Heart-Shaped Box

What the fuck are you doin’ to yourself, boy? Craddock’s ghost asked him, but Jude wasn’t listening anymore. Couldn’t pay attention through the feeling in his hand, a sensation of having been deeply pierced, almost to the bone.

I’m not through with you, Craddock said, but he was, he just didn’t know it. Jude’s mind reached for the sound of the barking dogs like a drowning man grasping at a life preserver, found it and clasped it to him. He was on his feet, and he began to move.

Get to the dogs. His life—and Georgia’s—depended on it. It was an idea that made no rational sense, but Jude did not care what was rational. Only what was true.

The pain was a red ribbon he held between his hands, following it away from the dead man’s voice and back to his own thoughts. He had a great tolerance for pain, always had, and at other times in his life had even willfully sought it out. There was an ache way down in his wrist, in the joint, a sign of how deep his wound was, and some part of him appreciated that ache, wondered at it. He caught sight of his reflection in the window as he rose. He was grinning in the straggles of his beard, a vision even worse than the expression of terror he’d glimpsed in his own face a moment before.

Get back here, said Craddock, and Jude slowed for an instant, then found his step and kept on.

He shot a look at Georgia on his way by—couldn’t risk a glance back to see what Craddock was doing—and she was still curled on the floor, her arms around her stomach and her hair in her face. She glanced back at him from under her bangs. Her cheeks were damp with sweat. Her eyelids fluttered. The eyes beneath pleaded, questioned, fogged over with pain.

He wished there were time to say he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t running, wasn’t leaving her, that he was leading the dead man away, but the pain in his hand was too intense. He couldn’t think past it to line words up into clear sentences. And besides, he didn’t know how long he’d be able to think for himself, before Craddock would get ahold of him again. He had to control the pace of what happened next, and it had to happen fast. That was fine. It was better that way. He had always been at his best operating in 5/4 time.

He heaved himself down the hall, made the stairs and took them fast, too fast almost, four at a time, so it was like falling. He crashed down the last few steps to the red clay tiles of the kitchen. One ankle turned under him. He stumbled into the chopping block, with its slender legs and scarred surface stained with old blood. A cleaver was buried in the soft wood at one edge, and the wide, flat blade glinted like liquid mercury in the dark. He saw the stairs behind him reflected in it and Craddock standing on them, his features blurred, his hands raised over his head, palms out, a tent-revival preacher testifying to the flock.

Stay, Craddock said. Get the knife. But Jude concentrated on the throbbing in the palm of his hand. It was the deep hurt of pierced muscle and had the effect of clearing his head and centering him. The dead man couldn’t make Jude do what he wanted if Jude was in too much pain to hear him. He shoved himself back from the chopping block, and his momentum carried him away from it and down the length of the kitchen.

He hit the door into Danny’s office, pushed through it, and rushed on into darkness.

19

Three steps through the door, he pulled up, hesitated for a moment to get his bearings. The shades were drawn. There was no light anywhere. He could not see his way in all that darkness and had to move forward more slowly, shuffling his feet, hands stretched before him, feeling for objects that might be in his path. The door wasn’t far, and then he would be outside.

As he went forward, though, he felt an anxious constriction in his chest. It was a little more work to breathe than he liked. He felt at any moment his hands would settle on Craddock’s cold, dead face in the dark. At the thought he found himself fighting not to panic. His elbow struck a standing lamp, and it crashed over. His heart throbbed. He kept moving his feet forward in halting baby steps, but he had no sense of getting any closer to where he was going.

A red eye, the eye of a cat, opened slowly in the darkness. The speakers that flanked the stereo cabinet came on with a thump of bass and a low, empty hum. The constriction was around Jude’s heart, a sickening tightness. Keep breathing, he told himself. Keep moving. He’s going to try to stop you from getting outside. The dogs barked and barked, voices rough, strained, not far away now.

The stereo was on, and there should’ve been radio, but there was no radio. There was no sound at all. Jude’s fingers brushed the wall, the doorframe, and then he grasped the doorknob with his punctured left hand. An imaginary sewing needle turned slowly in the wound, producing a cold flare of pain.

Jude twisted the doorknob, pulled the door back. A slash opened in the darkness, looking out into the glare of the floodlights on the front of the dead man’s truck.

“You think you’re something special because you learnt how to play a fuckin’ guitar?” said Jude’s father from the far end of the office. He was on the stereo, his voice loud and hollow.

In the next moment, Jude became aware of other sounds coming from the speakers—heavy breathing, scuffling shoes, the thud of someone bumping a table—noises that suggested a quiet, desperate wrestling match, two men struggling with each other. There was a little radio play going. It was a play Jude knew well. He had been one of the actors in the original.

Jude stopped with the door half open, unable to plunge out into the night, pinned in place by the sounds coming from the office stereo.

“You think knowin’ how to do that makes you better than me?” Martin Cowzynski, his tone amused and hating all at the same time. “Get over here.”

Then came Jude’s own voice. No, not Jude’s voice—he hadn’t been Jude then. It was Justin’s, a voice in a slightly higher octave, one that cracked sometimes and lacked the resonance that had come with the development of his adult pipes. “Momma! Momma, help!”

Momma did not say anything, did not make a sound, but Jude remembered what she’d done. She had stood up from the kitchen table and walked to the room where she did her sewing and gently closed the door behind her, without daring to look at either of them. Jude and his mother had never helped each other. When they needed it most, they had never dared.

“I said get the fuck over here,” Martin told him.

The sound of someone knocking into a chair. The sound of the chair banging against the floor. When Justin cried out again, his voice wavered with alarm.

“Not my hand! No, Dad, not my hand!”

“Show you,” his father said.

And there came a great booming sound, like a door slamming, and Justin-the-boy-on-the-radio screamed and screamed again, and at the sound of it Jude pitched himself out into the night air.

He missed a step, stumbled, dropped to his knees in the frozen mud of the driveway. Picked himself up, took two running steps, and stumbled again. Jude fell onto all fours in front of the dead man’s pickup. He stared over the front fender at the brutal framework of the brush guard and the floodlights attached to it.

The front of a house or a car or a truck could sometimes look like a face, and so it was with Craddock’s Chevy. The floodlights were the bright, blind, staring eyes of the deranged. The chrome bar of the fender was a leering silver mouth. Jude expected it to lunge at him, tires spinning on the gravel, but it didn’t.

Bon and Angus leaped against the chain-link walls of their pen, barking relentlessly—deep, throaty roars of terror and rage, the eternal, primitive language of dogs: See my teeth, stay back or you will feel them, stay back, I am worse than you. He thought for an instant they were barking at the truck, but Angus was looking past him. Jude glanced back to see at what. The dead man stood in the door to Danny’s office. Craddock’s ghost lifted his black fedora, set it carefully on his head.

Son. You come on back here, son, the dead man said, but Jude was trying not to listen to him, was concentrating intently on the sound of the dogs. Since their barking had first disrupted the spell he’d been under, up in the studio, it had seemed like the most important thing in the world to get to them, although he could not have explained to anyone, including himself, why it mattered so. Only that when he heard their voices, he remembered his own.

Jude hauled himself up off the gravel, ran, fell, got up, ran again, tripped at the edge of the driveway, came crashing down on his knees once more. He crawled through the grass, didn’t have the strength in his legs to launch himself onto his feet again. The cold air stung in the pit of his wounded hand.

He glanced back. Craddock was coming. The golden chain dropped from his right hand. The blade at the end of it began to swing, a silver slash, a streak of brilliance tearing at the night. The gleam and flash fascinated Jude. He felt his gaze sticking to it, felt the thought draining out of him—and in the next instant he crawled straight into the chain-link fence with a crash and dropped to his side. Rolled onto his back.

He was up against the swinging door that held the pen shut. Angus banged into the other side, eyes turned up in his head. Bon stood rigidly behind him, barking with a steady, shrill insistency. The dead man walked toward them.

Let’s ride, Jude, said the ghost. Let’s go for a ride on the nightroad.

Jude felt himself going empty, felt himself surrendering to that voice again, to the sight of that silver blade cutting back and forth through the dark.

Angus hit the chain-link fence so hard he bounced off it and fell on his side. The impact brought Jude out of his trance again.

Angus.

Angus wanted out. He was already back on his feet, barking at the dead man, scrabbling his paws against the chain link.

And Jude had a thought then, wild, half formed, remembered something he had read yesterday morning, in one of his books of occultism. Something about animal familiars. Something about how they could deal with the dead directly.

The dead man stood at Jude’s feet. Craddock’s gaunt, white face was rigid, fixed in an expression of contempt. The black marks shivered before his eyes.

You listen, now. You listen to the sound of my voice.

“I’ve heard enough,” Jude said.

He reached up and behind him found the latch to the pen, released it.

Angus hit the gate an instant later. It crashed open, and Angus leaped at the dead man, making a sound Jude had never heard from his dog before, a choked and gravelly snarl that came from the deep barrel of his chest. Bon shot past a moment later, her black lips drawn back to show her teeth and her tongue lolling.

The dead man took a reeling step backward, his face confused. In the seconds that followed, Jude found it difficult to make sense of what he was actually seeing. Angus leaped at the old man—only it seemed in that instant that Angus was not one dog but two. The first was the lean, powerfully built German shepherd he’d always been. But attached to this shepherd was an inky darkness in the shape of a dog, flat and featureless but somehow solid, a living shadow.

Angus’s material body overlapped this shadow form, but not perfectly. The shadow dog showed around the edges, especially in the area of Angus’s snout—and gaping mouth. This second, shadowy Angus struck the dead man a fraction of an instant ahead of the real Angus, coming at him from his left-hand side, away from the hand with the gold chain and the swinging silver blade. The dead man cried out—a choked, furious cry—and was spun, staggered backward. He shoved Angus off him, clipped him across the snout with an elbow. Only no; it wasn’t Angus he was shoving, it was that other, black dog that dipped and leaned like a shadow thrown by candle flame.

Bon launched herself at Craddock’s other side. Bon was two dogs as well, had a wavering shadow twin of her own. As she leaped, the old man snapped the gold chain at her, and the crescent-shaped silver blade whined in the air. It passed through Bon’s front right leg, up around the shoulder, without leaving a mark. But then it sank into the black dog attached to her, snagged its leg. The shadow Bon was caught and, for one moment, pulled a little out of shape, deformed into something not quite dog, not quite…anything. The blade came loose, snapped back to the dead man’s hand. Bon yelped, a horrid, piercing shout of pain. Jude did not know which version of Bon did the yelping, the shepherd or the shadow.

Angus threw himself at the dead man once more, jaws agape, reaching for his throat, his face. Craddock couldn’t spin fast enough to get him with his swinging knife. The shadow Angus put his front paws on his chest and heaved, and the dead man stumbled down into the driveway. When the black dog lunged, it could stretch itself almost a full yard away from the German shepherd it was attached to, lengthening and going slim like a shadow at the end of day. Its black fangs snapped shut a few inches from the dead man’s face. Craddock’s hat flew. Angus—both the German shepherd and the midnight-colored dog attached to him—scrambled on top of him, gouging at him with his claws.

Time skipped.

The dead man was on his feet again, backed against the truck. Angus had skipped through time with him, was ducking and tearing. Dark teeth ripped through the dead man’s pant leg. Liquid shadow drizzled from scratches in the dead man’s face. When the drops hit the ground, they hissed and smoked, like fat falling in a hot frying pan. Craddock kicked, connected, and Angus rolled, came up on his feet.

Angus crouched, that deep snarl boiling up from inside him, his gaze fixed on Craddock and Craddock’s swinging gold chain with its crescent-shaped blade on the end of it. Looking for an opening. The muscles in the big dog’s back bunched under the glossy short fur, coiled for the spring. The black dog attached to Angus leaped first, by just a fraction of an instant, mouth yawning open, teeth snapping at the dead man’s crotch, going for his balls. Craddock shrieked.

Skip.

The air reverberated with the sound of a slamming door. The old man was inside his Chevy. His hat was in the road, mashed in on itself.

Angus hit the side of the truck, and it rocked on its springs. Then Bon hit the other side, paws scrabbling frantically on steel. Her breath steamed the window, her slobber smeared the glass, just as if it were a real truck. Jude didn’t know how she had got all the way over there. A moment ago she’d been cowering next to him.

Bon slipped, turned in a circle, threw herself at the pickup truck once more. On the other side of the truck, Angus jumped at the same time. In the next instant, though, the Chevy was gone, and the two dogs bounded into each other. Their heads audibly knocked, and they crashed down onto the frozen mud where the truck had been only an instant before.

Except it wasn’t gone. Not entirely. The floodlights remained, two circles of light floating in midair. The dogs sprang back up, wheeled toward the lights, then began barking furiously at them. Bon’s spine was humped up, her fur bristling, and she backed away from the floating, disembodied lights as she yapped. Angus had no throat left for barking, each roaring yawp hoarser than the one before. Jude noted that their shadow twins had vanished, fled with the truck, or had gone back inside their corporeal bodies, where they’d always been hiding, perhaps. Jude supposed—the thought seemed quite reasonable—that those black dogs attached to Bon and Angus had been their souls.

The round circles of the floodlights began to fade, going cool and blue, shrinking in on themselves. Then they winked out, leaving nothing behind except faint afterimages printed on the backs of Jude’s retinas, wan, moon-colored disks that floated in front of him for a few moments before fading away.

20

Jude wasn’t ready until the sky in the east was beginning to lighten with the first show of false dawn. Then he left Bon in the car and brought Angus inside with him. He trotted up the stairs and into the studio. Georgia was where he’d left her, asleep on the couch, under a white cotton sheet he’d pulled off the bed in the guest room.

“Wake up, darlin’,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Georgia rolled toward him at his touch. A long strand of black hair was pasted to her sweaty cheek, and her color was bad—cheeks flushed an almost ugly red, while the rest of her skin was bone white. He put the back of his hand against her forehead. Her brow was feverish and damp.

She licked her lips. “Whafuck time is it?”

“Five.”

She glanced around, sat up on her elbows. “What am I doing here?”

“Don’t you know?”

She looked up at him from the bottoms of her eyes. Her chin began to tremble, and then she had to look away. She covered her eyes with one hand.

“Oh, God,” she said.

Angus leaned past Jude and stuck his snout against her throat, under her jaw, nudging at it, as if telling her to keep her chin up. His great staring eyes were moist with concern.

She jumped when his wet nose kissed her skin, sat the rest of the way up. She gave Angus a startled, disoriented look and laid a hand on his head, between his ears.

“What’s he doing inside?” She glanced at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens, ankle-length duster. At almost the same time, she seemed to register the throaty rumble of the Mustang idling in the driveway. It was already packed. “Where are you going?”

“Us,” he said. “South.”

RIDE ON

21

The daylight began to fail when they were just north of Fredericksburg, and that was when Jude saw the dead man’s pickup behind them, following at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile.

Craddock McDermott was at the wheel, although it was hard to make him out clearly in the weak light, beneath the yellow shine of the sky, where the clouds glowed like banked embers. Jude could see he was wearing his fedora again, though, and drove hunched over the wheel, shoulders raised to the level of his ears. He had also put on a pair of round spectacles. The lenses flashed with a weird orange light, beneath the sodium-vapor lamps over I-95, circles of gleaming flame—a visual match for the floods on the brush guard.

Jude got off at the next exit. Georgia asked him why, and he said he was tired. She hadn’t seen the ghost.

“I could drive,” she said.

She had slept most of the afternoon and now sat in the passenger seat with her feet hitched under her and her head resting on her shoulder.

When he didn’t reply, she took an appraising look at his face and said, “Is everything all right?”

“I just want to get off the road before dark.”

Bon stuck her head into the space between the front seats to listen to them talk. She liked to be included in their conversations. Georgia stroked her head, while Bon stared up at Jude with a look of nervous misgiving visible in her chocolate eyes.

They found a Days Inn less than half a mile from the turnpike. Jude sent Georgia to get the room, while he sat in the Mustang with the dogs. He didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized, wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t been in the mood for about fifteen years.

As soon as Georgia was out of the car, Bon scrambled into her empty seat, curled up in the warm ass print Georgia had left in the leather. As Bon settled her chin on her front paws, she gave Jude a guilty look, waiting for him to yell, to tell her to get in the back with Angus. He didn’t yell. The dogs could do what they wanted.

Not long after they first got on the road, Jude had told Georgia about how the dogs had gone after Craddock. “I’m not sure even the dead man knew that Angus and Bonnie could go at him like that. But I do think Craddock sensed they were some kind of threat, and I think he would’ve been glad to scare us out of the house and away from them, before we figured out how to use the dogs against him.”

At this, Georgia had twisted around in her seat, to reach into the back and dig behind Angus’s ears, leaning far enough into the rear to rub her nose against Bon’s snout. “Who are my little hero dogs? Who is it? Yeah, you are, that’s right,” and so forth, until Jude had started to feel half mad with hearing it.

Georgia came out of the office, a key hooked over one finger, which she wiggled at him before turning and walking around the corner of the building. He followed in the car and parked at an empty spot, in front of a beige door among other beige doors, at the rear of the motel.

She went inside with Angus while Jude walked with Bon along a tangle of scrub woods at the edge of the parking lot. Then he came back and left Bon with Georgia and took Angus for the walk. It was important for neither of them to stray far from the dogs.

These woods, behind the Days Inn, were different from the forest around his farmhouse in Piecliff, New York. They were unmistakably southern woods, smelled of sweet rot and wet moss and red clay, of sulfur and sewage, orchids and motor oil. The atmosphere itself was different, the air denser, warmer, sticky with dampness. Like an armpit. Like Moore’s Corner, where Jude had grown up. Angus snapped at the fireflies, blowing here and there in the ferns, beads of ethereal green light.

Jude returned to the room. In the ten minutes it took to pass through Delaware, he had stopped at a Sunoco for gas and thought to buy a half dozen cans of Alpo in the convenience store. It had not occurred to him, however, to buy paper plates. While Georgia used the bathroom, Jude pulled one of the drawers out of the dresser, opened two cans, and slopped them in. He set the drawer on the floor for the dogs. They fell upon it, and the sound of wet slobbering and swallowing, harsh grunts and gasps for air, filled the room.

Georgia came out of the bathroom, stood in the door in faded white panties and a strappy halter that left her midriff bare, all evidence of her Goth self scrubbed away, except for her shiny, black-lacquered toenails. Her right hand was wrapped in a fresh knot of bandage. She looked at the dogs, nose wrinkled in an expression of amused disgust.

“Boy, are we livin’ foul. If housekeepin’ finds out we been feedin’ our dogs from the dresser drawers, we will not be invited back to the Fredericksburg Days Inn.” She spoke in cornpone, putting on for his bemusement. She had been dropping g’s and drawing out her vowels off and on throughout the afternoon—doing it sometimes for laughs and sometimes, Jude believed, without knowing she was doing it. As if in leaving New York she was also traveling away from the person she’d been there, unconsciously slipping back into the voice and attitudes of who she’d been before: a scrawny Georgia kid who thought it was a laugh to go skinny-dipping with the boys.

