Jane’s Cafe had been a fund of information. In an overheard conversation, he had learned that the sheriff wouldn’t allow Jane to carry a dinner tray to the prisoner’s cell, and the lunch tray hadn’t been touched. The sheriff was twice as mean as usual, or so Jane told Betty Hale, and that useless new girl wouldn’t even look her in the eye when Jane asked if something was wrong.

Betty had allowed that not much got past Jane, and maybe Tom Jessop should have made her the new deputy.

Then the postman had chimed in with his bit of news: The sheriff had been driving the roads all day, looking for somebody, scanning every tree he could see from the car windows. But first thing this morning, he had torn out on the road to the old Shelley place like a bat out of Augusta’s attic.

The prisoner was gone all right, vanished. Everyone in Jane’s Cafe had agreed on that. “Just like her mother,” Jane had said.

Fred had searched the old Shelley place, hunting Cass’s brat, but found no trace of her. She would not have gone into the swamp around Finger Bayou. No one but Augusta could navigate that mire in the dark. This wood was the likely place. This is where he would have gone.

He emerged from the trees and stopped in a clearing to light a cigarette. He would not have found the dog’s body if he had not tripped over the canvas parcel concealed by broken branches. He struck another match and held it over a hollowed-out log. Black leather protruded from the opening. He didn’t have to pull it out to know it was the duffel bag that had sat for three days in the sheriff’s office. It belonged to her, as did this damned dog stiffening in the canvas shroud.

He blew out the match. Footsteps? Yes, someone was coming this way.

Fred moved quickly to replace the branches over the dog, and then he pulled back into the woods. He slung the rifle over one shoulder by its strap and reached up to a tree branch. He pulled his body up and into the cover of dense leaves before the woman entered the clearing.

She was soft-stepping like a deer. Every now and then, she stopped and listened, just as a deer would do. The tan of the deputy’s uniform was light against her dark flesh. When she paused against the black bark of a tree, the outline of her skin lost all definition, and there was a heart-stopping moment when Fred believed her uniform was haunted by a woman he could no longer see.

His heart was beating again, and harder now. He could swear he heard it thumping on the wall of his chest as her gun glided out of the holster, and the barrel pointed skyward. Though she never looked up, twice she had aimed the gun straight at him, and he forgot to breathe. Now she was very still, listening again.

Could she hear it – his heartbeat?

No, that’s crazy. But he held one hand over his chest.

Finally, Deputy Beaudare ran off into the woods, stopping once to look back, then running on, graceful as any animal he’d ever killed.

CHAPTER 13

They stopped by the telephone pole near Henry Roth’s cottage. Henry motioned him to stay, signing, “See you later.” Then he walked off and left Charles standing in the middle of a dirt road.

Later?

A familiar voice called out to him. “Look up, Charles.”

His eyes followed the pole’s long line high into the air. Silver spikes sprouted from its sides, and in the dark at the top of the sky, the thick shaft spread out wooden arms laden with thick cables and blinking lights.

Going on faith that Mallory was up there, he began to climb the silver ladder. When he neared the crossbeams, he could see her silhouette working over the wires. Closer now, nearly there, he grasped one arm of the pole, and then they were face-to-face. Her hair was luminous in the dark, curls catching light from a waxing moon, and where the strands strayed into wisps, the stars shone through them.

She gave him a brief smile in lieu of hello. She didn’t like to waste her words, or perhaps she didn’t understand the average human’s need of them. She had always preferred the company of machines, which were quiet, efficient and disinclined to argue. Behind her back and to her face, the officers of NYPD had called her Mallory the Machine.

“Hello, again.” He made the mistake of looking down at the tiny road below them and the toy town in the distance. He hugged the crossbeam and focussed on her face. “I see you’re still working without a net.”

She seemed quite comfortable seated in her leather sling bearing the name of a local telephone company. “I assume you stole that.”

She nodded absently, taking no offense. She was intent on her handiwork with exposed wires. “I worked for the phone company’s computer operations up north.”

She reached across the nest of wires to undo his tie and pull it away from him. With one hand she undid the buttons on his vest and laid open his white shirt. Up here in the stars with Mallory – it was probably the most romantic moment of his life. He waited to see what she would do to ruin it.

She pointed a small dark box at his chest and sent out a projection of light. He looked down at the crisp computer screen glowing on his shirt-front and said, “I see you solved the resolution problem.”

“Uh-huh. I translated the pixels to analog waves. But it still sucks too much battery power.”

He gathered the backup battery must account for at least one of the wires running out of the tiny computer and into the pocket of her blazer. The image on his shirt changed as she bent her head over the minicomputer in the palm of her hand and worked the small keyboard with a silver pick. Her face was awash in reflected blue light.

It troubled him only a little that he was now conversant in computer jargon, though he loathed high technology. He was particularly well versed in this prototype of hers. A year ago, she had talked about little else. He so loved the sound of her voice, he had listened with rapt attention to the buzz words that were her poetry, as she explained the schematics for customized components which passed for high art in her world. The conversation had been one-sided then. It was so rare to hear her expend more than the necessary amount of words, he had not wanted to interrupt, to argue, to end it.

Now that he had finally been incorporated into her computer as a living screen, he wondered if she would look on him with greater affection. “I suppose your next project will be an electronic book.” This was his growing fear, that the beloved, friendly handheld book would turn into a creature with megabytes.

“You have to let go of the twentieth century, Charles. It’s almost over now.”

“So you don’t care for my theory that the Luddites will inherit the earth?”

No, they both knew that she was the inheritor, this strange child of high technology. Look at her now, glowing with electronic light – wires running in and out of her clothes.

He looked down at the projected diagram on his shirt. “What’s that?”

“You’re looking at a power company grid. I worked for them for a while, too. Watch this.” She turned toward Dayborn below. The lights went out again, and so did those of Owltown beyond it. Now the street-lamps switched on and off, one by one. And then all the lights of Dayborn came on at once. Owltown remained in the dark, as did everything on this side of Upland Bayou.

“Neat trick? It was a lot of work planting independent switches.”

So now he knew where she had been all these months from spring into autumn – laying traps, planning, scheming. “And how long did you work for the tax assessor?”

“Very good, Charles. But I downloaded what I needed during the proficiency test. I didn’t stay for the job interview.”

The tax records would tell her which citizens had lived here seventeen years ago, who had died, and who had moved away. By now, she would have bank records and credit reports. She would know what debts they owed, and who tithed to church or charity and how much. She hac probably been listening to the phone conversations of Dayborn for months, gathering information, planning her homecoming. “The tax base helped me with my list.”