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“Where did you go?” he said.

She reached out unsteadily, her fingers batting his lips.

“Shhh,” she said. “It's very early in the sky.”

“All right. You're hammered.”

She looked to the side as if someone were standing behind her.

“No. I mean, maybe I am, that's beside the point,” she said. “Hammered. I am hammered. You have the funniest way of talking, Micah Darling my darling. Come with me.”

They went into the yard and stood in the grass looking at the sky, the midnight blue fading to yellow, the trees in black silhouette.

“Isn't it the most beautiful sky you've ever seen?” she said. “Why would they do this?”

Micah rearranged the blanket on his shoulders. “Who?”

“If you knew that, you would know everything,” said Charlotte. She pressed her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I'm sweaty right now. And dizzy. I believe I'm going to throw up if I'm not mistaken.”

Micah took her hand and led her inside the house.

“Is Joan here?”

“They're at Big Bear.”

“Take me to your bathroom.”

Micah gathered Charlotte's hair and held it fast behind her head as she knelt throwing up what she'd drunk.

When the convulsions of her rib cage had turned to shivers, she reached up with her left hand and pulled the silver handle down.

She got to her feet and looked into the mirror on the medicine cabinet.

“I'm the baddest thing that ever came down the road,” she said.

“You're the best bad thing I ever seen.”

Micah ran water till it was hot and soaked a washcloth in the sink and washed her face slowly and tenderly as Lyris had done for him when he was young. She cried for a little while and then laughed.

Charlotte brushed her teeth and took a slug of Listerine and swished it around and spat it out.

“I feel like a fire has gone out in me,” she said. “Can we go to bed now?”

They went to his bedroom, where he gave her a shirt to wear and she undressed, folded her clothes over the back of the chair, and pulled the shirt on over her head.

Her lean brown arms emerged from the white sleeves of the shirt one at a time and with her hands she smoothed the cloth down.

They got into bed. Micah sat and rolled the blanket out in the air and let it drift down over them. Charlotte turned on her side and patted her hip meaning snuggle up.

“Micah.”

“Yeah.”

“How did that magician know about your sister?”

“I don't know. I've been thinking about that myself.”

“I love you.”

Micah went back to sleep. Charlotte went to sleep for the first time all night.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

A
LBERT ROBESHAW
drove up to Mayall to interview the parents of Sandra Zulma, wishing all the while they'd refused to see him. A reporter must question people bad things have happened to, but Albert was happier when they hung up the phone or closed the door, keeping their sadness private.

Clouds covered the sky, giving the streets of Mayall the look of old postcards from Louise's shop. The Zulmas lived in a Tudor house with a steep roof and an upright piano abandoned in a melting bank of snow on the curb. A melancholy detail, thought Albert. Perhaps Sandra had played the piano, and they couldn't have it in the house now that she'd gone missing and wanted for murder.

The parents met him at the door and let him into a cold and dark house. They went to the dining room and sat at a maple table with candles burning and red wax running down, as if Sandra were dead, which was possible.

The father was a thin man with gray hair on his forearms. The mother had short blond hair and looked sleepy. Albert turned on his tape recorder and asked about the piano but it turned out to be from the house next door. The neighbors always put things on their side, though they'd been asked not to.

“Where do you think she is?” said Albert.

“We don't know,” said the mother. “That's why we're talking to you. To tell her ‘Come home.
'
”

“She is our daughter always,” said the father.

“They were friends,” said Albert. “Jack and Sandra.”

“When they were little I'd watch them out this window back here,” said the mother. “Sandy'd sit cross-legged with her face to the sun and have Jackie scratch her back. She was always a very itchy girl.”

“Some of them teased her,” said the father. “She was smart and liked to talk. She was different. Kids sometimes aren't easy on girls. Girls sometimes aren't. Jackie was on her side.”

“But something happened.”

“They got older,” said the mother. “Different things drew their attention. That was sad for Sandy. I know it was. I get tired of saying it. This was fifteen years ago.”

“Is it fair to say that Sandy has some unrealistic ideas?” said Albert.

“Oh,” said the father. “Certainly.”

“From the books,” said the mother. “We will show you the books.”

“Did she go to college? Have jobs?”

“She was accepted at one college here and one in Maine,” said the mother. “But she decided to take a year off, and then another year off, and you know how that goes. She did have jobs. She worked for the phone company. She worked for an organic farm raising string beans. Her last job she was a maid at a hotel in Lac Brillant.”

“How did that go?”

