“It may be. But what’s the alternative? The fences are already up, Dex. The best fence is the forest and the weather. There’s only the one road out, from what I’ve heard, and it leads straight to Fort LeDuc, which is a military town. Sixty miles away. It’s not practical to hike that far.”

“It could be done,” Dex said.

“Maybe, with the right gear and supplies. Then you have the problem of arriving without money or ID or useful skills. And evading the Proctors while you’re at it. And who are we talking about here? You, me, a few able-bodied men? It would still leave most of Two Rivers under martial law.”

“I know. I’m not happy about it. If you have a better idea, tell me.”

“We find Stern.”

“Jesus, Howard.” Dex sighed. “What makes you think he’s alive?”

“His telephone number. He gave me a private number where I could reach him. Mostly evenings, he said. I wrote it down.”

“I don’t see—”

“No, listen. The thing is, it’s a four-one-six exchange. Everything at the lab, including the dorms, was a seven-oh-six number. Here in town, most numbers are four-one-five, four-one-six, four-one-seven. The one time I called his private line, a woman answered. Not a switchboard. Just, ‘Hello? Yes?’ So the obvious implication is that he had a town residence, an apartment or a room or maybe a woman he was seeing. He might have been there when the accident happened.”

“More likely he wasn’t. If something was going on at the lab, wouldn’t he have been involved?”

“Well, I don’t know. Not necessarily.”

“But you don’t have any real evidence he’s alive. You haven’t seen him.”

“No—”

“It’s a small town, Howard.”

“He would be hiding. Like me. Maybe somebody picking up rations for him, so he doesn’t have to go out in the street. But no, I have no direct evidence. Just …”

“What?”

“A feeling.”

“Pardon me, but that’s not too scientific.”

“A hunch. No, it’s not scientific. But, Dex, doesn’t it seem like there’s something happening here? I won’t say ‘supernatural,’ that’s a stupid word, but something out of the ordinary?”

“That’s a safe bet!”

“Not just the obvious. I mean, subtler things. Dreams. My dreams are different now. Visions. Maybe what I saw in the woods was a vision. I never believed in so-called psychic phenomena. But since the accident at the lab…” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I believe. Maybe a hunch is not something to ignore.”

That was logical, Dex thought, but it was a suspicious kind of logic. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “All you have is the number?”

“No address. Stern didn’t like people knowing too much about him—even a favorite nephew.”

“The Proctors hooked up their own phone lines, but they haven’t fixed the exchanges. I don’t know what the hell good a number is.”

“Well, it might be in the phone book.”

“What, under Stern?”

“Obviously not. But I keep thinking about the woman who answered. The way she answered. Her tone of voice. Casual. Proprietary—it was her phone. Probably the number is in the book, but under another name.”

“Great. There must be twenty-five thousand names in the Bayard County phone book. What do you do, leaf through it a page at a time?”

“No. Nor is there any way to get the information from the phone company, or whoever used to be the phone company. That stumped me for a long time. But the man who owned this house, Paul Cantwell, he was a CPA. You know what he has in the bedroom upstairs? A PC with every kind of accounting and data-basing software known to man. Quite capable of sorting the phone book for a number.”

“You can’t type in the text of the phone book. Or does he have that on disk, too?”

“No, but look: we don’t have to type it in. You know what an optical reader is?”

“Takes text from a printed page.”

“Right. So we can scan the phone book. Feed it to the computer a page at a time.”

Howard was dangerously enthusiastic about this, Dex thought. “You have an optical reader in the house, too?”

“No. That’s the tricky part. We need to get one. There’s a store on Beacon—”

“Howard, all those stores are roped off. The Proctors are shipping out the contents.”

Howard leaned forward, rattling his empty cup. “I walk down Beacon every time I go to the food depot. There’s a store called Desktop Solutions on Beacon between Oak and Grace. The Bureau inventory is working south from Oak and west from the lakeshore. They haven’t been there yet.”

“Still, it’s behind a rope.”

“I can cross a rope.”

“There are militiamen on every corner.”

“They’re sparser at night,” Howard said.

“Oh,” Dex said. “Oh, no. They’re on a hair trigger out there, Howard. They shoot people.”

“Out the back gate of this house there’s an alleyway that runs to Oak. Across Oak there’s a similar alley in back of the Beacon Street shops. The alleys aren’t well lit and they aren’t patrolled like the main streets.”

“Purely insane. And what are you taking this risk for? A telephone number?”

“To find out what happened!” Howard was visibly trembling. “To know, Dex! Even if we can’t go home. And anyway—Christ, it’s my uncle!” He looked down. “1 don’t know anybody in this town except you. I never really lived here. My family was all in New York State. Except Stern.”

“Howard … no matter what, the odds are he’s dead.”

“I can’t leave it at that.”

The light in the window had faded. The clouds were heavy. Dex looked at his watch. It was past curfew. He was stuck here for the night.

He looked at Howard: painfully young, a kid in duct-taped glasses. A damn fool.

“Maybe you ought to make some more coffee,” Dex said. “We can’t leave until the moon is down.”

CHAPTER NINE

Even at the raw end of autumn, even in the brittle hour after midnight, Two Rivers owned a tenuous warmth.

From its highest point, the hill above Powell Creek Park, the town fell in dark terraces of wood-frame houses, small lawns, and neat brick storefronts to the hidden shore of Lake Merced. Streetlights cut irregular circles into the windy night.

The town faded to black at its border. It was isolated in the hilly northern peninsula of the province of Mille Lacs, a territory of trading posts, lumber towns, iron mines, copper mines. Here, the darkness had a weight.

There were wolves in the forest, and periodically that autumn they had come loping into the outskirts of town, their curiosity aroused by the powerful and unfamiliar mixture of human scents. But the wolves, after a cautious investigation, almost always chose to avoid the paved streets. There was something in this mingled air they didn’t like.

Beyond the westernmost arc of the lake, on what had once been Ojibway treaty land, the ruins of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory cast a delicate light across the belly of a cloud. Other lights moved unseen among the trees.

In the town itself, along the gridwork of empty streets, the only moving lights were the headlights of the patrol cars; the only sound was the sound of their motors, of their tires gritting on the frost-white asphalt.

Luke was not visiting tonight, and Clifford’s mother had gone to bed at ten o’clock. When she didn’t have company she went to bed early and slept almost till noon. Which was okay with Clifford.

He stayed up much later. He was allowed to sleep in as long as he wanted, and he had learned that when his mother went to bed—braced by stiff doses of the unlabeled distilled whiskey Luke brought her on a weekly basis—the house became his own.

He owned it. From the cavernous, cluttered living room to the dark and scary basement, it was his domain. On nights like this the house seemed immensely large. It was a kingdom, vast and a little eerie, and he was its uneasy ruler.