell with her face and figure. You tipped a V at the two girls with the white Jag who were renting the house on the corner of Jasmine Street and Lakeland Avenue-and wondered what spending the night with the two of them would be like. You talked baseball with Mr. Hammond on Laurel Lane as he everlastingly trimmed his hedges. Mr. Hammond was with IBM (“Which stands for I’ve Been Moved,” he would tell you endlessly as the electric clippers hummed and buzzed), originally from Atlanta and a rabid Atlanta Braves fan. He loathed Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, which did not exactly endear him to the neighbourhood. Not that Hammond gave a shit. He was just waiting for IBM to hand him a fresh set of walking papers.
But Mr. Hammond was not the point. Mrs. Bacon wasn’t the point, nor were those two luscious peaches in their white jag with the dull red primer paint around the headlights. The point was that after a while your brain formed its own subconscious subset: people who belong in Lakeland.
But in the months before Vicky was killed and Charlie snatched from the Dugans” house, there had been people around who didn’t belong to that subset. Andy had dismissed them, telling himself it would be foolish to alarm Vicky just because talking to Quincey had made him paranoid.
The people in the light-gray van. The man with the red hair that he had seen slouched behind the wheel of an AMC Matador one night and then behind the wheel of a Plymouth Arrow one night about two weeks later and then in the shotgun seat of the gray van about ten days after that. Too many salesmen came to call. There had been evenings when they had come home from a day out or from taking Charlie to see the latest Disney epic when he had got the feeling that someone had been in the house, that things had been moved around the tiniest bit.
That feeling of being watched.
But he hadn’t believed it would go any further than watching. That had been his crazy mistake. He was still not entirely convinced that it had been a case of panic on their part. They might have been planning to snatch Charlie and himself, killing Vicky because she was relatively useless-who really needed a low-grade psychic whose big trick for the week was closing the refrigerator door from across the room?
Nevertheless, the job had a reckless, hurry-up quality to it that made him think that Charlie’s surprise disappearance had made them move more quickly than they had intended. They might have waited if it had been Andy who dropped out of sight, but it hadn’t been. It had been Charlie, and she was the one they were really interested in. Andy was sure of that now.
He got up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. Time he went to bed, time he stopped hashing over these old, hurtful memories. He was not going to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Vicky’s death. He had only been an accessory before the fact, after all. And the rest of his life might not be that long, either. The action on Irv Manders’s porch hadn’t been lost on Andy McGee. They had meant to waste him. It was only Charlie they wanted now.
He went to bed, and after a while he slept. His dreams were not easy ones. Over and over he saw that trench of fire running across the beaten dirt of the dooryard, saw it divide to make a fairy-ring around the chopping block, saw the chickens going up like living incendiaries. In the dream, he felt the heat capsule around him, building and building.
She said she wasn’t going to make fires anymore.
And maybe that was best.
Outside, the old October moon shone down on Tashmore Pond on Bradford, New Hampshire, across the water, and on the rest of New England. To the south, it shone down on Longmont, Virginia.
Sometimes Andy McGee had feelings-hunches of extraordinary vividness. Ever since the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall. He didn’t know if the hunches were a low-grade sort of precognition or not, but he had learned to trust them when he got them.
Around noon on that August day in 1980, he got a bad one.
It began during lunch in the Buckeye Room, the faculty lounge on the top floor of the Union building. He could even pinpoint the exact moment. He had been having creamed chicken on rice with Ev O'Brian, Bill Wallace, and Don Grabowski, all in the English Department. Good friends, all of them. And as usual, someone had brought along a Polish joke for Don, who collected them. It had been Ev’s joke, something about being able to tell a Polish ladder from a regular one because the Polish ladder had the word STOP lettered on the top rung. All of them were laughing when a small, very calm voice spoke up in Andy’s mind.
(something’s wrong at home)
That was all. That was enough. It began to build up almost the same way that his headaches built up when he overused the push and tipped himself over. Only this wasn’t a head thing; all his emotions seemed to be tangling themselves up, almost lazily, as if they were yarn and some bad-tempered cat had been let loose along the runs of his nervous system to play with them and snarl them up.
He stopped feeling good. The creamed chicken lost whatever marginal appeal it had had to begin with. His stomach began to flutter, and his heart was beating rapidly, as if he had just had a bad scare. And then the fingers of his right hand began abruptly to throb, as if he had got them jammed in a door.
Abruptly he stood up. Cold sweat was breaking on his forehead.
“Look, I don’t feel so good,” he said. “Can you take my one o'clock, Bill?”
“Those aspiring poets? Sure. No problem. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Something I ate, maybe.”
“You look sort of pale,” Don Grabowski said. “You ought to cruise over to the infirmary, Andy.”
“I may do that,” Andy said.
He left, but with no intention whatever of going to the infirmary. It was quarter past twelve, the late summer campus drowsing through the last week of the final summer session. He raised a hand to Ev,
Bill, and Don as he hurried out. He had not seen any of them since that day.
He stopped on the Union’s lower level, let himself into a telephone booth, and called home. There was no answer. No real reason why there should have been; with Charlie at the Dugans, Vicky could have been out shopping, having her hair done, she could have been over at Tammy Upmore’s house or even having lunch with Eileen Bacon. Nevertheless, his nerves cranked up another notch. They were nearly screaming now.
He left the Union building and half walked, half ran to the station wagon, which was in the Prince Hall parking lot. He drove across town to Lakeland. His driving was jerky and poor. He jumped lights, tailgated, and came close to knocking a hippie of his ten-speed Olympia. The hippie gave him the finger. Andy barely noticed. His heart was trip hammering now. He felt as if he had taken a hit of speed.
They lived on Conifer Place-in Lakeland, as in so many suburban developments built in the fifties, most of the streets seemed named for trees or shrubs. In the midday August heat, the street seemed queerly deserted. It only added to his feeling that something bad had happened. The street looked wider with so few cars parked along the curbs. Even the few kids playing here and there could not dispel that strange feeling of desertion; most of them were eating lunch or over at the playground. Mrs. Flynn from Laurel Lane walked past with a bag of groceries in a wheeled caddy, her paunch as round and tight as a soccer ball under her avocado-colored stretch pants. All up and down the street, lawn sprinklers twirled lazily, fanning water onto the grass and rainbows into the air.
Andy drove the offside wheels of the wagon up over the curb and then slammed on the brakes hard enough to lock his seatbelt momentarily and to make the wagon’s nose dip toward the pavement. He turned off the engine with the gearshift still in Drive, something he never did, and went up the cracked cement walk that he kept meaning to patch and somehow never seemed to get around to. His heels clacked meaninglessly. He noticed that the venetian blind over the big living-room picture window (mural window, the realtor who had sold them the house called it, here ya gotcha basic mural window) was drawn, giving the house a closed, secretive aspect he didn’t like. Did she usually pull the blind? To keep as much of the summer heat out as possible, maybe? He didn’t know. He realised there were a great many things he didn’t know about her life when he was away.
He reached for the doorknob, but it didn’t turn; it only slipped through his fingers. Did she lock the door when he was gone? He didn’t believe it. That wasn’t Vicky. His worry-no, it was terror now increased. And yet there was one moment (which he would never admit to himself later), one small moment when he felt nothing but an urge to turn away from that locked door. Just hightail it. Never mind Vicky, or Charlie, or the weak justifications that would come later.
Just run.
Instead, he groped in his pocket for his keys.
In his nervousness he dropped them and had to bend to pick them up-car keys, the key to the east wing of Prince Hall, the blackish key that unlocked the chain he put across Granther’s road at the end of each summer visit. Keys had a funny way of accumulating.
He plucked his housekey from the bunch and unlocked the door. He went in and shut it behind him. The light in the living room was a low, sick yellow. It was hot. And still. Oh God it was so still.
“Vicky?”
No answer. And all that no answer meant was that she wasn’t here. She had put on her boogie shoes, as she liked to say, and had gone marketing or visiting. Except that she wasn’t doing either of those things. He felt sure of it. And his hand, his right hand… why were the fingers throbbing so?
“Vicky!”
He went into the kitchen. There was a small Formica table out there with three chairs. He and Vicky and Charlie usually ate their breakfast in the kitchen. One of the chairs now lay on its side like a dead dog. The salt shaker had overturned and salt was spilled across the table’s surface. Without thinking about what he was doing, Andy pinched some of it between the thumb and first finger of his left hand and tossed it back over his shoulder, muttering under his breath, as both his father and his Granther had done before him, “Salt salt malt malt bad luck stay away.”
There was a pot of soup on the Hotpoint. It was cold. The empty soup can stood on the counter. Lunch for one. But where was she? “Vicky!” he hollered down the stairs. Dark down there. The laundry room and the family room, which ran the length of the house. No answer.