“I seen people treat a hotel room worst,” he said. “Worst” instead of “worse.” His own accent, which had become very slight over the years, was thickening up as well. If he wasn’t careful, he would be talking like an extra from Hee Haw by the time they got to South Carolina. It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there. “My bassist, Dizzy, took a shit in a dresser drawer once, when I wouldn’t get out of the bathroom fast enough.”

Georgia laughed, although he saw her watching him with something close to concern—wondering, maybe, what he was thinking. Dizzy was dead. AIDS. Jerome, who’d played rhythm guitar and keyboards and pretty much everything else, was dead, too, had run his car off the road, 140 miles an hour, hit a tree, and crushed his Porsche like a beer can. Only a handful of people knew that it wasn’t a drunk-driving accident, but that he had done it cold sober, on purpose.

Not long after Jerome cashed out, Kenny said it was time to call it a day, that he wanted to spend some time with his kids. Kenny was tired of nipple rings and black leather pants and pyrotechnics and hotel rooms, had been faking it for a while anyway. That was it for the band. Jude had been a solo act ever since.

Maybe he wasn’t even that anymore. There was his box of demos in the studio at home, almost thirty new songs. But it was a private collection. He had not bothered to play them for anyone. It was just more of the same. What had Kurt Cobain said? Verse chorus verse. Over and over. Jude didn’t care anymore. AIDS got Dizzy, the road got Jerome. Jude didn’t care if there was any more music.

It didn’t make sense to him, the way things had worked out. He had always been the star. The band had been called Jude’s Hammer. He was the one who was supposed to die tragically young. Jerome and Dizzy were meant to live on, so they could tell PG-13 stories about him years later, on a VH1 retrospective—the both of them balding, fat, manicured, at peace with their wealth and their rude, noisy pasts. But then Jude had never been good at sticking to the script.

Jude and Georgia ate sandwiches they’d picked up in the same Delaware gas station where Jude had bought the Alpo. They tasted like the Saran Wrap they’d come wrapped in.

My Chemical Romance was on Conan. They had rings in their lips and eyebrows, their hair done up in spikes, but beneath the white pancake makeup and black lipstick they looked like a collection of chubby kids who had probably been in their high-school marching band a few years earlier. They leaped around, falling into each other, as if the stage beneath them were an electrified plate. They played frantically, pissing themselves with fear. Jude liked them. He wondered which of them would die first.

After, Georgia switched off the lamp by the bed and they lay together in the dark, the dogs curled up on the floor.

“I guess it didn’t get rid of him,” she said. “Burning his suit.” No Daisy Duke accent now.

“It was a good idea, though.”

“No it wasn’t.” Then: “He made me do it, didn’t he?”

Jude didn’t reply.

“What if we can’t figure out how to make him go away?” she asked.

“Get used to smellin’ dog food.”

She laughed, her breath tickling his throat.

She said, “What are we going to do when we get where we’re going?”

“We’re going to talk to the woman who sent me the suit. We’re going to find out if she knows how to get rid of him.”

Cars droned on I-95. Crickets thrummed.

“Are you going to hurt her?”

“I don’t know. I might. How’s your hand?”

“Better,” she said. “How’s yours?”

“Better,” he said.

He was lying, and he was pretty sure she was, too. She had gone into the bathroom to re-dress the hand when they first got into the room. He had gone in after, to re-dress his, and found her old wraps in the trash. He pulled the loops of gauze out of the wastebasket to inspect them. They stank of infection and antiseptic cream, and they were stained with dried blood and something else, a yellow crust that had to be pus.

As for his own hand, the gouge he’d put in it probably needed stitches. Before leaving the house that morning, he had tugged a first-aid kit out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and used some Steri-Strips to pull the gash closed, then wound it in white bandages. But the gouge continued to seep, and by the time he took the wraps off, blood was beginning to soak through them. The hole in his left hand bulged open between the Steri-Strips, a red, liquid eye.

“The girl who killed herself,” Georgia began. “The girl this is all about…”

“Anna McDermott.” Her real name now.

“Anna,” Georgia repeated. “Do you know why she killed herself? Was it because you told her to scram?”

“Her sister obviously thinks so. Her stepdaddy, too, I guess, since he’s haunting us.”

“The ghost…can make people do things. Like getting me to burn the suit. Like making Danny hang himself.”

He’d told her about Danny in the car. Georgia had turned her face to the window, and he’d heard her crying softly for a while, making little damp, choked sounds, which evened out after a time into the slow, regular inhalations of sleep. This was the first either of them had mentioned Danny since.

Jude continued, “The dead man, Anna’s stepdaddy, learned hypnotism torturing Charlie in the army and stayed with it after he got out. Liked to call himself a mentalist. In his life he used that chain of his, with the silver razor on the end of it, to put people into trances, but now he’s dead, he don’t need it anymore. Something about when he says things, you just have to do it. All of a sudden, you’re just sitting back, watching him run you here and there. You don’t even feel anything. Your body is a suit of clothes, and he’s the one wearing it, not you.” A dead man’s suit, Jude thought, with a shuddery feeling of revulsion. Then he said, “I don’t know much about him. Anna didn’t like to talk on him. But I know she worked for a while as a palm reader, and she said her stepdaddy was the one who taught her how. He had an interest in the less-understood aspects of the human mind. Like, for example, on the weekends he’d hire himself out as a dowser.”

“Those are people who find water by waving sticks in the air? My grandma hired an old hillbilly with a mouthful of gold teeth to find her a fresh spring after her well went dry. He had a hickory stick.”

“Anna’s stepdaddy, Craddock, didn’t bother with a stick. He just used that pretty razor on a chain he’s got. Pendulums work about as well, I guess. Anyway, the psycho bitch who sent me the suit, Jessica McDermott Price, wanted me to know that her pop had said he’d get even with me after he was dead. So I think the old man had some ideas about how to come back. In other words, he’s not an accidental ghost, if that makes sense. He got the way he is now on purpose.”

A dog yapped somewhere in the distance. Bon lifted her head, gazed thoughtfully in the direction of the door, then lowered her chin back to her forepaws.

“Was she pretty?” Georgia asked.

“Anna? Yeah. Sure. You want to know if she was good in the sack?”

“I’m just asking. You don’t got to be a son of a bitch about it.”

“Well, then. Don’t ask questions you don’t really want to know the answers to. Notice I never inquire about your past lays.”

“Past lays. Goddammit. Is that the way you think of me? The present lay, soon to be the past lay?”

“Christ. Here we go.”

“And I’m not being a snoop. I’m trying to figure this out.”

“How is knowing whether she was pretty going to help you figure anything out about our ghost problem?”

She held the sheet to her chin and stared at him in the dark.

“So she was Florida and I’m Georgia. How many other states has your dick visited?”

“I couldn’t tell you. I don’t have a map somewhere with pins in it. You really want me to make an estimate? While we’re on the subject, why stop with states? I’ve had thirteen world tours, and I always took my cock along with me.”

“You fuckin’ asshole.”

He grinned in his beard. “I know that’s probably shocking, to a virgin such as yourself. Here’s some news for you: I got a past. Fifty-four years of it.”

“Did you love her?”

“You can’t leave it alone, can you?”

“This is important, goddammit.”

“How’s it important?”

She wouldn’t say.

He sat up against the headboard. “For about three weeks.”

“Did she love you?”

He nodded.

“She wrote you letters? After you sent her home?”

“Yeah.”

“Angry letters?”

He didn’t reply at first, considering the question.

“Did you even fuckin’ read ’em, you insensitive shitbird?” There it was again, an unmistakably rural and southern cadence in her voice. Her temper was up, and she’d forgotten herself for a moment. Or maybe it was not a case of forgetting herself, Jude thought, so much as the opposite.

“Yeah, I read ’em,” he said. “I was hunting around for them when the shit blew up in our faces back in New York.”

He was sorry Danny had not found them. He had loved Anna and lived with her and talked with her every day they were together but now understood he had not learned nearly enough about her. He knew so little of the life she’d lived before him—and after.

“You deserve whatever happens to you,” she said. Georgia rolled away from him. “We both deserve it.”

He said, “They weren’t angry. Sometimes they were emotional. And sometimes they were scary, because there was so little emotion in them. In the last one, I remember she said something about how she had things she wanted to talk about, things she was tired of keeping secret. She said she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time. Which should’ve been a warning sign to me right there. Except she said stuff like that other times, and she never…anyway. I been trying to tell you she wasn’t right. She wasn’t happy.”

“But do you think she still loved you? Even after you put your boot in her ass?”

“I didn’t—” he started, then let out a thin, seething breath. Wouldn’t let himself be baited. “I suppose probably she did.”

Georgia didn’t speak for a long time, her back to him. He studied the curve of her shoulder. At last she said, “I feel bad for her. It’s not a lot of fun, you know.”

“What?”

“Being in love with you. I’ve been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you’re something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.” She spoke plainly, calmly, without looking at him.

It made him catch his breath a little, what she said, and for an instant he wanted to tell her he was sorry, but he shied from the word. He was out of practice at apologies and loathed explanations. She waited for him to reply, and when he didn’t, she pulled the blanket up to cover her shoulder.

He slid down against the pillow, put his hands behind his head.

“We’ll be passing through Georgia tomorrow,” she said, still not turning toward him. “I want to stop and see my grandma.”

“Your grandma,” Jude repeated, as if he weren’t sure he’d heard her right.

“Bammy is my favorite person in the world. She bowled a perfect three hundred once.” Georgia said it as if the two things followed each other naturally. Maybe they did.

“You know the trouble we’re in?”

“Yeah. I was vaguely aware.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea to start making detours?”

“I want to see her.”

“How about we stop in on our way back? You two can catch up on old times then. Hell, maybe the two of you could go bowl a couple strings.”

Georgia was a little while in answering. At last she said, “I was feelin’ like I ought to see her now. It’s been on my mind. I don’t think it’s any sure thing we’ll be makin’ the trip back. Do you?”

He pulled his beard, staring at the shape of her under the sheet. He didn’t like the idea of slowing for any reason but felt the need to offer her something, some concession, to make her loathe him a little less. Also, if Georgia had things she wanted to say to someone who loved her, he supposed it made sense not to wait around. Putting off anything that mattered no longer seemed like sensible planning.

“She keep lemonade in the fridge?”

“Fresh made.”

“Okay,” Jude said. “We’ll stop. Not too long, though, okay? We can be in Florida this time tomorrow if we don’t mess around.”

One of the dogs sighed. Georgia had opened a window to air out the odor of Alpo, the window that looked into the courtyard at the center of the motel. Jude could smell the rust of the chain-link fence and a dash of chlorine, although there was no water in the pool.

Georgia said, “Also, I used to have a Ouija board, once upon a time. When we get to my grandma’s, I want to poke around for it.”

“I already told you. I don’t need to talk to Craddock. I already know what he wants.”

“No,” Georgia said, her voice short with impatience. “I don’t mean so we can talk to him.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“We need it if we’re going to talk to Anna,” Georgia said. “You said she loved you. Maybe she can tell us how to get out of this mess. Maybe she can call him off.”

22

Lake Pontchartrain, huh? I didn’t grow up too far from there. My parents took us campin’ there once. My stepdaddy fished. I can’t remember how he did. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain?”

She was always after him with her questions. He could never decide if she listened to the answers or just used the time when he was talking to think of something else to pester him about.

“Do you like to fish? Do you like raw fish? Sushi? I think sushi is disgusting, except when I’m drinkin’, and then I’m in the mood. Repulsion masks attraction. How many times have you been to Tokyo? I hear the food is really nasty—raw squid, raw jellyfish. Everything is raw there. Did they not invent fire in Japan? Have you ever had bad food poisonin’? Sure you have. On tour all the time.

“What’s the hardest you ever puked? You ever puked through your nostrils? You have? That’s the worst.

“But did you fish Lake Pontchartrain much? Did your daddy take you? Isn’t that the prettiest name? Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Pontchartrain, I want to see the rain on Lake Pontchartrain. You know what the most romantic sound in the world is? Rain on a quiet lake. A nice spring rain. When I was a kid, I could put myself into a trance just sittin’ at my window watchin’ the rain. My stepdad used to say he never met anyone as easy to put into a trance as me. What were you like growin’ up? When’d you decide to change your name?

“Do you think I should change my name? You should pick out a new name for me. I want you to call me whatever you want to call me.”

“I already do,” he said.

“That’s right. You do. From now on, my name is Florida. Anna McDermott is dead to me. She’s a dead girl. All gone. I never liked her anyway. I’d rather be Florida. Do you miss Louisiana? Isn’t it funny we only lived four hours apart from each other? We coulda crossed paths. Do you think you and I were ever in the same room, at the same time, and didn’t know it? Probably not, though, right? Because you blew out of Louisiana before I was even born.”

It was either her most endearing habit or her most infuriating. Jude was never sure. Maybe it was both at the same time.

“You ever shut up with the questions?” he asked her the first night they slept together. It was two in the morning, and she’d been interrogating him for an hour. “Were you one of those kids who would drive their momma crazy going, ‘Why is the sky blue? Why doesn’t the earth fall into the sun? What happens to us when we die?’”

“What do you think happens to us when we die?” Anna asked. “You ever seen a ghost? My stepdaddy has. My stepdaddy’s talked to them. He was in Vietnam. He says the whole country is haunted.”

By then he already knew that her stepfather was a dowser as well as a mesmerist, and in business with her older sister, also a hypnotist by trade, the both of them back in Testament, Florida. That was almost the full extent of what he knew about her family. Jude didn’t push for more—not then, not later—was content to know about her what she wanted him to know.

He had met Anna three days before, in New York City. He’d come down to do a guest vocal with Trent Reznor for a movie sound track—easy money—then stuck around to see a show Trent was doing at Roseland. Anna was backstage, a petite girl, violet lipstick, leather pants that creaked when she walked, the rare Goth blonde. She asked if he wanted an egg roll and got it for him and then said, “Is it hard to eat with a beard like that? Do you get food in it?” At him with the questions almost from hello. “Why do you think so many guys, bikers and stuff, grow beards to look threatening? Don’t you think they’d actually work against you in a fight?”

“How would a beard work against you in a fight?” he asked.

She grabbed his beard in one fist and yanked at it. He bent forward, felt a tearing pain in the lower half of his face, ground his teeth, choked on an angry cry. She let go, continued, “Like if I was ever in a fight with a bearded man, that’s the first thing I’d do. ZZ Top would be pushovers. I could take all three of them myself, little itty-bitty me. Course, those guys are stuck, they can’t shave. If they ever shaved, no one would know who they were. I kind of guess you’re in the same boat, now I think about it. It’s who you are. That beard gave me bad dreams as a little girl, when I used to watch you in videos. Hey! You know, you could be completely anonymous without your beard. You ever think of that? Instant vacation from the pressures of celebrity. Plus, it’s a liability in combat. Reasons to shave.”

“My face was a liability to getting laid,” he said. “If my beard gave you bad dreams, you should see me without it. You’d probably never sleep again.”

“So it’s a disguise. An act of concealment. Like your name.”

“What about my name?”

“That isn’t your real name. Judas Coyne. It’s a pun.” She leaned toward him. “Name like that, are you from a nutty Christian family? I bet. My stepdaddy says the Bible is all bunk. He was raised Pentecostal, but he wound up a spiritualist, which is how he raised us. He’s got a pendulum—he can hang it over you and ask you questions and tell if you’re lying by the way it swings back and forth. He can read your aura with it, too. My aura is black as sin. How about yours? Want me to read your palm? Palm reading is nothing. Easiest trick in the book.”

She told his fortune three times. The first time she was kneeling naked in bed beside him, a gleaming line of sweat showing in the crease between her breasts. She was flushed, still breathing hard from their exertions. She took his palm, moved her fingertips across it, inspecting it closely.

“Look at this lifeline,” Anna said. “This thing goes on for miles. I guess you live forever. I wouldn’t want to live forever myself. How old is too old? Maybe it’s metaphorical. Like your music is forever, some malarkey along those lines. Palm reading ain’t no exact science.”

And then once, not long after he finished rebuilding the Mustang, they had gone for a drive into the hills overlooking the Hudson. They wound up parked at a boat ramp, staring out at the river, the water flecked with diamond scales beneath a high, faded-blue sky. Fluffy white clouds, thousands of feet high, crowded the horizon. Jude had meant to drive Anna to an appointment with a psychiatrist—Danny had set it up—but she’d dissuaded him, said it was too nice a day to spend it in a doctor’s office.

They sat there, windows down, music low, and she picked up his hand, lying on the seat between them. She was having one of her good days. They’d been coming less and less often.

“You love again after me,” she said. “You get another chance to be happy. I don’t know if you’ll let yourself take it. I kind of think not. Why don’t you want to be happy?”

“What do you mean, after you?” he asked. Then he said, “I’m happy now.”

“No you aren’t. You’re still angry.”

“With who?”

“Yourself,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing. “Like it’s your fault Jerome and Dizzy died. Like anyone could’ve saved them from themselves. You’re still real pissed with your daddy, too. For what he did to your mother. For what he did to your hand.”

This last statement stole his breath. “What are you talking about? How do you know about what he did to my hand?”

She flicked her gaze toward him: an amused, cunning look. “I’m starin’ at it right now, aren’t I?” She turned his hand over, moved her thumb across his scarred knuckles. “You don’t have to be psychic or anything. You just have to have sensitive fingers. I can feel where the bones healed. What’d he hit this hand with to smash it? A sledgehammer? They healed real bad.”

“The basement door. I took off one weekend to play a show in New Orleans. A battle-of-the-bands thing. I was fifteen. Helped myself to a hundred bucks’ bus fare out of the family cash box. I figured it wouldn’t be like stealing, ’cause we’d win the contest. Five-hundred-dollar cash prize. Pay it all back with interest.”

“How’d you do?”

“Took third. We all got T-shirts,” Jude said. “When I came back, he dragged me over to the basement door and smashed my left hand in it. My chord-making hand.”

She paused, frowning, then glanced at him in confusion. “I thought you made chords with the other hand.”

“I do now.”

She stared.

“I kinda taught myself how to make them with my right hand while my left was healing, and I just never went back.”

“Was that hard?”

“Well. I wasn’t sure my left would ever be good for making chords again, so it was either that or stop playing. And it would’ve been a lot harder to stop.”

“Where was your mom when this happened?”

“Can’t remember.” A lie. The truth was, he couldn’t forget. His mother had been at the table when his father started to pull him across the kitchen, toward the basement door, and he had screamed for her to help, but she only got up and put her hands over her ears and left for the sewing room. He could not, in truth, blame her for refusing to intervene. Supposed he had it coming, and not for taking a hundred dollars out of the cash box either. “S’okay. I wound up playing better guitar after I had to switch hands anyway. It just took about a month of making the most horrible fuckin’ noises you ever heard. Eventually someone explained I had to restring my guitar backwards if I was going to play with my hands reversed. After that I picked it up pretty easy.”

“Plus, you showed your daddy, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer. She examined his palm once more, and rolled her thumb across his wrist. “He isn’t through with you yet. Your daddy. You’ll see him again.”

“No I won’t. I haven’t looked at him for thirty years. He doesn’t figure in my life anymore.”

“Sure he does. He figures into it every single day.”

“Funny, I thought we decided to skip visiting the psychiatrist this afternoon.”

