Dale shrugged. “I’d like to go into Oak Hill sometime this week to get some provisions,” he said, amusing himself at the use of the word “provisions.” Pretty soon he’d be talking like one of his mountain man characters.
“That’d be fine,” said Sheriff McKown. “I trust that you’ll be coming back here until we get all of this other stuff cleared up.”
“Does all this other stuff include the return of my property, Sheriff? The over-and-under, I mean.”
McKown rubbed his chin. “I think we’d better hang on to that weapon until we find those boys, Professor Stewart.” The small man hesitated a moment. “Have you been taking the Prozac?”
“Yes,” lied Dale.
“The other prescription stuff too?”
“I haven’t had to,” Dale said. “I’ve been sleeping like a baby.” Like the dead.
“Have you talked to this Dr. Williams in Missoula again?”
“I haven’t been away from The. . . from the farm,” said Dale. “No phone.”
“Well, maybe you can talk to her when you come into Oak Hill.”
“Maybe,” agreed Dale.
When the sheriff got back in his vehicle, Dale leaned over and tapped on the driver’s-side window. The glass whined down. “Sheriff,” said Dale, “are you and your deputies going to be checking on me every day?”
“Well, we’re concerned about you, sir. And there’s this outstanding issue of the false report.”
Dale said nothing. Snow was falling gently on his bare head and eyelashes.
“But why don’t you give me a call when you’re in Oak Hill this week, just tell us when you’re heading back here. Then we’ll drop by sometime later in the week and make sure everything’s all right here.” When Dale just nodded, McKown said, “Well, if I don’t see you before Tuesday, you have a Happy New Year, Professor Stewart.”
Dale stood back and watched as the sheriff’s car turned around in the quickly falling snow and headed down the snowy lane. He noticed that the car’s wheels rolled over the fresh paw prints in the snow as the sheriff drove away.
That afternoon Dale changed his mind about buying plastic sheeting for the second floor and nailed up two sheets to cover the opening. The thin cotton did almost nothing to keep the cold air from flowing down the staircase, but the barrier offered some psychological relief.
Dale worked on his novel all the rest of that afternoon and evening, forgetting to eat, forgetting to pause even to go to the bathroom. The house grew quite cold as night approached, but Dale was lost in the hot summer days of his childhood and did not notice. He was almost three hundred pages into the novel by then, and although no distinct plot had emerged, a tapestry had been woven of leafy summer days, of the Bike Patrol kids wandering free around Elm Haven and the surrounding fields and woods during the long summer days and evenings, of endless hardball games on the dusty high school ball field and wild games of hide-and-seek in the deep woods near the Calvary Cemetery. Dale wrote about the Bootleggers’ Cave—not deciding whether his band of friends would find it or not—and he wrote about friendship itself, about the friendship of eleven-year-old boys in those distant, intense days of dying innocence.
When he looked up from the ThinkPad, it was after midnight. His computer and desk lamp were the only lights on in the house. A cold draft curled through the Old Man’s study. Dale saved his book to hard disk and floppy disk, checked DOS for any phantom messages—there were none—and walked through the dark house to the kitchen to make some soup before turning in.
“Dale.” The whisper was so soft as to be almost indistinguishable from the hiss of the hot water heater or the rough purr of the furnace waiting to light again. “Dale.” It was coming from the top of the darkened staircase.
No, not darkened. There was a light on the second floor, up there behind the taut, white wall of sheet. Seeking out no weapon, not even thinking about finding the baseball bat or crowbar, Dale climbed the cold stairs.
The light was only a dim glow from the front bedroom. The candle again. A shadow moved between the bedroom door and the wall of translucent white sheet. Dale watched as the center of the sheet seemed to ripple in a stronger breeze, then bulged ever so slightly outward. He moved to the top step and leaned closer. Six inches from his face, the sheet took on the definite impression of a nose, a brow, eye sockets, full lips.
Michelle or Clare?
Before he could find a resemblance, the bulge receded, but another disturbance moved the thin cotton toward him lower down. Three ripples, then five. Fingers. Dale looked down and could see the perfect shape of a woman’s hand, palm toward him, fingers straining against the sheet. He waited for the sheet to rip free of the nails. When it did not, he moved his own left hand to within an inch of that slowly moving white hand in the cloth. Less than an inch. His fingertips were millimeters away from touching the pressing fingertips through the sheet.
“No,” whispered Dale. He turned and went slowly downstairs. When he looked up the staircase again, the glow was gone and the sheet was as flat and vertical as the edge of some ageless glacier. He went into the kitchen and made some tomato soup, using the last of his milk to mix half-and-half with water in the can just as his mother had shown him when he was ten years old.
He had just dozed off in the basement, listening to the big band music as usual, when a sudden silence made him snap awake.
Dale sat up on the edge of Duane’s old bed. The radio console had gone dark. Had he shut it off? He didn’t remember doing so. But the reading lamp was still on, so the fuse hadn’t blown. Suddenly he felt a slight chill. “Aw, no,” he whispered to the empty basement.
Sliding out from under the quilt, setting the book of Proust he’d been reading safely on a wine-crate bookcase, Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall.
The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he’d listened to over the past two months. All empty.
He went back and sat on the edge of the bed. “This,” he said to no one in particular, “is just plain stupid.”
Suspecting on some deep level that this would be the last night he would ever sleep in Duane McBride’s home, Dale slid back under the quilt and listened to the wind rise outside in the dark.
TWENTY-SIX
THE sunrise of the last day of the old year, the old century, and the old millennium did not dawn; it seeped in like an absentminded spill of sick light, its stain of lighter gray blotting slowly beneath a shroud of darker gray. Dale watched it from the kitchen where he had been since 5:00A.M., drinking coffee and looking out the small windows, watching the snow fall just beyond the frosted panes and sensing the movement of black hounds circling farther out.
The snow was already ten inches deep, and it continued to fall. The stunted trees along the long lane had become as fanciful as twisted bonsai inked into some Japanese watercolor, snow-laden, abstracted. The outbuildings no sooner appeared in the weak morning light than they tried to disappear behind accumulating drifts and blowing snow. Even the white Land Cruiser was up to its black running boards in snow and wore rounded cornices and caps on its hood and windshield.
Dale checked his provisions—smiling again at the word—and decided that he had enough canned goods and bread to last for a few days. A part of him knew that he would not need a few days’ worth of food, but he worked at ignoring that voice.
It was a good day to write and Dale wrote, conjuring up summer days while winter pressed cold and flat against the study’s single-paned glass. When he took a break for a late lunch sometime before 3:00P.M., the daylight was already ebbing, draining out of the day like gray water out of a sink. Dale returned to the computer but could not concentrate on the passage in the scene in the chapter that had seemed so alive only moments earlier. He shut down Windows and stared at the DOS screen.