He looked around the kitchen again. Neat and tidy. Two of Charlie’s drawings, made at the Vacation Bible School she had attended in July, held on the refrigerator with small plastic vegetables that had magnetic bases. An electric bill and a phone bill stuck on the spike with the motto PAY THESE LAST written across the base. Everything in its place and a place for everything.
Except the chair was overturned. Except the salt was spilled. There was no spit in his mouth, none at all. His mouth was as dry and slick as chrome on a summer day.
Andy went upstairs, looked through Charlie’s room, their room, the guest room. Nothing. He went back through the kitchen, flicked on the stairway light, and went downstairs. Their Maytag washer gaped open. The dryer fixed him with one glassy porthole eye. Between them, on the wall, hung a sampler Vicky had bought somewhere; it read HONEY, WE’re ALL WASHED UP. He went into the family room and fumbled for the light switch, fingers brushing at the wall, crazily sure that at any moment unknown cold fingers would close over his and guide them to the switch. Then he found the plate at last, and the fluorescent bars set into the Armstrong ceiling glowed alive.
This was a good room. He had spent a lot of time down here, fixing things up, smiling at himself all the time because, in the end, he had become all those things that as undergraduates they had sworn they would not become. All three of them had spent a lot of time down here. There was a TV built into the wall, a Ping-Pong table, an oversized backgammon board. More board games were cased against one wall, there were some coffee-table-sized books ranged along a low table that Vicky had made from barnboard. One wall had been dressed in paperbacks. Hung on the walls were several framed and matted afghan squares that Vicky had knitted; she joked that she was great at individual squares but simply didn’t have the stamina to knit a whole damn blanket. There were Charlie’s books in a special kid-sized bookcase, all of them carefully arranged in alphabetical order, which Andy had taught her one boring snowy night two winters before and which still fascinated her.
A good room.
An empty room.
He tried to feel relief. The premonition, hunch, whatever you wanted to call it, had been wrong.
She just wasn’t here. He snapped off the light and went back into the laundry room.
The washing machine, a front-loader they had picked up at a yard sale for sixty bucks, still gaped open. He shut it without thinking, much as he had tossed a pinch of the spilled salt over his shoulder. There was blood on the washer’s glass window. Not much. Only three or four drops. But it was blood.
Andy stood staring at it. It was cooler down here, too cool, it was like a morgue down here. He looked at the floor. There was more blood on the floor. It wasn’t even dry. A little sound, a soft, squealing whisper, came from his throat.
He began to walk around the laundry room, which was nothing but a small alcove with white plaster walls. He opened the clothes hamper. It was empty but for one sock. He looked in the cubbyhole under the sink. Nothing but Lestoil and Tide and Biz and Spic “n Span. He looked under the stairs. Nothing there but cobwebs and the plastic leg of one of Charlie’s older dolls-that dismembered limb lying patiently down here and waiting for rediscovery for God knew how long.
He opened the door between the washer and the dryer and the ironing board whistled down with a ratchet and a crash and there beneath it, her legs tied up so that her knees were just below her chin, her eyes open and glazed and dead, was Vicky Tomlinson McGee with a cleaning rag stuffed in her mouth. There was a thick and sickening smell of Pledge furniture polish in the air.
He made a low gagging noise and stumbled backward. His hand flailed, as if to drive this terrible vision away, and one of them struck the control panel of the dryer and it whirred into life. Clothes began to tumble and click inside. Andy screamed. And then he ran. He ran up the stairs and stumbled going around the corner into the kitchen and sprawled flat and bumped his forehead on the linoleum. He sat up, breathing hard.
It came back. It came back in slow motion, like a football instant replay where you see the quarterback sacked or the winning pass caught. It haunted his dreams in the days that came later. The door swinging open, the ironing board falling down to the horizontal with a ratcheting sound, reminding him somehow of a guillotine, his wife crammed into the space beneath and in her mouth a rag that had been used to polish the furniture. It came back in a kind of total recall and he knew he was going to scream again and so he slammed his forearm into his mouth and he bit it and the sound that came out was a fuzzy, blocked howl. He did that twice, and something came out of him and he was calm. It was the false calm of shock, but it could be used. The amorphous fear and the unfocused terror fell away. The throbbing in his right hand was gone. And the thought that stole into his mind now was as cold as the calmness that had settled over him, as cold as the shock, and that thought was CHARLIE.
He got up, started for the telephone, and then turned back to the stairs. He stood at the top for a moment, biting at his lips, steeling himself, and then he went back down. The dryer turned and turned. There was nothing in there but a pair of his jeans, and it was the big brass button at the waist that made that clicking, clinking sound as they turned and fell, turned and fell. Andy shut the dryer off and looked into the ironing-board closet.
“Vicky,” he said softly.
She stared at him with her dead eyes, his wife. He had walked with her, held her hand, entered her body in the dark of night. He found himself remembering the night she had drunk too much at a faculty party and he had held her head while she threw up. And that memory became the day he had been washing the station wagon and he had gone into the garage for a moment to get the can of Turtle Wax and she had picked up the hose and had run up behind him and stuffed the hose down the back of his pants. He remembered getting married and kissing her in front of everyone, relishing that kiss, her mouth, her ripe, soft mouth.
“Vicky,” he said again, and uttered a long, trembling sigh.
He pulled her out and worked the rag from her mouth. Her head lolled limp on her shoulders. He saw that the blood had come from her right hand, where some of her fingernails had been pulled. There was a small trickle of blood from one of her nostrils, but none anywhere else. Her neck had been broken by a single hard blow.
“Vicky,” he whispered.
Charlie, his mind answered back.
In the still calm that now filled his head, he understood that Charlie had become the important thing, the only important thing. Recriminations were for the future. He went back into the family room, not bothering to turn on the light this time. Across the room, by the Ping-Pong table, was a couch with a drop cloth over it. He took the drop cloth and went back into the laundry room and covered Vicky with it. Somehow, the immobile shape of her under the sofa’s drop cloth was worse. It held him nearly hypnotized. Would she never move again? Could that be?
He uncovered her face and kissed her lips. They were cold.
They pulled her nails, his mind marveled. Jesus Christ, they pulled her nails.
And he knew why. They wanted to know where Charlie was. Somehow they had lost track of her when she went to Terri Dugan’s house instead of coming home after day-camp. They had panicked, and now the watching phase was over. Vicky was dead-either on purpose or because some Shop operative had got overzealous. He knelt beside Vicky and thought it was possible that, prodded by her fear, she had done something rather more spectacular than shutting the fridge door from across the room. She might have shoved one of them away or knocked the feet out from beneath one of them. Too bad she hadn’t had enough to throw them into the wall at about fifty miles an hour, he thought.
It could have been that they knew just enough to make them nervous, he supposed. Maybe they had even been given specific orders: The woman may be extremely dangerous. If she does something-anything-to jeopardize the operation, get rid of her. Quick.
Or maybe they just didn’t like leaving witnesses. Something more than their share of the taxpayer’s dollar was at stake, after all.
But the blood. He should be thinking about the blood, which hadn’t even been dry when he discovered it, only tacky. They hadn’t been gone long when he arrived.
More insistently his mind said: Charlie!
He kissed his wife again and said, “Vicky, I’ll be back.”
But he had never seen Vicky again, either.
He had gone upstairs to the telephone and looked up the Dugans” number in Vicky’s Phone-Mate. He dialed the number the Joan Dugan answered. “Hi, Joan,” he said, and now the shock was aiding him: his voice was perfectly calm, an everyday voice. “Could I speak to Charlie for a second?” “Charlie?” Mrs. Dugan sounded doubtful. “Well, she went with those two friends of yours. Those teachers. Is… wasn’t that all right?”
Something inside of him went skyrocketing up and then came plunging down. His heart, maybe. But it would do no good to panic this nice woman whom he had only met socially four or five times. It wouldn’t help him, and it wouldn’t help Charlie.
“Damn,” he said. “I was hoping to catch her still there. When did they go?”
Mrs. Dugan’s voice faded a little. “Terri, when did Charlie go?”
A child’s voice piped something. He couldn’t tell what. There was sweat between his knuckles.
“She says about fifteen minutes ago.” She was apologetic. “I was doing the laundry and I don’t have a watch. One of them came down and spoke to me. It was all right, wasn’t it, Mr. McGee? He looked all right…”
A lunatic impulse came to him, to just laugh lightly and say Doing the laundry, were you? So was my wife. I found her crammed in under the ironing board. You got off lucky today, Joan.
He said, “That’s fine. Were they coming right here, I wonder?”
The question was relayed to Terri, who said she didn’t know. Wonderful, Andy thought. My daughter’s life is in the hands of another six-year-old girl.
He grasped at a straw.
