The ride home was quick and easy, though he almost creamed another fool riding a lightless bike after he got off the freeway. He leaned on the horn. The noise seemed all the louder for being so unusual now. He hoped it made the jerk on the bicycle piss his pants.
Kelly dropped her bags in the foyer and ran rejoicing to the bathroom. The water in the shower stall started to splash. Playboy recoiled from the bags. They were large and unfamiliar, which might mean they were going to kill him. But, when they didn’t jump up and start ripping the cat limb from limb, he cautiously approached and sniffed them to find out where they’d been. By the way he sniffed and sniffed, they’d been some interesting places.
The water stopped. The blow-dryer buzzed. Kelly came out wearing different clothes and a blissful expression. “God, that was great!” she said. “Now I want to see Deborah.”
“I’ll get her.” Colin went upstairs to his daughter’s room. He scooped her out of bed.
“Daddy?” she muttered. “What’s going on?” Even as he carried her down to the front room, she wasn’t more than a quarter awake.
“Who’s that?” he said. One of her eyes opened just enough to see who it was. When she did, both eyes opened—wide, wider, widest.
“Mommy!” she squealed, and started trying to run even though Colin was still holding her. He set her down so she’d quit kicking his ribs. She squealed again while she was charging Kelly. Playboy thought she might be charging him and flew up the stairs. Deborah did her best to tackle her mother. She might be outweighed four to one, but she had momentum and enthusiasm on her side.
“Hello, sweetie!” Kelly picked her up and hung on to her and kissed her. Right that minute, watching them, Colin was as happy as he’d been in his whole life. He gave Marshall an extra fifty when his son headed back to Janine’s place.
“Hey, too much,” Marshall said. He was a solid kid—not that he was such a kid any more.
“Don’t worry about it,” Colin told him. “It’s all good tonight.”
“Hey,” Marshall said again, and then, “Thanks.” He rolled his bike out the door and pedaled off into the night. He had front and rear lights—Colin checked to make sure.
“You didn’t come back,” Deborah was saying to Kelly. “You didn’t come back and you didn’t come back and you didn’t come back and—”
“I couldn’t come back,” Kelly broke in when she saw that would go on for some time. “Things in Chicago stopped working, like they do here when the power goes out. Only they couldn’t start it up again. There’s a whole big part of the country where the power doesn’t want to start back up. And it’s cold back there, too.”
“It gets cold here,” Deborah said. “It’s cold now.”
“Not when I’ve got my arms around you,” Kelly said, and Deborah giggled. “But I mean cold, cold, cold, way colder than it ever gets here.”
“Yuck,” Deborah said, which was just what Colin was also thinking.
Kelly nodded. “Yuck is right. You know what a pain it is when the power goes off. And when it’s cold like that and the power goes off, it’s even worse.”
“People turn into ice cubes.” Deborah thought it was funny, because she didn’t know it was real.
Colin knew too well it was. Not a whole lot of video was coming out of the frozen Northeast and Upper Midwest. By the nature of things, you had to bring your own power supply with you to shoot video when you wanted to do that in places where it was out. Then you needed either a satellite hookup or time to get your tape to some place that did have power so you could broadcast. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people had already frozen to death. More would, till things got straightened out. If things got straightened out.
Playboy came back downstairs. He stalked over to Kelly and rubbed against her, as if to admit he remembered her. Then he flopped at her feet, rolled over onto his back, and started to purr, as if to admit he was glad he remembered her. And well he might have been. She fed him and gave him water and changed his catbox more than anyone else. Cats were honest about remembering and appreciating things like that. From everything Colin had seen, they were a hell of a lot more honest about it than people were.
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a gig in Greenville, up at the base of Moosehead Lake. That was more than twenty miles from Guilford: no laughing matter with the snow as high as LeBron James’ eye. Part of the deal was that the promoter had to lay on a sleigh to take the band both ways.
It wasn’t Jim Farrell’s sleigh. There were others up here. No: this one belonged to Doug Kincaid, Rob’s father-in-law. Rob didn’t know what kind of arrangement Doug had made with the fellow who’d set up the concert. Whatever it was, he would have bet Doug hadn’t come out on the short end of it. Whatever Doug Kincaid did, he did well. He made a point—often an annoying point—of doing well.
Before the band set out, Lindsey told Rob, “Keep your hand in your pocket whenever you have anything to do with my dad. That way, you’ll make sure you come back with your wallet.”
“If he wants my wallet, he can have it,” Rob answered. “My license and the charge cards long since expired, and I hardly ever have cash in there—not that cash is worth a whole hell of a lot around here any which way.”
She gave him a wifely look. “Don’t be more difficult than you can help,” she said, which proved she had a fair handle on the character of the man she’d married.
Before the sleigh arrived, Justin Nachman said, “I want another look at your father-in-law’s lady friend. IIRC, that was one seriously hot babe.”
“You haven’t sent a text in years, but you still talk like one,” Charlie Storer said.
Rob had more things on his mind than dialectical immaterialism. “Try not to say that where the guy doing the driving can hear you, okay?” he told Justin. “I don’t know what kind of grief Doug can give you if he gets pissed off, and I don’t want to find out. I don’t think you do, either.”
“Hey, I’m cool,” Justin said. “If ‘Don’t get the locals mad at you’ isn’t the number one mantra for a band on the road, it oughta be.”
“Okus-dokus. You got that one right,” Rob said.
“‘Okus-dokus’?” Biff Thorvald dug a finger into his ear, as if to say he couldn’t have heard what he thought he’d heard.
Slightly shamefaced, Rob answered, “I got it out of one of the books in the tower at the Mansion Inn. I’ve been looking for a place where I could throw it in.”
“Yeah, well, now you can fuckin’-A throw it out again,” Biff said. After a little thought—it didn’t take much—Rob decided that was a good idea.
He hadn’t gone north and east of Guilford since the last time he hunted in this direction. Pretty soon, the sleigh took him farther than he’d walked. He stared at the unfamiliar scenery. It didn’t look much different from what he saw around his home town, but he didn’t know what came next before it came. That felt distinctly odd.
When he said as much, Justin nodded. “Yeah. I was thinking the same thing,” he agreed. “Pretty weird.”
“We used to throw shit in the vans and drive for three states without even thinking about it,” Rob said wonderingly. “Half the time, we didn’t even bother looking out the window. It was just, like, the road. What we had to go on till we got to where shit mattered again.”
“That world is dead as shoe leather,” Justin said. Rob nodded and smiled to himself at the same time. Justin had had the room under the tower at Dick Barber’s domain. No doubt he’d read some of the books on the shelves up there, too. Rob was pretty sure he knew which one that figure of speech came from.