“You don’t look like no clown,” Nummy assured him. “Clowns make people smile.”
“Did your grandma ever wear pants?”
“Sometimes she did.”
“Was she a fat old tub or did she waste away? Maybe I’d fit in her pants.”
“No, sir. You always felt like she was big, but then sometimes you’d look at her and you’d see how she was really tiny. And shorter than me.”
Mr. Lyss hadn’t been excitable for a while, but someone like him couldn’t stay calm for long. He moved back and forth in the kitchen, the way an animal sometimes got restless in a pen. He pointed at the clock on the wall. “You know what time it is, Peaches? Do you know the time? Can you even tell time?”
“I know the hour and the half. And ten minutes to each and from each. But I don’t like the middle ten minutes between the hour and the half. The middle ten is confusing.”
Shaking one fist at Nummy and then the other, Mr. Lyss said, “I’ll tell you what time it is, you bonehead mooncalf. It’s a quarter till too late. They’re going to be coming here to look for you, for us.” His tight hands flew open, grabbed Nummy’s sweatshirt, became fists again, and shook Nummy every which way while he shouted. “I need pants! I need a shirt, a sweater, some kind of jacket that doesn’t have a police patch on it! You know anywhere a skinny-assed reject like me can get himself clothes to fit?”
“Yes, sir,” Nummy said when Mr. Lyss stopped shaking him and threw him back against the kitchen table. “After his brain stroke, Poor Fred he lost a lot of his weight. He’s like a scarecrow.”
“Who? Fred who?” Mr. Lyss demanded, as though they’d never talked about Poor Fred before.
“Poor Fred LaPierre,” Nummy explained. “Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s husband next door.”
“The Trudy who hired you to murder him.”
“No, sir. She didn’t hire me. What she done was try to hire Mr. Bob Pine.”
Mr. Lyss pounded one fist into the open palm of his other hand, pounded and pounded while he talked. “Doesn’t sound like the generous kind of woman who’d give away some of her husband’s clothes to help a poor traveler down on his luck. Sounds like a bitch to me!”
“Like I told you, Mrs. Trudy LaPierre she’s gone, nobody knows where. They say she’s on the run, but what she done was take the car, so I think they’re wrong, and she’s driving. And Poor Fred he’s up in bear care gumming mush and half plastered.”
His face all red and his lips skinned back from his charcoal teeth, Mr. Lyss slammed both fists down on the table, slammed them again, slammed them again. Right then Mr. Lyss reminded Nummy of an angry baby, except he was old, and except he looked like he might kill somebody, which a baby never would.
When he stopped slamming his fists, Mr. Lyss said, “Do you ever make sense, you featherbrain oaf? I need pants! Look at the clock. Look at the clock!”
Mr. Lyss pulled back one bony fist like he was going to punch Nummy. Nummy closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands, but the punch didn’t come.
After a while, Mr. Lyss said in a little quieter voice, “What the hell are you trying to tell me?”
Nummy opened his eyes and peeked at the old man through spread fingers. Hesitantly, he lowered his hands.
He took a moment to get his thoughts in a row, and then he said, “Before she run off in the car, Mrs. Trudy LaPierre she breaked Poor Fred’s right arm and right leg with a fireplace poker. Then what she did is she got his false teeth and smashed them. Now Poor Fred he’s up in the Bear Street Care Home, his right side in a cast and eating only all softer kinds of food.”
“Poor Fred ought to be called Stupid Fred for marrying such a psychopath,” Mr. Lyss said. “And why do half the streets in this town have bear in their name?”
“There’s a bunch of bears in the general area,” Nummy explained.
“So what you’re telling me is that nobody’s home next door, at the LaPierre house. We could just go there and take some clothes.”
“Borrow some clothes,” Nummy said. “You don’t want to steal.”
“Of course, yes, and when I’m done with them, I’ll have them dry-cleaned and pressed, and I’ll return them in a pretty box with a thank-you note.”