She said, “You have five luck lines. You’re luckier than a cat, Jude Coyne. The world must still be payin’ you back for all your daddy did to you. Five luck lines. The world is never going to be done payin’ you back.” She laid his hand aside. “Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said. “Is there any part of you, you won’t stick a pin in?” She had them in her ears, her tongue, one nipple, her labia. “Who are you trying to scare away?”

Anna gave him his final palm reading just a few weeks before Jude packed her stuff. He looked out the kitchen window early one evening and saw her trudging through a cold October rain to the barn, wearing only a black halter and black panties, her naked flesh shocking in its paleness.

By the time he caught up to her, she had crawled into the dog pen, the part of it that was inside the barn, where Angus and Bon went to get out of the rain. She sat in the dirt, mud smeared on the backs of her thighs. The dogs whisked here and there, shooting worried looks her way and giving her space.

Jude climbed into the pen on all fours, angry with her, sick to death of the way it had been the last two months. He was sick of talking to her and getting dull, three-word answers, sick of laughter and tears for no reason. They didn’t make love anymore. The thought repelled him. She didn’t wash, didn’t dress, didn’t brush her teeth. Her honey-yellow hair was a rat’s nest. The last few times they had attempted to have sex, she’d turned him off with the things she wanted, had embarrassed and sickened him. He didn’t mind a certain amount of kink, would tie her up if she wanted, pinch her nipples, roll her over and put it in her ass. But she wasn’t happy with that. She wanted him to hold a plastic bag over her head. To cut her.

She was hunched forward, with a needle in one hand. She pushed it into the thumb of the other, working intently and deliberately—pricking herself once, then again, producing fat, gem-bright drops of blood.

“The hell you doing?” he asked her, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice and failing. He took her by the wrist, to stop her sticking herself.

She let the needle drop into the mud, then reversed his grip, squeezed his hand in hers and stared down at it. Her eyes glowed with fever in their dark, bruised-looking hollows. She was down to sleeping three hours a night at best.

“You’re running out of time almost as fast as I am. I’ll be more useful when I’m gone. I’m gone. We have no future. Someone is going to try and hurt you. Someone who wants to take everything away from you.” She rolled her eyes up to look into his face. “Someone you can’t fight. You’ll fight anyway, but you can’t win. You won’t win. All the good things in your life will soon be gone.”

Angus whined anxiously and slipped in between them, burrowing his snout in her crotch. She smiled—first smile he’d seen in a month—and dug behind his ears.

“Well,” she said. “You’ll always have the dogs.”

He twisted free of her grip, took her by the arms, lifted her to her feet. “I don’t listen to nothing you say. You’ve told my fortune three times at least, and it comes out a different way every time.”

“I know,” she said. “But they’re all true anyway.”

“Why were you sticking yourself with a needle? Why you want to do that?”

“I done it since I was a girl. Sometimes if I stick myself a couple times, I can make the bad thoughts go away. It’s a trick I taught myself to clear my head. Like pinchin’ yourself in a dream. You know. Pain has a way of wakin’ you up. Of remindin’ you who you are.”

Jude knew.

Almost as an afterthought, she added, “I guess it isn’t workin’ too good anymore.” He led her out of the pen and back across the barn. She spoke again, said, “I don’t know what I’m out here for. In my underwear.”

“I don’t either.”

“You ever dated anyone as crazy as me, Jude? Do you hate me? You’ve had a lot of girls. Tell me honest, am I the worst? Who was your worst?”

“Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?” he wanted to know.

As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him.

“I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”

23

He woke a little after nine with a melody in his head, something with the feel of an Appalachian hymn. He nudged Bon off the bed—she had climbed up with them in the night—and pushed aside the covers. Jude sat on the edge of the mattress, mentally running over the melody again, trying to identify it, to remember the lyrics. Only it couldn’t be identified, and the lyrics couldn’t be recalled, because it hadn’t existed until he thought it up. It wouldn’t have a name until he gave it one.

Jude rose, slipped across the room and outside, onto the concrete breezeway, still in his boxers. He unlocked the trunk of the Mustang and pulled out a battered guitar case with a ’68 Les Paul in it. He carried it back into the room.

Georgia hadn’t moved. She lay with her face in the pillow, one bone-white arm above the sheets and curled tight against her body. It had been years since he dated anyone with a tan. When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.

He let himself into the john. By now Angus and Bon were both trailing him, and he whispered at them to stay. They sank to their bellies outside the door, staring forlornly in at him, accusing him with their eyes of failing to love them enough.

He wasn’t sure how well he could play with the puncture wound in his left hand. The left did the picking and the right found the chords. He lifted the Les Paul from its case and began to fiddle, bringing it into tune. When he strummed a pick across the strings, it set off a low flare of pain—not bad, almost just an uncomfortable warmth—in the center of his palm. It felt as if a steel wire were sunk deep into the flesh and beginning to heat up. He could play through that, he thought.

When the guitar was in tune, he searched for the proper chords and began to play, reproducing the tune that had been in his head when he woke. Without the amp the guitar was all flat, soft twang, and each chord made a raspy, chiming sound. The song itself might have been a traditional hill-country melody, sounded like something that belonged on a Folkways record or a Library of Congress retrospective of traditional music. Something with a name like “Fixin’ to Dig My Grave.” “Jesus Brung His Chariot.” “Drink to the Devil.”

“ ‘Drink to the Dead,’” he said.

He put the guitar down and went back into the bedroom. There was a small notepad on the night table, and a ballpoint pen. He brought them into the bathroom and wrote down “Drink to the Dead.” Now it had a title. He picked up the guitar and played it again.

The sound of it—the sound of the Ozarks, of gospel—gave him a little prickle of pleasure, which he felt along his forearms and across the back of his neck. A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

He wished he had his DAT recorder, wanted to get what he had down on tape. Instead he put the guitar aside once more, and scribbled the chords on the notepad, beneath his title. Then he took up the Les Paul and played the lick again, and again, curious to see where it would take him. Twenty minutes later there were spots of blood showing through the bandage around his left hand, and he had worked out the chorus, which built naturally from the initial hook, a steady, rising, thunderous chorus, a whisper to a shout: an act of violence against the beauty and sweetness of the melody that had come before.

“Who’s that by?” Georgia asked, leaning in through the bathroom door, knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.

“Me.”

“I like that one.”

“It’s okay. Sound even better if this thing was plugged in.”

Her soft black hair floated around her head, had a swirled, airy look to it, and the shadows under her eyes drew his attention to how large they were. She smiled drowsily down at him. He smiled back.

“Jude,” she said, in a tone of almost unbearable, erotic tenderness.

“Yeah?”

“You think you could get your ass out of the bathroom, so I could pee?”

When she shut the door, he dropped his guitar case on the bed and stood in the dimness of the room, listening to the muffled sound of the world beyond the drawn shades: the drone of traffic on the highway, a car door slamming, a vacuum cleaner humming in the room directly above. It came to him then that the ghost was gone.

Ever since the suit had arrived at his house in its black heart-shaped box, he had sensed the dead man lingering close to him. Even when Jude couldn’t see him, he was conscious of his presence, felt it almost as a barometric weight, a kind of pressure and electricity in the air, such as precedes a thunderstorm. He had existed in that atmosphere of dreadful waiting for days, a continuous crackle of tension that made it difficult to taste his food or find his way into sleep. Now, though, it had lifted. He had somehow forgotten the ghost while he’d been writing the new song—and the ghost had somehow forgotten him, or at least not been able to intrude into Jude’s thoughts, into Jude’s surroundings.

He walked Angus, took his time. Jude was in short sleeves and jeans, and the sun felt good on the back of his neck. The smell of the morning—the pall of exhaust over I-95, the swamp lilies in the brush, the hot tarmac—got his blood going, made him want to be on the road, to be driving somewhere, anywhere. He felt good: an unfamiliar sensation. Maybe he was randy, thought about the pleasant tousle of Georgia’s hair and her sleep-puffy eyes and lithe white legs. He was hungry, wanted eggs, a chicken-fried steak. Angus chased a groundhog into waist-high grass, then stood at the edge of the trees, yapping happily at it. Jude went back to give Bon a turn to stretch her legs and heard the shower.

He let himself in the bathroom. The room was steamy, the air hot and close. He undressed, slipped in around the curtain, and climbed into the tub.

Georgia jumped when his knuckles brushed her back, twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder. She had a black butterfly tattooed on her left shoulder and a black heart on her hip. She turned toward him, and he put his hand over the heart.

She pressed her damp, springy body against his, and they kissed. He leaned into her, over her, and to balance herself, Georgia put her right hand against the wall—then inhaled, a sharp, thin sound of pain, and pulled the hand back as if she had burned it.

Georgia tried to lower her hand to her side, but he caught her wrist and lifted it. The thumb was inflamed and red, and when he touched it lightly, he could feel the sick heat trapped inside it. The palm, around the ball of the thumb, was also reddened and swollen. On the inside of the thumb was the white sore, glittering with fresh pus.

“What are we going to do about this thing?” he asked.

“It’s fine. I’m putting antiseptic cream on it.”

“This isn’t fine. We ought to run you to the emergency room.”

“I’m not going to sit in some emergency room for three hours to have someone look at the place I poked myself with a pin.”

“You don’t know what stuck you. Don’t forget what you were handling when this happened to you.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I just don’t believe that any doctor is going to make it better. Not really.”

“You think it’s going to get better on its own?”

“I think it’ll be all right—if we make the dead man go away. If we get him off our backs, I think we’ll both be all right,” she said. “Whatever’s wrong with my hand, it’s part of this whole thing. But you know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t know anything, but he had notions, and he was not happy to hear they matched her own. He bowed his head, considering, wiped at the spray on his face. At last he said, “When Anna was at her worst, she’d poke herself in the thumb with a needle. To clear her head, she told me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. It just makes me uneasy, you getting stuck like she used to stick herself.”

“Well. It doesn’t worry me. Actually, that almost makes me feel better about it.” Her good hand moved across his chest as she spoke, her fingers exploring a landscape of muscle beginning to lose definition and skin going slack with age, and all of it overgrown with a mat of curling silver hairs.

“It does?”

“Sure. It’s something else her and I got in common. Besides you. I never met her, and I don’t hardly know anything about her, but I feel connected to her somehow. I’m not afraid of that, you know.”

“I’m glad it’s not bothering you. I wish I could say the same. Speaking for myself, I don’t much like thinking about it.”

“So don’t,” she said, leaning into him and pushing her tongue into his mouth to shut him up.

24

Jude took Bon for her overdue walk while Georgia busied herself in the bathroom, dressing and rebandaging her hand and putting in her studs. He knew she might be occupied for twenty minutes, so he stopped by the car and pulled her laptop out of the trunk. Georgia didn’t even know they had it with them. He’d packed it automatically, without thinking, because Georgia took it with her wherever she went and used it to stay in touch with a gaggle of geographically far-flung friends by way of e-mail and instant message. And she dribbled away countless hours browsing message boards, blogs, concert info, and vampire porn (which would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t so depressing). But once they were on the road, Jude had forgotten they had the laptop with them, and Georgia had never asked about it, so it had spent the night in the trunk.

Jude didn’t bring his own computer—he didn’t have one. Danny had handled his e-mail and all the rest of his online obligations. Jude was aware that he belonged to an increasingly small segment of the society, those who could not quite fathom the allure of the digital age. Jude did not want to be wired. He had spent four years wired on coke, a period of time in which everything seemed hyperaccelerated, as in one of those time-lapse movies, where a whole day and night pass in just a few seconds, traffic reduced to lurid streaks of light, people transformed into blurred mannequins rushing jerkily here and there. Those four years now felt more like four bad, crazy, sleepless days to him—days that had begun with a New Year’s Eve hangover and ended at crowded, smoky Christmas parties where he found himself surrounded by strangers trying to touch him and shrieking with inhuman laughter. He did not ever want to be wired again.

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

Now, though, he was in the mood to score. He lugged her laptop back to the room, plugged in, and went online. He didn’t make any attempt to access his e-mail account. In truth, he wasn’t sure how to access his e-mail. Danny had a program all set up to reel in Jude’s messages from the Net, but Jude couldn’t have said how to get at that information from someone else’s computer. He knew how to Google a name, however, and he Googled Anna’s.

Her obituary was short, half the length her father’s had been. Jude was able to read it in a glance, which was all it merited. It was her photograph that caught his attention and gave him a brief hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. He guessed it had been taken close to the end of her life. She was glancing blankly into the camera, some strands of pale hair blown across a face that was gaunt, her cheeks sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones.

When he had known her, she’d sported rings in her eyebrows and four apiece in each of her ears, but in the photo they were gone, which made her too-pale face that much more vulnerable. When he looked closely, he could see the marks left by her piercings. She’d given them up, the silver hoops and crosses and ankhs and glittering gems, the studs and fishhooks and rings she had stuck into her skin to make herself look dirty and tough and dangerous and crazy and beautiful. Some of it was true, too. She really had been crazy and beautiful; dangerous, too. Dangerous to herself.

The obituary said nothing about a suicide note. It said nothing about suicide. She had died not three months before her stepfather.

He ran another search. He tapped in “Craddock McDermott, dowsing,” and half a dozen links popped up. He clicked on the topmost result, which brought him to a nine-year-old article in the Tampa Tribune, from their living/arts section. Jude looked at the pictures first—there were two—and stiffened in his chair. It was a while before he could unlock his gaze from those photographs and shift his attention to the text beside them.

The story was titled “Dowsing for the Dead.” The slug line read: 20 years after Vietnam, Capt. Craddock McDermott is ready to lay some ghosts to rest…and raise some others.

The article opened with the story of Roy Hayes, a retired biology professor, who at the age of sixty-nine had learned to fly light planes and who had, one fall morning in 1991, taken an ultralight up over the Everglades to count egrets for an environmental group. At 7:13 A.M. a private strip south of Naples had received a transmission from him.

“I think I’m having a stroke,” Hayes said. “I’m dizzy. I can’t tell how low I am. I need help.”

That was the last anyone had heard from him. A search party, involving more than thirty boats and a hundred men, had not been able to find a trace of either Hayes or his plane. Now, three years after his disappearance and presumed death, his family had taken the extraordinary step of hiring Craddock McDermott, Captain U.S. Army (ret.), to lead a new search for his remains.

“He didn’t go down in the ’Glades,” McDermott states with a confident grin. “The search parties were always looking in the wrong place. The winds that morning carried his plane farther north, over Big Cypress. I put his position less than a mile south of I-75.”McDermott believes he can pinpoint the site of the crash to an area the size of a square half mile. But he didn’t work out his estimate by consulting meteorological data from the morning of the disappearance, or by examining Dr. Hayes’s final radio transmissions, or by reading eyewitness reports. Instead he dangled a silver pendulum above an outsize map of the region. When the pendulum began to swing rapidly back and forth, over a spot in south Big Cypress, McDermott announced he had found the impact zone.And when he takes a private search team into the Big Cypress swamp later this week, to look for the downed ultralight, he will not be bringing with him sonar, metal detectors, or hound dogs. His plan for locating the vanished professor is much more simple—and unnerving. He means to appeal to Roy Hayes directly—to call upon the deceased doctor himself to lead the party to his final resting place.

The article shifted to backstory, exploring Craddock’s earliest encounters with the occult. A few lines were spent detailing the more gothic details of his early family life. It touched briefly on his father, the Pentecostal minister with a penchant for snake handling, who had disappeared when Craddock was just a boy. It lingered for a paragraph on his mother, who had twice moved them across the country, after seeing a phantom she called “the walking-backwards man,” a vision that foretold of ill luck. After one such visit from the walking-backwards man, little Craddock and his mother departed an Atlanta apartment complex, not three weeks before the building burned to the ground in an electrical fire.

Then it was 1967, and McDermott was an officer stationed in Vietnam, where he was placed in charge of interrogating the captured elite of the People’s Liberation Army. He found himself assigned to the case of one Nguyen Trung, a chiromancer, who had reportedly learned his fortune-telling arts from Ho Chi Minh’s own brother and who had offered his services to a variety of higher-ups among the Vietcong. To put his prisoner at ease, McDermott asked Trung to help him understand his spiritual beliefs. What followed was a series of extraordinary conversations on the subjects of prophecy, the human soul, and the dead, discussions McDermott said had opened his eyes to the supernatural all around him.

“In Vietnam the ghosts are busy,” McDermott avers. “Nguyen Trung taught me to see them. Once you know how to look for them, you can spot them on every street corner, their eyes marked out and their feet not touching the ground. The living are often known to employ the dead over there. A spirit that believes it has work to do won’t leave our world. It’ll stay until the job is done.“That was when I first began to believe we were going to lose the war. I saw it happen on the battlefield. When our boys died, their souls would come out of their mouths, like steam from a teakettle, and run for the sky. When the Vietcong died, their spirits remained. Their dead went right on fighting.”

After their sessions had concluded, McDermott lost track of Trung, who disappeared around the time of Tet. As for Professor Hayes, McDermott believed that his final fate would be known soon enough.

“We’ll find him,” McDermott said. “His spirit is unemployed at the moment, but I’ll give him some work. We’re going to ride together—Hayes and I. He’s going to lead me right to his body.”

At this last—We’re going to ride together—Jude felt a chill crawling on the flesh of his arms. But that was not as bad as the peculiar feeling of dread that came over him when he looked at the photographs.

The first was a picture of Craddock leaning against the grill of his smoke-blue pickup. His barefoot stepdaughters—Anna was maybe twelve, Jessica about fifteen—sat on the hood, one to either side of him. It was the first time Jude had ever seen Anna’s older sister, but not the first time he’d ever looked upon Anna as a child—she was just the same as she’d been in his dream, only without the scarf over her eyes.

In the photograph Jessica had her arms around the neck of her smiling, angular stepfather. She was almost as rangy as he was, tall and fit, her skin honey-colored and healthy with tan. But there was something off about her grin—toothy and wide, maybe too wide, too enthusiastic, the sell-sell-sell grin of a frantic real estate salesperson. And there was something off about her eyes, too, which were as bright and black as wet ink, and disconcertingly avid.

Anna sat a little apart from the other two. She was bony, all elbows and knees, and her hair came almost to her waist—a long, golden spill of light. She was also the only one not putting on a smile for the camera. She wasn’t putting on any kind of expression at all. Her face was dazed and expressionless, her eyes unfocused, the eyes of a sleepwalker. Jude recognized it as the expression she wore when she was off in the monochromatic, upside-down world of her depression. He was struck with the troubling idea that she had wandered that world for most of her childhood.

Worst of all, though, was a second, smaller photograph, this one of Captain Craddock McDermott, in fatigues and a sweat-stained fishing hat, M16 slung over one shoulder. He posed with other GIs on hard-packed yellow mud. At his back were palms and standing water; it might’ve been a snapshot of the Everglades, if not for all the soldiers, and their Vietnamese prisoner.

The prisoner stood a little behind Craddock, a solidly built man in a black tunic, with shaved head, broad, handsome features, and the calm eyes of a monk. Jude knew him at first glance as the Vietnamese prisoner he had encountered in his dream. The fingers missing from Trung’s right hand were a dead giveaway. In the grainy, poorly colored photo, the stumps of those fingers had been freshly stitched with black thread.