“I have to go down to the market on the corner,” he said to Mrs. Dugan. “Will you ask Terri if they had the car or the van? In case I see them.”
This time he heard Terri. “It was the van. They went away in a gray van, like the one David Pasioco’s father has.”
“Thanks,” he said. Mrs. Dugan said not to mention it. The impulse came again, this time just to scream My wife is dead! down the line at her. My wife is dead and why were you doing your laundry while my daughter was getting into a gray van with a couple of strange men?
Instead of screaming that or anything, he hung up and went outside. The heat whacked him over the head and he staggered a little. Had it been this hot when he came? It seemed much hotter now. The mailman had come. There was a Woolco advertising circular sticking out of the mailbox that hadn’t been there before. The mailman had come while he was downstairs cradling his dead wife in his arms. His poor dead Vicky: they had pulled out her nails, and it was funny-much funnier than the way the keys had of accumulating, really-how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player, he thought, one big mother. Death is Franco Harris or Sam Cunningham or Mean Joe Green. And it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.
Get your feet moving, he thought. Fifteen minutes” lead time-that’s not so much. It’s not a cold trail yet. Not unless Terri Dugan doesn’t know fifteen minutes from half an hour or two hours. Never mind that, anyway. Get going.
He got going. He went back to the station wagon, which was parked half on and half off” the sidewalk.
He opened the driver’s-side door and then spared a glance back at his neat suburban house on which the mortgage was half paid. The bank let you take a “payment vacation” two months a year if you needed it. Andy had never needed it. He looked at the house dozing in the sun, and again his shocked eyes were caught by the red flare of the Woolco circular sticking out of the mailbox, and whap! death hit him again, making his eyes blur and his teeth clamp down.
He got in the car and drove away toward Terri Dugan’s street, not going on any real, logical belief that he could pick up their trail but only on blind hope. He had not seen his house on Conifer Place in Lakeland since then.
His driving was better now. Now that he knew the worst, his driving was a lot better. He turned on the radio and there was Bob Seger singing “Still the Same.”
He drove across Lakeland, moving as fast as he dared. For one terrible moment he came up blank on the name of the street, and then it came to him. The Dugans lived on Blassmore Place. He and Vicky had joked about that: Blassmore Place, with houses designed by Bill Blass. He started to smile a little at the memory, and whap! the fact of her death hit him again, rocking him.
He was there in ten minutes. Blassmore Place was a short dead end. No way out for a gray van at the far end, just a cyclone fence that marked the edge of the John Glenn Junior High School.
Andy parked the wagon at the intersection of Blassmore Place and Ridge Street. There was a green-over-white house on the corner. A lawn sprinkler twirled. Out front were two kids, a girl and a boy of about ten. They were taking turns on a skateboard. The girl was wearing shorts, and she had a good set of scabs on each knee.
He got out of the wagon and walked toward them. They looked him up and down carefully.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for my daughter. She passed by here about half an hour ago in a gray van. She was with… well, some friends of mine. Did you see a gray van go by?”
The boy shrugged vaguely.
The girl said, “You worried about her, mister?”
“You saw the van, didn’t you?” Andy asked pleasantly, and gave her a very slight push. Too much would be counterproductive. She would see the van going in any direction he wanted, including skyward.
“Yeah, I saw a van,” she said. She got on the skateboard and glided toward the hydrant on the corner and then jumped off: “It went right up there.” She pointed farther up Blassmore Place. Two or three intersections up was Carlisle Avenue, one of Harrison’s main thoroughfares. Andy had surmised that would be the way they would go, but it was good to be sure.
“Thanks,” he said, and got back into the wagon.
“You worried about her?” the girl repeated.
“Yes, I am, a little,” Andy said.
He turned the wagon around and drove three blocks up Blassmore Place to the junction with Carlisle Avenue. This was hopeless, utterly hopeless. He felt a touch of panic, just a small hot spot, but it would spread. He made it go away, made himself concentrate on getting as far down their trail as possible. If he had to use the push, he would. He could give a lot of small helping pushes without making himself feel ill. He thanked God that he hadn’t used the talent-or the curse, if you wanted to look at it that way-all summer long. He was up and fully charged, for whatever that was worth.
Carlisle Avenue was four lanes wide and regulated here by a stop-and-go light. There was a car wash on his right and an abandoned diner on his left. Across the street was an Exxon station and Mike’s Camera Store. If they had turned left, they had headed downtown. Right, and they would be headed out toward the airport and Interstate 80.
Andy turned into the car wash. A young guy with an incredible shock of wiry red hair spilling over the collar of his dull green coverall jived over. He was eating a Popsicle. “No can do, man,” he said before Andy could even open his mouth. “The rinse attachment busted about an hour ago. We’re closed.”
“I don’t want a wash,” Andy said. “I’m looking for a gray van that went through the intersection maybe half an hour ago. My daughter was in it, and I’m a little worried about her.”
“You think somebody might have snatched her?” He went right on eating his Popsicle. “No, nothing like that,” Andy said. “Did you see the van?” “Gray van? Hey, goodbuddy, you have any idea how many cars go by here in just one hour? Or half an hour? Busy street, man. Carlisle is a very busy street.” Andy cocked his thumb over his shoulder. “It came from Blassmore Place. That’s not so busy.” He got ready to add a little push, but he didn’t have to. The young guy’s eyes suddenly brightened. He broke his Popsicle in two like a wishbone and sucked all the purple ice off one of the sticks in a single improbable slurp.
“Yeah, okay, right,” he said. “I did see it. I’ll tell you why I noticed. It cut across our tarmac to beat the light. I don’t care myself, but it irritates the shit out of the boss when they do that. Not that it matters today with the rinser on the fritz. He’s got something else to be irritated about.”
“So the van headed toward the airport.”
The guy nodded, flipped one of the Popsicle sticks back over his shoulder, and started on the remaining chunk. “Hope you find your girl, goodbuddy. If you don’t mind a little, like, gray-tuitous advice, you ought to call the cops if you’re really worried.”
“I don’t think that would do much good,” Andy said. “Under the circumstances.”
He got back in the wagon again, crossed the tarmac himself, and turned onto Carlisle Avenue. He was now headed west. The area was cluttered with gas stations, car washes, fast-food franchises, used-car lots. A drive-in advertised a double bill consisting Of THE CORPSE GRINDERS and BLOODY MERCHANTS OF DEATH. He looked at the marquee and heard the ironing board ratcheting out of its closet like a guillotine. His stomach rolled over.
He passed under a sign announcing that you could get on I-80 a mile and a half farther west, if that was your pleasure. Beyond that was a smaller sign with an airplane on it. Okay, he had got this far. Now what?
Suddenly he pulled into the parking lot of a Shakey’s Pizza. It was no good stopping and asking along here. As the car-wash guy had said, Carlisle was a busy street. He could push people until his brains were leaking out his ears and only succeed in confusing himself. It was the turnpike or the airport, anyway. He was sure of it. The lady or the tiger.
He had never in his life tried to make one of the hunches come. He simply took them as gifts when they did come, and usually acted on them. Now he slouched farther down in the driver’s seat of the wagon, touching his temples lightly with the tips of his fingers, and tried to make something come. The motor was idling, the radio was still on. The Rolling Stones. Dance, little sister, dance.
Charlie, he thought. She had gone off to Terri’s with her clothes stuffed in the knapsack she wore just about everywhere. That had probably helped to fool them. The last time he had seen her, she was wearing jeans and a salmon-colored shell top. Her hair was in pigtails, as it almost always was. A nonchalant good-bye, Daddy, and a kiss and holy Jesus, Charlie, where are you now?
Nothing came.
Never mind. Sit a little longer. Listen to the Stones. Shakey’s Pizza. You get your choice, thin crust or crunchy. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as Granther McGee used to say. The Stones exhorting little sister to dance, dance, dance. Quincey saying they’d probably put her in a room so two hundred and twenty million Americans could be safe and free. Vicky. He and Vicky had had a hard time with the sex part of it at first. She had been scared to death. Just call me the Ice Maiden, she had said through her tears after that first miserable botched time. No sex, please we’re British. But somehow the Lot Six experiment had helped with that-the totality they had shared was, in its own way, like mating. Still it had been difficult. A little at a time. Gentleness. Tears. Vicky beginning to respond, then stiffening, crying out Don’t, it’ll hurt, don’t, Andy, stop it! And somehow it was the Lot Six experiment, that common experience, that had enabled him to go on trying, like a safecracker who knows that there is a way, always a way. And there had come a night when they got through it. Later there came a night when it was all right. Then, suddenly, a night when it was glorious. Dance, little sister, dance. He had been with her when Charlie was born. A quick, easy delivery. Quick to fix, easy to please…
Nothing was coming. The trail was getting colder and he had nothing. The airport or the turnpike? The lady or the tiger?