“All right until she put some cars in the lake. They weren't her cars, she wasn't driving them. She just let off the parking brake and gave them a shove.”

“Why?”

“No reason. What reason would there be.”

“Did she ever have a run-in with the Boy Scouts?”

The mother yawned. “After the Lac Brillant situation, excuse me, she disappeared,” she said. “She was living here with us again and we didn't know where she went. Honestly it was a relief. Isn't that a terrible thing to say? Don't put in that I said that.”

“Okay.”

“And the Boy Scouts found her,” said the father. “Quite by accident. She'd been living in the woods south of town. In a den, I would almost call it.”

“They've searched the woods,” said Albert.

“Dogs, infrared scanners, state troopers. They never find anything.”

“Do you believe she did what they say she did?”

The father folded his hands and turned his head aside. “What I believe is, she should come home.”

They went then to see her room, down a hall past tall tables with faded linens, family pictures, dim lamps with shades of colored glass.

The gloom of the unused hallway was not unusual, Albert thought. Everyone sets out their possessions to portray a good and orderly life, and, when things go bad, the possessions become cold reminders of what might have been. That's what it was like. It gave him the shivers.

Sandra's room had drawings all over. A forest with winding path on one wall, a shadowy castle hallway with faraway hearth on the other, stars and quarter moon and darkness on the ceiling. And Albert wondered if she thought she had come from this place or was going to it.

“The doctors said drawing might help,” said the mother. “I don't think they meant she should draw on her room but that's how she took it.”

“She did it all freehand,” said the father. “These are her pencils. These are her books.”

The bolted metal bookcase leaned with the weight of a hundred books. They had cracked spines and yellowed pages. Some had grown thick from contact with water. Micah figured Sandy had left them in the rain or dropped them in the bathtub. They drew him closer to whoever she was, wherever she was. He began writing the names of the books:

The Táin

Mythology

Mythologies

Celtic Myths and Legends

Myths and Legends of the Celts

Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology

The Mabinogion

Ethan Frome

Cuchulain of Muirthemne

The World of the Celts

Best of Mad Libs

Art of the Celts: 700 BC to AD 700

The Golden Compass

The Playboy of the Western World

Wuthering Heights

Beowulf

The Oxford Book of Death

That Was Then, This Is Now

Albert took
Cuchulain of Muirthemne
down and thumbed through the pages. With pink highlighter Sandra had marked a passage near the end: “I am Emer of the Fair Form; there is no more vengeance for me to find; I have no love for any man. It is sorrowful my stay is after the Hound.”

While Albert looked at the books, the mother lay on her side on Sandra's bed, staring at the forest drawn on the wall.

“Do you have all that you need?” she said.

Meanwhile, Dan Norman drove over to the Robeshaws' home farm, looking for Claude, the father. A veteran of county politics and Democrat for life, Claude had been Dan's great ally when Dan was sheriff.

The Robeshaws were in the alleyway of the barn, ringing the noses of hogs to keep them from rooting up fences. They still kept outdoor hogs, did things the old way. Driving by you'd see the freshly painted A-houses in bright rows across the pasture. It was known that the family would never go the confinement route as long as Claude was alive.

Now he leaned his arms on a fence, watching two of his sons and his daughter-in-law at work. His eyes were barely open but he saw all that went on.

“We're getting on to being done,” said Anna, wife of Nestor.

Oldest to youngest the Robeshaw kids were Rolfe, Julia, Nestor, Dean, Susan, and Albert, who had been the last to leave home. Rolfe, Julia, and Nestor had farms of their own.

“You left a message on my machine,” said Dan. “Sounded like you were making a speech to the flower club.”

“Ah, I hate those things,” he said. “The sound goes off and I forget what I called to say. Which, I now do forget.”

“About Sandra Zulma.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Claude. He took a glove off and examined the blue corded veins on the back of his hand. “What in hell's going on over there?”

“Talk to Ed, man. He's the sheriff.”

“Here you've got a girl. Just out of a car wreck. Just out of ICU, for God's sake. Over six foot tall and no bigger around than a cane pole. And she walks away.”

“I know it.”

“How long have we had a Democratic sherif
f
?”

“Long time,” said Dan.

The old man lifted his chin and pulled up the collar of his waxed coat and scowled, showing fine white dentures.

“We lose the sheriff, pretty soon we lose the board of supervisors,” he said. “Next thing you know the whole place is run by maniacs.”

“She'll turn up.”

“How do you know?”

“Maybe she won't.”

