Tina wanted to walk through the diner and grab each of the customers by the throat, shake and threaten each of them, until she discovered who had rigged the jukebox. At the same time, she knew this wasn’t a rational thought; the explanation, whatever it might be, was not that simple. No one here had rigged the machine. Only a moment ago, she had envied these people for the very ordinariness of their lives. It was ludicrous to suspect any of them of being employed by the secret organization that had blown up her house. Ludicrous. Paranoid. They were just ordinary people in a roadside restaurant, having dinner.
Elliot shook the jukebox again, but this time to no avail.
The air grew colder still. Tina heard some of the customers commenting on it.
Elliot shook the machine harder than he had done the last time, then harder still, but it continued to repeat the two-word message in the voice of the country singer, as if an invisible hand were holding the pick-up stylus or laser-disc reader firmly in place.
The white-haired cashier came out from behind the counter. “I’ll take care of it, folks.” He called to one of the waitresses: “Jenny, check the thermostat. We’re supposed to have heat in here tonight, not air-conditioning.”
Elliot stepped out of the way as the old man approached.
Although no one was touching the jukebox, the volume increased, and the two words boomed through the diner, thundered, vibrated in the windows, and rattled silverware on the tables.
Some people winced and put their hands over their ears.
The old man had to shout to be heard above the explosive voices on the jukebox. “There’s a button on the back to reject the record.”
Tina wasn’t able to cover her ears; her arms hung straight down at her sides, frozen, rigid, hands fisted, and she couldn’t find the will or the strength to lift them. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound.
Colder, colder.
She became aware of the familiar, spiritlike presence that had been in Angela’s office when the computer had begun to operate by itself. She had the same feeling of being watched that she’d had in the parking lot a short while ago.
The old man crouched beside the machine, reached behind it, found the button. He pushed it several times.
“Have to unplug it!” the old man said.
The volume increased again. The two words blasted out of the speakers in all corners of the diner with such incredible, bone-jarring force that it was difficult to believe that the machine had been built with the capability of pouring out sound with this excessive, unnerving power.
Elliot pulled the jukebox from the wall so the old man could reach the cord.
In that instant Tina realized she had nothing to fear from the presence that lay behind this eerie manifestation. It meant her no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a flash of understanding she saw through to the heart of the mystery. Her hands, which had been curled into tight fists, came open once more. The tension went out of her neck and shoulder muscles. Her heartbeat became less like the pounding of a jackhammer, but it still did not settle into a normal rhythm; now it was affected by excitement rather than terror. If she tried to scream now, she would be able to do so, but she no longer wanted to scream.
As the white-haired cashier grasped the plug in his arthritis-gnarled hands and wiggled it back and forth in the wall socket, trying to free it, Tina almost told him to stop. She wanted to see what would happen next if no one interfered with the presence that had taken control of the jukebox. But before she could think of a way to phrase her odd request, the old man succeeded in unplugging the machine.
Following the monotonous, earsplitting repetition of that two-word message, the silence was stunning.
After a second of surprised relief, everyone in the diner applauded the old fellow.
Jenny, the waitress, called to him from behind the counter. “Hey, Al, I didn’t touch the thermostat. It says the heat’s on and set at seventy. You better take a look at it.”
“You must have done something to it,” Al said. “It’s getting warm in here again.”
“I didn’t touch it,” Jenny insisted.
Al didn’t believe her, but Tina did.
Elliot turned away from the jukebox and looked at Tina with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. God, yes! Better than I’ve been in a long time.”
He frowned, baffled by her smile.
“I know what it is. Elliot, I know exactly what it is! Come on,” she said excitedly. “Let’s go.”
He was confused by the change in her demeanor, but she didn’t want to explain things to him here in the diner. She opened the door and went outside.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The windstorm was still in progress, but it was not raging as fiercely as it had been when Elliot and Tina had watched it through the restaurant window. A brisk wind pushed across the city from the east. Laden with dust and with the powdery white sand that had been swept in from the desert, the air abraded their faces and had an unpleasant taste.
They put their heads down and scurried past the front of the diner, around the side, through the purple light under the single mercury-vapor lamp, and into the deep shadows behind the building.
In the Mercedes, in the darkness, with the doors locked, she said, “No wonder we haven’t been able to figure it out!”
“Why on earth are you so—”
“We’ve been looking at this all wrong—”
“—so bubbly when—”
“—approaching it ass-backwards. No wonder we haven’t been able to find a solution.”
“What are you talking about? Did you see what I saw in there? Did you hear the jukebox? I don’t see how that could have cheered you up. It made my blood run cold. It was weird.”
“Listen,” she said excitedly, “we thought someone was sending me messages about Danny being alive just to rub my face in the fact that he was actually dead — or to let me know, in a roundabout fashion, that the way he died wasn’t anything like what I’d been told. But those messages haven’t been coming from a sadist. And they haven’t been coming from someone who wants to expose the true story of the Sierra accident. They aren’t being sent by a total stranger or by Michael. They are exactly what they appear to be!”
Confused, he said, “And to your way of thinking, what do they appear to be?”
“They’re cries for help.”
“What?”
“They’re coming from Danny!”
Elliot stared at her with consternation and with pity, his dark eyes reflecting a distant light. “What’re you saying — that Danny reached out to you from the grave to cause that excitement in the restaurant? Tina, you really don’t think his ghost was haunting a jukebox?”
“No, no, no. I’m saying Danny isn’t dead.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
“My Danny is alive! I’m sure of it.”
“We’ve already been through this argument, and we rejected it,” he reminded her.
“We were wrong. Jaborski, Lincoln, and all the other boys might have died in the Sierras, but Danny didn’t. I know it. I sense it. It’s like… a revelation… almost like a vision. Maybe there was an accident, but it wasn’t like anything we were told. It was something very different, something exceedingly strange.”