The Croning Part 10

His thoughts jumped to Mich.e.l.le. Oh, no! What if they were after her too? There'd be another door in the back, surely. The light in the gallery changed subtly and he whirled and saw someone approaching him from between the exhibit cases. The individual moved with alarming speed, bent low to the floor, but straightening as he or she drew nearer. Unfolding...

"I guess you'd best come with me," Bronson Ford said. It sounded like Bronson Ford, at least. The voice quavered on the edge of diabolical laughter. The figure was too tall-it loomed over Don. He yelled, albeit a cry that was silenced in an instant. This figure reached for him with a splayed hand both spindly and large. All Don could smell as it snuffed his consciousness was the whiff of his own puke.

He was shambling along a hallway and the realization he couldn't remember getting there was jarring as a broken reel in a film.

There'd been a surreal conversation with Bronson Ford about art, or anthropology, and prior to that, an even more fanciful exchange with the two feds who'd seemed intent on convincing him his granddad was a super-villain, Mich.e.l.le was a double agent, and that the moon landings were faked and half the aristocracy of Olympia partic.i.p.ated in Black Ma.s.s or worse. A wave of dizziness and disorientation swept over him, and for a few seconds he swooned, nearly overcome by the sensation he'd wandered these gloomy halls for an eternity. He also recalled fragments of voices, the rustle of fabric, of being smothered, and then these impressions were swallowed by the mists of amnesia.

The other guests had retired and the houselights were dim. He groped his way back to the guestroom, praying Mich.e.l.le awaited him there. The interior was mostly dark except for a pocket of light in the living room. He found Mich.e.l.le curled on the couch near the mammoth rattan floor lamp very similar to one back in San Francisco they'd bought at a bazaar in Hong Kong nearly a decade ago when their relationship was in the final legs of a second honeymoon phase. He'd attended a geophysics conference, and she, being on sabbatical to write a book about multiculturalism, traveled with him for research purposes. They skipped the conference and spent a week sightseeing, losing themselves amongst the mazes, and gambling and partying at the nightclubs where Mandarin-speaking locals whined American pop cla.s.sics in pa.s.sable English.

There were a few tense moments upon returning safely stateside when it seemed possible a brand-new baby might be on the way-but one wasn't; thank G.o.d for a weak sperm count for once and crisis averted! The twins, G.o.d bless 'em, were plenty. These many years later, neither of Don nor Mich.e.l.le was sufficiently comfortable to examine his or her feelings in light of current events and the benefit of hindsight.

Mich.e.l.le had been crying; her blotchy face shone pale as an egg. For a queasy moment seeing her camped beneath the tall lamp as if posed by a photographer, memories of the Hong Kong excursion and the resultant baby scare caused Don's pulse rate to accelerate again, precipitated the looming disorientation and sickness.

"Honey, sorry it's so late. Whatsa matter?" he said. "Sweetie..."

She had wrapped herself in a raggedy quilt her grandmother sewed at parochial school. She pulled the quilt tight under her chin and stared at him. "Tell me a secret. One only you and I know."

Don sat on the edge of the couch. He awkwardly took her hand; it was cold. "Honey, what are you doing out here?" It occurred to him that this might be a ploy to deflect his natural peevishness at being abandoned earlier during the reception. He squashed that line of conjecture and put on a brave smile.

She left her hand in his, limp as a dead fish. She stared at him with that queer, drugged expression and said nothing.

"Okay. What kind of secret?"

"Anything," she said. "As long as it's ours."

"Um. That was kind of b.i.t.c.hy abandoning me to the wolves, this evening. Er, I guess that's no secret since everybody saw the dust cloud, right?"

She stared at him and he guessed then that she too had been drinking and more heavily than he first presumed.

Don swallowed and forced a smile. "I can't match my socks and, uh, I wear 'em inside out. Oh, oh, and I forget to change 'em more often than two or three times a month. How's that?"

She squeezed his hand and seemed relieved. "It's you."

"Yeah, babe. Hope to G.o.d you weren't expecting Don Juan." He stroked her wrist.

She nodded. Her expression slackened, became heavy with exhaustion. Don coaxed her from the couch, and together they swayed and stumbled into the bedroom.

Don clicked off the light and was instantly weightless upon the king-sized bed, coc.o.o.ned by the blankets and the swaddling darkness and had almost fallen into the well of sleep when Mich.e.l.le mumbled at him across the swells and swales, the inland sea. "Huh, whazzat?" he said.

