>If the police know there is an old boyfriend. Why would Clare tell anyone in her new life at Princeton about you, Dale? What did she call you that time you thought she was joking—“My first foray into the gray-haired set”? Why would she reveal that to anyone in her new life?
>My hair’s not that gray.
Dale made his loop, found no new words on the screen, read the exchange that was there, and laughed out loud in the dark house. “Jesus Christ, I’m certifiable.” He turned off the computer.
A soft voice said something indecipherable upstairs.
Dale got the flashlight and went up, leaning into the cold draft flowing down the staircase. There was a light. He hefted the bat, feeling his heart pound faster in his chest but also feeling no real fear. Whatever was there was there.
The remaining candle in the front bedroom had been re-lighted. It flickered as he entered, and his shadow danced on the mildewed wallpaper.
“Michelle?” There was no answer. He smashed the candle with the baseball bat, the flame skittering across floorboards before dying, and then went downstairs using only his flashlight.
Outside a dog howled.
Dale turned on the kitchen light, found the yellow legal pad he kept on the counter, and started a shopping list for the morning:
plastic sheeting
nails
After a moment of thought, he added:
new shotgun and shells
A different dog howled somewhere in the dark farther to the west, out toward the barn. Dale checked the flimsy door locks, turned out the light, and went downstairs to the basement.
It was warmer there. He turned on the soft lamp near the bed, got into his pajamas, and crawled under the thick comforter. The sheets felt clean, the pillows soft. He tried to read from an open paperback— Swann’s Way, open to the “Swann in Love” section—but he was too sleepy to make sense of the words. The big console radio was whispering dance music, but Dale was too tired to get up and shut it off. Besides, the glow of the wide dial was reassuring in the dark.
The starlight was visible through the small, high windows near the ceiling. Occasionally a dark shape would occlude the stars, then another would glide by, but Dale did not notice. He snored while he slept.
This night is where my friend Dale passed the point of no return. What was going to happen here was going to happen. He knew that even as he slept. There was no going back.
Dale did not feel like an unintelligent character in a sloppily told tale. This was his life. Everything in the past year or two had seemed to lead him here—to this house, to these events, to this pending conclusion to all doubts. In an age when his generation sought to hide all reality behind simulation and feigned experience, Dale had to know what was real. What was memory and what was fantasy? And there remained the simple fact that despite everything, Dale did not believe in haunted houses or ghosts. This disbelief ran deep as marrow, and his belief in this disbelief was as stubborn as bone. Dale believed in mental illness and in schizophrenia and in the uncharted confusions of the mind, but not in ghosts.
More important to his decision to stay these last few days of his life at The Jolly Corner was his perception—was his understanding —that whatever was happening to him had to be resolved here. This cascade of insane events had come to him in the form of a coming to life of something vital, a stirring of energies, a preparation for birth. Or perhaps a preparation for death. Either way, Dale believed, labor had been induced in this cold farmhouse out in the ass end of Illinois, and some rough beast was slouching toward The Jolly Corner either to be born or to die.
And there was the final fact that Dale knew that he could not go home now—could not show up at Anne’s and Mab’s and Katie’s door in this shape—could not return to the shreds and tatters of his former life in Missoula without this thing being resolved, these questions answered.
Once, when talking with Clare during a long hike in Glacier Park, he had asked her what she thought the topography of a human life might look like. She suggested that it was an inverted cone measured out in units of potential—infinite at the top, zero at the bottom—and that the decreasing radials around the diminishing outer shell of the cone could be measured in accelerating time as one grew closer to old age, death, dissolution. Dale had thought this a tad pessimistic. He had suggested that perhaps a human life was a simple parabola in which one never knew when the apogee—the highest, most sublime point—had been achieved.
“Maybe this is your apogee,” Clare had said, gesturing to the pine forest and the lake and the distant peaks and to herself. Somewhere nearby in the trees a Clark’s nutcracker had scolded them.
“Not yours?” he said, pausing to hitch up the chafing backpack straps.
“Definitely not mine,” Clare said in that offhand tone of casual cruelty that somehow seemed strangely attractive to him then—cosmopolitan, perhaps.
But Dale had wondered about that topography of a lifetime later, both before and after Clare and the sure grasp of his sanity had left him. Recently, it had amused him to think that the ribbon of his life might be twisted in a mad Möbius loop, curling back on and through itself, inside becoming outside, losing entire dimensions even while acquiring some impossible continuity.
Christmas had been on a Tuesday this year. Dale half expected to be arrested or dragged off to the loony bin by the weekend, but although Deputy Presser showed up to check on him—to make sure that he hadn’t left—on Saturday and Sheriff McKown came by late on Sunday, no one grabbed him and clasped him in handcuffs or strapped him into a straitjacket.
Both times Dale saw a sheriff’s car coming up the snowy drive, he was sure it was C.J. Congden. What would he do if it was? He had no idea. Each time the car drew close enough to be identified, Dale felt something like a sense of disappointment that it wasn’t Congden.
“How are you doing out here, Professor?” asked Sheriff McKown on Sunday afternoon. Dale had just been leaving for a walk, and the sheriff walked down to where Dale had paused near the large gasoline tank behind the generator shed. “Everything all right?” asked the sheriff.
Dale nodded.
“This amount of snow is something after all these warm, dry winters, huh?”
Dale asked, “Have you found the five skinheads?”
The sheriff had removed his Stetson and rubbed his fingers around the brim in a motion that reminded Dale of one of C.J. Congden’s habits. Perhaps all cops with cowboy hats did that. “Nope,” he said. “Their families haven’t heard from them, either. But there is one piece of interesting news.”
Dale waited.
“We have an old bachelor farmer who lives north of you who’s gone missing,” said McKown. “Bebe Larson. Him and his old Chevy Suburban disappeared on the day before Christmas Eve.”
“Do you think I killed him as well as the skinheads?” asked Dale.
McKown put his Stetson on slowly. “Actually, I was thinking that maybe Mr. Larson ran into your friends on County Six and they might have borrowed his truck and maybe him as well.”
“You think those boys are capable of kidnapping?” said Dale.
“I think Lester Bonheur is capable of anything,” McKown said flatly. “And the others are just along for the ride.”