The Stones finished. The Doobie Brothers came on, wanting to know without love, where would you be right now. Andy didn’t know. The sun beat down. The lines in the Shakey’s parking lot had been freshly painted. They were very white and firm against the black-top. The lot was more than three quarters full. It was lunchtime. Had Charlie got her lunch? Would they feed her? Maybe
(maybe they’ll stop make a service stop you know at one of those Hojos along the pike-after all they can’t drive can’t drive can’t drive)
Where? Can’t drive where?
(can’t drive all the way to Virginia without making a rest stop can they? I mean a little girl has got to stop and take a tinkle sometime, doesn’t she?)
He straightened up, feeling an immense but numb feeling of gratitude. It had come, just like that. Not the airport, which would have been his first guess, if he had only been guessing. Not the airport but the turnpike. He wasn’t completely sure the hunch was bona fide, but he was pretty sure. And it was better than not having any idea at all.
He rolled the station wagon over the freshly painted arrow pointing the way out and turned right on Carlisle again. Ten minutes later he was on the turnpike, headed east with a toll ticket tucked into the battered, annotated copy of Paradise Lost on the seat beside him. Ten minutes after that, Harrison, Ohio, was behind him. He had started on the trip east that would bring him to Tashmore, Vermont, fourteen months later.
The calm held. He played the radio loud and that helped. Song followed song and he only recognized the older ones because he had pretty much stopped listening to pop music three or four years ago. No particular reason; it had just happened. They still had the jump on him, but the calm insisted with its own cold logic that it was a very good jump-and that he would be asking for trouble if he just started roaring along the passing lane at seventy.
He pegged the speedometer at just over sixty, reasoning that the men who had taken Charlie would not want to exceed the fifty-five speed limit. They could flash their credentials at any Smokey who pulled them down for speeding, that was true, but they might have a certain amount of difficulty explaining a screaming six-year-old child just the same. It might slow them down, and it would surely get them in dutch with whoever was pulling the strings on this show.
They could have drugged her and hidden her, his mind whispered. Then if they got stopped for busting along at seventy, even eighty, they’d only have to show their paper and keep right on going. Is an Ohio state cop going to toss a van that belongs to the Shop?
Andy struggled with that as eastern Ohio flowed by. First, they might be scared to drug Charlie. Sedating a child can be a tricky business unless you’re an expert… and they might not be sure what sedation would do to the powers they were supposed to be investigating. Second, a state cop might just go ahead and toss the van anyway, or at least hold them in the breakdown lane while he checked the validity of their ID. Third, why should they be busting their asses? They had no idea anyone was onto them. It was still not one o'clock. Andy was supposed to be at the college until two o'clock. The Shop people would not expect him to arrive back home until two-twenty or so at the earliest and probably felt they could count on anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours after that before the alarm was raised. Why shouldn’t they just be loafing along?
Andy went a little faster.
Forty minutes passed, then fifty. It seemed longer. He was beginning to sweat a little; worry was nibbling through the artificial ice of calm and shock. Was the van really someplace up ahead, or had the whole thing been so much wishful thinking?
The traffic patterns formed and re-formed. He saw two gray vans. Neither of them looked like the one he had seen cruising around Lakeland. One was driven by an elderly man with flying white hair. The other was full of freaks smoking dope. The driver saw Andy’s close scrutiny and waved a roach clip at him. The girl beside him popped up her middle finger, kissed it gently, and tipped it Andy’s way. Then they were behind him.
His head was beginning to ache. The traffic was heavy, the sun was bright. Each car was loaded with chrome, and each piece of chrome had its own arrow of sun to flick into his eyes. He passed a sign that said REST AREA 1 MILE AHEAD.
He had been in the passing lane. Now he signaled right and slipped into the travel lane again. He let his speed drop to forty-five, then to forty. A small sports car passed him and the driver blipped his horn at Andy in irritated fashion as he went by.
REST AREA, the sign announced. It wasn’t a service stop, simply a turn-out with slant parking, a water fountain, and bathrooms. There were four or five cars parked in there and one gray van. The gray van. He was almost sure of it. His heart began to slam against the walls of his chest. He turned in with a quick twist of the station wagon’s wheel, and the tires made a low wailing sound.
He drove slowly down the entranceway toward the van, looking around, trying to take in everything at once. There were two picnic tables with a family at each one. One group was just clearing up and getting ready to go, the mother putting leftovers into a bright orange carrier bag, the father and the two kids policing up the junk and taking it over to the trash barrel. At the other table a young man and woman were eating sandwiches and potato salad. There was a sleeping baby in a carrier seat between them. The baby was wearing a corduroy jumper with a lot of dancing elephants on it. On the grass, between two big and beautiful old elms, were two girls of about twenty, also having lunch. There was no sign of Charlie or of any men who looked both young enough and tough enough to belong to the Shop.
Andy killed the station wagon’s engine. He could feel his heartbeat in his eyeballs now. The van looked empty. He got out.
An old woman using a cane came out of the ladies” comfort station and walked slowly toward an old burgundy Biscayne. A gent of about her age got out from behind the wheel, walked around the hood, opened her door, and handed her in. He went back, started up the Biscayne, a big jet of oily blue smoke coming from the exhaust pipe, and backed out.
The men’s-room door opened and Charlie came out. Flanking her on the left and right were men of about thirty in sport coats, open-throated shirts, and dark double-knit pants. Charlie’s face looked blank and shocked. She looked from one of the men to the other and then back at the first. Andy’s guts began to roll helplessly. She was wearing her pack sack. They were walking toward the van. Charlie said something to one of them and he shook his head. She turned to the other. He shrugged, then said something to his partner over Charlie’s head. The other one nodded. They turned around and walked toward the drinking fountain.
Andy’s heart was beating faster than ever.
Adrenaline spilled into his body in a sour, jittery flood. He was scared, scared plenty, but something else was pumping up inside him and it was anger, it was total fury. The fury was even better than the calm. It felt almost sweet. Those were the two men out there that had killed his wife and stolen his daughter, and if they weren’t right with Jesus, he pitied them.
As they went to the drinking fountain with Charlie; their backs were to him. Andy got out of the wagon and stepped behind the van.
The family of four who had just finished their lunch walked over to a new midsized Ford, got in, and backed out. The mother glanced over at Andy with no curiosity at all, the way people look at each other when they are on long trips, moving slowly through the digestive tract of the U.S. turnpike system. They drove off, showing a Michigan plate. There were now three cars and the gray van and Andy’s station wagon parked in the rest area. One of the cars belonged to the girls. Two more people were strolling across the grounds, and there was one man inside the little information booth, looking at the I-80 map, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans.
Andy had no idea of exactly what he was going to do.
Charlie finished her drink. One of the two men bent over and took a sip. Then they started back toward their van. Andy was looking at them from around the van’s back-left corner. Charlie looked scared, really scared. She had been crying. Andy tried the back door of the van, not knowing why, but it was no good anyway; it was locked.
Abruptly he stepped out into full view.
They were very quick. Andy saw the recognition come into their eyes immediately, even before the gladness flooded Charlie’s face, driving away that look of blank, frightened shock.
“Daddy!” she cried shrilly, causing the young couple with the baby to look around. One of the girls under the elms shaded her eyes to see what was happening.
Charlie tried to run to him and one of the men grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her back against him, half-twisting her pack sack from her shoulders. An instant later there was a gun in his hand. He had produced it from somewhere under his sport coat like a magician doing an evil trick. He put the barrel against Charlie’s temple.
The other man began to stroll unhurriedly away from Charlie and his partner, then began to move in on Andy. His hand was in his coat, but his conjuring was not as good as his partner’s had been; he was having a little trouble producing his gun.
“Move away from the van if you don’t want anything to happen to your daughter,” the one with the gun said. “Daddy!” Charlie cried again.
Andy moved slowly away from the van. The other fellow, who was prematurely bald, had his gun out now. He pointed it at Andy. He was less than five feet away. “I advise you very sincerely not to move,” he said in a low voice. “This is a Colt forty-five and it makes a giant hole.”
The young guy with his wife and baby at the picnic table got up. He was wearing rimless glasses and he looked severe. “What exactly is going on here?” he asked in the carrying, enunciated tones of a college instructor.
The man with Charlie turned toward him. The muzzle of his gun floated slightly away from her so that the young man could see it. “Government business,” he said. “Stay right where you are; everything is fine.”
The young man’s wife grabbed his arm and pulled him down. Andy looked at the balding agent and said in a low, pleasant voice, “That gun is much too hot to hold.”
Baldy looked at him, puzzled. Then, suddenly, he screamed and dropped his revolver. It struck the pavement and went off: One of the girls under the elms let out a puzzled, surprised shout. Baldy was holding his hand and dancing around. Fresh white blisters appeared on his palm, rising like bread dough.