"I thought you came in earlier," she said, her voice m.u.f.fled by a pillow. "A while ago. I was reading and...I went to sleep and something woke me."

"Yeh? What did."

"You."

"Oh." Don lay face down, engrossed by intestinal gurgles, the womb-noises of his guts rebelling at their contents. "I did? When?"

Mich.e.l.le remained silent. Then, even as Don decided she'd fallen asleep, she said dreamily, "I dunno. Earlier. I opened my eyes and there you were, watching me sleep. You used to do that, 'member?"

"Sure do, mm-hm."

"Why would you be standing in the closet? Just standing there between my dresses. Couldn't figure that out."

"Honey?" Don rolled over. "This is crazy, I know. Do you happen to know a physicist named Nelson Cooye? These two weirdoes claimed you're an evil, evil woman. A mistress of skullduggery. Our taxes in action, eh?" He reached toward her, but she was too far away across the water and he fell back. He stared into the gloom and listened to her breathe and after a bit she began to snore.

He dreamed of walking naked across a savanna toward a stand of Eucalyptus trees. Agents Frick and Frack stood to his left in the tall gra.s.s. The men were naked but for loincloths and sungla.s.ses. Both were shouting at him; their voices didn't carry and he walked onward.

A piece of the earth rose between the trees and pushed one over with a series of low cracks. The thing was a sloth, or an elephant. It watched him and as he approached, legs propelling him against his yammering instinct, he soon saw that it was neither of those animals. Then he was in its shadow.

In the morning he recalled a fragment of his vision with a small scream. Five seconds later it had evaporated from his mind and was lost.

CHAPTER SIX.

Bluebeard's Husband (Now) Though his days were busy after Mich.e.l.le departed, Don initiated further measures to minimize the solitude of the empty house. He invited Argyle Arden and Turk Standish for a barbeque over the weekend, and inveigled Harris Camby, the former Pierce County Sheriff, to attend as well-promising ale and horseshoes. Harris was a formidable presence in the pits; even when the sheriff was dead-drunk none of his friends or colleagues could hope to match his prowess.

Sat.u.r.day proved lovely; a bright, warm afternoon hinted at the possibility of a prolonged summer. Don grilled ribs and served steins of Irish stout to his friends. As midday slowly ceded to a soft, hazy twilight, he lounged on the porch with Argyle. Harris and his grandson Lewis were methodically drubbing Turk and Argyle's companion for the day, a preppy grad student named Hank. Hank, a beefy kid in a heavy Norwegian sweater and fancy slacks, sweated and scowled, apparently displeased at Harris's wry commentary regarding the boy's game, and possibly even more so with Turk's complacency about being thoroughly sh.e.l.led. His face flushed red as a fired brick and he drank too many rum and c.o.kes for Don's comfort.

The conversation meandered, being of no consequence beyond a pleasant diversion, when Argyle took his pipe stem from between his teeth and said, "Has Mich.e.l.le gotten anywhere with her survey?" He meant, of course, the genealogical research and translations she'd chipped away at for decades. It had once been a hobby, a method of easing her tensions and frustrations during the inevitable setbacks and disappointments in discovering the Lost Tribe.

"I gather yes. She's in there, going great guns."

Argyle chuckled. "She's a terrier with a bone. Always been that way when it comes to her pa.s.sions."

"We don't discuss it, really. Over my head."

"Hrmm. You've got rocks for brains, is why. I hope she publishes her findings. The work is quite intricate. Her piece regarding the demographical data of her ancestors' princ.i.p.al migratory trajectories is remarkable. Admittedly, I did collaborate on particular bits of procedural doc.u.mentation-"

"If you look closely, you'll note my eyes are glazing."

"Bah. How's Kurt doing?"

"Fine, fine. I called him yesterday. He's laid up at home. Says Winnie's rubbing his feet and feeding him grapes."

"Hah! I hope she doesn't hear him running at the mouth or I'd bet good money he's a dead man." Argyle sucked on his pipe. "If Kurt's okay, then what's the matter?"

"Nothing. I'm happy as a clam at high tide. The weather is marvelous, yeah? The house is all mine for a while-"

"About that."

Don waited and when it seemed as if his friend wouldn't continue his thought, he said, "What about it? Afraid I'll go stir crazy? No chance of that, not with tending Mich.e.l.le's vegetables and puttering about."

