He felt her go rigid.

“What’s happening?” she asked, her voice trembling. “What’s going on, Johnny?”

“What do you see?” he asked urgently. “Tell me exactly what you see.”

“A road, a house. It’s misty.”

“How many windows in the house?”

“Uh, two… three… four that I can see.”

“How many chimneys?”

“Two.”

“Do you hear anything?”

“Your hands are over my ears.”

He moved them. “Now?”

“A piano.”

“What’s it playing?”

“I… I don’t know. It sounds familiar, but…” She turned and buried her face in his chest. “I’m scared, Johnny.”

“It’s all right, nothing’s going to happen to us.” He lowered his head and kissed her hair, and, as he did, he heard the crickets. He looked up, and the lake looked back at him.

He showed her the lake, then put his arm about her and walked her into the living room. He sat her down on the piano bench and inserted a roll into the piano.

“What are you doing?”

“Listen.” He switched on the instrument; it began to play.

“That’s the song, the song I heard out there on the deck,” she said after a moment. Her voice was small and frightened. “Johnny, do you know what is happening here? Please tell me if you do.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. But I know now that I’m not crazy.”

“Why?” she demanded. “What makes you so damned confident about that? You may be crazy, and I may be, too.”

“No, we’re not crazy, either of us.”

“Why not?”

“Because two people, even two crazy people, can’t have the same hallucination. What we saw was real.”

16

The morning after Scotty, too, had seen the vision, which is how Howell had come to think of it, Howell woke with an oddly pleasant feeling. It was mysterious, but faintly familiar, and it took him a couple of hours to bring it into focus. For a year, now, and perhaps for the better part of two, he now realized, he had been, more than anything else, bored. For all of his life, boredom had been foreign to him, and his work as a newspaperman had been boredom’s antithesis. Now, on this bright, cool August morning, in this most beautiful of places, in the throes of what could only be a classic, male-menopausal, midlife crisis, he was experiencing anew the intellectual and emotional condition which had always driven him: curiosity. He was once again, at long last, interested in something.

The fact of Scotty’s seeing the vision convinced him that he was not mad, not hallucinating. He was by no means convinced that what he had been experiencing had a supernatural basis. The experience was, in some sense, real; it had a rational, if unfamiliar basis, and he was a rational man. He would proceed rationally.

Scotty did not entirely share his view of the situation. “Listen, John, this place is screwy – haunted, or something.”

“Or something. Does it scare you?”

“Well, yeah, a little.” She cocked her head to one side and looked thoughtful. “I mean, I’m not terrified, no more than after the seance, but that didn’t seem quite as real.”

Howell had been about to tell her about the girl; but now he felt that the introduction into the situation of what Scotty might interpret as a ghost might disturb her too much, and he didn’t want her to panic on him, now. “Well, I think it all means something, and I want to find out what.”

“How do you figure on doing that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly, but before I can proceed, there’s something I need.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve got it.”

Howell knew where to get it, too, he thought as he drove into Sutherland. He read the directory at the courthouse and bounded up the stairs two at a time. A young woman asked if she could help him.

“What a lovely dress,” he said, enthusiastically. She blushed. “Lovely. Uh, I’m interested in the local geography, and I wonder if I might see a survey map of the area?”

“Why, sure.” She was putty in his hands, now. “The whole county?”

“Oh, no, not the whole thing, just the town of Sutherland and the surrounding area.”

She reached under the counter and pulled out a sheet of typewriter paper with a map printed on it. “Here’s the official Chamber of Commerce map of the town, and that shows a little bit beyond the city limits.”

“Well, I really had something on a little larger scale in mind, something with a lot of detail.”

“How about a mile to the inch?”

“Perfect.”

She went to a wide-drawered cabinet, fished in a drawer, and pulled out a larger sheet. “There you are,” she said, spreading it on the counter before him.

And there he was. It took only a moment to find the crossroads and follow the road down to the cabin. True to life, the line of the road stopped at the lake’s edge. “Oh, that’s terrific,” he said, grinning at her and making her blush again. “Now, do you think you might have a map of the same area, on the same scale, before the lake?”

She wrinkled her brow and looked doubtfully around the room. “Gee, I don’t have the slightest idea where that would be. Just a minute, I’ll ask Mrs. O’Neal. She’s been here forever, and she’ll know just where to put her hand on it.”

The girl walked across the room to a door and knocked. Howell could see, through a glass partition, an older woman working at a desk. She looked up and heard the girl’s question, then looked out for a long moment at Howell. Then she got up from her desk, still looking at him, brushed the wrinkles from her skirt, walked out of the office and across the room to the counter where Howell stood waiting. “May I help you?” she asked, in a manner which immediately told Howell she had no intention of doing so.

“Gosh, I hope so,” Howell replied, in the manner of a high school junior doing research for a term paper. “I was just wondering if I could have a look at a map just like this one, except before the lake.”

“This is a map of the town of Sutherland,” she said evenly. “The town of Sutherland was much smaller before the lake, so of course, there can be no such map.”

“Oh, sure, I see,” Howell came back, as cheerful as ever. “Well, then, do you reckon I could see a map of the area without the town? Just the valley, and all?”

“Sir,” she said, not quite so evenly, now, “you are missing the point. The courthouse was not built until the town was built, so we would not have such a map.”

“Oh, yes, sure, that was dumb of me. Uh, where was the county seat before it was at Sutherland?”

“It was over in Pinewood, but when it was moved here, the old courthouse was torn down to make way for a school.”

“And the records were moved here.”

“Yes.”

“Well is there, maybe, somebody here now who worked in the old courthouse who might be familiar with the old maps?”

“I worked in the old courthouse,” she said, icily. “I have been in charge of these records for thirty-eight years.”

“Well, someone with all your knowledge is just the person I’m looking for,” Howell said, casting charm again, and watching it ricochet right off the old bat.

“When we moved the records, we naturally discarded a lot of outdated material, including old maps. I did it myself. I tell you again, no such map exists.”

A glance at the astonished face of the girl standing behind her told Howell that the woman was lying. “Oh, shucks. Well, I guess I’ll just have to go to the Army Corps of Engineers in Atlanta,” he said, anxious to let her know she had not won.

“I’m afraid that would be useless,” the woman replied with a triumphant smirk. “Lake Sutherland was privately built. The Corps of Engineers was not involved.”

Howell glanced at the girl, who looked embarrassed and shrugged. “Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to forget about it,” he said ruefully, and slunk out of the room, hoping the woman believed him.

He thought about approaching the girl after hours, but she seemed thoroughly intimidated by her superior. He would have to think of something else.