“That’ll be nice,” Nummy said.
“Yes, it’ll be lovely. Now let’s get out of here before they show up on your doorstep and do to us what they did to the people at the jail.”
Nummy had tried to put out of his mind what had been done to the people in the next cell, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget the way you could sometimes forget Christmas was coming until people started putting up their decorations. When Mr. Lyss mentioned it, Nummy saw it all again in his mind so clear he almost needed to throw up.
They left by the back door. Nummy locked the house and put the key in its secret place under the mat, and they walked to the house next door, which was about fifty or sixty steps because both houses had some land. Grandmama always said no matter how pleasant your neighbors were, it was good to have some land, and in the case of Mrs. Trudy LaPierre it was, Grandmama said, double good.
The LaPierre house was one story. The back porch had a ramp instead of steps, so Poor Fred could get in and out of the house in his wheelchair.
Nummy checked under the doormat, but there wasn’t a key. That was all right, because Mr. Lyss had his six steel picks, and they were in his jacket pocket, not up his butt, so he set to work on the lock right away. Behind the house were only the yard and then the woods, so no one could see what they were doing. They were inside quick.
The house didn’t have any draperies because Mrs. Trudy LaPierre said they held dust and made her allergies worse. Instead there were white-painted wood shutters at every window, and because the slats were open only a little, the rooms were gloomy.
Grandmama said Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s allergies were no more real than her story about winning the Miss Idaho beauty pageant when she was eighteen, and why she had shutters was because with draperies she couldn’t as easily spy on neighbors with binoculars.
Nummy didn’t feel right being in someone else’s house when they weren’t home, but Mr. Lyss seemed comfortable. He switched on lights as needed and led the way into Poor Fred’s bedroom, which was different from Mrs. Trudy’s room.
Mr. Lyss was searching through bureau drawers for a sweater to borrow when outside in the street a car turned the corner fast and sharp, tires squealing, the engine loud as it raced past the house. Then another car turned the corner just as fast. Mr. Lyss went to a window that looked north, and opened the shutters wider. As one car’s brakes shrieked and then the other’s, he picked up binoculars from a nearby chair and brought them to his eyes.
Nummy wished he, too, had a place at the window until Mr. Lyss said, “Cops.” Then Nummy felt half sick and didn’t want to be near a window anymore.
“Two cars, four cops,” Mr. Lyss said. “Of course, the cars are just cars, but the cops are something a whole lot worse than cops. Two are going up the front steps, two going around to your back door. I’ll bet you thirty-eight dollars they find your hidden key.”
“Betting is wicked. What if they come here?”
“They won’t.”
“But what if they do?”
“Then we’re dead.”
chapter 32
Two city employees arrived in a panel truck full of materials and power tools to make the necessary modifications to the barn at the back of the Potter property.
The new Mayor Erskine Potter was overseeing preparations at the Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Roadhouse, where that evening Riders in the Sky Church would hold its once-a-month family social for the last time. Nancy and Ariel Potter opened the big barn doors, the panel truck drove inside, and they closed the doors behind it.
Everyone knew what needed to be done, and they set to work without discussion. Nancy and Ariel cut window-size squares from thick rolls of insulation and with double-stick tape adhered them to the glass. The men fo
llowed behind them, screwing inch-thick squares of soundboard over the windows.
The three horses in the stalls along the north wall were not troubled by the shriek of the power drill. They watched from over the half doors of their stalls, intrigued by the activity.
When all daylight was banished from the barn, illumination came solely from a dozen bare bulbs under copper shades that dangled on chains from the ceiling beams.
In two of the three empty stalls along the south side of the big room, the walls and doors were fortified with eighth-inch-thick interior steel plating fixed snugly in place with lag bolts. Simple hook-and-eye latches were changed out for two sturdy latch bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom of each door.
