“Pardon?” said the deputy who had shown up at the KWIK’N’EZ hours earlier. Taylor was short and fat.
“Car keys,” said Dale. He took them from the deputy and crawled up into his Toyota SUV. The truck started immediately. Dale turned on the overhead light and found his cell phone where it had slipped down between the center console and the passenger seat. He thumbed its on switch, but the display showed the charge depleted. Dale slid the phone into his shirt pocket and joined the three deputies on the stoop. He was cold and shivering without a jacket.
The kitchen was just as he and Michelle had left it after dinner—dishes rinsed but piled on the counter, the apple pie cold next to the empty coffee cups. Dale remembered that Michelle had turned off the coffeemaker before they had gone upstairs.
Deputy Presser stepped over to the stove and pulled the Savage over-and-under shotgun from where it had been propped against the wall. He broke it open, removed the unfired.410 cartridge, and raised his eyebrows while looking at Dale.
“I kept the gun loaded because of the dogs,” said Dale.
“So you’d seen them dogs before,” said Deputy Reiss from where he stood looking into the empty dining room.
“I told you both that I’d seen the dogs before. Just never so. . . big.”
Deputies Presser and Reiss exchanged glances. Dale noticed that Presser had slipped the shotgun cartridge in his jacket pocket. He handed the weapon to Deputy Taylor, who remained standing by the outside door.
“I’m freezing,” said Dale. “I’m going to go downstairs to get a sweater.”
“We’ll come with you,” said Deputy Presser. To Taylor, he said, “Larry, you look in the rooms up here.”
The basement was, as always, warmer than the upstairs. Dale pulled a heavy wool sweater from his stack of clothes near the bed and slipped it over his head while the two deputies looked around the room, shining their flashlights behind the furnace and peering into the empty coal bin. Michelle was not hiding anywhere.
Upstairs again, Deputy Taylor reported that there was nothing on the first floor. Presser nodded and stepped into Dale’s study. “What’s that mean?” asked the deputy, pointing his heavy flashlight at the IBM ThinkPad’s screen.
The message on the otherwise dark screen read,>Hrot-garmr. Si-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. Wargus sit.
“Is that German?” asked Deputy Presser.
“I’m a writer,” said Dale. He was stalling for time and trying to translate the message himself. He had never seen it before.
“I asked you if it was German or something.”
Dale shook his head. “Just double-talk. I’m writing a science fiction novel, and I’m trying to get the sound of some alien’s speech.”
“Like Klingon, you mean,” offered Deputy Reiss from the hall.
“Right,” said Dale.
“Shut up, Dick,” said Deputy Presser. The deputy walked out into the hall, leaving Dale to continue staring at the screen. If any of the deputies read Old English—a long shot, Dale knew—he might be in trouble. But as far as he could tell, only the first and last parts of the message were in Old English. “Hrot-garmr” translated as fire, but literally meant “howling dog,” as in the howling funeral pyre they built for Beowulf’s or Brynhild’s funeral in the old epics. “Wargus sit” translated into “he shall be a warg”—that word again. “Warg” meant an outlaw who had literally become a wolf in the eyes of his comrades, a worrier of corpses, someone who, like Indo-European werewolves, deserved to be strangled.
“Mr. Stewart? What’s upstairs?”
Dale came out into the crowded hall and looked up to where Deputy Presser stood five steps up the staircase. “Nothing’s up there,” said Dale. “It’s been sealed off for years. I just took the weather plastic down a few weeks ago. It’s empty.” He shut up, realizing that he was babbling. His heart pounded in syncopation with his throbbing headache.
“Mind if I take a look?” asked Deputy Presser. Without waiting for an answer, the deputy switched on his flashlight and loudly climbed the stairs. Deputy Reiss followed. Taylor went back into the kitchen, still carrying Dale’s empty over-and-under. Dale hesitated a few seconds and then went up the stairs.
Both men were in the front bedroom. One of the candles on the bedside table had burned out in its own pool of wax, but the other one was still burning. The blanket and the quilt on the bed were still mussed from when Michelle tossed them back as she got up to leave just. . . My God, thought Dale. . . just hours earlier. It seemed like days.
Deputy Presser lifted the quilt with his long flashlight and looked at Dale for an explanation. Dale met his gaze and stayed silent.
The three looked in the other room—dark and empty except for the child-sized rocking chair still in the middle of the room—and then clumped downstairs to the kitchen again.
“Are you going to search for her outside?” asked Dale. His throat felt raw and his head pounded worse than ever.
“Yeah,” said Deputy Presser. “In the morning. Deputy Taylor here’ll stay with you until we get back.”
“To hell with waiting until morning,” said Dale. Someone had brought his flashlight inside from where it had fallen during the dog attack and set it on the counter. Dale tried it. It worked. “I’m going to search the fields and outbuildings now.”
Deputy Presser shrugged. “Larry,” he said, talking to Taylor, “you stay with him here at the farm until we get back. If Mr. Stewart goes looking, you stay near your car radio in case we need to get in touch. If he don’t come back in an hour, you radio dispatch. You got that?”
“But Brian, it’s cold and dark out there as a. . .”
“You do what I say.” Presser looked at Dale. “We’ll be back sometime in the morning. Mr. Stewart, I suggest you get some sleep rather than wander around the farm in the dark, but Larry’ll be here in case you need help.”
“I don’t need for Deputy Taylor to stay,” said Dale. “But I’ll need my shotgun.”
Presser took the weapon from Taylor. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said with absolutely no tone of regret. “We’re going to have to keep this at the sheriff’s office for a while. Just in case.”
“Just in case of what?” said Dale, truly mystified.
The deputy looked Dale hard in the eye. “You say there’s a woman missing here. You say dogs got her. Well, if a woman’s really missing, maybe something other than dogs got at her. We may need this shotgun for tests.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Dale.
Presser gestured for Deputy Reiss to follow him, motioned for Deputy Taylor to stay where he was, and he and Reiss went out to their car and drove off. Dale glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes after 4:00A.M. —still three hours until the first pale hint of sunrise.
Dale pulled on his winter peacoat, which was hanging on a hook by the door, switched on the flashlight, and went outside.
You shouldn’t ought to go off alone,” shouted Deputy Taylor from the circle of light on the stoop.
“Come with me, then,” called Dale, not turning, walking toward the first outbuilding.
“I gotta stay near the car radio!”
Dale paid no further attention to the deputy. At the edge of the muddy turnaround, he whisked his flashlight beam through the frozen weeds, stabbed it behind the fences, swept it around the outside of the chicken coop. Nothing. Dale slammed the frozen door to the coop open and peered inside, moving the light from walls to nests to floor. For a second it looked as if someone had piled a dozen small, dark-metal coffins in the coop, but then Dale remembered moving Mr. McBride’s punch-card learning machines out here. Dark stains were everywhere, but they were the old, dried, faded stains. A fox had gotten into the coop when there had been chickens here, he had told Michelle. Or a dog.