"Yes, it sounds swell. But that's not what I meant. What I mean is, it's a shame you two inherited this place." Argyle swallowed some beer and gestured vaguely with his pipe. "Let's face it, with the exception of Mich.e.l.le, the Mocks are seriously strange. You've never even met any of them, thus there's absolutely zero familial attachment. Must be like living in a cheap, bizarre museum. You're more curator than owner."

"Not true. I met Babette, once."

"For about thirty seconds, sure. Didn't that dame stay at the Samovar instead of here? There you go. Anyway, back to you and your lovely wife. I'm thinking you two are looking like a couple of silver foxes-"

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. Really, though. If your back gets much worse, those stairs will be impossible. When you go senile and start drooling into a bib Mich.e.l.le will have to set you up with a gurney in the parlor, because she won't want to jog back and forth. And that'll just be tacky. People will be too embarra.s.sed to visit-"

"Ah, at least there's a silver lining."

"You think so now. Mich.e.l.le will be forced to meet her friends at their houses, the Kiwanis club, or, sweet Lord, bingo-"

"Mich.e.l.le doesn't like bingo."

"The h.e.l.l she doesn't. See, that's the problem. She's got interests you don't have the foggiest notion about. It'll get worse. Pretty quick she'll be shacking with the pool boy from the Broadsword hotel and spending your retirement on the slots at the Happy Eagle."

"If I'm senile, I don't think any of this is a problem."

"Trust me, lad. What you two need is to sell off this place and get into a nice updated rambler in town, close to the bus lines so when you become incompetent and lose your license you can still go fill your little canvas bag at the supermarket. h.e.l.l, you're a stubborn goat-I know you aren't listening to a d.a.m.ned thing I say. Try this then: get that no-account son of yours and do it up right. Cart off a mountain of the junk, slap on a coat of paint and some trifles you've got in storage, and voila! It'll seem more like home. Think on it. I know a guy who'll take most of this c.r.a.p off your hands."

Don laughed and poured Argyle another beer.

That evening after his company had gone home, he repaired to the parlor and rested in his favorite chair, a compendium of subterranean geophysical studies resting heavily across his thighs, and conceded that Argyle had raised a valid point. The house was a museum. They'd never gotten around to boxing things up or shipping unwanted items away to the Salvation Army, or Goodwill, for the bald fact four months a year seemed too short and there were numerous, more pressing tasks, the inevitable backlogs of work-related business, and the torpid apathy that accompanied hot weather. Now he had no such excuse. Nine months they'd lived here full time; nine months of him picking about the edges, wary of tackling the Herculean Labor, his greatest obstacle being Mich.e.l.le's diffidence. If and when they decided to overhaul the decor, she insisted upon itemizing and meticulously cataloging everything down to the last spoon, the last shred of paper.

Well, he could handle something as simple as that, couldn't he? I'm a grown man-a PhD, for Pete's sake! And I'm not afraid of my wife! Which wasn't quite true, but nice to believe, if half-heartedly. A faint doubt nagged him, however; this doubt forced him to question whether he harbored an ulterior motive. He'd long sublimated a growing desire to poke about the place in depth, and, horrors of impropriety! peruse the materials in Mich.e.l.le's study, the books she pored over with indefatigable determination, yet never brought to bed or spoke of with any candor.

It was difficult for any degree of mystery to survive eons of marriage. Historically, he'd welcomed the enigma of his wife, cognizant they'd managed so swimmingly because of their frequent and lengthy separations due to work, and no less the professional compartmentalization they maintained even in these, their golden years. Lately, though, he felt dissatisfied and mildly resentful regarding this aloofness, perhaps goaded by the awareness that while his life and work were slowly succ.u.mbing to entropy, hers flourished magnificently as ever. She remained exotic and he had been relegated to pasture, effectively condemned to isolation in a house that unnerved and depressed him. And why? Why her fixation upon this plot of land, this building? He thrust aside the thought as unworthy and convinced himself his motives were altruistic, or at least pragmatic.

Girded by this new-found resolve to transform the house into a more agreeable habitat, he rang Kurt at home to request his support and physical a.s.sistance in the endeavor. Don prepared for his son's inevitable protestations of business deadlines, domestic crises and the like. Thus it was to his bemus.e.m.e.nt that Kurt hesitated briefly and then said he'd drive down in the morning and stay for a couple of days. He promised to bring a truckload of boxes and packing tape, but on one condition. Don had to agree to a campout at the fishing hole about a mile up the creek from their house. Don opened his mouth to protest this ridiculous notion and the line went dead. He hadn't gotten around to modernizing their communications system, so he repeatedly tapped the reset hook to no avail. Thule raised his head and growled. Racc.o.o.ns came onto the porch for late-night snacks. Don listened for the garbage pail getting knocked about. Thule put his nose between his paws and dozed again.