While the men replaced the locks on the outer barn doors, Ariel carried a small bag of apples to the horses in the north-side stalls. With a knife, she cut two of the apples in quarters and fed the pieces one at a time to Queenie, a handsome bay mare. She did the same with Valentine, another bay mare, and then cut three apples in quarters for the stallion.
Commander was a powerful beast, sorrel with a lighter mane and tail. As Ariel fed him the apples, the mares craned their necks over their stall doors to watch him eat, and they nickered softly as if with approval.
“We’ll be so fast, faster than the fastest wind,” she whispered to Commander.
He met her eyes as he crunched the apples. His teeth were large and square.
“We’ll never sleep,” she said, “we’ll run the hills, the fields, the forest paths.”
Commander’s nostrils flared, and he snorted. With one hoof, he pawed the stall floor.
His size appealed to her—so strong, so formidable.
As Commander finished the last piece of the third apple, Ariel said, “We’ll go where we want and chase them down, and nothing will be able to stop us.”
She reached up to stroke his forehead. With her fingers, she combed the pale forelock that cascaded over his poll.
“We’ll kill everything. We’ll kill them all,” she said. “We’ll kill every last one of them.”
chapter 33
How much they hated me.
Room 218. The boy in the bed. Bryce Walker pacing and restless.
How much they hated me.
If Bryce had been inclined to second-guess his suspicion that the atmosphere in the hospital had become downright eerie and that the medical personnel were markedly less professional than they had been only the previous night, his conversation with young Travis Ahern all but eliminated his doubt.
The two nurses standing over the boy’s bed, in the dark, saying nothing, attending to no nursing task, only watching him, watching and—in his words—hating him … The character of that incident was of such a piece with Bryce’s experiences during the morning that he and Travis at once became allies and conspirators.
If something singular was happening, if the air of threat was not imagined, he would be responsible for the boy in a crisis. He needed, therefore, to know what had led to his hospitalization.
According to the extensive notes on his chart and according to the young man himself, Travis Ahern was brought into the emergency room suffering from anaphylactic shock, an allergic reaction of such severity that his tongue, throat, and airways were nearly swollen shut. His blood pressure dropped so low that he lost consciousness. Injections of epinephrine saved his life.
Because Rainbow Falls lacked an allergist, Travis’s G.P.—Kevin Flynn—hospitalized the boy and the next day administered skin tests, injections of small amounts of forty allergens in Travis’s back. Only strawberries and cat dander caused reactions, both moderate. Dr. Flynn scheduled another series of injections for later in the day.
Before the physician returned, Travis endured a second episode of anaphylactic shock as bad as the first. He might well have died if he had not already been in the hospital.
The boy was immediately put on a diet consisting only of those foods to which he had shown no sensitivity in the first battery of tests, and the second group of tests was postponed until the following day. His lunch, consumed before the allergen injections, became the focus of the search for a causative agent.
In spite of a restricted diet known to be safe for him, Travis suffered a third episode, the worst of the three. This time, when he was revived with epinephrine and antihistamines, he was disoriented for a while, and his eyes remained nearly swollen shut for hours.
Alarmed at the frequency of the attacks, Dr. Flynn decided, incredibly, that the offending substance must be in the boy’s drinking water. Travis drank eight to ten glasses of city tap water a day.
His bedside carafe had been taken away and filled with orange juice. Ice cubes were made specially for him, using bottled water. Since then, he hadn’t experienced another allergic reaction.
The laboratory was conducting chemical and mineral analyses of tap water. The primary purifying chemical used by the city was a form of chlorine. The number of parts per million seemed far too low to trigger anaphylactic shock, but apparently there were cases on record of minute quantities of substances causing fatal shock. Dr. Flynn was supposed to have done a skin test with the chlorine almost two hours earlier; but as yet he had not appeared.
“As soon as they know what I’m allergic to, what I’m not allowed to eat or drink, then I can go home,” Travis said. “I really want to go home now.”