The man with Charlie stared at his partner, and for a moment the gun was totally distracted from her small head. “You’re blind,” Andy told him, and pushed just as hard as he could. A sickening wrench of pain twisted through his head. The man screamed suddenly. He let go of Charlie and his hands went to his eyes.
“Charlie,” Andy said in a low voice, and his daughter ran to him and clutched his legs in a trembling bear hug. The man inside the information booth ran out to see what was going on.
Baldy, still clutching his burned hand, ran toward Andy and Charlie. His face worked horribly.
“Go to sleep,” Andy said curtly, and pushed again. Badly dropped sprawling as if poleaxed. His forehead bonked on the pavement. The young wife of the stern young man moaned.
Andy’s head hurt badly now, and he was remotely glad that it was summer and that he hadn’t used the push, even to prod a student who was letting his grades slip for no good reason, since perhaps May. He was charged up-but charged up or not, God knew he was going to pay for what he was doing this hot summer afternoon.
The blind man was staggering around on the grass, holding his hands up to his face and screaming. He walked into a green barrel with PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on its side and fell down in an overturned jumble of sandwich bags, beer cans, cigarette butts, and empty soda bottles.
“Oh Daddy, jeez I was so scared,” Charlie said, and began to cry. “The wagon’s right over there. See it?” Andy heard himself say. “Get in and I’ll be with you in a minute.” “Is Mommy here?” “No. Just get in, Charlie.” He couldn’t deal with that now. Now, somehow, he had to deal with these witnesses. “What the hell is this?” the man from the information booth asked, bewildered.
“My eyes,” the man who had had his gun up to Charlie’s head screamed. “My eyes, my eyes. What did you do to my eyes, you son of a bitch?” He got up. There was a sandwich bag sticking to one of his hands. He began to totter off toward the information booth, and the man in the bluejeans darted back inside.
“Go, Charlie.”
“Will you come, Daddy?”
“Yes, in just a second. Now go.”
Charlie went, blond pigtails bouncing. Her pack sack was still hanging askew.
Andy walked past the sleeping Shop agent, thought about his gun, and decided he didn’t want it. He walked over to the young people at the picnic table. Keep it small, he told himself. Easy. Little taps. Don’t go starting any echoes. The object is not to hurt these people.
The young woman grabbed her baby from its carrier seat rudely, waking it. It began to. cry. “Don’t you come near me, you crazy person!” she said. Andy looked at the man and his wife. “None of this is very important,” he said, and pushed. Fresh pain settled over the back of his head like a spider… and sank in.
The young man looked relieved. “Well, thank God.”
His wife offered a tentative smile. The push hadn’t taken so well with her; her maternity had been aroused.
“Lovely baby you have there,” Andy said. “Little boy, isn’t it?”
The blind man stepped off the curbing, pitched forward, and struck his head on the doorpost of the red Pinto that probably belonged to the two girls. He howled. Blood flowed from his temple. “I’m blind.” he screamed again.
The young woman’s tentative smile became radiant. “Yes, a boy,” she said. “His name is Michael.”
“Hi, Mike,” Andy said. He ruffled the baby’s mostly bald head.
“I can’t think why he’s crying,” the young woman said. “He was sleeping so well until just now. He must be hungry.”
“Sure, that’s it,” her husband said.
“Excuse me.” Andy walked toward the information booth. There was no time to lose now. Someone else could turn into this roadside bedlam at any time. “What is it, man?” the fellow in the bluejeans asked. “Is it a bust?” “Nah, nothing happened,” Andy said, and gave another light push. It was starting make him feel sick now. His head thudded and pounded. “Oh,” the fellow said. “Well, I was just trying to figure out how to get to Chagrin Falls from here. Excuse me.” And he sauntered back inside the information booth.
The two girls had retreated to the security fence that separated the turn-out from the private farmland beyond it. They stared at him with wide eyes. The blind man was now shuffling around on the pavement in a circle with his arms held stiffly out in front of him. He was cursing and weeping.
Andy advanced slowly toward the girls, holding his hands out to show them there was nothing in them. He spoke to them. One of them asked him a question and he spoke again. Shortly they both began to smile relieved smiles and to nod. Andy waved to them and they both waved in return. Then he walked rapidly across the grass toward the station wagon. His forehead was beaded with cold sweat and his stomach was rolling greasily. He could only pray that no one would drive in before he and Charlie got away, because there was nothing left. He was completely tipped over. He slid in behind the wheel and keyed the engine.
“Daddy,” Charlie said, and threw herself at him, buried her face against his chest. He hugged her briefly and then backed out of the parking lot. Turning his head was agony.
The black horse. In the aftermath, that was the thought that always came to him. He had let the black horse out of its stall somewhere in the dark barn of his subconscious and now it would again batter its way up and down through his brain. He would have to get them someplace and lay up. Quick. He wasn’t going to be capable of driving for long.
“The black horse,” he said thickly. It was coming. No… no. It wasn’t coming; it was here. Thud… thud… thud. Yes, it was here. It was free.
“Daddy, look out!” Charlie screamed.
The blind man had staggered directly across their path. Andy braked. The blind man began to pound on the hood of the wagon and scream for help. To their right, the young mother had begun to breast feed her baby. Her husband was reading a paperback. The man from the information booth had gone over to talk to the two girls from the red Pinto-perhaps hoping for some quickie experience kinky enough to write up for the Penthouse Forum. Sprawled out on the pavement, Baldy slept on. The other operative pounded on the hood of the wagon again and again. “Help me!” he screamed. “I’m blind! Dirty bastard did something to my eyes! I’m blinds” “Daddy,” Charlie moaned.
For a crazy instant, he almost floored the accelerator. Inside his aching head he could hear the sound the tires would make, could feel the dull thudding of the wheels as they passed over the body. He had kidnapped Charlie and held a gun to her head. Perhaps he had been the one who had stuffed the rag into Vicky’s mouth so she wouldn’t scream when they pulled out her fingernails. It would be so very good to kill him… except then what would separate him from them?
He laid on the horn instead. It sent another bright spear of agony through his head. The blind man leaped away from the car as if stung. Andy hauled the wheel around and drove past him. The last thing he saw in the rearview mirror as he drove down the reentry lane was the blind man sitting on the pavement, his face twisted in anger and terror… and the young woman placidly raising baby Michael to her shoulder to burp him.
He entered the flow of turnpike traffic without looking. A horn blared; tires squalled. A big Lincoln swerved around the wagon and the driver shook his fist at them. “Daddy, are you okay?” “I will be,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far away. “Charlie, look at the toll ticket and see what the next exit is.” The traffic blurred in front of his eyes. It doubled, trebled, came back together, then drifted into prismatic fragments again. Sun reflecting off bright chrome everywhere.
“And fasten your seatbelt, Charlie.”
The next exit was Hammersmith, twenty miles farther up. Somehow he made it. He thought later that it was only the consciousness of Charlie sitting next to him, depending on him, that kept him on the road. Just as Charlie had got him through all the things that came after-the knowledge of Charlie, needing him. Charlie McGee, whose parents had once needed two hundred dollars.
There was a Best Western at the foot of the Hammersmith ramp, and Andy managed to get them checked in, specifying a room away from the turnpike. He used a bogus name. “They’ll be after us, Charlie,” he said. “I need to sleep. But only until dark, that’s all the time we can take… all we dare to take. Wake me up when it’s dark.” She said something else, but then he was falling on the bed. The world was blurring down to a gray point, and then even the point was gone and everything was darkness, where the pain couldn’t reach. There was no pain and there were no dreams. When Charlie shook him awake again on that hot August evening at quarter past seven, the room was stifling hot and his clothes were soaked with sweat. She had tried to make the air conditioner work but hadn’t been able to figure out the controls.
“It’s okay,” he said. He swung his feet onto the floor and put his hands on his temples, squeezing his head so it wouldn’t blow up. “Is it any better, Daddy?” she asked anxiously. “A little,” he said. And it was… but only a little. “We’ll stop in a little while and get some chow. That’ll help some more.” “Where are we going?”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. He had only the money he had left the house with that morning-about seventeen dollars. He had his Master Charge and his Visa, but he had paid for their room with the two twenties he always kept in the back of his wallet (my run-out money, he sometimes told Vicky, joking, but how hellishly true that had turned out to be) rather than use either one of them. Using either of those cards would be like painting a sign: THIS WAY TO THE FUGITIVE COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. The seventeen dollars would buy them some burgers and top off the wagon’s gas tank once. Then they would be stone broke.
“'I don’t know, Charlie,” he said. “Just away.”
“When are we going to get Mommy?”