“I want you to think about running again.”

“I have thought about it.”

“Once you put the badge on, you never really take it off.”

“You get that off TV?”

“Most likely. I heard you were up on 41 after she crashed that car.”

“Yeah. Just happened to be going by. She told me she found him.”

“I should say she did,” said Claude. “You give it some consideration. Now come up to the house for dinner.”

“Ah, I wouldn't want to bother you.”

“I wouldn't have asked if you bothered me.”

Dan and the Robeshaws walked up to the house, water welling in their bootprints. They washed up in the bathroom off the kitchen, as Dan had done thirty-five years ago when he was a teenager walking their bean fields with a corn knife. They still used the Lava soap that scraped your hands clean like stone.

The Moose in Stone City held a fish fry Friday nights, and Dan and Lynn Lord met for a working supper. Lynn emptied a worn leather satchel of folders and pushed them across the table.

“We have three new affairs. Suspected anyway. All you have to do is figure out which is which.”

“This is the part of the job I hate.”

“I know it, Dan. But they pay the rent. The economy goes up and down, jealousy is with us always. This is the season for affairs.”

“Is it?”

“I've done the numbers.”

“Probably has to do with weather.”

“Ice. Rain. A kind of fatalism.”

“What else?” said Dan.

“Shipping Giant got knocked over for nine packages. They'd like them back. It's that son of a bitch they call the Laughing Bandit.”

The snow thawed in the daytime, and the water froze at night, making slicks that ran diagonally across the highways.

One night driving home from a tavern in Pringmar, Tiny felt the car drifting out from under him. He countersteered, and reaching dry pavement the wheels slammed into line with pleasantly predictable violence. He heard banging in the trunk.

He remembered the boxes he'd taken from Shipping Giant. When he got home he carried them into the house. There were seven left after the two he'd given the fugitive Sandra Zulma.

Tiny spread them on the floor of the living room, made a drink, and watched a TV show about paranormal investigators who visited places around the world troubled by aimless spirits. It was a poor show. They lugged a lot of gear, found next to nothing, and talked about the need for further analysis.

Still he watched it as he cut open the boxes. What he was doing seemed such a parody of loneliness that he had to laugh. He enjoyed being alive come what might.

Some of the items he had no use for. There were forklift binders and a woman's shirt, if that's what it was, all strings and straps and good luck to whoever tried to climb into it.

Then came a Sims game that Tiny would not play, but Micah used to have Sims. He would design big beautiful houses for them. The women turned fully pregnant overnight, and kitchen fires were common.

Tiny went to find the phone. It would be early in Los Angeles. He punched the number in and listened to it ring until a recording came on. Returning to the davenport he laid the phone on its back on the coffee table. The ghost hunters were snooping around in a dungeon.

“Would you like us to show you the way out?” said one.

“Yeah, that'd be great,” said Tiny.

He opened what had been a nice food basket with wine and cheese and flowers, but he had to throw it all out because it had frozen repeatedly.

The last boxes held wind chimes, a necklace, and a dog collar with the name “Cody” etched in brass. Tiny went to the boot room and woke up the goat long enough to buckle the new collar on her.

“Now you are Cody,” he said.

The phone rang. It was Micah.

“I got you something,” said Tiny. “It's a computer game. Hold on.”

He cradled the phone between shoulder and ear and picked up the box and put his reading glasses on.

“Sims 2: Bon Voyage,” he said. “Looks like they're going on vacation.”

“You got me a Sims game?”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Doesn't seem like you.”

“What do you think, I stole it?”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“You're going to get in trouble.”

“How are you?”

“I got a girlfriend, Dad.”

The news made Tiny feel old. He sat down and moved the phone over to his good ear.

“A girlfriend, Micah.”

“Her name is Charlotte. She rides horses.”

“You open doors for her, all right? And don't let her get cold.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“They get cold easy. Or, you know, I'm sure they all don't, but a good many.”

“I'll get her some gloves.”

“There you go. And if there's a chill take your coat off and put it on her. That means a lot for some reason.”

“I've got to go.”

“All right, Micah. Love you.”

He put the phone down, turned the TV off, and took the necklace out back to see it in moonlight. It was a thousand-dollar necklace. The links glowed silver blue in his hand.

A possum moved slowly along the tree line. The wind changed direction and the possum stood on its hind legs and opened its mouth wide, as if it had just said something hilarious and was waiting for the big laugh that would follow.

People who thought that nature was a happy playground should spend some time looking into the mouth of a possum.