The same caption that identified this man as Nguyen Trung described the setting as a field hospital in Dong Tam, where Trung had received care for combat-related injuries. That was almost right. Trung had lopped off his own fingers only because he thought they were about to attack—so it had been combat of a sort. As for what had happened to him, Jude thought he knew. Jude thought it was likely that after Trung had no more to tell Craddock McDermott—about ghosts and the work ghosts did—he’d gone for a ride on the nightroad.

The article did not say if McDermott had ever found Roy Hayes, retired professor and ultralight pilot, but Jude believed he had, although there was no rational reason to think such a thing. To satisfy himself he did another search. Roy Hayes’s remains had been laid to rest five weeks later, and in fact Craddock had not found him—not personally. The water was too deep. A state police scuba team had gone in and pulled him out, in the place where Craddock told them to dive.

Georgia threw open the bathroom door, and Jude quit her browser.

“Whatchu doin’?” she asked.

“Trying to figure out how to check my mail,” he lied. “You want a turn?”

She looked at her computer for a moment, then shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t have the least interest in going online. Isn’t that funny? Usually you can’t peel me off.”

“Well, see? Running for your life ain’t all bad. Just look at how it’s building character.”

He pulled out the dresser drawer again and slopped another can of Alpo into it.

“Last night the smell of that shit was making me want to gag,” Georgia said. “Strangely, this morning it’s getting me hungry.”

“Come on. There’s a Denny’s up the street. Let’s go for a walk.”

He opened the door, then held out his hand to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her stone-washed black jeans, heavy black boots, and sleeveless black shirt, which hung loose on her slight frame. In the golden beam of sunlight that fell through the door, her skin was so pale and fine it was almost translucent, looked as if it would bruise at the slightest touch.

Jude saw her glance at the dogs. Angus and Bon bent over the drawer, heads together as they went snorkeling in their food. He saw Georgia frown, and he knew what she was thinking, that they’d been safe as long as they kept the dogs close. But then she squinted back at Jude, standing in the light, took his hand, and let him pull her to her feet. The day was bright. Beyond the door the morning waited for them.

He was, for himself, not scared. He still felt under the protection of the new song, felt that in writing it he had drawn a magic circle around the both of them that the dead man could not penetrate. He had driven the ghost away—for a time anyhow.

But as they crossed the parking lot—thoughtlessly holding hands, a thing they never did—he happened to glance back at their hotel room. Angus and Bon stared out through the picture window at them, standing side by side on their hind legs, with their front paws on the glass and their faces wearing identical looks of apprehension.

25

The Denny’s was loud and overcrowded, thick with the smell of bacon fat and burnt coffee and cigarette smoke. The bar, just to the right of the doors, was a designated smoking area. That meant that after five minutes of waiting up front to be seated, you could plan on smelling like an ashtray by the time you were led to your table.

Jude didn’t smoke himself and never had. It was the one self-destructive habit he’d managed to avoid. His father smoked. On errands into town, Jude had always willingly bought him the cheap, long boxes of generics, had done it even without being asked, and they both knew why. Jude would glare at Martin across the kitchen table, while his father lit a cigarette and took his first drag, the tip flaring orange.

“If looks could kill, I’d have cancer already,” Martin said to him one night, without any preamble. He waved a hand, drew a circle in the air with the cigarette, squinting at Jude through the smoke. “I got a tough constitution. You want to kill me off with these, you’re gonna have to wait a while. You really want me dead, there’s easier ways to do it.”

Jude’s mother said nothing, concentrated on shelling peas, face screwed up in an expression of intent study. She might have been a deaf-mute.

Jude—Justin then—did not speak either, simply went on glaring at him. He was not too angry to speak but too shocked, because it was as if his father had read his mind. He’d been staring at the loose, chicken-flesh folds of Martin Cowzynski’s neck with a kind of fury, wanting to will a cancer into it, a lump of black-blossoming cells that would devour his father’s voice, choke his father’s breath. Wanting that with all his heart: a cancer that would make the doctors scoop out his throat, shut him up forever.

The man at the next table had had his throat scooped out and used an electrolarynx to talk, a loud, crackling joy buzzer that he held under his chin to tell the waitress (and everyone else in the room): “YOU GOT AIR-CONDITIONIN’? WELL, TURN IT ON. YOU DON’T BOTHER TO COOK THE FOOD, WHY YOU WANNA FRAH YOUR PAYIN’ CUSTOMERS? JESUS CHRIST. I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN.” This was a fact he felt to be of such overwhelming importance that he said it again after the waitress walked away, repeating himself to his wife, a fantastically obese woman who didn’t look up from her newspaper as he spoke. “I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. CHRIST. FRAH US LIKE AIGS.” He looked like the old man from that painting, American Gothic, down to the gray strands of hair combed over his balding dome.

“Wonder what sort of old couple we’d make,” Georgia said.

“Well. I’d still be hairy. It would just be white hair. And it would probably be growing in tufts out of all the wrong places. My ears. My nose. Big, crazy hairs sticking out of my eyebrows. Basically like Santa, gone horribly fuckin’ wrong.”

She scooped a hand under her breasts. “The fat in these is going to drain steadily into my ass. I got a sweet tooth, so probably my teeth will fall out on me. On the bright side, I’ll be able to pop out my dentures for toothless, old-lady blow jobs.”

He touched her chin, lifted her face toward his. He studied her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep, bruised hollows, eyes that watched with a wry amusement that did not quite mask her desire to meet with his approval.

“You got a good face,” he said. “You got good eyes. You’ll be all right. With old ladies it’s all about the eyes. You want to be an old lady with lively eyes, so it looks like you’re always thinking of something funny. Like you’re looking for trouble.”

He drew his hand away. She peered down into her coffee, smiling, flattered into an uncharacteristic shyness.

“Sounds like you’re talking about my grandma Bammy,” she said. “You’ll love her. We could be there by lunch.”

“Sure.”

“My grandma looks like the friendliest, most harmless old thing. Oh, but she likes tormenting people. I was living with her by the time I was in the eighth grade. I’d have my boyfriend Jimmy Elliott over—to play Yahtzee, I said, but really we were sneaking wine. Bammy would leave a half-full bottle of red in her fridge most days, leftover from dinner the night before. And she knew what we were doing, and one day she switched purple ink for the booze and left it for us. Jimmy let me take the first slug. I got a mouthful and went and coughed it all down myself. When she came home, I still had a big purple ring on my mouth, purple stains all down my jaw, purple tongue. It didn’t come out for a week either. I expected Bammy to paddle me good, but she just thought it was funny.”

The waitress came for their order. When she was gone, Georgia said, “What was it like being married, Jude?”

“Peaceful.”

“Why did you divorce her?”

“I didn’t. She divorced me.”

“She catch you in bed with the state of Alaska or something?”

“No. I didn’t cheat—well, not too often. And she didn’t take it personal.”

“She didn’t? Are you for real? If we were married and you helped yourself to a piece, I’d throw the first thing came to hand at you. And the second. I wouldn’t drive you to the hospital either. Let you bleed.” She paused, bent over her mug, then said, “So what did it?”

“It would be hard to explain.”

“Because I’m too stupid?”

“No,” he said. “More like I’m not smart enough to explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, I wanted to work at being a husband. Then I didn’t. And when I didn’t anymore—she just knew it. Maybe I made sure she knew it.” And as he said it, Jude was thinking how he’d started staying up late, waiting for her to get tired and go to bed without him. He’d slip in later, after she was asleep, so there was no chance of making love. Or how he would sometimes start playing guitar, picking at a tune, in the middle of her telling him something—playing right over her talk. Remembering how he’d held on to the snuff movie instead of throwing it away. How he’d left it out where she could find it—where he supposed he knew she would find it.

“That doesn’t make sense. Just all of a sudden, you didn’t feel like making the effort? That doesn’t seem like you. You aren’t the type to give up on things for no reason.”

It wasn’t for no reason, but what reason there was defied articulation, could not be put into words in a way that made sense. He had bought his wife the farmhouse, bought it for both of them. He bought Shannon one Mercedes, then another, a big sedan and a convertible. They took weekends, sometimes, in Cannes, and flew there on a private jet where they were served jumbo shrimp and lobster tail on ice. And then Dizzy died—died as badly and painfully as a person could die—and Jerome killed himself, and still Shannon would come into Jude’s studio and say, “I’m worried about you. Let’s go to Hawaii” or “I bought you a leather jacket—try it on,” and he would begin to strum at his guitar, hating the chirp of her voice and playing over it, hating the thought of spending more money, of owning another jacket, of going on another trip. But mostly just hating the contented, milk-fed look of her face, her fat fingers with all their rings, the cool look of concern in her eyes.

At the very end, when Dizzy was blind and raging with fever and soiling himself almost hourly, he got the idea in his head that Jude was his father. Dizzy wept and said he didn’t want to be gay. He said, “Don’t hate me anymore, Dad, don’t hate me.” And Jude said, “I don’t. I never.” And then Dizzy was gone, and Shannon went right on ordering Jude clothes and thinking about where they should eat lunch.

“Why didn’t you have children with her?” Georgia asked.

“I was worried I’d have too much of my father in me.”

“I doubt you’re anything like him,” she said.

He considered this over a forkful of food. “No. He and I have pretty much exactly the same disposition.”

“What scares me is the idea of having kids and then them finding out the truth about me. Kids always find out. I found out about my folks.”

“What would your kids find out about you?”

“That I dropped out of high school. That when I was thirteen I let a guy turn me into a prostitute. The only job I was ever good at involved taking my clothes off to Mötley Crüe for a roomful of drunks. I tried to kill myself. I been arrested three times. I stole money from my grandma and made her cry. I didn’t brush my teeth for about two years. Am I missing anything?”

“So this is what your kid would find out: No matter what bad thing happens to me, I can talk to my mother, because she’s been through it all. No matter what shitty thing happens to me, I can survive it, because my mom was through worse, and she made it.”

Georgia lifted her head, smiling again, her eyes glittering bright with pleasure and mischief—the kind of eyes Jude had been talking about only a few minutes before.

“You know, Jude,” she said, reaching for her coffee with the fingers of her bandaged hand. The waitress was behind her, leaning forward with the coffeepot to refill Georgia’s mug and not looking at what she was doing, staring instead down at her check pad. Jude saw what was going to happen but couldn’t force the warning out of his throat in time. Georgia went on talking, “Sometimes you’re such a decent guy, I can almost forget what an assh—”

The waitress poured just as Georgia moved her cup and dumped coffee over the bandaged hand. Georgia wailed and yanked the hand back, drawing it tight against her chest, her face twisting in a hurt, sickened grimace. For a moment there was glassy shock in her eyes, a flat and empty shine that made Jude think she might be about to pass out.

Then she was up, clutching the bad hand in her good one. “Want to watch where the fuck you’re pourin’ that, you dumb bitch?” she shouted at the waitress, that accent coming over her again, her voice going country on her.

“Georgia,” Jude said, starting to rise.

She made a face and waved him back to his chair. She thudded the waitress with her shoulder, on her way by her, stalking toward the hall to the bathrooms.

Jude nudged his plate aside. “Guess I’ll take the check when you get a chance.”

“I am so sorry,” the waitress said.

“Accidents happen.”

“I am so sorry,” the waitress repeated. “But that is no reason for her to talk to me that way.”

“She got burnt. I’m surprised you didn’t hear worse.”

The waitress said, “The two of you. I knew what I was serving the moment I laid eyes on you. And I served you just as nice as I’d serve anyone.”

“Oh? You knew what you were serving? What was that?”

“Pair of lowlifes. You look like a drug peddler.”

He laughed.

“And you only got to take one glance at her to know what she is. You payin’ her by the hour?”

He stopped laughing.

“Get me the check,” he said. “And get your fat ass out of my sight.”

She stared at him a moment longer, her mouth screwed up as if she were getting ready to spit, then hurried away without another word.

The people at the tables immediately around him had stopped their conversations to gawk and listen. Jude swept his gaze here and there, staring back at anyone who dared stare at him, and one by one they returned to their food. He was fearless when it came to making eye contact, had looked into too many crowds for too many years to lose a staring contest now.

Finally the only people left watching him were the old man out of American Gothic and his wife, who might’ve been a circus fat lady on her day off. She at least made an effort to be discreet, peeping at Jude from the corners of her eyes while pretending to be interested in the paper spread before her. But the old man just stared, his tea-colored eyes judging and also somehow amused. In one hand he held the electrolarynx to his throat—it hummed faintly—as if he were about to comment. Yet he said nothing.

“Got something on your mind?” Jude asked, when staring right into the old man’s eyes didn’t embarrass him into minding his own business.

The old man raised his eyebrows, then wagged his head back and forth: No, nothing to say. He lowered his gaze back to his plate with a comic little sniff. He set the electrolarynx down beside the salt and pepper.

Jude was about to look away, when the electrolarynx came to life, vibrating on the table. A loud, toneless, electric voice buzzed forth: “YOU WILL DIE.”

The old man stiffened, sat back in his wheelchair. He stared down at his electrolarynx, bewildered, maybe not really sure it had said anything. The fat lady curled her paper and peered over the top of it at the device, a wondering frown set on a face as smooth and round as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s.

“I AM DEAD,” the electrolarynx buzzed, chattering across the surface of the table like a cheap windup toy. The old man plucked it up between his fingers. It made joy-buzzer sounds from between them. “YOU WILL DIE. WE WILL BE IN THE DEATH HOLE TOGETHER.”

“What’s it doin’?” said the fat woman. “Is it pickin’ up a radio station again?”

The old man shook his head: Don’t know. His gaze rose from the electrolarynx, which now rested in the cup of his palm, to Jude. He peered at Jude through glasses that magnified his astonished eyes. The old man held his hand out, as if offering the device to Jude. It hummed and jittered about.

“YOU WILL KILL HER KILL YOURSELF KILL THE DOGS THE DOGS WON’T SAVE YOU WE’LL RIDE TOGETHER LISTEN NOW LISTEN TO MY VOICE WE WILL RIDE AT NIGHTFALL. YOU DON’T OWN ME. I OWN YOU. I OWN YOU NOW.”

“Peter,” the fat woman said. She was trying to whisper, but her voice choked, and when she forced her next breath up, it came out shrill and wavering. “Make it stop, Peter.”

Peter just sat there holding it out to Jude, as if it were a phone and the call was for him.

Everyone was looking, the room filled with crosscurrents of worried murmuring. Some of the other customers had come up out of their chairs to watch, didn’t want to miss what might happen next.

Jude was up, too, thinking, Georgia. As he rose and started to turn toward the hallway to the restrooms, his gaze swept the picture windows that looked out front. He stopped in midmovement, his gaze catching and holding on what he saw in the parking lot. The dead man’s pickup idled there, waiting close to the front doors, the floodlights on, globes of cold white light. No one sitting in it.

A few of the onlookers were standing around, at tables just behind his, and he had to shove through them to reach the corridor to the bathrooms. Jude found a door that said WOMEN, slammed it in.

Georgia stood at one of the two sinks. She didn’t glance up at the sound of the door banging against the wall. She stared at herself in the mirror, but her eyes were unfocused, not really fixed on anything, and her face wore the wistful, grave expression of a child almost asleep in front of the television.

She cocked her bandaged fist back and drove it into the mirror, hard as she could, no holding back. She pulverized the glass in a fist-size circle, with shatter lines jagging out away from the hole in all directions. An instant later silver spears of mirror fell with a ringing crash, broke musically against the sinks.

A slender, yellow-haired woman with a newborn in her arms stood a yard away, beside a changing table that folded out from the wall. She grabbed the baby to her chest and began to scream, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Georgia grabbed an eight-inch scythe blade of silver, a gleaming crescent moon, raised it to her throat, and tipped her chin back to gouge into the flesh beneath. Jude broke out of the shock that had held him in the doorway and caught her wrist, twisted it down to her side, then bent it back, until she made a pitiful cry and let go. The mirrored scythe fell to the white tiles and shattered with a pretty clashing sound.

Jude spun her, twisting her arm again, hurting her. She gasped and shut her eyes against tears but let him force her forward, march her to the door. He wasn’t sure why he hurt her, if it was panic or on purpose, because he was angry at her for going off or angry at himself for letting her.

The dead man was in the hall outside the bathroom. Jude didn’t register him until he’d already walked past him, and then a shudder rolled through him, left him on legs that wouldn’t stop trembling. Craddock had tipped his black hat at them on their way by.

Georgia could barely hold herself up. Jude shifted his grip to her upper arm, supporting her, as he rammed her across the dining room. The fat lady and the old man had their heads together.

“…WASN’T NO RADIO STATION…”

“Weirdos. Weirdos playing a prank.”

“SHADDAP, HERE THEY COME.”

Others stared, jumped to get out of the way. The waitress who only a minute before had accused Jude of being a drug peddler and Georgia of being his whore stood by the front counter talking to the manager, a little man with pens in his shirt pocket and the sad eyes of a basset hound. She pointed at them as they crossed the room.

Jude slowed at his table long enough to throw down a pair of twenties. As they went by the manager, the little man lifted his head to regard them with his tragic gaze but did not say anything. The waitress went on sputtering in his ear.

“Jude,” Georgia said when they went through the first set of doors. “You’re hurting me.”

He relaxed his grip on her upper arm, saw that his fingers had left waxy white marks in her already pale flesh. They thumped through the second set of doors and were outside.

“Are we safe?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But we will be soon. The ghost has a healthy fear of them dogs.”

They walked quickly past Craddock’s empty and idling pickup truck. The passenger-side window was rolled down about a third of the way. The radio was on inside. One of the AM right-wingers was talking, in a smooth, confident, almost arrogant voice.

“…it feels good to embrace those core American values, and it feels good to see the right people win an election, even if the other side is going to say it wasn’t fair, and it feels good to see more and more people returning to the politics of common Christian good sense,” said the deep, dulcet voice. “But you know what would feel even better? To choke that bitch standing next to you, choke that bitch, then step into the road in front of a semi, lay down for it, lay down and…”

Then they were past, the voice out of earshot.

“We’re going to lose this thing,” Georgia said.

“No we aren’t. Come on. It isn’t a hundred yards back to the hotel.”

“If he doesn’t get us now, he’s going to get us later. He told me. He said I might as well kill myself and get it over, and I was going to. I couldn’t help myself.”

“I know. That’s what he does.”

They started along the highway, right at the edge of the gravel breakdown lane, with the long stalks of sawgrass whipping at Jude’s jeans.

Georgia said, “My hand feels sick.”

He stopped, lifted it for a look. It wasn’t bleeding, either from punching the mirror or from lifting up the curved blade of glass. The thick, muffling pads of the bandage had protected her skin. Still, even through the wraps he could feel an unwholesome heat pouring off it, and he wondered if she had broken a bone.

“I bet. You hit the mirror pretty hard. You’re lucky you aren’t all hacked up.” Nudging her forward, getting them moving again.

“It’s beating like a heart. Going whump-whump-whump.” She spat, spat again.

Between them and the motel was an overpass, a stone train trestle, the tunnel beneath narrow and dark. There was no sidewalk, no room even for the breakdown lane at the sides of the road. Water dripped from the stone ceiling.

