22

Bob Decker lay in his creaky motel bed and glanced again at the glowing numerals on the clock radio.

Almost midnight. He needed sleep, dammit. They’d all be up and moving in five hours or so.

But Gerry Canney’s suspicions about Dan Keane kept echoing off the inner walls of his skull.

And maybe he hates them so much that he doesn’t want to stop fighting them…

What was the one thing all his years in the Secret Service had taught him? Never take anything for granted.

Which meant he couldn’t take Dan Keane for granted.

As much as he doubted—loathed—the possibility, he’d worked out a plan to check out Keane. But he couldn’t do it alone.

He reached for the phone and dialed Canney’s room.

Tuesday

1

“Where are we?” Katie said, staring out the panel truck’s side window.

“We’re in the woods, honey bunch. Like deep in the woods.” Poppy squinted through the windshield into the dim predawn light as she followed her uncle’s pickup along a narrow, winding back road. Weeds growing in the mound between the sandy ruts scraped along the undercarriage.

The forty-foot scrub pines crowded close to the road, leaning over it, seeming to open ahead as she approached, and close in behind as she passed.

She’d been out here a number of times as a girl with her dad when he’d make a run to bring the Appletons some Christmas pies or stock up on their applejack, but she’d never learned the way. Never wanted to. She’d been a passenger those times and had never noticed how one stretch of road looked pretty much like every other, almost as if they were driving in circles.

She wished she could like turn on her headlights or something, but Uncle Luke had said it was safest to keep them off—otherwise he would have brought her out here last night.

Thank God for little favors. Appletons by day were bad enough, but Appletons by night…

She shuddered.

“It makes me feel lonely out here,” Katie said.

“It is lonely. But some folks don’t get lonely like us. And some folks don’t like to have much to do with other folks, so they like it out here.” And some folk shouldn’t be seen by the rest of us.

At least no one would find Katie and her out here— not in a million years. But that cut both ways. She was just as lost out here as anyone else—safe but trapped.

Uncle Luke finally made a sharp right turn and pulled to a stop in a small clearing. Four other pickups in various stages of rust rot were parked any which way in the sand. Poppy’s truck brought the total to six.

“All right now,” Uncle Luke said as he helped her and Katie from the truck. In his free hand he held a gallon jug and the sleeping bag he was lending them. “Stick close to me until they know who we are.”

“They don’t know we’re coming?” Poppy’s stomach was cinched into a double granny knot as she looked around. Trees. Nothing but trees and sand and scrub brush… and a path leading away through the brush.

“How was I supposed to let them know?”

“You didn’t—?” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say something about calling them, but remembered there were like no phone lines out here. No electricity, no running water, either. “Never mind.”

She carried Katie along the path, keeping close behind her uncle. At least the light was better now. The cloudless sky was turning a pale blue as the path moved onto an upslope. Going to be another beautiful sunny day.

“Are these more uncles we’re visiting?” Katie said.

“Oh, no,” Poppy told her. “I’m not related to—”

“ ‘Course you are,” Uncle Luke said.

“Well, sure,” she said, wishing her uncle would shut up. “Everybody in the pines is related one way or another. I meant—”

“No, these are real kin. My great-grandfather Samuel— your great-great-grandfather—married off his sister Anna to Jacob Appleton way back when. These folk are your cousins.” Poppy wanted to kick her uncle in the butt. Damn! Why’d he have to go and say that sort of stuff in front of Katie? She didn’t want the little thing to know she shared blood with the Appletons.

Suddenly Uncle Luke stopped and Poppy bumped into his back.

“Hello to the house!” he called.

Poppy jumped as a voice shouted from no more than ten feet to their left. “Who the hell’s out here so goddamn early in the mornin‘?”

“It’s me—Luke Mulliner. I got my niece Poppy with me, and she’s got a little one with her.” A grizzled-looking guy who could have been sixty or could have been eighty, skinny as the scrub pine he’d been hiding behind, stepped into the open. He held his shotgun ready while he gave them the once over.

And Poppy gave him her own once-over. His overalls were worn through in spots—so fashionable in Soho, but this was the real thing. He wore worn sneakers with no socks, and his ankles were filthy. His hands weren’t much better. His left eye seemed to be stuck looking at his nose while his gray hair shot from his scalp in tufts. His back was bent and twisted, which made him lean forward and to the right.

She remembered this Appleton from when she was a little girl, even though almost everything about him had changed. Everything except his tongue. He kept licking his lips. Every two or three seconds his beefy red tongue would zip out and run along his lips, then disappear. Poppy remembered that tongue.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “You look like a Mulliner.”

“And you’re Lester, aren’t you?” Uncle Luke said. “I haven’t been out here for a while.”

“That’s right,” Lester said, lowering the shotgun. He didn’t offer to shake. “C’mon. I’ll take you up the house.” He eyed the jug dangling from Uncle Luke’s finger.

“Here for some jack?”

“Yep. Been a while since I had some and I miss it.”

“It’s awfully good, ain’t it.”

“That it is.”

Poppy remembered stealing some of her dad’s stock of applejack when she was a teenager. Powerful stuff— Jersey lightning. And no one made better applejack than the Appletons. Matter of fact, she’d been high on Appleton applejack when she and Charlie did it and conceived Glory.

But that wasn’t the Appletons’ fault.

Another hundred yards uphill and they came to a large clearing hazed with blue-white woodsmoke, and sprawled in its center… the house.

Poppy stopped and stared as it all came back to her.

The house… the crazy Appleton house.

It looked like it might have started out as like a oneroom shack. Then somebody must have added a shed to one end, and then maybe an extra room to the other, then an extension on to the shed, and so on… and so on…

That was because as the Appleton kids grew up, they didn’t move away, they just like added a section for themselves. Poppy guessed that if the Appletons had been some rich and respectable clan like the Kennedys, this sort of thing would be called a compound.

But this was no compound—this was a… sprawl. A sprawl with lots of galvanized pipe acting as chimneys, and all those chimneys smoking. The place looked like they’d built it out of whatever scrap material they could find with little or no thought to matching it with what they’d used before. No section looked like it was any kin to any of the other sections nuzzling up against it. Corrugated metal nailed to marine plywood abutting particle board and cedar shakes. Roofs of genuine shingles, vinyl siding, sheet metal, or old rugs and linoleum tacked over wooden slats.

The hide of a deer was tacked to one wall; and over to the right, three dead rabbits hung head down from a clothesline. She turned Katie slightly so she wouldn’t see them and ask what had happened to Bambi and Peter Cottontail.

The Appletons had lived here as long as anyone could remember. All of them. Nobody left, and nobody new was allowed in. And that meant that with no outsiders to choose from, you had to like pair off with somebody who was a pretty damn close relation. Which was why a lot of the Appletons tended to be soft in the head and look the way they did.