I thought they’d made that one an unbook, Louis thought, bemused.

“Yes,” he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash register. “Your grandda and I like each other fine,” he said and thought again of his mother’s story of how when a woman really wanted a baby, she “found” one. He remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own children.

Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.

“Oh,” she said and fell silent.

The silence made him uneasy. To break it he said, “So do you think you’ll have a good time in Chicago?”

No.

“No? Why not?”

She looked up at him with that fey expression. “I’m scared.”

He put his hand on her head. “Scared? Honey, what for? You’re not scared of the plane, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at Gage’s funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage’s crib and that was empty too. But there was dirt in it.”

Lazarus, come forth.

For the first time in months he remembered the dream he had had after Pascow’s death-the dream, and then waking up to find his feet dirty and the foot of the bed caked with pine needles and muck.

The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred.

“Just dreams,” he said to Ellie, and his voice sounded, to his ears at least, perfectly normal. “They’ll pass.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” she said, “or that we were staying here. Can we stay, Daddy? Please? I don’t want to go to Grandma and Grandda’s… I just want to go back to school. Okay?”

“Just for a little while, Ellie,” he said. “I’ve got”-he swallowed-”a few things to do here, and then I’ll be with you. We can decide what to do next.”

He expected an argument, perhaps even an Ellie-style tantrum. He might even have welcomed it-a known quantity, as that look was not. But there was only that pallid, disquieting silence which seemed so deep. He could have asked her more but found he didn’t dare; she had already told him more than he perhaps wanted to hear.

Shortly after he and Ellie returned to the boarding lounge, the flight was called. Boarding passes were produced, and the four of them got in line. Louis embraced his wife and kissed her hard.

She clung to him for a moment and then let him go so he could pick Ellie up and buss her cheek.

Ellie gazed at him solemnly with her sibyl’s eyes. “I don’t want to go,” she said again but so low oniy Louis could really hear over the shuffle and murmur of the boarding passengers. “I don’t want Mommy to go either.”

“Ellie, come on,” Louis said. “You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, “but what about you? Daddy, what about you?”

The line had begun to move now. People were walking down the jetway to the 727.

Rachel pulled Ellie’s hand and for a moment she resisted, holding up the line, her eyes fixed on her father-and Louis found himself remembering her impatience last time, her cries of come on-come on-come on.

“Daddy?”

“Go now, Ellie. Please.”

Rachel looked at Ellie and saw that dark, dreamy look for the first time.

“Ellie?” she said, startled and, Louis thought, a little afraid. “You’re holding up the line, baby.”

Ellie’s lips trembled and grew white. Then she allowed herself to be led into the jetway. She looked back at him, and he saw naked terror in her face. He raised his hand to her in false cheeriness.

Ellie did not wave back.

44

As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak fell over his mind. He became aware that he meant to go through with this. His mind, which had been sharp enough to get him through med school mostly on a scholarship and what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-danish on the 5 to 11 A. M. shift six days a week, had taken the problem over and broken it down into components, as if this was just another prelim-the biggest one he had ever taken. And he intended to pass it with an A plus, one hundred percent.

He drove to Brewer, the little city across the Penobscot River from Bangor. He found a parking spot across the street from Watson’s Hardware.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.

“Yes,” Louis said. “I’d like a heavy flashlight-one of the square ones-and something I can hood it with.”

The clerk was a small slim man with a high forehead and sharp eves. He smiled now, but his smile was not particularly pleasant. “Going jacking, good buddy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Gonna jacklight a few deer tonight?”

“Not at all,” Louis said, unsmiling. “I haven’t a license to jack.” The clerk blinked and then decided to laugh. “In other words, mind my own business, huh?

Well, look-you can’t hood one of those big lights, but you can get a piece of felt and poke a hole in the middle of it. Cut the beam clown to a penlight.”

“That sounds fine,” Louis said. “Thanks.”

“Surely. Anything else for you today?”

“Yes indeed,” Louis said. “I need a pick, a shovel, and a spade. Short-handled shovel, long-handled spade. A stout length of rope, eight feet long. A pair of work gloves. A canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight.”

“I can do all that,” the clerk said.

“I’ve got a septic tank to dig up,” Louis said. “It looks like I’m in violation of the zoning ordinances, and I’ve got some very nosy neighbors. I don’t know if hooding my light will do any good or not, but I thought I might give it a try. I could get a pretty good fine.”

“Oh-oh,” the clerk said, “better get a clothespin for your nose while you’re at it.”

Louis laughed dutifully. His purchases came to $58. 60. He paid cash.

As gas prices went up, they had used the big station wagon less and less. For some time it had had a bad wheel-bearing, but Louis had kept putting off the repair job. This was partly because he didn’t want to part with the two hundred it was likely to cost, hut mostly because it was a nuisance. Now, when he could have really used the big old dinosaur, lie didn’t dare chance it. The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going hack to Ludlow with the pick, shovel, and spade in there. Jud Crandall’s eyes were sharp, and there was nothing wrong with his brains either. He would know what was up.

Then it occurred to him that there was no real reason to go back to Ludlow anyway. Louis recrossed the Chamberlain Bridge into Bangor and checked into the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on the Odlin Road-once again near the airport, once again near Pleasantview Cemetery where his son was buried. He checked in under the name Dee Dee Ramone and paid cash for his room.

He tried to nap, reasoning that he would be glad of the rest before tomorrow morning. In the words of some Victorian novel or other, there was wild work ahead of him tonight-enough wild work to last a lifetime.

But his brain simply would not shut down.

He lay on the anonymous motel bed beneath a nondescript motel print of picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet, coins, and keys on the night table beside him, his hands behind his head. That feeling of coldness still held; he felt totally unplugged from his people, the places that had become so familiar to him, even his work. This could have been any Howard Johnson’s in the world-in San Diego or Duluth or Bangkok or Charlotte Amalie. He was nowhere, and now and then a thought of surpassing oddity struck him: before he saw any of those familiar places and faces again, he would see his son.

His plan kept unreeling in his mind. He looked at it from all angles, poked it, prodded it, looked for holes or soft places. And he felt that in truth he was walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness.