A shutter banged against the wall of the cabin; it sounded like a gunshot. It was certifiably spooky up here.

I asked him about the girl.

“What about her?”

“Your interview with her-it’s in your notes?”

“Among other things.”

“And she still believes all that stuff-about the space robots rescuing her out of the water?”

“See for yourself. They’re on my desk.”

I looked over at his rolltop antique. Like something blown up-but I thought I could just make out a small spiral notebook peeking out from the top of the trash, like the winner of King of the Hill.

“Why bother,” I said. “We can safely assume spacemen didn’t make a visit to Littleton Flats.”

“Not unless you believe in fairy tales,” he said. “Do you?”

“What?”

“Believe in fairy tales?”

“No.”

“Ever read one as an adult?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you. Especially when you stop believing in goblins.”

I didn’t know quite how to respond to that.

“I guess you’re going to want to stay the night?” he asked.

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble. You have six empty cabins to choose from.”

I said thanks. Wished him luck with his truck in Fishbein.

“My notes,” he said. “You can copy them or memorize them. I want them back where I left them. I’d pick a cabin with wood inside. Sweet dreams.”

TWENTY-SIX

The interview with Bailey Kindlon had obviously been taped, then both sides of the conversation transcribed.

Wren’s Rule number two: transcribe your tape recordings for in case!

He’d begun by jotting down his general impressions of her. The 3-year-old survivor of the Aurora Dam Flood was middle-aged by now. She was divorced and lived alone. He noted her living room was lined with books on alien abductions.

He soon found out why.

He began by thanking her for seeing him and reiterating the purpose of his visit. He was doing a story on the Aurora Dam Flood. He was hoping she could remember some things about that day, even though she was so little at the time.

Actually, I remember a lot, she told him. You’d be surprised what a 3-year-old brain retains. Of course, doing the whole therapy thing’s helped.

Wren acknowledged that it must have been horrible for her.

You know, at the time, you’re a little kid, and in a way, that helps. And in a way, it doesn’t. I remember being photographed for some newspaper two days after I was rescued and cracking this big smile because I was going to be on the front page of a paper. This is two days after I was orphaned. So yeah, it helped being 3, but let me tell you, as the years went on, and all sorts of psychic shit began raining on my parade, it wasn’t so cool after all. Kids bury it, that’s all. And in some ways, that’s worse.

Wren asked her if that meant she’d remembered things only later on.

No. She’d always remembered some things. Playing in her backyard that Sunday morning.

I remembered putting my Raggedy Ann in a stroller and singing a lullaby to her. I remembered my mother flying out of the screen door, yelling something to me, but not really hearing it very well because there was this roar-like a jet engine, but then not like a jet engine, like some 747 landing right on top of you. It was too close. I remembered that sort of confluence of sound and sensation. Then it was as if I’d been lifted up-my dad would do that, grab me around the waist from behind and swing me up in the air like a loop-de-loop. It was like that. I was suddenly picked up except my dad wasn’t there, and my mother was gone too, and I was all wet. I was suddenly in a pool-but the pool was my whole backyard, the whole street. I remember whizzing past Mrs. Denning’s house-she was our neighbor-and seeing the house itself; her entire house began moving, spinning past me like a top, and it was like I was in The Wizard of Oz, that scene where Dorothy gets picked up by the tornado and everything is swirling around in the air, only this was water. I remembered all that.

Was that it, then? Wren asked her. All she remembered before therapy?

No. She remembered being rescued. She’d grabbed onto a piece of wood-or it grabbed onto her. Who knows? That’s what saved her. An old cellar door. She was on it for at least a day before they found her.

Who found her? Wren asked. The police, the firemen?

No, she said. Not the police or firemen.

Then who?

Aliens.

Wren managed to keep his incredulity in check. He asked her to tell him about that. The aliens.

Well, they weren’t exactly aliens, she explained. Not at first. It was their robots.

I was on the door. I remember being hungry and thirsty and wet and feeling like I was in this dream that I just couldn’t wake up from. There were all these dolls in the water, floating Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys. But they weren’t dolls, of course. When my therapist took me back, I saw them. All the dead people in the water, hundreds and hundreds, open-eyed, but like the eyes of dead fish, you know, that white, filmy, soulless look. They kept bumping up against the storm door, bobbing up out of the water as if they were trying to climb up there with me, but of course they couldn’t. They were all dead. That’s when the robots came.

Wren asked her to tell him everything she remembered about the robots.

She was drifting, she said. Maybe she’d even fallen asleep. She suddenly woke up, heard this kind of sloshing sound. They were coming through the water for her. White robots. They had arms and heads, but no hands or faces. That’s how she knew they weren’t human. They moved in slow motion, like mechanical dolls.

How many? Wren asked.

Six or seven, she said.

And did they speak to her?

How could they? she reminded him. They had no faces, no mouths. They just made these clicking sounds-like dolphins.

The robots had lifted her up from the cellar door. Then they’d carried her off.

Where? Wren asked.

Their spaceship.

I was on this table. Some of this stuff I always remembered, and some of it came back later under hypnosis. I was strapped onto this metal table and they were examining me with these awful-looking instruments. As you know, or don’t know, that’s pretty common with alien abductions. Have you ever read Whitley Schreiber’s book?

Wren said he hadn’t.

She explained that it was pretty much the bible among alien abductees. Schreiber had been abducted three times.

Wren said he’d be sure to pick up a copy. He asked her to go on.

I was on the table, she said. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. There was this… light shining down on me-a kind of blue glow-it was endless, as if there were no real source to it, understand? They were staring at me.

Wren reminded her she’d told him that the aliens didn’t have eyes.

Those were the robots, Bailey corrected him. These were the aliens. She was in their spaceship now. The aliens had eyes. But no mouths. Which means they couldn’t speak to her, either. But they could communicate with her. They could put their thoughts into her head. Like telepathy.

What thoughts were those? Wren asked her.

Well, she couldn’t really remember exactly. That she shouldn’t be afraid, mostly. That they weren’t going to hurt her. Even if that didn’t turn out to be entirely true.

A couple of things did hurt. They put some of the instruments inside me-my mouth, and, well… lower down. I remember crying and asking for my mom and dad.

Wren asked her to describe what the spaceship looked like.