Andy looked up at her and his headache started to get worse again. He thought of the drops of blood on the floor and on the washing-machine porthole. Ire thought of the smell of Pledge.
“Charlie-“he said, and could say no more. There was no need, anyway.
She looked at him with slowly widening eyes. Her hand drifted up to her trembling mouth.
“Oh no, Daddy… please say it’s no.”
“Charlie-”
She screamed, “Oh please say it’s no!”
“Charlie, those people who-”
“Please say she’s all right, say she’s all right, say she’s all right!”
The room, the room was so hot, the air conditioning was off, that was all it was, but it was so hot, his head aching, the sweat rolling down his face, not cold sweat now but hot, like oil, hot-
“No,” Charlie was saying, “No, no, no, no, no.” She shook her head. Her pigtails flew back and forth, making him think absurdly of the first time he and Vicky had taken her to the amusement park, the carousel-
It wasn’t the lack of air conditioning.
“Charlie!” He yelled. “Charlie, the bathtub! The water!”
She screamed. She turned her head toward the open bathroom door and there was a sudden blue flash in there like a lightbulb burning out. The showerhead fell off the wall and clattered into the tub, twisted and black. Several of the blue tiles shattered to fragments.
He barely caught her when she fell, sobbing.
“Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”
“It’s all right,” he said shakily, and enfolded her. From the bathroom, thin smoke drifted out of the fused tub. All the porcelain surfaces had crack-glazed instantly. It was as if the entire bathroom had been run through some powerful but defective firing kiln. The towels were smoldering.
“It’s all right,” he said, holding her, rocking her. “Charlie, it’s all right, it’s gonna be all right, somehow it’ll come right, I promise.” “I want Mommy,” she sobbed. He nodded. He wanted her, too. He held Charlie tightly to him and smelled ozone and porcelain and cooked Best Western towels. She had almost flash-fried them both.
“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.
“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever. “It’s gonna be all right.” He was crying. He couldn’t help it now. His tears came in a flood and he held her to his chest as tightly as he could. “Charlie, I swear to you, somehow, it’s gonna be all right.”
The one thing they had not been able to hang around his neck-as much as they might have liked to-was the murder of Vicky. Instead, they had elected to simply erase what had happened in the laundry room. Less trouble for them. Sometimes-not often-Andy wondered what their neighbors back in Lakeland might have speculated. Bill collectors? Marital problems? Maybe a drug habit or an incident of child abuse? They hadn’t known anyone on Conifer Place well enough for it to have been any more than idle dinnertable chat, a nine days” wonder soon forgotten when the bank that held the mortgage released their house.
Sitting on the deck now and looking out into darkness, Andy thought he might have had more luck that day than he had known (or been able to appreciate). He had arrived too late to save Vicky, but he had left before the Removal People arrived.
There had never been a thing about it in the paper, not even a squib about how-funny thing! an English instructor named Andrew McGee and his family had just up and disappeared. Perhaps the Shop had got that quashed, too. Surely he had been reported missing; one or all of the guys he had been eating lunch with that day would have done that much. But it hadn’t made the papers, and of course, bill collectors don’t advertise.
“They would have hung it on me if they could,” he said, unaware that he had spoken aloud.
But they couldn’t have. The medical examiner could have fixed the time of death, and Andy, who had been in plain sight of some disinterested third party (and in the case of Eh-116, Style and the Short Story, from ten to eleven-thirty, twenty-five disinterested third parties) all that day, could not have been set up to take the fall. Even if he’d been unable to provide substantiation for his movements during the critical time, there was no motive.
So the two of them had killed Vicky and then gone haring off after Charlie-but not without notifying what Andy thought of as the Removal People (and in his mind’s eye he even saw them that way, smooth-faced young men dressed in white coveralls). And sometime after he had gone haring off after Charlie, maybe as short a time as five minutes, but almost surely no longer than an hour, the Removal People would have rolled up to his door. While Conifer Place dozed the afternoon away, Vicky had been Removed.
They might even have reasoned-correctly-that a missing wife would have been more of a problem for Andy than a provably dead one. No body, no estimated time of death. No estimated time of death, no alibi. He would be watched, cosseted, politely tied down. Of course they would have put Charlie’s description out on the wire-Vicky’s too, for that matter-but Andy would not have been free to simply go tearing off on his own. So she had been Removed, and now he didn’t even know where she was buried. Or maybe she had been cremated. Or-
Oh shit why are you doing this to yourself?
He stood up abruptly and poured the remainder of Granther’s mule-kick over the deck railing. It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it.
A neat trick if you could do it. He looked up at the dark shapes of the trees and squeezed the glass tightly in his right hand, and the thought crossed his mind again.,
Charlie I swear to you, somehow it’s gonna be all right.
That winter in Tashmore, so long after his miserable awakening in that Ohio motel, it seemed his desperate prediction had finally come true. It was not an idyllic winter for them. Not long after Christmas, Charlie caught a cold and snuffled and coughed her way through to early April, when it finally cleared up for good. For a while she ran a fever. Andy fed her aspirin halves and told himself that if the fever did not go down in three days” time, he would have to take her to the doctor across the lake in Bradford, no matter what the consequences. But her fever did go down, and for the rest of the winter Charlie’s cold was only a constant annoyance to her. Andy managed to get himself a minor case of frostbite on one memorable occasion in March and nearly managed to burn them both up one screaming, subzero night in February by overloading the woodstove. Ironically, it was Charlie who woke up in the middle of the night and discovered the cottage was much too hot.
On December 14 they celebrated his birthday and on March 24 they celebrated Charlie’s. She was eight, and sometimes Andy looked at her with a kind of wonder, as if catching sight of her for the first time. She was not a little girl anymore; she stood to past his elbow. Her hair had got long again, and she had taken to braiding it to keep it out of her eyes. She was going to be beautiful. She already was, red nose and all.
They were without a car. Irv Manders’s Willys had frozen solid in January, and Andy thought the block was cracked. He had started it every day, more from a sense of responsibility than anything else, because not even four-wheel drive would have pulled them out of Granther’s camp after the New Year. The snow, undisturbed except for the tracks of squirrels, chipmunks, a few deer, and a persistent raccoon that came around to sniff” hopefully at the garbage hold, was almost two feet deep by then.
There were old-fashioned cross-country skis in the small shed behind the cottage-three pairs of them, but none that would fit Charlie. It was just as well. Andy kept her indoors as much as possible. They could live with her cold, but he did not want to risk a return of the fever.
He found an old pair of Granther’s ski boots, dusty and cracked with age, tucked away in a cardboard toilet-tissue box under the table where the old man had once planed shutters and made doors. Andy oiled them, flexed them, and then found he still could not fill Granther’s shoes without stuffing the toes full of newspaper. There was something funny about that, but he also found it a touch ominous. He thought about Granther a lot that long winter and wondered what he would have made of their predicament.
Half a dozen times that winter he hooked up the cross-country skis (no modern snap-bindings here, only a confusing and irritating tangle of straps, buckles, and rings) and worked his way across the wide, frozen expanse of Tashmore Pond to the Bradford Town Landing. From there, a small, winding road led into the village, tucked neatly away in the hills two miles east of the lake.
He always left before first light, with Granther’s knapsack on his back, and never arrived back before three in the afternoon. On one occasion he barely beat a howling snowstorm that would have left him blinded and directionless and wandering on the ice. Charlie cried with relief when he came in-and then went into a long, alarming coughing fit.
The trips to Bradford were for supplies and clothes for him and Charlie. He had Granther’s struttin money, and later on, he broke into three of the larger camps at the far end of Tashmore Pond and stole money. He was not proud of this, but it seemed to him a matter of survival. The camps he chose might have sold on the real-estate market for eighty thousand dollars apiece, and he supposed the owners could afford to lose their thirty or forty dollars” worth of cookie-jar money-which was exactly where most of them kept it. The only other thing he touched that winter was the large range-oil drum behind the large, modern cottage quaintly named CAMP CONFUSION. From this drum he took about forty gallons of oil.
He didn’t like going to Bradford. He didn’t like the certain knowledge that the oldsters who sat around the big potbellied stove down by the cash register were talking about the stranger who was staying across the lake in one of the camps. Stories had a way of getting around, and sometimes they got into the wrong ears. It wouldn’t take much-only a whisper-for the Shop to make an inevitable connection between Andy, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s cottage in Tashmore, Vermont. But he simply didn’t know what else to do. They had to eat, and they couldn’t spend the entire winter living on canned sardines. He wanted fresh fruit for Charlie, and vitamin pills, and clothes. Charlie had arrived with nothing to her name but a dirty blouse, a pair of red pants, and a single pair of underdrawers. There was no cough medicine that he trusted, there were no fresh vegetables, and, crazily enough, hardly any matches. Every camp he broke into had a fireplace, but he found only a single box of Diamond wooden matches.