“Come on,” he said.

The overpass was a black frame, boxed around a picture of the Days Inn. Jude’s eyes were fixed on the motel. He could see the Mustang. He could see their room.

They did not slow as they passed into the tunnel, which stank of stagnant water, weeds, urine.

“Wait,” Georgia said.

She turned, doubled over, and gagged, bringing up her eggs, lumps of half-digested toast, and orange juice.

He held her left arm with one hand, pulled her hair back from her face with the other. It made him edgy, standing there in the bad-smelling dark, waiting for her to finish.

“Jude,” she said.

“Come on,” he said, tugging at her arm.

“Wait—”

“Come on.”

She wiped her mouth, with the bottom of her shirt. She remained bent over. “I think—”

He heard the truck before he saw it, heard the engine revving behind him, a furious growl of sound, rising to a roar. Headlights dashed up the wall of rough stone blocks. Jude had time to glance back and saw the dead man’s pickup rushing at them, Craddock grinning behind the wheel and the floodlights two circles of blinding light, holes burned right into the world. Smoke boiled off the tires.

Jude got an arm under Georgia and pitched himself forward, carrying her with him and out the far end of the tunnel.

The smoke-blue Chevy slammed into the wall behind him with a shattering crash of steel smashing against stone. It was a great clap of noise that stunned Jude’s eardrums, set them ringing. He and Georgia fell onto wet gravel, clear of the tunnel now. They rolled away from the side of the road, tumbled down the brush, and landed in dew-damp ferns. Georgia cried out, clipped him in the left eye with a bony elbow. He put a hand down into something squishy, the cool unpleasantness of swamp muck.

He lifted himself up, breathing raggedly. Jude looked back. It wasn’t the dead man’s old Chevy that had hit the wall but an olive Jeep, the kind that was open to the sky, with a roll bar in the back. A black man with close-cropped, steel-wool hair sat behind the steering wheel, holding his forehead. The windshield was fractured in a network of connected rings where his skull had hit it. The whole front driver’s side of the Jeep had been gouged down to the frame, steel twisted up and back in smoking, torn pieces.

“What happened?” Georgia asked, her voice faint and tinny, hard to make out over the droning in his ears.

“The ghost. He missed.”

“Are you sure?”

“That it was the ghost?”

“That he missed.”

He came to his feet, his legs unsteady, knees threatening to give. He took her wrist, helped her up. The whining in his eardrums was already beginning to clear. From a long way off, he could hear his dogs, barking hysterically, barking mad.

26

Heaping their bags into the back of the Mustang, Jude became aware of a slow, deep throb in his left hand, different from the dull ache that had persisted since he stabbed himself there yesterday. When he looked down, he saw that his bandage was coming unraveled and was soaked through with fresh blood.

Georgia drove while he sat in the passenger seat, with the first-aid kit that had accompanied them from New York open in his lap. He undid the wet, tacky dressings and dropped them on the floor at his feet. The Steri-Strips he’d applied to the wound the day before had peeled away, and the puncture gaped again, glistening, obscene. He had torn it open getting out of the way of Craddock’s truck.

“What are you going to do about that hand?” Georgia asked, shooting him an anxious look before turning her gaze back to the road.

“Same thing you’re doing about yours,” he said. “Nothing.”

He began to clumsily apply fresh Steri-Strips to the wound. It felt as if he were putting a cigarette out on his palm. When he’d closed the tear as best he could, he wrapped the hand with clean gauze.

“You’re bleeding from the head, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Little scrape. Don’t worry about it.”

“What happens next time? Next time we wind up somewhere without the dogs to look out for us?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was a public place. We should’ve been safe in a public place. People all around, and it was bright daylight, and he went and come at us anyway. How are we supposed to fight somethin’ like him?”

He said, “I don’t know. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it already, Florida. You and your questions. Lay off a minute, why don’t you?”

They drove on. It was only when he heard the choked sound of her weeping—she was struggling to do it in silence—that he realized he’d called her Florida, when he had meant to say Georgia. It was her questions that had done it, one after another, that and her accent, those Daughter of the Confederacy inflections that had steadily been creeping into her voice the last couple days.

The sound of Georgia trying not to cry was somehow worse than if she wept openly. If she would just go ahead and cry, he could say something to her, but as it was, he felt it necessary to let her be miserable in private and pretend he hadn’t noticed. Jude sank low in the passenger seat and turned his face toward the window.

The sun was a steady glare through the windshield, and a little south of Richmond he fell into a disgusted, heat-stunned trance. He tried to think what he knew about the dead man who pursued them, what Anna had told him about her stepfather when they were together. But it was hard to think, too much effort—he was sore, and there was all that sun in his face and Georgia making quiet, wretched noises behind the steering wheel—and anyway he was sure Anna hadn’t said much.

“I’d rather ask questions,” she told him, “than answer them.”

She had kept him at bay with those foolish, pointless questions for almost half a year: Were you ever in the Boy Scouts? Do you shampoo your beard? What do you like better, my ass or my tits?

What little he knew should have invited curiosity: the family business in hypnotism, the dowser father who taught his girls to read palms and talk to spirits, a childhood shadowed by the hallucinations of preadolescent schizophrenia. But Anna—Florida—didn’t want to talk about who she’d been before meeting him, and for himself, he was happy to let her past be past.

Whatever she wasn’t telling him, he knew it was bad, a certain kind of bad. The specifics didn’t matter—that’s what he believed then. He had thought, at the time, that this was one of his strengths, his willingness to accept her as she was, without questions, without judgments. She was safe with him, safe from whatever ghosts were chasing her.

Except he hadn’t kept her safe, he knew that now. The ghosts always caught up eventually, and there was no way to lock the door on them. They would walk right through. What he’d thought of as a personal strength—he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know—was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets—or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.

Just once had she risked something like confession, something close to self-revelation. It was at the end, shortly before he sent her home.

She’d been depressed for months. First the sex went bad, and then there was no sex at all. He’d find her in the bath, soaking in ice water, shivering helplessly, too confused and unhappy to get out. Thinking on it now, it was as if she were rehearsing for her first day as a corpse, for the evening she would spend cooling and wrinkling in a tub full of cold water and blood. She prattled to herself in a little girl’s crooning voice but went mute if he tried to talk to her, stared at him in bewilderment and shock, as if she’d just heard the furniture speak.

Then one night he went out. He no longer remembered for what. To rent a movie maybe, or get a burger. It was just after dark as he drove home. Half a mile from the house, he heard people honking their horns, the oncoming cars blinking their headlights.

Then he passed her. Anna was on the other side of the road, running in the breakdown lane, wearing nothing but one of his oversize T-shirts. Her yellow hair was windblown and tangled. She saw him as he passed, going the other way, and lunged into the road after him, waving her hand frantically and stepping into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

The truck’s tires locked and shrieked. The trailer’s rear end fishtailed to the left while the cab swung right. It banged to a stop, two feet from rolling over her. She didn’t appear to notice. Jude had stopped himself by then, and she flung open the driver’s-side door, fell against him.

“Where did you go?” she screamed. “I looked for you everywhere. I ran, I ran, and I thought you were gone, so I ran, I ran lookin’.”

The driver of the semi had his door open, one foot out on the step-down. “What the fuck is up with that bitch?”

“I got it,” Jude said to him.

The trucker opened his mouth to speak again, then fell silent as Jude hauled Anna in across his legs, an act that hiked up her shirt and raised her bare bottom to the air.

Jude threw her into the passenger seat, and immediately she was up again, falling into him, shoving her hot, wet face against his chest.

“I was scared I was so scared and I ran—”

He shoved her off him with his elbow, hard enough to slam her into the passenger-side door. She fell into a shocked silence.

“Enough. You’re a mess. I’ve had it. You hear? You aren’t the only one who can tell fortunes. You want me to tell you about your future? I see you holding your fuckin’ bags, waitin’ for a bus,” he said.

His chest was tight, tight enough to remind him he wasn’t thirty-three but fifty-three, almost thirty years older than she. Anna stared. Her eyes round and wide and uncomprehending.

He put the car into drive and began to roll for home. As he turned in to the driveway, she bent over and tried to unzip his pants, to give him a blow job, but the thought turned his stomach, was an unimaginable act, a thing he could not let her do, so he hit her with the elbow again, driving her back once more.

He avoided her most of the next day, but the following night, when he came in from walking the dogs, she called from the top of the back stairs. She asked if he would make her some soup, just a can of something. He said all right.

When he brought it to her, a bowl of chicken noodle on a small tray, he could see she was herself again. Washed out and exhausted, but clear in her head. She tried to smile for him, something he didn’t want to see. What he had to do was going to be hard enough.

She sat up, took the tray across her knees. He sat on the side of the bed and watched her take little swallows. She didn’t really want it. It had only been an excuse to get him up to the bedroom. He could tell from the way her jaw tightened before each tiny, fretful sip. She had lost twelve pounds in the last three months.

She set it aside after finishing less than a quarter of the broth, then smiled, in the way of a child who has been promised ice cream if she’ll choke down her asparagus. She said thank you, it was nice. She said she felt better.

“I have to go to New York next Monday. I’m doing Howard Stern,” Jude said.

An anxious light flickered in her pale eyes. “I…I don’t think I ought to go.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. The city would be the worst thing for you.”

She looked at him so gratefully he had to glance away.

“I can’t leave you here either,” he said. “Not by yourself. I was thinking maybe you ought to stay with family for a while. Down in Florida.” When she didn’t reply, he went on, “Is there someone in your family I can call?”

She slid down into her pillows. She drew the sheet up to her chin. He was worried she would start crying, but when he looked, she was staring calmly at the ceiling, her hands folded one atop the other on her breastbone.

“Sure,” she said finally. “You were good to put up with me for as long as you did.”

“What I said the other night…”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s good. What I said is better forgotten. I didn’t mean any of it anyhow.” Although in fact what he’d said was exactly what he meant, had only been the harshest possible version of what he was telling her now.

The silence drew out between them until it was uncomfortable, and he felt he should prod her again, but as he was opening his mouth, she spoke first.

“You can call my daddy,” she said. “My stepdaddy, I mean. You can’t call my real daddy. He’s dead, of course. You want to talk to my stepdaddy, he’ll drive all the way up here to pick me up in person if you want. Just give him the word. My stepdaddy likes to say I’m his little onion. I bring tears to his eyes. Isn’t that a cute thing to say?”

“I wouldn’t make him come get you. I’ll fly you private.”

“No plane. Planes are too fast. You can’t go south on a plane. You need to drive. Or take a train. You need to watch the dirt turn to clay. You need to look at all the junkyards full of rustin’ cars. You need to go over a few bridges. They say that evil spirits can’t follow you over running water, but that’s just humbug. You ever notice rivers in the North aren’t like rivers in the South? Rivers in the South are the color of chocolate, and they smell like marsh and moss. Up here they’re black, and they smell sweet, like pines. Like Christmas.”

“I could take you to Penn Station and put you on the Amtrak. Would that take you south slow enough?”

“Sure.”

“So I’ll call your da—your stepfather?”

“Maybe I better call him,” she said. It crossed his mind then how rarely she spoke to anyone in her family. They’d been together more than a year. Had she ever called her stepfather, to wish him happy birthday, to tell him how she was doing? Once or twice Jude had come into his record library and found Anna on the phone with her sister, frowning with concentration, her voice low and terse. She seemed unlike herself then, someone engaged in a disagreeable sport, a game she had no taste for but felt obliged to play out anyway. “You don’t have to talk to him.”

“Why don’t you want me to talk to him? ’Fraid we won’t get along?”

“It’s not that I’m worried he’ll be rude to you or nothin’. He isn’t like that. My daddy is easy to talk to. Everybody’s friend.”

“Well then, what?”

“I never talked to him about it yet, but I just know what he thinks about us taking up with each other. He won’t like it. You the age you are and the kind of music you play. He hates that kind of music.”

“There’s more people don’t like it than do. That’s the whole point.”

“He doesn’t think much of musicians at all. You never met a man with less music in him. When we were little, he’d take us on these long drives, to someplace where he’d been hired to dowse for a well, and he’d make us listen to talk radio the whole way. It didn’t matter what to him. He’d make us listen to a continuous weather broadcast for four hours.” She pulled two fingers slowly through her hair, lifting a long, golden strand away from her head, then letting it slip through her fingers and fall. She went on, “He had this one creepy trick he could do. He’d find someone talkin’, like one of those Holy Rollers that are always kickin’ it up for Jesus on the AM. And we’d listen and listen, until Jessie and me were beggin’ him for anything else. And he wouldn’t say anything, and he wouldn’t say anything, and then, just when we couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d start to talk to himself. And he’d be sayin’ exactly what the preacher on the radio was sayin’, at exactly the same time, only in his own voice. Recitin’ it. Deadpan, like. ‘Christ the Redeemer bled and died for you. What will you do for Him? He carried His own cross while they spat on Him. What burden will you carry?’ Like he was readin’ from the same script. And he’d keep going until my momma told him to quit. That she didn’t like it. And he’d laugh and turn the radio off. But he’d keep talkin’ to himself. Kind of mutterin’. Sayin’ all the preacher’s lines, even with the radio off. Like he was hearin’ it in his head, gettin’ the broadcast on his fillings. He could scare me so bad doing that.”

Jude didn’t reply, didn’t think a reply was called for, and anyway was not sure whether the story was true or the latest in a succession of self-delusions that had haunted her.

She sighed, let another strand of her hair flop. “I was sayin’, though, that he wouldn’t like you, and he has ways of gettin’ rid of my friends when he doesn’t like them. A lot of daddies are overprotective of their little girls, and if someone comes around they don’t care for, they might try and scare ’em off. Lean on ’em a little. Course that never works, because the girl always takes the boy’s side, and the boy keeps after her, either because he can’t be scared or doesn’t want her to think he can be scared. My stepdaddy’s smarter than that. He’s as friendly as can be, even with people he’d like to see burnt alive. If he ever wants to get rid of someone he doesn’t want around me, he drives them off by tellin’ ’em the truth. The truth is usually enough.

“Give you an example. When I was sixteen, I started running around with this boy I just knew my old man wouldn’t like, on account of this kid was Jewish, and also we’d listen to rap together. Pop hates rap worst of all. So one day my stepdaddy told me it was going to stop, and I said I could see who I wanted, and he said sure, but that didn’t mean the kid would keep wantin’ to see me. I didn’t like the sound of that, but he didn’t explain himself.

“Well, you’ve seen how I get low sometimes and start thinkin’ crazy things. That all started when I was twelve, maybe, same time as puberty. I didn’t see a doctor or anything. My stepdaddy treated me himself, with hypnotherapy. He could hold things in check pretty good, too, as long as we sat down once or twice a week. I wouldn’t get up to any of my crazy business. I wouldn’t think there was a dark truck circling the house. I wouldn’t see little girls with coals for eyes watchin’ me from under the trees at night.

“But he had to go away. He had to go to Austin for some conference on hypnogogic drugs. Usually he took me along when he went on one of his trips, but this time he left me at home with Jessie. My mom was dead by then, and Jessie was nineteen and in charge. And while he was gone I started havin’ trouble sleepin’. That’s always the first sign I’m gettin’ low, when I start havin’ insomnia.

“After a couple nights, I started seein’ the girls with the burning eyes. I couldn’t go to school on Monday, because they were waitin’ outside under the oak tree. I was too scared to go out. I told Jessie. I said she had to make Pop come home, that I was gettin’ bad ideas again. She told me she was tired of my crazy shit and that he was busy and I would be all right till he got back. She tried to make me go to school, but I wouldn’t. I stayed in my room and watched television. But pretty soon they started talkin’ to me through the TV. The dead girls. Tellin’ me I was dead like they was. That I belonged in the dirt with them.

“Usually Jessie got back from school at two or three. But she didn’t come home that afternoon. It got later and later, and every time I looked out the window, I saw the girls starin’ back at me. My stepdad called, and I told him I was in trouble and please come home, and he said he’d come quick as he could, but he wouldn’t be back until late. He said he was worried I might hurt myself and he’d call someone to come be with me. After he hung up, he phoned Philip’s parents, who lived up the street from us.”

“Philip? Was this your boyfriend? The Jewish kid?”

“Uh-huh. Phil came right over. I didn’t know him. I hid under the bed from him, and I screamed when he tried to touch me. I asked him if he was with the dead girls. I told him all about them. Jessie showed up pretty soon afterward, and Philip ran off quick as he could. After that he was so freaked out he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And my stepdaddy just said what a shame. He thought Philip was my friend. He thought Philip, more than anyone else, could be trusted to look out for me when I was havin’ a rough time.”

“So is that what’s worrying you? Your old man is going to let me know you’re a lunatic and I’ll be so shocked I won’t ever want to see you again? ’Cause I got to tell you, Florida, hearing you get kind of crazy now and then wouldn’t exactly be a newsflash.”

She snorted, soft breathy laughter. Then she said, “He wouldn’t say that. I don’t know what he’d say. He’d just find somethin’ to make you like me a little less. If you can like me any less.”

“Let’s not start with that.”

“No. No, on second thought maybe you best call my sister instead. She’s an unkind bitch—we don’t get along a lick. She never forgave me for being cuter than her and gettin’ better Christmas presents. After Momma died, she had to be Susie Homemaker, but I still got to be a kid. Jessie was doin’ our laundry and cookin’ our meals by the time she was fourteen, and no one has ever been able to appreciate how hard she had to work or how little fun she got to have. But she’ll arrange to get me home without any nonsense. She’ll like havin’ me back, so she can boss me around and make rules for me.”

But when Jude called her sister’s house, he got the old man anyway, who answered on the third ring.

“What’n I do for you? Go ahead and talk. I’ll help you if I can.”

Jude introduced himself. He said Anna wanted to come home for a while, making it out to be more her idea than his. Jude wrestled mentally with how to describe her condition, but Craddock came to his rescue.

“How’s she sleepin’?” Craddock asked.

“Not too well,” Jude said, relieved, understanding somehow that this said it all.

Jude offered to have a chauffeur drive Anna from the train station in Jacksonville to Jessica’s house in Testament, but Craddock said no, he would meet her at the Amtrak himself.

“A drive to Jacksonville will suit me fine. Any excuse to get out in my truck for a few hours. Put the windows down. Make faces at the cows.”

“I hear that,” Jude said, forgetting himself and warming to the old man.

“I appreciate you takin’ care of my little girl like you done. You know, when she was just a pup, she had posters of you all over her walls. She always did want to meet you. You and that fella from…what was their name? That Mötley Crüe? Now, she really loved them. She followed them for half a year. She was at all their shows. She got to know some of them, too. Not the band, I guess, but their road team. Them were her wild years. Not that she’s real settled now, is she? Yeah, she loved all your albums. She loved all kinds of that heavy metal music. I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Jude felt a dry, ticklish sensation of cold spreading behind his chest. He knew what Craddock was telling him—that she had fucked roadies to hang with Mötley Crüe, that star fucking was a thing with her, and if she wasn’t sleeping with him, she’d be in the sack with Vince Neil or Slash—and he also knew why Craddock was telling him. For the same reason he had let Anna’s Jewish friend see her when she was out of her head, to put a wedge between them.

