Catherine slipped off her shoes, reclined on the sofa, and napped until Doug Archer knocked at the door.
Before he left, Doug Archer said a strange thing.
His visit went well, otherwise. He was friendly and his interest seemed genuine, more than just businesslike. He asked about her work. Catherine was shy about her painting even though she had begun to earn some money through a couple of small Seattle galleries. She’d taken fine arts courses at college, but the work she produced was mainly intuitive, personal, meticulous. She worked with acrylics and sometimes with montage. Her subjects were usually small—a leaf, a water drop, a ladybug—but her canvases were large, impressionistic, and layered with bright acrylic washes. After her last show a Seattle newspaper critic said she “seemed to coax light out of paint,” which had pleased her. But she didn’t tell Archer that; only that she painted and that she was thinking of doing some work here during the summer. He said he’d love to see some of her work sometime. Catherine said she was flattered but there was nothing to show right now.
He was thorough about the house. He inspected the basement, the water heater and the furnace, the fuseboard and the window casements. Upstairs, he made a note about the oak floors and moldings. Lastly, he went outside and gazed up at the eaves. Catherine told him Gram Peggy had had the roof inspected every year.
She walked him to his car. “I suppose we’ll have to put it on the market pretty soon. I don’t even know what that involves. I guess people come to see it?”
“We don’t have to hurry. You must be upset by all this.”
“Dazed. I think I’m dazed.”
“Take as long as you need. Call me when you’re ready to talk about it.”
“I appreciate that,” Catherine said.
Archer put his hand on the door of the car, then seemed to hesitate. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Did your grandmother ever talk much about her neighbors?”
“Not that I remember. I did meet Mrs. Horton from around the corner. Apparently they used to drive to the mall together.”
“How about the house down the other direction—the man who lived there? She ever mention him? This would have been ten or more years ago.”
“I don’t remember anything like that. Why?”
“No real reason.” Something personal, she guessed. He was obviously embarrassed to have asked. “Will you do me one favor, Catherine? If you notice anything strange happening, will you give me a call? My number’s on the card. You can reach me pretty much anytime.”
“What do you mean, anything strange?”
“Odd occurrences,” Archer said unhappily.
“Like what? Ghosts, flying saucers, that kind of thing? Is there a lot of that around here?” She couldn’t help smiling.
“Nothing like that. No, look, forget I asked, okay? It’s nothing important. Just kind of a hobby with me.”
He thanked her, she thanked him, he drove away. How odd, Catherine thought as his car vanished into the tree shadows along the Post Road. What an unusual man. What a strange thing to ask.
She didn’t think more about it. A bank of clouds moved in and a steady, sullen rain fell without interruption for most of a week. Catherine stayed in the house and began to itemize some of Gram Peggy’s possessions, room by room. It was depressing weather and depressing work. She felt lost in this big old house, but the rhythms of it—the ticking of the mantel clock and the morning and evening light through the high dusty windows—were familiar and in their own way reassuring.
Still, she was glad when the sun came out. After a couple of warm days the ground had dried and she was able to move around the big back lawn and some distance down a trail into the woods. She remembered taking some of these walks with Gram Peggy and how intimidating the forest had seemed— still seemed, in fact. There was enough red cedar behind the house to make her feel very small, as if she’d shrunk, Alice-style, to the size of a caterpillar. The trail was narrow, probably a deer trail; the forest was cool and silent.
She took these walks almost every day and before long she began to feel a little braver. She ranged farther than Gram Peggy had ever taken her. Some of this woodland was municipal property, and farther east it had been staked out by the timber interests, but nobody up along the Post Road cared too much about property lines and Catherine was able to wander fairly freely. Most days she hiked south down the slope of the hill, keeping east of the road and the houses.
She bought a guidebook and taught herself to identify some of the wildlife. She had seen a salamander, a thrush, and something she believed was a “pileated woodpecker.” There was the tantalizing possibility of encountering a black bear, though that hadn’t happened yet. Sometimes she brought her lunch with her; sometimes she carried a sketchbook.
She had already found favorite places in the woods. There was a meadow where she could sit on a fallen log and gaze across a thicket of salal and huckleberry, where the forest sloped away toward Belltower. There was a sandy spot by a creek where she thought she might scatter Gram Peggy’s ashes. And another meadow, farther south, riddled with deer trails, where an abandoned woodshed sagged under a growth of moss.
The woodshed fascinated her. There was something inviting about the cockeyed slant of the door. Surely there was nothing inside, Catherine told herself; or only a cord of moldy firewood. But then again there might be an old plough or spinning wheel, something she could clean up and peddle to the antique shops in Belltower. Unless this was somebody’s property, in which case she would be stealing. But she could at least peek.
She had this thought vaguely in mind Wednesday morning, her second week in Belltower, when she packed a bag lunch and went wandering. It was a warm day and she was sweating by the time she passed the creek. She pressed on south, paused to tie her hair up off her neck, hiked past the huckleberry thicket and on down to the woodshed in its sunny meadow.
She approached the door of the ancient structure, high-stepping through berry-bush runners to avoid a stand of fireweed … then she hesitated.
It seemed to her she could hear faint motion inside.
Curiosity killed the cat, Gram Peggy used to say. But she always added the less salutary rider—Satisfaction brought it back. Gram Peggy had been a big believer in satisfied curiosity.
So Catherine opened the creaking woodshed door and peered inside, where a stack of newspapers had moldered for decades, and where something hideous moved and spoke in the darkness.
Eleven
How did it feel to begin life over again, thirty years in the past?
Giddy, Tom thought. Strange. Exhilarating.
And—more often now—frightening.
It wasn’t clear to him when or why the fear had started. Maybe it had been there all along, a subtler presence than now. Maybe it had started when he moved into the house on the Post Road, a steady counterpoint to all the raucous events since. Maybe he’d been born with it.
But it wasn’t fear, exactly; it was a kind of systematic disquiet … and he felt it most profoundly on a hot Thursday afternoon in July, when he could have sworn, but couldn’t prove, that somebody followed him from Lindner’s Radio Supply to Larry Millstein’s apartment.