A campout? What foolishness was this? He decided it was idle chatter, perhaps a way to invoke some semblance of the bond they shared during Kurt's boyhood. Don stared into the fire and turned the conversation over, searching for clues to explain Kurt's mysterious exhibition of philanthropy. Perhaps his son wanted first crack at some of the antique collectibles, although that seemed far-fetched and uncharitable of Don besides. Kurt hadn't the slightest clue as to evaluating such things and he didn't need money. His company paid exorbitant wages supplemented by lucrative retirement programs and medical benefits. Don scratched his head, then let it go, loath to look askance at good fortune. In the morning he'd zoom into town to stock plenty of Kurt's favorite beer, mildly worried that maybe the boy had abandoned beer for white wine, or mineral water, or whatever affectation struck the fancy of his generation's rich, Patagonia-clad suburbanites.

Before bed, he jogged around the house and made sure every single light was in working order and switched on. Heaven help him if Mich.e.l.le ever checked the bill and put two and two together; he'd be blackened toast. He fell asleep with the ma.s.sive geophysics tome weighing against his chest, soft light from the nightstand lamp warm across his cheek.

The thud of the book sliding from his lap and hitting the floor brought him to the surface. The room was dark as dark gets, although as his rheumy eyes adjusted, he discerned a blurry crack of light beneath the bedroom door. He groped for the lamp, upsetting the gla.s.s of water that soaked his dentures. Pulling the chain had no effect; it only produced the dry rattle that bespoke an open circuit. Sweat popped out on his face and he froze, trembling in his pajamas, inexplicably consumed by an image of the cellar door swung wide like a mouth skinned open to reveal a throat.

Water dripped from the overturned gla.s.s on the stand to the floor. Then new noises came: squeaking and rustling. He understood even in his blindness the closet door, a wooden panel that folded like an accordion, had slid on its track.

Oh, boy. Adrenaline squirted into his blood. There was a presence in the room. Unless, oh, of course-the dog. Thule was a hunting dog at heart. He often nosed about, sniffing for vermin. Thule must've moved the panel after smelling one of those blasted rodents that hid in the walls. Don raised himself in bed to admonish his pet and floorboards shifted in the closet, followed by a low utterance, a cross between a wheeze and a drawn-out croak, although he knew instinctively that wasn't quite it, but his mind couldn't fix upon the proper description; it lay beyond his experience. Don's heart skipped and he thought, Here comes the big one, as his chest tightened. Clothes hangers jostled and clacked. Something under the bed sc.r.a.ped, like nails gouging wood, and the groaning croak came again, slightly m.u.f.fled and directly beneath him, a pneumonia victim's burbling, gasping inhalation.

Don shouted and threw back the bedcovers. He clambered from bed and lurched to the door. He flung it open and light from the hall illuminated parts of the room. The closet appeared empty except for shirts and pants and jackets hanging neatly from their hooks. Clothing swayed gently. He couldn't make out anything in the darkness under the bed. Poor Thule cowered on the opposite side of the room. He shook in brute terror; a pool of urine spread along the dips and warps of the floorboards. Don, not daring to reenter the bedroom, beckoned him with quavering rea.s.surances and eventually the dog came, tail tucked between his legs, foam dripping from his muzzle as if he had gone mad. Together, they retreated to the kitchen and Don saw the cellar door was indeed open by several inches. He shut the door and wedged a chair under the k.n.o.b, a trick he'd seen in the movies, along with using a credit card to pick a lock. He put on a coat and dialed the sheriff's office to report a possible burglary in progress. The dispatcher promised to send a car right away.

"Right away" turned out to be forty minutes. Don developed a migraine from squinting; he'd left his gla.s.ses upstairs. He finally calmed enough to boil coffee. Two sheriff's deputies arrived in a Bronco and came in and took his report. The pair were amiable men who were duly impressed he was friends with old man Camby. They searched the house, clumping room to room in their heavy boots, shining flashlights while their radios squawked and crackled. They checked the cellar (refraining from comment about his wedging the door, although they exchanged looks) and performed a sweep of the barn. Meanwhile, Don waited on the porch, his arms crossed to ward the damp and chill. Frogs rasped in the black sea of gra.s.s. Don's knees knocked and he spooked himself with the thought the men might not emerge from the barn, that he would huddle, petrified, until some unimaginable doom slithered forth to drag him from the face of the earth.