What Jude had not foreseen was that he could know what Craddock was doing and it could work anyway. No sooner had Craddock said it than Jude started thinking where he and Anna had met, backstage at a Trent Reznor show. How had she got there? Who did she know, and what did she have to do for a backstage pass? If Trent had walked into the room right then, would she have sat at his feet instead and asked the same sweet, pointless questions?

“I’ll take care of her, Mr. Coyne. You just send her back to me. I’ll be waitin’,” Craddock told him.

Jude took her to Penn Station himself. She’d been at her best all morning—was trying very hard, he knew, to be the person he’d met, not the unhappy person she really was—but whenever he looked at her, he felt that dry sensation of chill in his chest again. Her elfish grins, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears to show her studded little pink earlobes, her latest round of goofy questions, seemed like cold-blooded manipulations and only made him want to get away from her even more.

If she sensed, however, that he was holding her at a distance, she gave no sign, and at Penn Station she stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck in a fierce hug—an embrace without any sexual connotations at all.

“We had us some fun, didn’t we?” she asked. Always with her questions.

“Sure,” he said. He could’ve said more—that he’d call her soon, that he wanted her to take better care of herself—but he didn’t have it in him, couldn’t wish her well. When the urge came over him, to be tender, to be compassionate, he heard her stepdaddy’s voice in his head, warm, friendly, persuasive: “I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Anna grinned, as if he had replied with something quite clever, and squeezed his hand. He stayed long enough to watch her board but didn’t remain to see the train depart. It was crowded and loud on the platform, noisy with echoing voices. He felt harried and jostled, and the stink of the place—a smell of hot iron, stale piss, and warm, sweating bodies—oppressed him.

But it wasn’t any better outside, in the rainy fall cool of Manhattan. The sense of being jostled, hemmed in from all sides, remained with him all the way back to the Pierre Hotel, all the way back even to the quiet and emptiness of his suite. He was belligerent, needed to do something with himself, needed to make some ugly noises of his own.

Four hours later he was in just the right place, in Howard Stern’s broadcasting studio, where he insulted and hectored, humiliated Stern’s entourage of slow-witted ass kissers when they were foolish enough to interrupt him, and delivered his fire sermon of perversion and hate, chaos and ridicule. Stern loved him. His people wanted to know when Jude could come back.

He was still in New York City that weekend, and in the same mood, when he agreed to meet some of the guys from Stern’s crew at a Broadway strip club. They were all the same people he had mocked in front of an audience of millions earlier in the week. They didn’t take it personally. Being mocked was their job. They were crazy for him. They thought he had killed.

He ordered a beer he didn’t drink and sat at the end of a runway that appeared to be one long, frosted pane of glass, lit from beneath with soft blue gels. The faces gathered in the shadows around the runway all looked wrong to him, unnatural, unwholesome: the faces of the drowned. His head hurt. When he shut his eyes, he saw the lurid, flashing fireworks show that was prelude to a migraine.

When he opened his eyes, a girl with a knife in one hand sank to her knees in front of him. Her eyes were closed. She folded slowly backward, so the back of her head touched the glass floor, her soft, feathery black hair spread across the runway. She was still on her knees.

She moved the knife down her body, a big-bladed hunting bowie with a wide, serrated edge. She wore a dog collar with silver rings on it, a teddy with laces across the bosom that squeezed her breasts together, black stockings.

When the handle of the knife was between her legs, blade pointing at the ceiling—parody of a penis—she flung it into the air, and her eyes sprang open, and she caught it when it came down and arched her back at the same time, raising her chest to the ceiling like an offering, and sliced the knife downward.

She hacked the black lace down the middle, opening a dark red slash, as if slitting herself from throat to crotch. She rolled and threw off the costume, and beneath she was naked except for the silver rings through her nipples, which swung from her breasts, and a G-string pulled up past her hard hip bones. Her supple, sealskin-smooth torso was crimson with body paint.

AC/DC was playing “If You Want Blood You Got It,” and what turned him on wasn’t her young, athletic body or the way her breasts swung with the hoops of silver through them or how, when she looked right at him, her stare was direct and unafraid.

It was that her lips were moving, just barely. He doubted if anyone else in the whole room besides him even noticed. She was singing to herself, singing along to AC/DC. She knew all the words. It was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months.

He raised his beer to her, only to find that it was empty. He had no memory of drinking it. The waitress brought him another a few minutes later. From her he learned that the dancer with the knife was named Morphine and was one of their most popular girls. It cost him a hundred to get her phone number and to find out she’d been dancing for around two years, almost to the day she stepped off the bus from Georgia. It cost him another hundred to get that when she wasn’t stripping, she answered to Marybeth.

27

Jude took the wheel just before they crossed into Georgia. His head hurt, an uncomfortable feeling of pressure on his eyeballs more than anything else. The sensation was aggravated by the southern sunshine glinting off just about everything—fenders, windshields, road signs. If not for his aching head, the sky would’ve been a pleasure, a deep, dark, cloudless blue.

As the Florida state line approached, he was conscious of a mounting anticipation, a nervous tickle in the stomach. Testament was by then perhaps only four hours away. He would be at her house tonight, Jessie Price, née McDermott, sister to Anna, elder stepdaughter to Craddock, and he did not know what he might do when he reached the place.

It had crossed his mind that when he found her, it might end in death for someone. He had thought already that he could kill her for what she’d done, that she was asking for it, but for the first time, now that he was close to facing her, the idea became more than angry speculation.

He’d killed pigs as a boy, had picked up the fall-behinds by the legs and smashed their brains out on the concrete floor of his father’s cutting room. You swung them into the air and then hit the floor with them, silencing them in midsqueal with a sickening and somehow hollow splitting sound, the same noise a watermelon would make if dropped from a great height. He’d shot other hogs with the bolt gun and imagined he was killing his father as he did it.

Jude had made up his mind to do whatever he had to. He just didn’t know what that was yet. And when he thought about it closely, he dreaded learning, was almost as afraid of his own possibilities as he was of the thing coming after him, the thing that had once been Craddock McDermott.

He thought Georgia was dozing, did not know she was awake until she spoke.

“It’s the next exit,” she said in a sand-grain voice.

Her grandmother. Jude had forgotten about her, had forgotten he’d promised to stop.

He followed her instructions, hung a left at the bottom of the off-ramp and took a two-lane state highway through the shabby outskirts of Crickets, Georgia. They rolled by used-car lots, with their thousands of red, white, and blue plastic pennants flapping in the wind, let the flow of traffic carry them into the town itself. They cruised along one edge of the grassy town square, past the courthouse, the town hall, and the eroded brick edifice of the Eagle Theater.

The route to Bammy’s house led them through the green grounds of a small Baptist college. Young men, with ties tucked into their V-neck sweaters, walked beside girls in pleated skirts, with combed, shining hairdos straight out of the old Breck shampoo commercials. Some of the students stared at Jude and Georgia, in the Mustang, the shepherds standing up in the backseat, Bon and Angus breathing steam on the rear windows. A girl, walking beside a taller boy who sported a yellow bow tie, shrank back against her companion as they went past. Bow Tie put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Jude did not flip them off and then drove for a few blocks feeling good about himself, proud of his restraint. His self-control, it was like iron.

Beyond the college they found themselves on a street lined with well-kept Victorians and Colonials, shingles out front advertising the practices of lawyers and dentists. Farther down the avenue, the houses were smaller, and people lived in them. At a lemon Cape with yellow roses growing on a flower trellis to one side, Georgia said, “Turn in.”

The woman who answered the door was not fat but stocky, built like a defensive tackle, with a broad, dark face, a silky mustache and clever, girlish eyes, a brown shot through with jade. Her flip-flops smacked against the floor. She stared at Jude and Georgia for a beat, while Georgia grinned a shy, awkward grin. Then something in her grandmother’s eyes (Grandmother? How old was she? Sixty? Fifty-five? The disorienting thought crossed Jude’s mind that she might even be younger than himself ) sharpened, as if a lens had been brought into focus, and she screamed and threw open her arms. Georgia fell into them.

“M.B.!” Bammy cried. Then she leaned away from her, and, still holding her by the hips, stared into her face. “What is wrong with you?”

She put a palm to Georgia’s forehead. Georgia twisted from her touch. Bammy saw her bandaged hand next, caught her by the wrist, gave it a speculative look. Then she let go of the hand—almost flung it away.

“You strung out? Christ. You smell like a dog.”

“No, Bammy. I swear to God, I am not on no drugs right now. I smell like a dog because I’ve had dogs climbin’ all over me for most of two days. Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?” The process that had begun almost a thousand miles before, when they started traveling south, seemed to have completed itself, so that everything Georgia said sounded country now.

Only had her accent really started reasserting itself once they were on the road? Or had she started slipping into it even earlier? Jude thought maybe he’d been hearing the redneck in her voice going all the way back to the day she stuck herself with the nonexistent pin in the dead man’s suit. Her verbal transformation disconcerted and unsettled him. When she talked that way—Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?—she sounded like Anna.

Bon squeezed into the gap between Jude and Georgia and looked hopefully up at Bammy. The long pink ribbon of Bon’s tongue hung out, spit plopping from it. In the green rectangle of the yard, Angus tracked this way and that, whuffing his nose at the flowers growing around the picket fence.

Bammy looked first at Jude’s Doc Martens, then up to his scraggly black beard, taking in scrapes, the dirt, the bandage wrapped around his left hand.

“You the rock star?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You both look like you been in a fight. Was it with each other?”

“No, Bammy,” Georgia said.

“That’s cute, with the matchin’ bandages on your hands. Is that some kind of romantic thing? Did you two brand each other as a sign of your affection? In my day we used to trade class rings.”

“No, Bammy. We’re fine. We were drivin’ through on our way to Florida, and I said we should stop. I wanted you to meet Jude.”

“You should’ve called. I would’ve started dinner.”

“We can’t stay. We got to get to Florida tonight.”

“You don’t got to get anywhere except bed. Or maybe the hospital.”

“I’m fine.”

“The hell. You’re the furthest thing from fine I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She plucked at a strand of black hair stuck to Georgia’s damp cheek. “You’re covered in sweat. I know sick when I see it.”

“I’m just boiled, is all. I spent the last eight hours trapped inside that car with those ugly dogs and bad air-conditionin’. Are you going to move your wide ass out of the way, or are you going to make me climb back into that car and drive some more?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What’s the holdup?”

“I’m tryin’ to figure what the chances are you two are here to slaughter me for the money in my purse and take it to buy OxyContin. Everyone is on it these days. There’s kids in junior high prostitutin’ themselves for it. I learned about it on the news this morning.”

“Lucky for you we aren’t in junior high.”

Bammy seemed about to reply, but then her gaze flicked past Jude’s elbow, fixed on something in the yard.

He glanced back to see what. Angus was in a squat, body contracted as if his torso contained an accordion, the shiny black fur of his back humped up into folds, and he was dropping shit after shit into the grass.

“I’ll clean up. Sorry about that,” Jude said.

“I’m not,” Georgia said. “You take a good look, Bammy. If I don’t see a toilet in the next minute or two, that’s gonna be me.”

Bammy lowered her heavily mascaraed eyelids and stepped out of the way. “Come on in, then. I don’t want the neighbors seein’ you standin’ around out here anyway. They’ll think I’m startin’ my own chapter of the Hells Angels.”

28

When they had been introduced, formally, Jude found out her name was Mrs. Fordham, which is what he called her from then on. He could not call her Bammy; paradoxically, he could not really think of her as Mrs. Fordham. Bammy she was, whatever he called her.

Bammy said, “Let’s put the dogs out back where they can run.”

Georgia and Jude traded a look. They were all of them in the kitchen then. Bon was under the kitchen table. Angus had lifted his head to sniff at the counter, where there were brownies on a plate under green Saran Wrap.

The space was too small to contain the dogs. The front hallway had been too small for them, too. When Angus and Bon came running down it, they had struck a side table, rattling the china on top of it, and reeled into walls, thudding them hard enough to knock pictures askew.

When Jude looked at Bammy again, she was frowning. She’d seen the glance that had passed between Jude and Georgia and knew it meant something, but not what.

Georgia spoke first. “Aw, Bammy, we can’t put them out in a strange place. They’ll get into your garden.”

Bon clouted aside a few chairs to squirm out from under the table. One fell over with a sharp bang. Georgia leaped toward her, caught her by the collar.

“I’ll take her,” Georgia said. “Is it all right if I run through the shower? I need to wash and maybe lie down. She can stay with me, where she won’t get into trouble.”

Angus put his paws up on the counter to get his snout closer to the brownies.

“Angus,” Jude said. “Get your ass over here.”

Bammy had cold chicken and slaw in the fridge. Also homemade lemonade, as promised, in a sweating glass pitcher. When Georgia went up the back stairs, Bammy fixed Jude a plate. He sat with it. Angus flopped at his feet.

From his place at the kitchen table, Jude had a view of the backyard. A mossy rope hung from the branch of a tall old walnut. The tire that had been attached to it once was long gone. Beyond the back fence was an alley, unevenly floored in old bricks.

Bammy poured herself a lemonade and leaned with her bottom against the kitchen counter. The windowsill behind her was crowded with bowling trophies. Her sleeves were rolled up to show forearms as hairy as his.

“I never heard the romantic story of how you two met.”

“We were both in Central Park,” he said. “Picking daisies. We got to talking and decided to have a picnic together.”

“It was either that or you met in some perverted fetish club.”

“Come to think of it, it might’ve been a perverted fetish club.”

“You’re eating like you never seen food before.”

“We overlooked lunch.”

“What’s your hurry? What’s happenin’ in Florida you’re in such a rush to get to? Some friends of yours havin’ an orgy you don’t want to miss?”

“You make this slaw yourself?”

“You bet.”

“It’s good.”

“You want the recipe?”

The kitchen was quiet except for the scrape of his fork on the plate and the thud of the dog’s tail on the floor. Bammy stared at him.

At last, to fill in the silence, Jude said, “Marybeth calls you Bammy. Why’s that?”

“Short for my first name,” Bammy said. “Alabama. M.B.’s called me that since she was wetting her didies.”

A dry mouthful of cold chicken lodged partway down Jude’s windpipe. He coughed and thumped his chest and blinked at watering eyes. His ears burned.

“Really,” he said, when his throat was clear. “This may be out of left field, but you ever go to one of my shows? Like, did you maybe see me on a twin bill with AC/DC in 1979?”

“Not likely. I didn’t care for that kind of music even when I was young. Buncha gorillas stompin’ around the stage, shoutin’ swearwords and screamin’ their throats out. I might’ve caught you if you were openin’ for the Bay City Rollers. Why?”

Jude wiped at the fresh sweat on his forehead, his insides all queer with relief. “I knew an Alabama once. Don’t worry about it.”

“How’d the two of you both get so beat up? You got scrapes on your scrapes.”

“We were in Virginia, and we walked to Denny’s from our motel. On the way back, we were nearly run down.”

“You sure about the ‘nearly’ part?”

“Going under a train trestle. Fella ran his Jeep right into the stone wall. Bashed his face a good one on his windshield, too.”

“How’d he make out?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Was he drunk?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“What happened when the cops got there?”

“We didn’t stay to talk to them.”

“You didn’t stay—” she started, then stopped and threw the rest of her lemonade into the sink, wiped her mouth with the back of her forearm. Her lips were puckered, as if her last swallow of lemonade had been more sour than she liked.

“You are in some hurry,” she said.

“A mite.”

“Son,” she said, “just how much trouble are the two of you in?”

Georgia called to him from the top of the stairs.

Come lie down, Jude. Come upstairs. We’ll lie down in my room. You wake us up, Bammy, in an hour? We still got some drivin’ to do.”

“You don’t need to go tonight. You know you can stay over.”

“Better not,” Jude said.

“I don’t see the sense. It’s almost five already. Wherever you’re going, you won’t get there till late.”

“It’s all right. We’re night people.” He put his plate in the sink.

Bammy studied him. “You won’t leave without dinner?”

“No, ma’am. Wouldn’t think of it. Thank you, ma’am.”

She nodded. “I’ll fix it while you nap. What part of the South are you from, anyway?”

“Louisiana. Place called Moore’s Corner. You wouldn’t have heard of it. There’s nothing there.”

“I know it. My sister married a man who took her to Slidell. Moore’s Corner is right next to it. There’s good people around there.”

“Not my people,” Jude said, and he went upstairs, Angus bounding up the steps after him.

Georgia was waiting at the top, in the cool darkness of the upstairs hallway. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and she had on a faded Duke University T-shirt and a pair of loose blue shorts. Her arms were crossed under her breasts, and in her left hand was a flat white box, split at the corners and repaired with peeling brown tape.

Her eyes were the brightest thing in the shadows of the hall, greenish sparks of unnatural light, and in her wan, depleted face was a kind of eagerness.

“What’s that?” he asked, and she turned it so he could read what was written on the side.

OUIJA PARKER BROS. TALKING BOARD

29

She led him into her bedroom, where she removed the towel from her head and slung it over a chair.

It was a small room, under the eaves, with hardly enough space in it for them and the dogs. Bon was already curled up on the twin bed tucked against one wall. Georgia made a clicking sound with her tongue and patted the pillow, and Angus leaped up beside his sister. He settled.

Jude stood just inside the closed door—he had the Ouija board now—and turned in a slow circle, looking over the place where Georgia had spent most of her childhood. He had not been prepared for anything quite so wholesome as what he found. The bedspread was a hand-stitched quilt, patterned after an American flag. A herd of dusty-looking stuffed unicorns, in various sherbet colors, were corralled in a wicker basket in one corner.

She had an antique walnut dresser, with a mirror attached to it, one that could be tilted back and forth. Photos had been stuck into the mirror frame. They were sun-faded and curled with age and showed a toothy, black-haired girl in her teens, with a skinny, boyish build. In this picture she wore a Little League uniform a size too big for her, her ears jutting out under the cap. In that picture she stood between girlfriends, all of them sunburned, flat-chested, and self-conscious in their bikini tops, on a beach somewhere, a pier in the background.

The only hint of the person she was to become was in a final still, a graduation picture, Georgia in the mortarboard and black gown. In the photo she stood with her parents: a shriveled woman in a flower-print dress, straight off the rack in Wal-Mart, a potato-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a cheap checked sport coat. Georgia posed between them, smiling, but her eyes sullen and sly and resentful. And while she held her graduation certificate in one hand, the other was raised in the death-metal salute, pinkie and index finger sticking up in devil horns, her fingernails painted black. So it went.

Georgia found what she was looking for in the desk, a box of kitchen matches. She leaned over the windowsill to light some dark candles. Printed on the rear of her shorts was the word VARSITY. The backs of her thighs were taut and strong from three years of dancing.

“Varsity what?” Jude asked.

She glanced back at him, brow furrowed, then saw where he was looking, took a peek at her own backside, and grinned.

“Gymnastics. Hence most of my act.”

“Is that where you learned to chuck a knife?”

It had been a stage knife when she performed, but she could handle a real one, too. Showing off for him once, she’d thrown a Bowie into a log from a distance of twenty feet, and it had hit with a solid thunk, followed by a metallic, wobbling sound, the low, musical harmonic of trembling steel.