Grace Ahern, a single mother, visited her son in the evenings. But because she struggled to support them on her salary, and feared for her job in this poor economy, she couldn’t leave work to be with him during the day. Morning and afternoon, they kept in touch by phone.
“Except Mom hasn’t called today,” Travis said. “When I called her at home, I got our answering machine. Her direct line at work put me on to voice mail, but she must be there.”
“Where does she work?”
“At Meriwether Lewis.”
“The elementary school?”
“Yeah. She’s the dietician and chef. She’s a real good cook.”
“I’ll call information, get the main number at Meriwether, and ask the receptionist to track down your mom for you.”
Travis’s expression brightened. “That would be great.”
At the nightstand, Bryce plucked the handset from the phone. Instead of a tone, he got a recorded message in a woman’s voice of such studied pleasantness that it irritated him: “Telephone service has been temporarily disrupted. Please try again later. Thank you for your patience.”
chapter 34
After Carson called Erika Five, Deucalion rose from the game table and placed Scout in her uncle Arnie’s arms. To Michael and Carson, he said, “Pack what you think you’ll need, but be quick. I’ll be waiting at the car.”
“What I think we’ll need is guns,” Michael said.
Carson said, “Big ones. But aren’t we flying to Rainbow Falls? We can’t take guns on a plane.”
“We’re not going by a commercial airline. There won’t be any baggage inspection.”
“A charter flight? You can arrange that?”
“Just meet me at the car as quickly as you can.”
Without using a door, a hallway, or stairs, Deucalion stepped out of the study and, apparently, into their garage.
Michael said, “I sure wish I’d been born with an intuitive understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.”
“I’d be happy if you just understood how to operate the washer and dryer.”
“What do you expect when the manufacturer makes one look so much like the other?”
“The poor repairman was sobbing.”
“He was laughing,” Michael said.
“He was laughing and sobbing,” Arnie said. “When you’re packed, Scout and I will be in the kitchen with Mrs. Dolan.”
As Arnie carried her out of the study, Scout said, “Ga-ga-wa-wa-ga-ga-ba-ba,” and Michael said, “She’s brilliant.”
Upstairs, they packed clothes and toiletries in two small bags, guns and
ammunition in two big suitcases.
“I hate this,” Carson said.
“Ahhh, it’ll be fun.”
“Nobody should have to slam down Victor Frankenstein twice in the same lifetime. And I can’t believe what I just heard myself say.”
“It could be worse,” Michael said.
“How could it be worse?”
“Everywhere you look these days—movies, TV, books—everything is vampires, vampires, vampires. Booorrring. If this was vampires, I’d just shoot myself now and to hell with Montana.”
Carson said, “Maybe we should just say to hell with Montana.”
“And shoot ourselves?”
“And not shoot ourselves.”
“Well, you know, this isn’t about Montana.”
“I know. I know it’s not.”
“It’s about Scout.”
“Sweet little Scout. And Arnie.”
“And it’s about Mrs. Dolan,” he said.
“It’s not that much about Mrs. Dolan.”
“Well, it’s a little bit about Mrs. Dolan.”
“A little bit,” she admitted.
“And it’s about the future of the human race.”
“Don’t lay that on me.”
“At least we know we’re fighting for the right side.”
“I think the jury’s still out on that one.”
Snapping shut the latches on his large suitcase, he said, “I don’t have clothes warm enough for Montana.”
“We’ll buy some jackets there, boots, whatever.”
“I hope I don’t have to wear a cowboy hat.”
“What’s wrong with a cowboy hat?”
“I’d look like a dink in one.”
“You’d look as adorable as ever.”
“Adorable, huh. In the movies, this is where we go into a clinch, lock lips, and make mad passionate love.”
“Not in a Frankenstein movie, it isn’t.”
They carried their luggage downstairs, left everything in the back hall, and went to the kitchen.