She removed a shotgun from the rack in the cabinet and put it on the desk. "Remington. Twenty-gauge. Pump action. Nice gun. So tell me something — how could he be a writer if it's supposed to be all about dealing with truth? He's only about lies and deceit. Is he a good writer?"
"Everyone says he is."
She took another shotgun from the cabinet and put it on the desk beside the first weapon. "Remington too. My dad's partial to the brand. Twelve-gauge. Pretty walnut stock, isn't it? I didn't ask you what everyone else says. What do you think? Is he any good as a novelist — in this future of yours?"
"He's successful."
"So what. Doesn't necessarily mean he's good."
"He's won a lot of awards, and I've always pretended to think he's good. But… I've really never felt he was much good at all."
Crouching, pulling open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, quickly pawing through the contents, she said, "So tonight you take your future back — and you will be good."
In one corner stood a gray metal box the size of a briefcase. It was ticking.
"What's that thing in the corner?" Joey asked.
"It monitors carbon monoxide and other toxic gases seeping up from the mine fires. There's one in the basement. This room isn't over the basement, it's an add-on, so it has a monitor of its own."
"An alarm goes off?"
"Yeah, if there's too many fumes." In the drawer she found two boxes of ammunition. She put them on the desk. "Every house in Coal Valley was equipped with them years ago."
"It's like living on a bomb."
"Yeah. But with a long, slow fuse."
"Why haven't you moved out?"
"Bureaucrats. Paperwork. Processing delays. If you move out before the government has the papers ready to sign, then they declare the house abandoned, a public danger, and they aren't willing to pay as much for it. You have to live here, take the risk, let it happen at their pace if you want to get a halfway fair price."
Opening one of the boxes of shells as Celeste opened the other, Joey said, "You know how to use these guns?"
"I've been going skeet-shooting and hunting with my dad since I was thirteen."
"You don't seem like a hunter to me," he said as he loaded the 20-gauge.
"Never killed anything. Always aim to miss."
"Your dad never noticed that?"
"Funny thing is — whether it's shotguns or rifles, whether it's small game or deer, he always aims to miss too. Though he doesn't think I know it."
"Then what's the point?"
As she finished loading the 12-gauge, she smiled with affection at the thought of her father. "He likes just being in the woods, walking in the woods on a crisp morning, the clean smell of the pines — and having some private time with me. He's never said, but I've always sensed he would've liked a son. Mom had complications with me, couldn't carry another baby. So I've always tried to give Dad a little of the son stuff. He thinks I'm a real tomboy."
"You're amazing," he said.
Hastily dropping spare shells into the various pockets of her black raincoat, she said, "I'm only what I'm here to be."
The strangeness of that statement harked back to other enigmatic things that she had said earlier in the night. He met her eyes, and once again he saw those mysterious depths, which seemed too profound for her years, too deep to be plumbed. She was the most interesting girl that he had ever known, and he hoped that she saw something appealing in his eyes.
As Joey finished stuffing spare shells into the pockets of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, Celeste said, "Do you think Beverly is the first?"
"The first?"
"That he's ever killed."
"I hope so… but I don't know."
"I think there've been others," she said solemnly.
"After that night, after Beverly, when I let him go… I know there must've been others. That's why he was a gypsy. Poet of the highway, my ass. He liked the life of a drifter 'cause he could keep moving through one police jurisdiction after another. Hell, I never realized it before, didn't want to realize it, but it's the classic sociopathic pattern
the loner on the road, the outsider, a stranger everywhere he goes, the next thing to invisible. Easier for a man like that to get caught if the bodies keep piling up in the same place. P.J.'s brilliance was to make a profession out of drifting, to become rich and famous for it, to have the unstructured lifestyle of a rootless serial killer but with the perfect cover — a respectable occupation that all but required rootlessness, and a reputation for writing uplifting stories about love and courage and compassion."
"But all that's in the future, as far as I'm concerned," Celeste said. "Maybe my future, our future. Or maybe only one possible future. I don't know how that works — or that it'll even help to think about it."
Joey had a bitter taste in his mouth — as though biting into a hard truth could produce a flavor as acrid as chewing on dry aspirin. "Whether it was one possible future or the only future, I still have to carry some of the guilt for all those he killed after Beverly, because could've put an end to it that night."
"Which is why you're here now, tonight, with me. To undo it all, Not just to save me but everyone who came after… and to save yourself." She picked up the 12-gauge and chambered a shell. "But what I meant was that I think he's killed before Beverly. He was just too cool with you, Joey, too smooth with that story about her running in front of his car up on Pine Ridge. If she'd been his first, he'd have been easily rattled. When you opened that trunk and found her, he'd have been more shaken. The way he handled you — he's used to carting dead women around in his car, looking for a safe place to dump them. He's had a lot of time to think about what he'd do if anyone ever caught him with a body before he was able to dispose of it."
Joey suspected that she was right about this, just as she was right about the weather not being responsible for the dead telephone.
No wonder he had reacted with blind panic in Henry Kadinska's office when the attorney revealed the terms of his father's last will and testament. The money in the estate had originally come from P.J. It was blood money in more ways than one, as tainted as Judas's thirty pieces of silver. Cash accepted from the devil himself could have been no less clean.
He chambered a shell in his shotgun. "Let's go."
OUTSIDE, THE SLEET STORM HAD PASSED, AND RAIN WAS FALLING ONCE more. The brittle ice on the sidewalks and in the streets was swiftly melting into slush.
Joey had been wet and cold all night. In fact, he had lived in a perpetual chill for twenty years. He was used to it.
Halfway along the front walk, he saw that the hood was standing open on the Mustang. By the time he got to the car, Celeste was shining the flashlight into the engine compartment. The distributor cap was gone.
"P.J.," Joey said. "Having his fun."
"Fun."
"To him it's all fun."
"I think he's watching us right now."
Joey surveyed the nearby abandoned houses, the wind-stirred trees between them: south to the end of the next block where the street terminated and the forested hills began, north one block to the main drag through town.
"He's right here somewhere," she said uneasily.
Joey agreed, but in the tumult of wind and rain, his brother's presence was even less easily detected than a reluctant spirit at a seance.
"Okay," he said, "so we're on foot. No big deal. It's a small town anyway. Who's closer — the Dolans or the Bimmers?"
"John and Beth Bimmer."