The officers returned and stood around awkwardly, uniforms smudged with cobwebs and dust. During their sweep, they spotted a racc.o.o.n in the eaves toward the rear of the house and startled a possum near the barn. Possums and racc.o.o.ns were bitter enemies and a noisy fight could've been what Don heard, explained the younger officer, a round-faced farm boy who doubtless knew his nocturnal critters. Don served them coffee and apologized for the false alarm. In the stark light of the kitchen, he inwardly questioned whether it had indeed been a false start, the byproduct of paranoia and isolation, or, saints preserve him, incipient dementia. Already, the incident threatened to fade into the mora.s.s of regular bad dreams.

The veteran of the two asked why he had removed the lights in the bedroom. Don didn't comprehend until the officer explained the bulbs were missing from the reading lamp and the overhead light. In fact the latter fixture had been unscrewed so that the globe dangled from the end of the threaded bolt and the wires were exposed. A definite fire hazard, the man warned, eyeing him sidelong as one might regard a potential kook.

Don was ashamed. He stammered another earnest apology, at a loss to reconcile this strange information with the lack of evidence of an intruder. The deputies a.s.sured him it wasn't a problem-a senior home alone in a semi-remote setting...better safe than sorry, right? Would he care for an escort to a friend's place for the night, a motel? He declined, professing foolishness at his overreaction.

It was three A.M. when their taillights dwindled into the black. His bladder had expanded to the size of a football and he fairly hopped into the bathroom to urinate, cursing his failing eyesight, his weak bowels and apparently diminishing numbers of brain cells.

He spent the rest of the evening in the parlor, sleeping in fits and starts, jolted by every tiny sound. In the gaps between dozing and waking he remembered the first night he'd ever heard strange noises in the house; 1962, the summer after they'd inherited the place. He'd awakened to creaking floorboards-the odd clink and sc.r.a.pe as of something small and metal dragging in the hallway. He'd sat up to investigate, when Mich.e.l.le gripped his wrist. Her hand was cold, wasn't it? Like it had been in a meat locker. How unreal the white oval of her face hanging there in the gloom. Her hair floated black and wild and her fingers tightened until his bones gritted. A purple ring puffed his wrist the next day.

Honey, don't, she'd said in a soft, matter-of-fact tone, and pulled him against her breast. Don't leave me. The bed is cold.

No, she was cold; her hands, her body, frigid as a corpse through her thin gown. Yet he'd streamed with sweat, his chest sticky, his pajamas drenched and he'd been breathing like a man who'd run up a steep hill.

Had he protested? He didn't think so. Something else happened then-he became leaden and sleepy and Mich.e.l.le soothed him and stroked his hair and he drifted away. In the morning it faded into a dream, could truly have been a dream for all he knew. Another of those unsettling occurrences he almost forgot, almost buried for good, until nights like this poked him in the tender spot that never quite healed.

"I'm surprised Winnie let you come," Don said when Kurt arrived later that morning to begin their Great Reconstruction of the house. They'd decided to start with the attic. He doc.u.mented their progress in a blank journal while Kurt wrapped objects in newspaper and then stuffed them into boxes. It was slow, dirty work.

"Oh, she didn't let me-she basically threw me out of the house." Kurt clapped his work gloves and dust smoked in the bluish light. He patted his stomach. "Morning sickness, bloating, I dunno. She's b.i.t.c.hy. Frankly, I'm happy as h.e.l.l to get away."

"Um," Don said, trying to remember what Mich.e.l.le's mood had been like during her early pregnancy, chagrined to realize he couldn't. "I know how it is." He tapped the list with his pen: a rusty bicycle; moth-eaten corduroy children's clothes; eight boxes of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments; five boxes of water-stained children's books; four boxes of marbles, jacks, playing cards, chess boards, wooden blocks, jigsaw puzzles, etc; two boxes of homemade candles and soap, mostly melted; five boxes of penny dreadfuls and counting; two boxes of phonograph platters; a Philco radio from the early '30s; and they weren't even warmed up. He still ached all over from dozing in the chair.

Moth-eaten canvases lay stacked like animal skins upon a crumbling easel deeper in the blue shadows; more of the bizarre grotesqueries he'd encountered in the past. This particular stack was of a highly stylized technique, a combination of oil and charcoal, unsigned and incredibly weathered to the point of ruin. That made him glad for each of nine or ten paintings he skimmed through dealt from individualized perspectives with a train of child-figures moving in a column across a plain toward a cavern in a mountainside. The plain was marked by a scatter of henges and megaliths. A muddy inscription near the bottom of one canvas read, Fathers and mothers come as slaves and depart as kin. The children slake Old Leech. They entertain him with their screams.