He could have gone farther afield-there were other camps and cottages-but many of the other areas were plowed out and patrolled by the Tashmore constabulary. And on many of the roads there were at least one or two year-round residents.
In the Bradford general store he was able to buy all the things he needed, including three pairs of heavy pants and three woolen shirts that were approximately Charlie’s size. There was no girls” underwear, and she had to make do with size-eight Jockey shorts. This disgusted and amused Charlie by turns.
Making the six-mile round trip across to Bradford on Granther’s skis was both a burden and a pleasure to Andy. He didn’t like leaving Charlie alone, not because he didn’t trust her but because he always lived with the fear of coming back and finding her gone… or dead. The old boots gave him blisters no matter how many pairs of socks he put on. If he tried to move too fast, he gave himself headaches, and then he would remember the small numb places on his face and envision his brain as an old bald tire, a tire that had been used so long and hard that it was down to the canvas in places. If he had a stroke in the middle of this damned lake and froze to death, what would happen to Charlie then?
But he did his best thinking on these trips. The silence had a way of clearing the head. Tashmore Pond itself was not wide-Andy’s path across it from the west bank to the east was less than a mile-but it was very long. With the snow lying four feet deep over the ice by February, he sometimes paused halfway across and looked slowly to his right and left. The lake then appeared to be a long corridor floored with dazzling white tile-clean, unbroken, stretching out of sight in either direction. Sugar-dusted pines bordered it all around. Above was the hard, dazzling, and merciless blue sky of winter, or the low and featureless white of coming snow. There might be the far-off call of a crow, or the low, rippling thud of the ice stretching, but that was all. The exercise toned up his body. He grew a warm singlet of sweat between his skin and his clothes, and it felt good to work up a sweat and then wipe it off your brow. He had somehow forgotten that feeling while teaching Yeats and Williams and correcting bluebooks.
In this silence, and through the exertion of working his body hard, his thoughts came clear and he worked the problem over in his mind. Something had to be done-should have been done long since, but that was in the past. They had come to Granther’s place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy way he felt about the oldtimers sitting around the stove with their pipes and their inquisitive eyes was enough to ram that fact home. He and Charlie were in a corner, and there had to be some way out of it.
And he was still angry, because it wasn’t right. They had no right. His family were American citizens, living in a supposedly open society, and his wife had been murdered, his daughter kidnapped, the two of them hunted like rabbits in a hedgerow.
He thought again that if he could get the story across to someone-or to several someones-the whole thing could be blown out of the water. He hadn’t done it before because that odd hypnosis-the same sort of hypnosis that had resulted in Vicky’s death-had continued, at least to some degree. He hadn’t wanted his daughter growing up like a freak in a sideshow. He hadn’t wanted her institutionalized-not for the good of the country and not for her own good. And worst of all, he had continued to lie to himself. Even after he had seen his wife crammed into the ironing closet in the laundry with that rag in her mouth, he had continued to lie to himself and tell himself that sooner or later they would be left alone. Just playing for funzies, they had said as kids. Everybody has to give back the money at the end.
Except they weren’t kids, they weren’t playing for funzies, and nobody was going to give him and Charlie anything back when the game was over. This game was for keeps.
In silence he began to understand certain hard truths. In a way, Charlie was a freak, not much different from the thalidomide babies of the sixties or those children of mothers who had taken DES; the doctors just hadn’t known that those girl children were going to develop vaginal tumors in abnormal numbers fourteen or sixteen years down the road. It was not Charlie’s fault, but that did not change the fact. Her strangeness, her freakishness, was simply on the inside. What she had done at the Manders farm had been terrifying, totally terrifying, and since then Andy had found himself wondering just how far her ability reached, how far it could reach. He had read a lot of the literature of parapsychology during their year on the dodge, enough to know that both pyrokinesis and telekinesis were suspected to be tied in with certain poorly understood ductless glands. His reading had also told him that the two talents were closely related, and that most documented cases centered around girls not a whole lot older than Charlie was right now.
She had been able to initiate that destruction at the Manders farm at the age of seven. Now she was nearly eight. What might happen when she turned twelve and entered adolescence? Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. She said she wasn’t going to use the power anymore, but if she was forced to use it? What if it began to come out spontaneously? What if she began to light fires in her sleep as a part of her own strange puberty, a fiery counterpart of the nocturnal seminal emissions most teenage boys experienced? What if the Shop finally decided to call off its dogs… and Charlie was kidnapped by some foreign power?
Questions, questions.
On his trips across the pond, Andy tried to grapple with them and came reluctantly to believe that Charlie might have to submit to some sort of custody for the rest of her life, if only for her own protection. It might be as necessary for her as the cruel leg braces were for the victims of muscular dystrophy or the strange prosthetics for the thalidomide babies.
And then there was the question of his own future. He remembered the numb places, the bloodshot eye. No man wants to believe that his own death-warrant has been signed and dated, and Andy did not completely believe that, but he was aware that two or three more hard pushes might kill him, and he realized that his normal life expectancy might already have been considerably shortened. Some provision had to be made for Charlie in case that happened.
But not the Shop’s way.
Not the small room. He would not allow that to happen.
So he thought it over, and at last he came to a painful decision.
Andy wrote six letters. They were almost identical. Two were to Ohio’s United States senators. One was to the woman who represented the district of which Harrison was a part in the U.S. House of Representatives. One was to the New York Times. One was to the Chicago Tribune. And one was to the Toledo Blade. All six letters told the story of what had happened, beginning with the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall and ending with his and Charlie’s enforced isolation on Tashmore Pond.
When he had finished, he gave one of the letters to Charlie to read. She went through it slowly and carefully, taking almost an hour. It was the first time she had got the entire story, from beginning to end.
“You’re going to mail these?” she asked when she finished.
“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow. I think tomorrow will be the last time I dare go across the pond.” It had at last begun to warm up a little. The ice was still solid, but it creaked constantly now, and he didn’t know how much longer it would be safe.
“What will happen, Daddy?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. All I can do is hope that once the story is out, those people who have been chasing us will have to give it up.”
Charlie nodded soberly. “You should have done it before.”
“Yes,” he said, knowing that she was thinking of the near cataclysm at the Manders farm last October. “Maybe I should have. But I never had a chance to think much, Charlie. Keeping us going was all I had time to think about. And what thinking you do get a chance to do when you’re on the run… well, mostly it’s stupid thinking. I kept hoping they’d give up and leave us alone. That was a terrible mistake.”
“They won’t make me go away, will they?” Charlie asked. “From you, I mean. We can stay together, can’t we, Daddy?” “Yes,” he said, not wanting to tell her that his conception of what might happen after the letters were mailed and received was probably as vague as hers. It was just “after.”
“Then that’s all I care about. And I’m not going to make anymore fires.”
“All right,” he said, and touched her hair. His throat was suddenly thick with a premonitory dread, and something that had happened near here suddenly occurred to him, something that he hadn’t thought of for years. He had been out with his father and Granther, and Granther had given Andy his.22, which he called his varmint rifle, when Andy clamored for it. Andy had seen a squirrel and wanted to shoot it. His dad had started to protest, and Granther had hushed him with an odd little smile.
Andy had aimed the way Granther taught him; he squeezed the trigger rather than just jerking back on it (as Granther had also taught him), and he shot the squirrel. It tumbled off its limb like a stuffed toy, and Andy ran excitedly for it after handing the gun back to Granther. Up close, he had been struck dumb by what he saw. Up close, the squirrel was no stuffed toy. It wasn’t dead. He had got it in the hindquarters and it lay there dying in its own bright dapples of blood, its black eyes awake and alive and full of a horrible suffering. Its fleas, knowing the truth already, were trundling off the body in three busy little lines.
His throat had closed with a snap, and at the age of nine, Andy tasted for the first time that bright, painty flavor of self-loathing. He stared numbly at his messy kill, aware that leis father and grandfather were standing behind him, their shadows lying over him-three generations of McGees standing over a murdered squirrel in the Vermont woods. And behind him, Granther said softly, Well, you done it, Andy. How do you like it? And the tears had come suddenly, overwhelming him, the hot tears of horror and realization-the realization that once it’s done, it’s done. He swore suddenly that he would never kill anything with a gun again. He swore it before God.
I’m not going to make anymore fires, Charlie had said, and in his mind Andy heard Granther’s reply to him on the day he had shot the squirrel, the day he had sworn to God he would never do anything like that again. Never say that, Andy. God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control. About what Irv Manders had said to Charlie.
Charlie had found a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy books in the attic and was working her way slowly but surely through them. Now Andy looked at her, sitting in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the old black rocker, sitting just where his grandmother had always sat, usually with a basket of mending between her feet, and he struggled with an urge to tell her to take it back, to take it back while she still could, to tell her that she didn’t understand. the terrible temptation: if the gun was left there long enough, sooner or later you would pick it up again.
