"Lewis doesn't chase after little girls."
"Girls in their twenties, then."
"No. I wouldn't."
"There. I'm right. You wouldn't have any sex life at all, like your precious partner Sears." She folded back the sheets and blankets on her side of the bed, and got out. "I'll shower first," she said. Stella demanded a long time by herself in the bathroom every morning. She put on her long white-gray robe and looked as if she were about to tell someone to sack Troy. "But I'll tell you what you should do. You should call Sears right now and tell him about that awful dream. You won't get anywhere if you won't at least talk about it. If I know you and Sears, you two can go for weeks at a time without saying anything personal to each other. That's dreadful. What in the world do you talk about, anyhow?"
"Talk about?" Ricky asked, a little taken aback. "We talk about law."
"Oh, law," Stella said, and marched off toward the bathroom.
When she returned nearly thirty minutes later he was sitting up in bed looking confused. The pouches beneath his eyes were larger than usual. "The paper isn't here yet," he said. "I went downstairs and looked."
"Of course it isn't here," Stella said, dropping a towel and a box of tissues on the bed, and turned away again to go into the dressing room. "What time do you think it is?"
"What time? Why, what time is it? My watch is on the table."
"It's just past seven."
"Seven?" They normally did not get up until eight, and Ricky usually dawdled around the house until nine-thirty before leaving for the office on Wheat Row. Though neither he nor Sears admitted it, there was no longer much work for them; old clients dropped in from time to time, there were a few complicated lawsuits which looked to drag on through the next decade, there was always a will or two or a tax problem to clarify, but they could have stayed home two days of every week without anybody noticing. Alone in his part of the office suite, Ricky lately had been rereading Donald Wanderley's second book, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he wanted its author in Milburn. "What are we doing up?"
"You woke us up with your screaming, if I have to remind you," Stella called from the dressing room. "You were having problems with a monster that was trying to eat you, remember?"
"Um," Ricky said. "I thought it looked dark outside."
"Don't be evasive," Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. "When you start to scream in your sleep, it's time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won't go to a doctor-"
"I won't go to a head doctor, anyhow," Ricky said. "My mind is in good working order."
"So I said. But since you won't consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don't like to see you eating yourself up." With that, she left for the downstairs.
Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling-simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears's phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn't have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.
"It's Ricky, Sears."
Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. "Ricky, thank God," he said. "You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?"
"Give me fifteen minutes," Ricky said. "What happened?" And then, thinking of his dream, "Did anybody die?"
"Why do you ask that?" Sears said in a different, sharper voice.
"No reason. I'll tell you later. I take it we're not going to Wheat Row."
"No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there-he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?"
"Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?"
Sears was impatient. "Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky."
5
While Ricky hurried into a scalding shower, Lewis Benedikt was jogging on a path through the woods. He did this every morning, jogging a regular two miles before making breakfast for himself and whatever young lady might have spent the night at his house. Today, as always after Chowder Society nights and far oftener than his friends imagined, there was no young lady, and Lewis was pushing himself harder than usual. The night before he'd had the worst nightmare of his life; its effects still clung to him, and he thought that a good run would blow them away-where another man would write in a diary or confide in his mistress or have a drink, Lewis exercised. So now, in a blue running suit and Adidas shoes, he puffed his way along the path through his woods.
Lewis's property had included both woods and pasture along with the stone farmhouse he had cherished from the moment he had seen it. It was like a fortress with shutters, a huge building constructed at the start of the century by a rich gentleman farmer who liked the look of the castles in the illustrated novels by Sir Walter Scott admired by his wife. Lewis neither knew nor cared about Sir Walter, but years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage. When he had decided to sell his hotel to the chain which had been offering increasing amounts of money for it over the six preceding years, he had enough money left after taxes to buy the only house in or near Milburn which would truly have satisfied him, and enough to furnish it as he wished. The paneling, guns and pikestaffs did not always please his female guests. (Stella Hawthorne, who had spent three adventurous afternoons at Lewis's farm shortly after his return, had said she'd never been had in an officers' mess before.) He'd sold the pasture land as soon as he could, but kept the woods because he liked the idea of owning them.
Jogging through them, he always saw something new which quickened his sense of life: one day a pocket of snowdrops and monkshoods in a hollow beside the stream, the next a red-winged blackbird as big as a cat peering wild-eyed at him from the branches of a maple. But today he was not looking, he was simply running along the snowy path, wishing that whatever was going on would stop. Maybe this young Wanderley could set things right again: judging by his book, he had been to a few dark places himself. Maybe John was right, and Edward's nephew would at least be able to figure out what was happening to the four of them. It could not just be guilt, after all this time. The Eva Galli business had happened so long ago that it had concerned five different men in a different country: if you looked at the land and compared it to what it was in the twenties, you'd never think it was the same place. Even his woods were second growth, though he liked to pretend that they were not.
Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them-they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch 'n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.