The name Old Leech struck a chord in his subconscious. He covered the pile with a drop-cloth, determined to burn the whole mess later. "Oh, hey, don't touch those," he said as Kurt rummaged in the cabinet of the dolls.

Kurt turned a rag doll over in his hands; a horrid thing of matted yarn, floppy, segmented limbs and coveralls wrinkled with age and mildew. Its eyes had fallen out. "Eh? This thing is heavier than it looks. Swear to Christ it's full of wet sand."

"Would you-? Your mother's got her mind set. She'll cook my goose for sure if we mess with them. We'll come back to it later."

"I doubt it," Kurt said. He laughed and tossed the doll aside. He looked around. "We've been at this for three hours. No end in sight. This must be what Purgatory is like."

"Sisyphus and son."

Kurt moved to the Westinghouse projector and the film canisters. "Ever watch any of these?" He picked up a couple of the canisters and gestured. "I mean, wow. Some of these babies are old as the hills." He began stacking them inside a box, pausing to name the t.i.tles of those that bore one. Most of the labels had faded to white. There were several dozen canisters, approximately a quarter of which contained Mich.e.l.le's personal collection from various travels abroad.

"There's not much to them," Don said after a period of cataloging the boxes, labeling with a magic marker, and stacking them. In truth, he'd only glanced at a few of the films, and those at metaphorical gunpoint, usually in the company of Mich.e.l.le's anthropologist friends following one of her trips; a gaggle of bluff academics in Hawaiian flower print shirts and Bermuda shorts, or in the case of the more staid variety (like Don himself), cheap suits they wore to every occasion, including the grocery store for cigarettes; everybody sipping gin and tonic and laughing uproariously at the in-jokes while Mich.e.l.le put on her dry-as-bones dead-pan narration and Don melted into the background, content to weather the tedium by pa.s.sing among them with the drink tray.

"What?"

"Bird watching, picnics, travelogue rubbish. Nothing interesting." Don winced at the paucity of creativity in his fabrication. He couldn't fathom his embarra.s.sment. Mich.e.l.le wasn't particularly enamored of his rock collection or his treatises on glaciations, was she?

"Bird watching?" Kurt frowned. "This must be from one of Mom's trips. Yeah, right here-Papua, New Guinea. Crng (Lynn. V) 10/83. What's on it?"

"You've seen your mother's slides. This is probably the same, but longer."

"Ugh. The b.l.o.o.d.y slideshows; how soon we forget." Kurt chucked the canister in with its mates. A couple minutes later, he whistled to Don. "Hey, Pop. Check this out." He waved an envelope of photographs he'd discovered in one of Mich.e.l.le's waterproof belt pouches; the kind she carried when afoot in jungles and deserts. The pouch had been mixed up with the film canisters. "I was doing a wee bit of snooping when we were over last week. Win is so taken by Mom's adventurous ways and I showed her some of the stuff she'd left here. Anyway, I came across these. See, these were taken in the '30s or '40s judging by the car there, and the house..."

Don accepted the photos; less than a dozen low quality black and white shots of the house with a Model T parked in the yard, and the barn a gray rectangle in the background. Other photographs featured pastorals: the field; the hill and stream; one from atop an elevated vantage in the valley. The last four were murky, overexposed-the dim interior of a forest revealed as an indistinct gallery of ghostly trunks; a pile of misshapen stones backlit by sunset; and two more of a person standing near the stones, facing the photographer, arms spread in a vee, a dark, indistinct object dangling from his or her left hand-a satchel, a sack, something lumpy. These last were shot in darkness at the edge of a bonfire. The figure was terribly out of focus; a blurry white cloud mottled in splotches of black.

"Aren't these odd," Don said, eyes widening as he realized the person was in the buff. Only flesh gave forth such a diffuse, moist glimmer. He checked the reverse; someone had written in faded ink: Crng Patricia W. 10/30/1937. He intensely disliked these pictures, and could tell Kurt felt the same. He slipped them into the envelope and put the envelope into his pocket for future perusal.

"Those rocks are familiar," Kurt said, oddly excited. "When I was a kid. Holly and I got turned around in the woods. That's where I saw them. In the woods."