When he found the harrier poem, his breath caught in his throat:
Henry’s keen intuition served him well, and his classes in logic at Harvard prepared him to reason his way quickly to the meaning of this discovery.
The poem left on the kitchen notepad was not a new composition. Jim had written it long before Henry’s arrival, not just hours ago.
Therefore, the poem could not possibly refer to the harriers in the sky moments before Henry murdered Jim. The poem had nothing to do with Jim’s murder and nothing to do with Henry’s, either.
Not that he had believed for a minute that Jim had returned from the dead to compose verse and threaten him with it. Henry was not a superstitious person, and even immersion in the primitive culture of these rural hills could not so quickly wash away the education and, indeed, enlightenment that he received in those hallowed halls in Cambridge. But at least finding the haiku in this book
Or did it?
Jim didn’t need to copy a haiku out of a book. Having written it, he would remember it. Remembering, he would see how useful it could be in the current circumstances.
No. Jim was not alive and was not one of the living dead. Jim was, damn it, as dead as—
In the attic, someone rapped out a few lines of iambic pentameter, then a few lines of dactylic heptameter.
Sixty-six
After more than thirty-one years, Tom Bigger remembered the way home as clearly as though he had left it only a month before. The street canopied with alders that were old even when he’d been a boy, the cast-iron streetlamps with the beveled panes, the grand old houses behind deep lawns all stirred in him a time when he was a boy, preadolescence, before he became so angry, before he was made angry by ideologies that now seemed insane to him and alien.
Like some others, his parents’ house had not been restored so much as remade into a greater grandeur than it originally possessed. Nevertheless, he could recognize it, and the sight of it thrilled as much as it saddened him.
The time had arrived to say good-bye to Josef Yurashalmi, and Tom fumbled for words to adequately express his gratitude.
But as the old man parked in front of the house, he said, “You don’t know they still live there, Tom. All these years … And though it pains me to say it, the way you look, you won’t inspire the confidence of whoever might live there now. If maybe your folks have moved and if maybe the people here know where they’ve gone, you’ll be more likely to learn their whereabouts if I’m at your side when you ring the bell.”
“You’ve done too much already. You should be heading home to Hannah, she’s not—”
“Hush, Tom. I’m an old man trying to do a
“
“An act of loving kindness, which I guess you haven’t seen much of in your years of rambling. At this time in his life, any old Jew like me starts wondering if he’s done enough of them.”
Humbled, Tom said, “I don’t think I’ve done any.”
“You’re young, you have time. I’m sorry if my slippers might embarrass you, but let’s go see if your
The street was quiet, but Tom’s heart was not. Walking with Josef toward the front door, he lost courage step by step. He had rejected them, had spoken of despising them and their values, and after all this time, they would be justified in despising him.
“You can do it,” Josef said. “You need to do it. I’ll stay as long as it takes for the three of you to be comfortable. But your folks are my age, Tom, so I probably know how they think better than you know. And how they’ll think about this — they’ll thank God you came back, and they’ll kiss you and cry and kiss you some more, and it’ll be like none of it ever happened.”
On the veranda, Tom took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.
Sixty-seven
With Puzzle and Riddle looking into the very bottom of the night, they found ways around three guards at different stations. The escapees made their way boldly toward the line of mobile laboratories, between two of them, south and then west toward the end of the yard, into the meadow.
From there they had to double back toward the north to find the entrance to the woods and the path that Merlin knew as well as any dray horse, in older times, knew and could follow its route without its driver’s direction.
Under the interlaced branches of the trees, the moonlight flickered and eventually went out. The way before them became black and forbidding. But Cammy knew that Merlin saw well in darkness, and his two new friends apparently saw even more clearly than he did.
Halfway to the Carlyle house, Puzzle halted them with a single word,
After the bear, they used flashlights, and progressed more quickly, with less stumbling and thrashing through the brush that here and there intruded on the trail.
When they left the forest and entered the fields farmed by the Carlyles, the lights of Jim and Nora’s house were a welcome sight.
At the front-porch steps, on the lawn, someone had parked a Land Rover that Cammy had never seen before. She was prepared to reveal Puzzle and Riddle to the Carlyles, but she wasn’t pleased about taking the risk of bringing someone unknown into the picture.
When her flashlight revealed Virginia license plates on the vehicle, her concern grew, and she whispered to Grady, “Better take them to the garage back of the barn. Jim’s Mountaineer is there, and I think he keeps the keys under the floor mat on the driver’s side. Load everybody and drift down here as quiet as you can.”
“Come with us,” Grady urged.
“Tell you what — I’ll wait on the porch until I see you coasting down this way. Then I’ll knock on the door. If I get Jim and Nora’s okay, we’ll be able to go legally, and that’s a lot better, nobody looking for a stolen Mountaineer. But if something’s wrong here, we’ll go any way we can.”
Sixty-eight
Earlier, in the late afternoon, Rudy Neems parked the rented SUV a block from Liddon Wallace’s house. In the cargo hold stood ten two-gallon cans that he bought at a Pep Boys and filled at a Mobil station. Because the