“Naw. Bammy taught me that. Bammy has some kind of throwing arm. Bowling balls. Softballs. She has a mean curve. She was pitching for her softball team when she was fifty. Couldn’t no one hit her. Her daddy taught her how to chuck a knife, and she taught me.”

After she lit the candles, she opened both windows a few inches, without raising the plain white shades. When the breeze blew, the shades moved and pale sunshine surged into the room, then abated, soothing waves of subdued brightness. The candles didn’t add much light, but the smell of them was pleasant, mixed with the cool, fresh, grassy scent of the outdoors.

Georgia turned and crossed her legs and sat on the floor. Jude lowered himself to his knees across from her. Joints popped.

He set the box between them, opened it, and took out the gameboard—was a Ouija board a game board, exactly? Across the sepia-colored board were all the letters of the alphabet, the words YES and NO, a sun with a maniacally grinning face, and a glowering moon. Jude set upon the board a black plastic pointer shaped like a spade in a deck of cards.

Georgia said, “I wasn’t sure I could turn it up. I haven’t looked at the damn thing in probably eight years. You remember that story I told you, ’bout how once I saw a ghost in Bammy’s backyard?”

“Her twin.”

“It scared hell out of me, but it made me curious, too. It’s funny how people are. Because when I saw the little girl in the backyard, the ghost, I just wanted her to go away. But when she vanished, pretty soon I got to wishin’ I’d see her again. I started wantin’ to have another experience like it sometime, to come across another ghost.”

“And here you are now with one hot on your tail. Who says dreams don’t come true?”

She laughed. “Anyway. A while after I saw Bammy’s sister in the backyard, I picked this up at the five-and-dime. Me and one of my girlfriends used to play around with it. We’d quiz the spirits about boys at school. And a lot of times I’d be movin’ the pointer in secret, makin’ it say things. My girlfriend, Sheryll Jane, she knew I was makin’ it say things, but she’d always pretend like she really believed we were talkin’ to a ghost, and her eyes would get all big and round and stick out of her head. I’d slide the pointer around, and the Ouija board would tell her some boy at school had a pair of her underwear in his locker, and she’d let out a screech and say, ‘I always knew he was weird about me!’ She was sweet to hang around with me and be so silly and play my games.” Georgia rubbed the back of her neck. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “One time, though, we were playin’ Ouija and it started workin’ for real. I wasn’t movin’ the pointer or anything.”

“Maybe Sheryll Jane was moving it.”

“No. It was movin’ on its own, and we both knew it. I could tell it was movin’ on its own because Sheryll wasn’t puttin’ on her act with them big eyes of hers. Sheryll wanted it to stop. When the ghost told us who it was, she said I wasn’t being funny. And I said I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, and she said stop it. But she didn’t take her hand off the pointer.”

“Who was the ghost?”

“Her cousin Freddy. He had hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were real close…Freddy and Sheryll.”

“What’d he want?”

“He said there was pictures in his family’s barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn’t want his parents to know he was gay and be any more upset than they were. He said that’s why he killed himself, because he didn’t want to be gay anymore. Then he said souls aren’t boys and aren’t girls. They’re only souls. He said there is no gay, and he’d made his momma sorrowful for nothin’. I remember that exactly. That he used the word ‘sorrowful.’”

“Did you go look for the pictures?”

“We snuck into the barn, next afternoon, and we found the loose floorboard, but there was nothin’ hidden under it. Then Freddy’s father came up behind us and gave us a good shoutin’ at. He said we had no business snoopin’ around his place and sent us runnin’. Sheryll said not finding any pictures proved it was all a lie and that I had faked the whole thing. You wouldn’t believe how mad she was. But I think Freddy’s father came across the pictures before us and got rid of them, so no one would know his kid was a fairy. The way he shouted at us was like he was scared about what we might know. About what we might be lookin’ for.” She paused, then added, “Me and Sheryll never really made it up. We pretended like we put it behind us, but after that we didn’t spend as much time together. Which suited me fine. By then I was sleepin’ with my daddy’s pal George Ruger, and I didn’t want a whole bunch of friends hangin’ around askin’ me questions about how come I had so much money in my pockets all of a sudden.”

The shades lifted and fell. The room brightened and dimmed. Angus yawned.

“So what do we do?” Jude said.

“Haven’t you ever played with one of these?”

Jude shook his head.

“Well, we each put a hand on the pointer,” she said, and started to reach forward with her right hand, then changed her mind and tried to draw it back.

It was too late. He reached out and caught her wrist. She winced—as if even the wrist were tender.

She had removed her bandages before showering and not yet put on fresh. The sight of her naked hand drove the air out of him. It looked as if it had been soaking in bathwater for hours, the skin wrinkly, white, and soft. The thumb was worse. For an instant, in the gloom, it looked almost skinless. The flesh was inflamed a startling crimson, and where the thumbprint belonged was a wide circle of infection, a sunken disk, yellow with pus, darkening to black at the center.

“Christ,” Jude said.

Georgia’s too-pale, too-thin face was surprisingly calm, staring back at him through the wavering shadows. She pulled her hand away.

“You want to lose that hand?” Jude asked. “You want to see if you can die from blood poisoning?”

“I am not as scared to die as I was a couple days ago. Isn’t that funny?”

Jude opened his mouth for a reply and found he had none to make. His insides were knotted up. What was wrong with her hand would kill her if nothing was done, and they both knew it, and she wasn’t afraid.

Georgia said, “Death isn’t the end. I know that now. We both do.”

“That isn’t any reason to just decide to die. To not take care of yourself.”

“I haven’t just decided to die. I’ve decided there isn’t goin’ to be any hospital. We’ve already talked that idea in circles. You know we can’t bring the dogs into no emergency room with us.”

“I’m rich. I can make a doctor come to us.”

“I told you already, I don’t believe that what’s wrong with me can be helped by any doctor.” She leaned forward, rapped the knuckles of her left hand on the Ouija board. “This is more important than the hospital. Sooner or later Craddock is going to get by the dogs. I think sooner. He’ll find a way. They can’t protect us forever. We are livin’ minute to minute, and you know it. I don’t mind dyin’ as long as he isn’t waitin’ for me on the other side.”

“You’re sick. That’s the fever thinking. You don’t need this voodoo. You need antibiotics.”

“I need you,” she said, her bright, vivid eyes steady on his face, “to shut the fuck up and put your hand on the pointer.”

30

Georgia said she would do the talking, and she put the fingers of her left hand next to his on the pointer—it was called the planchette, Jude remembered now. He looked up when he heard her draw a steadying breath. She shut her eyes, not as if she were about to go into a mystic trance but more as if she were about to leap from a high diving board and was trying to get over the churning in her stomach.

“Okay,” she said. “My name is Marybeth Stacy Kimball. I called myself Morphine for a few bad years, and the guy I love calls me Georgia, even though it drives me nuts, but Marybeth is who I am, my true name.” She opened her eyes to a squint, peeped at Jude from between her eyelashes. “Introduce yourself.”

He was about to speak when she held up a hand to stop him.

“Your real name, now. The name that belongs to your true self. True names are very important. The right words have a charge in them. Enough charge to bring the dead back to the living.”

He felt stupid—felt that what they were doing couldn’t work, was a waste of time, and they were acting like children. His career had afforded him a variety of occasions to make a fool out of himself, however. Once, for a music video, he and his band—Dizzy, Jerome, and Kenny—had run in mock horror through a field of clover, chased by a dwarf dressed in a dirty leprechaun suit and carrying a chain saw. In time Jude had developed something like an immunity to the condition of feeling stupid. So when he paused, it wasn’t out of a reluctance to speak but because he honestly didn’t know what to say.

Finally, looking at Georgia, he said, “My name is…Justin. Justin Cowzynski. I guess. Although I haven’t answered to that since I was nineteen.”

Georgia closed her eyes, withdrawing into herself. A dimple appeared between her slender eyebrows, a little thought line. Slowly, softly, she spoke. “Well. There you go. That’s us. We want to talk to Anna McDermott. Justin and Marybeth need your help. Is Anna there? Anna, will you speak to us today?”

They waited. The shade moved. Children shouted in the street.

“Is there anyone who would like to speak to Justin and Marybeth? Will Anna McDermott say somethin’ to us? Please. We’re in trouble, Anna. Please hear us. Please help us.” Then, in a voice that approached a whisper, she said, “Come on. Do somethin’.” Speaking to the planchette.

Bon farted in her sleep, a squeaking sound, like a foot skidding across wet rubber.

“She didn’t know me,” Georgia said. “You ask for her.”

“Anna McDermott? Is there an Anna McDermott in the house? Could you please report to the Ouija information center?” he asked, in a big, hollow, public announcer’s voice.

Georgia smiled, a wide, humorless grin. “Ah, yes. I knew it was only a matter of time before the fuckin’-around would commence.”

“Sorry.”

“Ask for her. Ask for real.”

“It’s not workin’.”

“You haven’t tried.”

“Yes I have.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Well, it just isn’t workin’.”

He expected hostility or impatience. Instead her smile broadened even more, and she regarded him with a quiet sweetness that he instantly mistrusted. “She was waitin’ for you to call, right up to the day she died. Like there was any chance of that. What, did you wait a whole week, before moving on in your state-by-state tour of America’s easiest snatch?”

He flushed. Not even a week. “You might not want to get too hot under the collar,” he said, “considering you’re the easy snatch in question.”

“I know, and it disgusts me. Put! Your! Hand! Back on the mother-fuckin’ pointer. We are not done here.”

Jude had been withdrawing his hand from the planchette, but at Georgia’s outburst he set his fingers back upon it.

“I’m disgusted with the both of us. You for bein’ who you are and me for lettin’ you stay that way. Now, you call for her. She won’t come for me, but she might for you. She was waitin’ for you to call right to the end, and if you ever had, she would’ve come running. Maybe she still will.”

Jude glared down at the board, the old-timey alphabet letters, the sun, the moon.

“Anna, you around? Will Anna McDermott come on and talk to us?” Jude said.

The planchette was dead, unmoving plastic. He had not felt so grounded in the world of the real and the ordinary in days. It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t right. It was hard to keep his hand on the pointer. He was impatient to get up, to be done.

“Jude,” Georgia said, then corrected herself. “Justin. Don’t quit on this. Try again.”

Jude. Justin.

He stared at his fingers on the planchette, the board beneath, and tried to think what wasn’t right, and in another moment it came to him. Georgia had said that true names had a charge in them, that the right words had the power to return the dead to the living. And he thought then that Justin wasn’t his true name, that he had left Justin Cowzynski in Louisiana when he was nineteen, and the man who got off the bus in New York City forty hours later was someone different entirely, capable of doing and saying things that had been beyond Justin Cowzynski. And what they were doing wrong now was calling for Anna McDermott. He had never called her that. She had not been Anna McDermott when they were together.

“Florida,” Jude said, almost sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was surprising to him, calm and self-assured. “Come on and talk to me, Florida. It’s Jude, darlin’. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I’m calling now. Are you there? Are you listening? Are you still waiting for me? I’m here now. I’m right here.”

The planchette jumped under their fingers, as if the board had been struck from beneath. Georgia jumped with it and cried out weakly. Her bad hand fluttered to her throat. The breeze shifted direction and sucked at the shades, snapping them against the windows and darkening the room. Angus lifted his head, eyes flashing a bright, unnatural green in the weak light from the candles.

Georgia’s good hand had remained on the pointer, and no sooner had it rattled back to rest on the board than it began to move. The sensation was unnatural and made Jude’s heart race. It felt as if there were another pair of fingers on the planchette, a third hand, reaching into the space between his hand and Georgia’s and sliding the pointer around, turning it without warning. It slipped across the board, touched a letter, stayed there for a moment, then spun under their fingers, forcing Jude to twist his wrist to keep his hand on it.

“W,” Georgia said. She was audibly short of breath. “H. A. T.”

“What,” Jude said. The pointer went on finding letters, and Georgia continued calling them out: a K, an E. Jude listened, concentrating on what was being spelled.

Jude: “Kept. You.”

The planchette made a half turn—and stopped, its little casters squeaking faintly.

“What kept you,” Jude repeated.

“What if it isn’t her? What if it’s him? How do we know who we’re talking to?”

The planchette surged, before Georgia had even finished speaking. It was like having a finger on a record that has suddenly begun to turn.

Georgia: “W. H. Y. I….”

Jude: “Why. Is. The. Sky. Blue.” The pointer went still. “It’s her. She always said she’d rather ask questions than answer them. Got to be kind of a joke between us.”

It was her. Pictures skipped in his head, a series of vivid stills. She was in the backseat of the Mustang, naked on the white leather except for her cowboy boots and a feathered ten-gallon hat, peeking out at him from under the brim, eyes bright with mischief. She was yanking his beard backstage at the Trent Reznor show, and he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from shouting. She was dead in the bathtub, a thing he hadn’t ever seen except in his mind, and the water was ink, and her stepfather, in his black undertaker’s suit, was on his knees beside the tub, as if to pray.

“Go on, Jude,” Georgia said. “Talk to her.”

Her voice was strained, pitched to just above a whisper. When Jude glanced up at Georgia, she was shivering, although her face was aglow with sweat. Her eyes glittered from deep in their dark and bony hollows…fever eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Georgia shook her head—Leave me alone—and shuddered furiously. Her left hand remained on the pointer. “Talk to her.”

He looked back at the board. The black moon stamped on one corner was laughing. Hadn’t it been glowering a moment before? A black dog at the bottom of the board was howling up at it. He didn’t think it had been there when they first opened the board.

He said, “I didn’t know how to help you. I’m sorry, kiddo. I wish you fell in love with anyone but me. I wish you fell in love with one of the good guys. Someone who wouldn’t have just sent you away when things got hard.”

“A. R. E. Y. O….” Georgia read, in that same effortful, short-of-breath voice. He could hear, in that voice, the work it took to suppress her shivering.

“Are. You. Angry.”

The pointer went still.

Jude felt a boil of emotions, so many things, all at once, he wasn’t sure he could put them into words. But he could, and it turned out to be easy.

“Yes,” he said.

The pointer flew to the word NO.

“You shouldn’t have done that to yourself.”

“D. O. N….”

“Done. What.” Jude read. “Done what? You know what. Killed your—”

The pointer skidded back to the word NO.

“What do you mean, no?”

Georgia spoke the letters aloud, a W, an H, an A.

“What. If. I. Can’t. Answer.” The pointer came to rest again. Jude stared for a moment, then understood. “She can’t answer questions. She can only ask them.”

But Georgia was already spelling again. “I. S. H. E. A….”

A great fit of shivering overcame her, so her teeth clattered, and when Jude glanced at her, he saw the breath steam from her lips, as if she were standing in a cold-storage vault. Only the room didn’t feel any warmer or colder to Jude.

The next thing he noticed was that Georgia wasn’t looking at her hand on the pointer, or at him, or at anything. Her eyes had gone unfocused, fixed on the middle distance. Georgia went on reciting the letters aloud, as the planchette touched them, but she wasn’t looking at the board anymore, couldn’t see what it was doing.

“Is.” Jude read as Georgia spelled the words in a strained monotone. “He. After. You.”

Georgia quit calling the letters, and he realized a question had been asked.

“Yes. Yeah. He thinks it’s my fault you killed yourself, and now he’s playing get-even.”

NO. The planchette pointed at it for a long, emphatic moment before beginning to scurry about again.

“W. H. Y. R. U….” Georgia muttered thickly.

“Why. Are. You. So. Dumb.” Jude fell silent, staring.

One of the dogs on the bed whined.

Then Jude understood. He felt overcome for a moment by a sensation of light-headedness and profound disorientation. It was like the head rush that comes from standing up too quickly. It was also a little like feeling rotten ice give way underfoot, the first terrible moment of plunge. It staggered him, that it had taken him so long to understand.

“Fucker,” Jude said. “That fucker.”

He noticed that Bon was awake, staring apprehensively at the Ouija board. Angus was watching, too, his tail thumping against the mattress.

“What can we do?” Jude said. “He’s coming after us, and we don’t know how to get rid of him. Can you help us?”

The pointer swung toward the word YES.

“The golden door,” Georgia whispered.

Jude looked at her—and recoiled. Her eyes had rolled up in her head, to show only the whites, and her whole body was steadily, furiously trembling. Her face, which had already been so pale it was like wax, had lost even more color, taking on an unpleasant translucence. Her breath steamed. He heard the planchette beginning to scrape and slide wildly across the board, looked back down. Georgia wasn’t spelling for him anymore, wasn’t speaking. He strung together the words himself.

“Who. Will. Be. The. Door. Who will be the door?”

“I will be the door,” Georgia said.

“Georgia?” Jude said. “What are you talking about?”

The pointer began to move again. Jude didn’t speak now, just watched it finding letters, hesitating on each for only an instant before whirring on.

Will. U. Bring. Me. Thru.

“Yes,” Georgia said. “If I can. I’ll make the door, and I’ll bring you through, and then you’ll stop him.”

Do. You. Swear.

“I swear,” she said. Her voice was thin and compressed and strained with her fear. “I swear I swear oh God I swear. Whatever I have to do, I just don’t know what to do. I’m ready to do whatever I have to do, just tell me what it is.”

Do. You. Have. A. Mirror. Marybeth.

“Why?” Georgia said, blinking, her eyes rolling back down to look blearily about. She turned her head toward her dresser. “There’s one—”

She screamed. Her fingers sprang up off the pointer, and she pressed her hands to her mouth to stifle the cry. In the same instant, Angus came to his feet and began to bark from where he stood on the bed. He was staring at what she was staring at. By then Jude was twisting to see for himself, his own fingers leaving the planchette—which began to spin around and around on its own, a kid doing doughnuts on his dirt bike.

The mirror on the dresser was tilted forward to show Georgia, sitting across from Jude, with the Ouija board between them. Only in the mirror her eyes were covered by a blindfold of black gauze and her throat was slashed. A red mouth gaped obscenely across it, and her shirt was soaked in blood.

Angus and Bon bounded from the bed in the same moment. Bon hit the floor and launched herself at the planchette, snarling. She closed her jaws on the pointer, the way she might have attacked a mouse scampering for its hole, and it burst into pieces in her teeth.

Angus hurled himself against the dresser and put his front paws on the top of it, barking furiously at the face in the mirror. The force of his weight rocked the dresser onto its rear legs. The mirror could be rotated forward and back, and now it swung back, tilting to show its face to the ceiling. Angus dropped to all fours, and an instant later the dresser did the same, coming down onto its wooden legs with a ringing crash. The mirror swung forward, pivoting to show Georgia her own reflection once more. It was only her reflection. The blood—and the black blindfold—were gone.

31

In the late-afternoon cool of the room, Jude and Georgia stretched out together on the twin bed. It was too small for the both of them, and Georgia had to turn on her side and throw a leg over him to fit beside him. Her face nestled into his neck, the tip of her nose cold against his skin.

