He was almost asleep an hour later, the wind having dropped and been replaced by a heavy, sleety rain, when he remembered the Bootleggers’ Cave.

Every summer during his four years in Elm Haven, Dale and his brother Lawrence had joined Mike and Kevin and Harlen and Bob McKown and some of the other town kids in searching Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s property north of the cemetery for the legendary Bootleggers’ Cave—a combination of underground speakeasy and liquor depot rumored to have been operated up County 6 during Prohibition. None of the kids knew what Prohibition had been, exactly, but that did not keep them from digging holes all over Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s hillsides in search of the legendary cave. Many of the old-timers swore that the bootleggers had operated out of their cave somewhere up County 6, always on the lookout for revenuers—none of the boys had a clue what “revenuers” were, but it sounded scary to them as well. By the time the Bike Patrol kids started digging up Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s property for the first time in the summer of 1959, the legend of the Bootleggers’ Cave had become gospel and had grown to include a complete speakeasy buried somewhere under those hills, complete with several Prohibition-era cars entombed there, hundreds of barrels of whiskey, and possibly a dead gangster or two. Dale and his friends had moved several tons of soil in the fruitless search.

But Duane almost never joined them on those outings. Dale had always thought that it was because the fat boy did not want to work at the digging, but Duane worked harder on his farm than any of the city kids, so one summer day Dale had asked him why he didn’t want to find the Bootleggers’ Cave with them.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Duane had said.

Dale had ridden his bike out to Duane’s farm alone—Lawrence was in bed with the flu—and Duane’s Old Man had sent Dale up to one of the high, hot lofts in the barn, where his genius friend was busy writing what looked like hieroglyphics on the barn wall. It turned out that they were hieroglyphics—Duane had decided to become religious and worship some Egyptian god or goddess—but Dale hadn’t been interested in that right then, even though Duane had accumulated quite a treasure trove of animal and bird skulls at his makeshift altar in the loft. Dale wanted to know about the Bootleggers’ Cave.

“What do you mean, we’re looking in the wrong place?”

“And for the wrong thing,” continued Duane, dabbing white paint on his row of bird-and-eyeball-and-wavy-line hieroglyphics.

“What do you mean?”

“The bootleggers didn’t have a cave, just one of these farmhouses with an escape tunnel they dug. The tunnel’s not even that long.”

“How do you know?”

“They used our house,” said Duane.

“You’ve seen this tunnel?”

“I haven’t been in it.”

“Where would we dig for it?”

“You don’t have to dig. It runs right out of the basement of The Jolly Corner.”

“And are there cars and stuff in it? Like dead guys?”

Dale had laughed and rubbed his nose with the paintbrush. “I don’t think so. More like rats and sewage. I doubt if the gangsters dug a very good tunnel. It must go right by where the old outhouse used to be.”

Dale had wrinkled his nose. “That isn’t the Bootleggers’ Cave. The real cave is huge—with cars in it and stuff—and lots of whiskey. We’re pretty sure it’s down by the creek on Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm.”

Duane had shrugged, and that had been the end of it. Dale had never asked him about it again.

Now, more than forty years later, Dale went to sleep smiling at the memory. He did not hear the scratching that had replaced the howl of the wind—a scratching coming from the darkness behind the furnace where the opening to the coal bin was.

TEN

DURING the next few weeks at the farm—the first three weeks of November—Dale began to enjoy himself. It was a brief respite before the nightmare.

It turned out that almost all of the disadvantages of the place and situation worked to his advantage in one way or another. The lousy weather—the warm fall days lasted only a day or two more before the snow and gray skies returned—kept him inside and drove him deeper into himself in that indefinable way so important to writers. And writing was what this so-called sabbatical was all about. Dale was using my old notebooks to retrieve the sense of being eleven years old in the Elm Haven of the summer of 1960. He had never clearly expressed to himself his goal of writing a book about that summer—or even of finally recapturing clear memories of that time—but this is what he proceeded to do in the weeks after his arrival at The Jolly Corner.

At first, the lack of connection there—no telephone, no Internet, no television—almost gave him a sense of vertigo. Despite his previous discipline as a writer and academic, he was still used to being connected. But as the days turned into weeks, the silence, especially the mental silence that comes from not being hammered by e-mail and phone calls, turned first into a pleasant advantage and then into a necessity. He thought of making the occasional call when in Oak Hill or Elm Haven—to his agent, to his daughters—but he did not need to make the phone calls and soon found reason to forget them.

He found a newspaper kiosk in Elm Haven and occasionally bought the Peoria Journal Star, ostensibly for national news, although it was the provincial Peoria and rural news that really caught his attention. More frequently, often after writing for hours, he would come down into the basement where I used to sleep and listen to one of the radios there—relaxing on my bed and listening to distant St. Louis’s one good jazz station much in the way that I used to spend hot summer nights listening to Cardinals and Cubs games, the voices rising and falling across the static of the breathing earth’s ionosphere, the sense of distance and space implicit in the ambiguities of the reception.

Most of the time, however, Dale Stewart celebrated his isolation. The weirdness of the house, the phantom light on the sealed-off second floor, and the encounters with skinheads and a former bully bemused him more than concerned him. It gave a flavor of strangeness without the harshness of real threat. It kept him inward-turned and progress-aimed.

He began to take walks. After decades living in the American West where the view is everything, where the scope and scale of nature is all but overwhelming, Dale found great satisfaction in finding a modest view from the small hill a quarter of a mile behind the barn—the flat area where I had buried my dog, Wittgenstein, more than forty years earlier, although Dale did not know that—and then following the frozen creek south another three-quarters of a mile to the Johnsons’ small woods. The gray skies and flat vistas seemed to make the scale of nature smaller here, more accessible, more observable, and Dale soon began to walk an hour or two each day, despite the harsh weather. Sometimes, heading back up the creek toward the farm or cutting across the frozen fields, Dale could not even see the farmhouse until the last few hundred yards, the barn appearing first, looming out of the snow and gloom, then the rusted oval of the fueling station gas tank hanging in its iron girders, then the washed-out, pale box of the house solidifying in the flat light.

He would make himself lunch—usually soup and French bread and some cheese—and then return to my Old Man’s study with its rolltop desk, bookcases, sleigh bed, and decent light. There he’d work, typing on his ThinkPad for several more hours, often printing out the day’s work on the compact HP Laserjet printer he’d brought along so that he could edit and revise the hard copy in the evening or the next morning. Then dinner—usually something more substantial than soup and bread—and another hour or two of writing before spending the evening reading or going to the basement to listen to jazz through the console radio’s scratchy but wonderful speaker.