God loves to make a man break a vow.
No one saw Andy mail his letters except Charles Payson, the fellow who had moved into Bradford in November and had since been trying to make a go of the old Bradford Notions “n” Novelties shop. Payson was a small, sad-faced man who had tried to buy Andy a drink on one of his visits to town. In the town itself, the expectation was that if Payson didn’t make it work during the coming summer, Notions “n” Novelties would have a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign back in the window by September 15. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was having a hard scrabble. Bradford wasn’t the town it used to be.
Andy walked up the street-he had left his skis stuck in the snow at the head of the road leading down to the Bradford Town Landing-and approached the general store. Inside, the oldsters watched him with mild interest. There had been a fair amount of talk about Andy that winter. The consensus about yonder man there was that he was on the run from something-a bankruptcy, maybe, or a divorce settlement. Maybe an angry wife who had been cheated out of custody of the kid: the small clothes Andy had bought hadn’t been-lost on them. The consensus was also that he and the kid had maybe broken into one of the camps across the Pond and were spending the winter there. Nobody brought this possibility up to Bradford’s constable, a Johnny-come-lately who had lived in town for only twelve years and thought he owned the place. Yonder man came from across the lake, from Tashmore, from Vermont. None of the old-timers who sat around Jake Rowley’s stove in the Bradford general store had much liking for Vermont ways, them with their income tax and their snooty bottle law and that fucking Russian laid up in his house like a Czar, writing books no one could understand.
Let Vermonters handle their own problems, was the unanimous, if unstated, view. “He won’t be crossin the pond much longer,” one of them said. He took another bite from his Milky Way bar and began to gum it. “Not less he’s got him a pair of water wings,” another answered, and they all chuckled.
“We won’t be seein him much longer,” Jake said complacently as Andy approached the store. Andy was wearing Granther’s old coat and a blue wool band pulled over his ears, and some memory-perhaps a family resemblance going back to Granther himself-danced fleetingly in Jake’s mind and then blew away. “When the ice starts to go out, he’ll just dry up and blow away. Him and whoever he’s keepin over there.”
Andy stopped outside, unslung his pack, and took out several letters. Then he came inside. The men forgathered there examined their nails, their watches, the old Pearl Kineo stove itself. One of them took out a gigantic blue railroad bandanna and hawked mightily into it.
Andy glanced around. “Morning, gentlemen.”
“Mawnin to you,” Jake Rowley said. “Get you anything?”
“You sell stamps, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, Gov'ment trust me that far.”
“I’d like six fifteens, please.”
Jake produced them, tearing them carefully from one of the sheets in his old black postage book. “Something else for you today.”
Andy thought, then smiled. It was the tenth of March. Without answering Jake, he went to the card rack beside the coffee grinder and picked out a large, ornate birthday card. TO YOU, DAUGHTER, ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY, it said. He brought it back and paid for it.
“Thanks,” Jake said, and rang it up.
“Very welcome,” Andy replied, and went out. They watched him adjust his headband, then stamp his letters one by one. The breath smoked out of his nostrils. They watched him go around the building to where the postbox stood, but none of them sitting around the stove could have testified in court as to whether or not he mailed those letters. He came back into view shouldering into his pack.
“Off he goes,” one of the old-timers remarked.
“Civil enough fella,” Jake said, and that closed the subject. Talk turned to other matters.
Charles Payson stood in the doorway of his store, which hadn’t done three hundred dollars” worth of custom all winter long, and watched Andy go. Payson could have testified that the letters had been mailed; he had stood right here and watched him drop them into the slot in a bunch.
When Andy disappeared from sight, Payson went back inside and through the doorway behind the counter where he sold penny candy and Bang caps and bubble gum and into the living quarters behind. His telephone had a scrambler device attached to it. Payson called Virginia for instructions.
There was and is no post office in Bradford, New Hampshire (or in Tashmore, Vermont, for that matter); both towns were too small. The nearest post office to Bradford was in Teller, New Hampshire. At one-fifteen P.m. on that March 10, the small postal truck from Teller pulled up in front of the general store and the postman emptied the mail from the standing box around to the side where Jake had pumped jenny gas until 1970. The deposited mail consisted of Andy’s six letters and a postcard from Miss Shirley Devine, a fifty-year-old maiden lady, to her sister in Tampa, Florida. Across the lake, Andy McGee was taking a nap and Charlie McGee was building a snowman.
The postman, Robert Everett, put the mail in a bag, swung the bag into the back of his blue and white truck, and then drove on to Williams, another small New Hampshire town in Teller’s zip-code area. Then he U-turned in the middle of what the Williams residents laughingly called Main Street and started back to Teller, where all the mail would be sorted and sent on at about three o'clock that afternoon. Five miles outside of town, a beige Chevrolet Caprice was parked across the road, blocking both of the narrow lanes.
Everett parked by the snowbank and got out of his truck to see if he could help.
Two men approached him from the car. They showed him their credentials and explained what they wanted.
“No!” Everett said. He tried on a laugh and it came out sounding incredulous, as if someone had just told him they were going to open Tashmore Beach for swimming this very afternoon.
“If you doubt we are who we say we are-“one of them began. This was Orville Jamieson, sometimes known as OJ, sometimes known as The Juice. He didn’t mind dealing with this hick postman; he didn’t mind anything as long as his orders didn’t take him any closer than three miles to that hellish little girl.
“No, it ain’t that; it ain’t that at all,” Robert Everett said. He was scared, as scared as any man is when suddenly confronted with the force of the government, when gray enforcement bureaucracy suddenly takes on a real face, like something grim and solid swimming up out of a crystal ball. He was determined nonetheless. “But what I got here is the mail. The U.S. mail. You guys must understand that.”
“This is a matter of national security,” OJ said. After the fiasco in Hastings Glen, a protective corden had been thrown around the Manders place. The grounds and the remains of the house had got the fine-tooth-comb treatment. As a result, OJ had recovered The Windsucker, which now rested comfortably against the left side of his chest.
“You say so, but that ain’t good enough,” Everett said.
OJ unbuttoned his Carroll Reed parka so that Robert Everett could see The Windsucker. Everett’s eyes widened, and OJ smiled a little. “'Now, you don’t want me to pull this, do you?”
Everett couldn’t believe this was happening. He tried one last time. “Do you guys know the penalty for robbing the U.S. mail? They put you in Leavenworth, Kansas, for that.”
“You can clear it with your postmaster when you get back to Teller,” the other man said, speaking for the first time. “Now let’s quit this fucking around, okay? Give us the bag of out-of-town mail.”
Everett gave him the small sack of mail from Bradford and Williams. They opened it right there on the road and sorted through it impersonally. Robert Everett felt anger and a kind of sick shame. What they were doing wasn’t right, not even if it was the secrets of the nuclear bomb in there. Opening the U.S. mail by the side of the road wasn’t right. Ludicrously, he found himself feeling about the same way he would have felt if a strange man had come barging into his house and pulled off his wife’s clothes.
“You guys are going to hear about this,” he said in a choked, scared voice. “You’ll see.”
“Here they are,” the other fellow said to OJ. He handed him six letters, all addressed in the same careful hand. Robert Everett recognized them well enough. They had come from the box at the Bradford general store. OJ put the letters in his pocket and the two of them walked back to their Caprice, leaving the opened bag of mail on the road. “You guys are going to hear about this!” Everett cried in a shaking voice.
Without looking back, OJ said, “Speak to your postmaster before you speak to anyone else. If you want to keep your Postal Service pension, that is.” They drove away. Everett watched them go, raging, scared, sick to his stomach. At last he picked up the mailbag and tossed it back into the truck. “Robbed,” he said, surprised to find he was near tears. “Robbed, I been robbed, oh goddammit, I been robbed.”
He drove back to Teller as fast as the slushy roads would allow. He spoke to his postmaster, as the men had suggested. The Teller postmaster was Bill Cobham, and Everett was in Cobham’s office for better than an hour. At times their voices came through the office door, loud and angry.
Cobham was fifty-six. He had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years, and he was badly scared. At last he succeeded in communicating his fright to Robert Everett as well. And Everett never said a word, not even to his wife, about the day he had been robbed on the Teller Road between Bradford and Williams. But he never forgot it, and he never completely lost that sense of anger and shame… and disillusion.
By two-thirty Charlie had finished her snowman, and Andy, a little rested from his nap, had got up. Orville Jamieson and his new partner, George Sedaka, were on an airplane. Four hours later, As Andy and Charlie were sitting down to a game of five hundred rummy, the supper dishes washed and drying in the drainer, the letters were on Cap Hollister’s desk.