He was numb. Jude knew he needed to think about what had just happened to them, but he could not seem to turn his thoughts back to what he’d seen in the mirror, back to what Anna had been trying to tell them. His mind wouldn’t go there. His mind wanted away from death for a few moments. He felt crowded by death, felt the promise of death all around, felt death on his chest, each death a stone heaped on top of him, driving the air out of him: Anna’s death, Danny’s, Dizzy’s, Jerome’s, the possibility of his own death and Georgia’s waiting just down the road from them. He could not move for the weight of all those deaths pressing down on him.

Jude had an idea that as long as he was very still and said nothing, he and Georgia could stay in this quiet moment together indefinitely, with the shades flapping and the dim light wavering around them. Whatever bad thing that was waiting for them next would never arrive. As long as he remained in the little bed, with Georgia’s cool thigh over him and her body clasped to his side, the unimaginable future wouldn’t come for them.

It came anyway. Bammy thumped softly on the door, and when she spoke, her voice was hushed and uncertain.

“You all right in there?”

Georgia pushed herself up on one elbow. She swiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Jude had not known until now that she’d been crying. She blinked and smiled crookedly, and it was real, not a smile for show, although for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what she had to smile about.

Her face had been scrubbed clean by her tears, and that smile was heartbreaking in its easy, girlish sincerity. It seemed to say, Oh, well. Sometimes you get a bad deal. He understood then that she believed what they’d both seen in the mirror was a kind of vision, something that was going to happen, that maybe they could not avert. Jude quailed at the idea. No. No, better Craddock should get him and be done with it than Georgia should die gasping in her own blood, and why would Anna show them that, what could she want?

“Honey?” Bammy asked.

“We’re fine,” Georgia called back.

Silence.

Then: “You aren’t fightin’ in there, are you? I heard bangin’ around.”

“No,” Georgia said, sounding affronted by the very suggestion. “Swear to God, Bammy. Sorry about the racket.”

“Well,” Bammy said. “Do you need anything?”

“Fresh sheets,” Georgia said.

Another silence. Jude felt Georgia trembling against his chest, a sweet shivering. She bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. Then he was fighting it, too, was overcome with a sudden, convulsive hilarity. He jammed a hand into his mouth, while his insides hitched with trapped, strangled laughter.

“Jesus,” said Bammy, who sounded like she wanted to spit. “Jesus Christ.” Her tread moving away from the door as she said it.

Georgia fell against Jude, her cool, damp face pressed hard to his neck. He put his arms around her, and they clutched each other while they gasped with laughter.

32

After dinner Jude said he had some phone calls to make and left Georgia and Bammy in Bammy’s living room. He didn’t really have anyone to call but knew that Georgia wanted some time with her grandmother and that they would be more themselves without him there.

But once he was in the kitchen, a fresh glass of lemonade before him and nothing to occupy himself with, he found the phone in his hand anyway. He dialed the office line to pick up his messages. It felt queer, to be busy with something so entirely grounded in the ordinary after all that had happened in the day, from their run-in with Craddock at Denny’s to the encounter with Anna in Georgia’s bedroom. Jude felt disconnected from who he’d been before he first saw the dead man. His career, his living, both the business and the art that had preoccupied him for more than thirty years, seemed matters of no particular importance. He dialed the phone, watching his hand as if it belonged to someone else, feeling he was a passive spectator to the actions of a man in a play, an actor performing the part of himself.

He had five messages waiting for him. The first was from Herb Gross, his accountant and business manager. Herb’s voice, which was usually oily and self-satisfied, was, in the recording, grainy with emotion. “I just heard from Nan Shreve that Danny Wooten was found dead in his apartment this morning. Apparently he hanged himself. We’re all dismayed here, as I’m sure you can imagine. Will you call me when you get this message? I don’t know where you are. No one does. Thank you.”

There was a message from an Officer Beam, who said that the Piecliff police were trying to reach Jude about an important matter, and would he call back. There was a message from Nan Shreve, his lawyer, who said she was handling everything, that the police wanted to collect a statement from him about Danny, and he should call as soon as he could.

The next message was from Jerome Presley, who had died four years ago, after he drove his Porsche into a weeping willow at just under a hundred miles an hour. “Hey, Jude, I guess we’re getting the band back together soon, huh? John Bonham on drums. Joey Ramone on backup vocals.” He laughed, then went on in his familiar, weary drawl. Jerome’s croak of a voice had always reminded Jude of the comic Steven Wright. “I hear you’re driving a souped-up Mustang now. That’s one thing we always had, Jude—we could talk cars. Suspensions, engines, spoilers, sound systems, Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Chargers, Porsches. You know what I was thinking about, night I drove my Porsche off the road? I was thinking about all the shit I never said to you. All the shit we didn’t talk about. Like how you got me hooked on your coke, and then you went and got straight and had the balls to tell me if I didn’t do the same, you’d throw me out of the band. Like how you gave Christine money to set herself up with her own place after she left me, when she ran off with the kids without a word. How you gave her money for a lawyer. There’s loyalty for you. Or how you wouldn’t make a simple fucking loan when I was losing everything—the house, the cars. And here I let you sleep on the bed in my basement when you were fresh off the bus from Louisiana and you didn’t have thirty dollars in your pocket.” Jerome laughed again—his harsh, corrosive, smoker’s laugh. “Well, we’ll get a chance to finally talk about all that stuff soon. I guess I’ll be seeing you any day. I hear you’re on the nightroad now. I know where that road goes. Straight into a fucking tree. They picked me out of the branches, you know. Except for the parts I left on the windshield. I miss you, Jude. I’m looking forward to putting my arms around you. We’re going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”

There was a clattering sound as Jerome took the phone from his ear and held it out so Jude could hear. What came through the line was a noise like no other Jude had ever heard before, alien and dreadful, a noise like the hum of flies, amplified a hundred times, and the punch and squeal of machinery, a steam press that banged and seethed. When listened to carefully, it was possible to hear words in all that fly hum, inhuman voices calling for Mother, calling for it to stop.

Jude was primed to delete the next message, expecting another dead person, but instead it was a call from his father’s housekeeper, Arlene Wade. She was so far from his thoughts that it was several moments before he was able to identify her old, warbly, curiously toneless voice, and by then her brief message was almost done.

“Hello, Justin, it’s me. I wanted to update you on your father. Hasn’t been conscious in thirty-six hours. Heartbeat is all fits and starts. Thought you’d want to know. He isn’t in pain. Call if you like.”

After Jude hung up, he leaned over the kitchen counter, looking out into the night. He had his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the window was open, and the breeze that drifted in was cool on his skin and perfumed with the smell of the flower garden. Insects hummed.

Jude could see his father in his head: the old man stretched out on his narrow cot, gaunt, wasted, his chin covered in a mangy white bristle, his temples sunken and gray. Jude even half believed he could smell him, the rank bad sweat, the stink of the house, an odor that included but was not limited to chicken shit, pig, and the ashtray smell of nicotine absorbed into everything—curtains, blankets, wallpaper. When Jude had finally lit out of Louisiana, he’d been fleeing that smell as much as escaping his father.

He had run and run and run, made music, made millions, spent a lifetime trying to put as much distance between himself and the old man as he could. Now, with a little luck, he and his father might die on the same day. They could walk the nightroad together. Or maybe they would ride, share the passenger seat of Craddock McDermott’s smoke-colored pickup. The two of them sitting so close to each other that Martin Cowzynski could rest one of his gaunt claws on the back of Jude’s neck. The smell of him filling the car. The smell of home.

Hell would smell like that, and they would drive there together, father and son, accompanied by their hideous chauffeur, with his silver crew cut and Johnny Cash suit and the radio turned to Rush Limbaugh. If hell was anything, it was talk radio—and family.

In the living room, Bammy said something in a low, gossipy murmur. Georgia laughed. Jude tilted his head at the sound and a moment later was surprised to find himself smiling in automatic response. How it was she could be in stitches again, with everything that was up against them and everything they’d seen, he couldn’t imagine.

Her laughter was a quality he prized in her above all others—the deep, chaotic music of it and the way she gave herself over to it completely. It stirred him, drew him out of himself. It was just after seven by the clock on the microwave. He would step back into the living room and join the two of them for a few minutes of easy, pointless talk, and then he would get Georgia’s attention and shoot a meaningful look at the door. The road was waiting.

He had made up his mind and was turning from the kitchen counter when a sound caught his attention, a lilting, off-key voice, singing: byebye, bay-bee. He turned on his heel, glanced back into the yard behind the house.

The rear corner of the yard was lit by a street lamp in the alley. It cast a bluish light across the picket fence and the big leafy oak with the rope hanging from one branch. A little girl crouched in the grass beneath the tree, a child of perhaps six or seven, in a simple red-and-white-checkered dress and with her dark hair tied in a ponytail. She sang to herself, that old one by Dean Martin about how it was time to hit the road to dreamland, digya in the land of nod. She picked a dandelion, caught her breath, and blew. The seed parachutes came apart, a hundred drifting white umbrellas that soared out into the gloom. It should’ve been impossible to see them, except that they were faintly luminescent, drifting about like improbable white sparks. Her head was raised, so she seemed almost to be staring directly at Jude through the window. It was hard to be sure, though. Her eyes were obscured by the black marks that jittered before them.

It was Ruth. Her name was Ruth. She was Bammy’s twin sister, the one who had disappeared in the 1950s. Their parents had called them in for lunch. Bammy had come running, but Ruth lingered behind, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her…alive.

Jude opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but found himself unable to speak. The breath caught in his chest and stayed there.

Ruth stopped singing, and the night went still, no sound even of insects now. The little girl turned her head, to glance into the alley behind the house. She smiled, and a hand flapped up in a small wave, as if she’d just noticed someone standing there, someone she knew, a friendly neighborhood acquaintance. Only there wasn’t anyone in the alley. There were old pages from a newspaper stuck to the ground, some broken glass, weeds growing between the bricks. Ruth rose from her crouch and walked slowly to the fence, her lips moving—talking soundlessly to a person who wasn’t there. When had Jude become unable to hear her voice? When she gave up singing.

As Ruth approached the fence, Jude felt a rising alarm, as if he were watching a child about to stray onto a busy highway. He wanted to call to her but could not, couldn’t even inhale.

He remembered then what Georgia had told him about her. That people who saw little Ruth always wanted to call to her, to warn her that she was in danger, to tell her to run, but that no one could manage it. They were too stricken by the sight of her to speak. A thought formed, the sudden, nonsensical thought that this was every girl Jude had ever known who he hadn’t been able to help; it was Anna and Georgia both. If he could just speak her name, get her attention, signal to her that she was in trouble, anything was possible. He and Georgia might beat the dead man yet, survive the impossible fix they had got themselves in.

And still Jude could not find his voice. It was maddening to stand there and watch and not be able to speak. He slammed his bandaged, injured hand against the counter, felt a shock of pain travel through the wound in his palm—and still could not force any sound up through the tight passage of his throat.

Angus was at his side, and he jumped when Jude pounded the counter. He lifted his head and lapped nervously at Jude’s wrist. The rough, hot stroke of Angus’s tongue on his bare skin startled him. It was immediate and real and it yanked him out of his paralysis as swiftly and abruptly as Georgia’s laughter had pulled him out of his feeling of despair only a few moments before. His lungs grabbed some air, and he called through the window.

“Ruth!” he shouted—and she turned her head. She heard him. She heard him. “Get away, Ruth! Run for the house! Right now!”

Ruth glanced again at the darkened, empty alley, and then she took an off-balance, lunging step back toward the house. Before she could go any farther, her slender white arm came up, as if there were an invisible line around her left wrist and someone was pulling on it.

Only it wasn’t an invisible line. It was an invisible hand. And in the next instant, she came right off the ground, hauled into the air by someone who wasn’t there. Her long, skinny legs kicked helplessly, and one of her sandals flew off and disappeared into the dark. She wrestled and fought, suspended two feet in the air, and was pulled steadily backward. Her face turned toward Jude’s, helpless and beseeching, the marks over her eyes blotting out her desperate stare, as she was carried by unseen forces over the picket fence.

“Ruth!” he called again, his voice as commanding as it had ever been onstage, when he was shouting to his legions.

She began to fade away as she was hauled off down the alley. Now her dress was gray-and-white checks. Now her hair was the color of moonsilver. The other sandal fell off, splashed in a puddle, and disappeared, although ripples continued to move across the shallow muddy water—as if it had fallen, impossibly, right out of the past and into the present. Ruth’s mouth was open, but she couldn’t scream, and Jude didn’t know why. Maybe the unseen thing that was tugging her away had a hand over her mouth. She passed under the bright blue glare of the street lamp and was gone. The breeze caught a newspaper, and it flapped down the empty alley with a dry, rattling sound.

Angus whined again and gave him another lick. Jude stared. A bad taste in his mouth. A feeling of pressure in his eardrums.

“Jude,” Georgia whispered from behind him.

He looked at her reflection in the window over the sink. Black squiggles danced in front of her eyes. They were over his eyes, too. They were both dead. They just hadn’t stopped moving yet.

“What happened, Jude?”

“I couldn’t save her,” he said. “The girl. Ruth. I saw her taken away.” He could not tell Georgia that somehow his hope that they could save themselves had been taken with her. “I called her name. I called her name, but I couldn’t change what happened.”

“Course you couldn’t, dear,” said Bammy.

33

Jude pivoted toward Georgia and Bammy. Georgia stood across the kitchen from him, in the doorway. Her eyes were just her eyes, no death marks over them. Bammy touched her granddaughter on the hip to nudge her aside, then eased into the kitchen around her and approached Jude.

“You know Ruth’s story? Did M.B. tell you?”

“She told me your sister got taken when you were little. She said sometimes people see her out in the yard, getting grabbed all over again. It isn’t the same as seeing it yourself. I heard her sing. I saw her taken away.”

Bammy put her hand on his wrist. “Do you want to set?”

He shook his head.

“You know why she keeps coming back? Why people see her? The worst moments of Ruth’s life happened out in that yard, while we all sat in here eating our lunch. She was alone and scared, and no one saw when she was taken away. No one heard when she stopped singing. It must’ve been the most awful thing. I’ve always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can’t be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash. Can I at least get you something else to drink?”

He nodded. She got the pitcher of lemonade, almost drained now, and sloshed the last of it into his glass.

While she poured, Bammy said, “I always thought if someone could speak to her, it might take a weight off her. I always thought if someone could make her feel not so alone in those last minutes, it might set her free.” Bammy tipped her head to the side—a curious, interrogatory gesture Jude had seen Georgia perform a million times. “You might’ve done her some good and not even know it. Just by saying her name.”

“What did I do? She still got taken.” Downing the glass in a swallow and then setting it in the sink.

“I never thought for a moment anyone could change what happened to her. That’s done. The past is gone. Stay the night, Jude.”

Her last statement was so completely unrelated to the one that had preceded it, Jude needed a moment to understand she had just made a request of him.

“Can’t,” Jude said.

“Why?”

Because anyone who offered them aid would be infected with the death on them, and who knew how much they had risked Bammy’s life just by stopping a few hours? Because he and Georgia were dead already, and the dead drag the living down. “Because it isn’t safe,” he said at last. That was honest, at least.

Bammy’s brow knotted, screwing up in thought. He saw her struggling for the right words to crack him open, to force him to talk about the situation they were in.

While she was still thinking, Georgia crept into the room, almost tiptoeing, as if afraid to make any sound. Bon was at her heels, gazing up with a look of idiot anxiety.

Georgia said, “Not every ghost is like your sister, Bammy. There’s some that are real bad. We’re having all kinds of trouble with dead people. Don’t ask either one of us to explain. It would just sound crazy.”

“Try me anyway. Let me help.”

“Mrs. Fordham,” Jude said, “you were good to have us. Thank you for dinner.”

Georgia reached Bammy’s side and tugged on her shirtsleeve, and when her grandmother turned toward her, Georgia put her pale and skinny arms around her and clasped her tight. “You are a good woman, and I love you.”

Bammy still had her head turned to look at Jude. “If I can do something…”

“But you can’t,” Jude said. “It’s like with your sister there in the backyard. You can shout all you want, but it won’t change how things play out.”

“I don’t believe that. My sister is dead. No one paid any attention when she quit singing, and someone took her away and killed her. But you are not dead. You and my granddaughter are alive and here with me in my house. Don’t give up on yourself. The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”

Something about this last gave Jude a nervous jolt, as if he’d touched metal and caught a sudden stinging zap of static electricity. Something about giving up on yourself. Something about singing. There was an idea there, but not one he could make sense of yet. The knowledge that he and Georgia had about played out their string—the feeling that they were both as dead as the girl he’d just seen in the backyard—was an obstacle no other thought could get around.

Georgia kissed Bammy’s face, once, and again: kissing tears. And at last Bammy turned to look at her. She put her hands on her granddaughter’s cheeks.

“Stay,” Bammy said. “Make him stay. And if he won’t, then let him go on without you.”

“I can’t do that,” Georgia said. “And he’s right. We can’t bring you into this any more than we already have. One man who was a friend to us is dead because he didn’t get clear of us fast enough.”

Bammy pressed her forehead to Georgia’s breast. Her breath hitched and caught. Her hands rose and went into Georgia’s hair, and for a moment both women swayed together, as if they were dancing very slowly.

When her composure returned—it wasn’t long—Bammy looked up into Georgia’s face again. Bammy was red and damp-cheeked, and her chin was trembling, but she seemed to be done with her crying.

“I will pray, Marybeth. I will pray for you.”

“Thank you,” Georgia said.

“I am countin’ on you coming back. I am countin’ on seeing you again, when you’ve figured out how to make things right. And I know you will. Because you’re clever and you’re good and you’re my girl.” Bammy inhaled sharply, gave Jude a watery, sidelong look. “I hope he’s worth it.”

Georgia laughed, a soft, convulsive sound almost like a sob, and squeezed Bammy once more.

“Go, then,” Bammy said. “Go if you got to.”

“We’re already gone,” Georgia said.

34

He drove. His palms were hot and slick on the wheel, his stomach churning. He wanted to slam his fist into something. He wanted to drive too fast, and he did, shooting yellow lights just as they turned red. And when he didn’t make a light in time and had to sit in traffic, he pumped the pedal, revving the engine impatiently. What he had felt in the house, watching the little dead girl get dragged away, that sensation of helplessness, had thickened and curdled into rage and a sour-milk taste in his mouth.

Georgia watched him for a few miles, then put a hand on his forearm. He twitched, startled by the clammy, chilled feel of her skin on his. He wanted to take a deep breath and recover his composure, not so much for himself as for her. If one of them was going to be this way, it seemed to him it ought to be Georgia, that she had more right to rage than he did, after what Anna had shown her in the mirror. After she had seen herself dead. He did not understand her quiet, her steadiness, her concern for him, and he could not find it in him to take deep breaths. When a truck in front of him was slow to get moving after the light turned green, he laid on the horn.

“Head out of your ass!” Jude yelled through the open window as he tore by, crossing the double yellow line to go past.

Georgia removed her hand from his arm, set it in her lap. She turned her head to stare out the passenger-side window. They drove a block, stopped at another intersection.

When she spoke again, it was in a low, amused mumble. She didn’t mean for him to hear, was talking to herself, and maybe not even completely aware she’d spoken aloud.

“Oh, look. My least favorite used-car lot in the whole wide world. Where’s a hand grenade when you need one?”