“I mean now.”
“Oh.” He closed his hand around hers.
“That’s not bad,” she said.
“It’s nice.”
“A good grip. Probably no spinal damage. I expected the worst.”
She had a warm, strong hand. He said, “Nice.”
He closed his eyes. An inner darkness leaped at him. He opened his eyes at once, before he could fall back into the dream.
“You can let go of my hand now,” she said.
“Not a dream, huh?”
“No dream.”
She clicked on the penlight again and directed it down between his seat and the center console.
“This is really strange,” he said.
She was peering along the narrow shaft of light.
“Not dreaming,” he said, “must be hallucinating.”
She popped the release button that disengaged the buckle on his safety harness from the latch between his seat and the console.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“What’s okay?” she asked, switching off the light and returning it to her jacket pocket.
“That you peed on the seat.”
She laughed.
“I like to hear you laugh.”
She was still laughing as she carefully extricated him from the harness.
“You’ve never laughed before,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “not much recently.”
“Not ever before. You’ve never barked either.”
She laughed again.
“I’m going to get you a new rawhide bone.”
“You’re very kind.”
He said, “This is damned interesting.”
“That’s for sure.”
“It’s so real.”
“Seems unreal to me.”
Even though Spencer remained mostly passive through the process, getting out of the harness left him so dizzy that he saw three of the woman and three of every shadow in the car, like superimposed images on a photograph.
Afraid that he would pass out before he had a chance to express himself, he spoke in a raspy rush of words: “You’re a real friend, pal, you really are, you’re a perfect friend.”
“We’ll see if that’s how it turns out.”
“You’re the only friend I have.”
“Okay, my friend, now we’ve come to the hard part. How the hell am I going to get you out of this junker when you can’t help yourself at all?”
“I can help myself.”
“You think you can?”
“I was an Army Ranger once. And a cop.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I’ve been trained in tae kwon do.”
“That would really be handy if we were under assault by a bunch of ninja assassins. But can you help me get you out of here?”
“A little.”
“I guess we’ve got to give it a try.”
“Okay.”
“Can you lift your legs out of there, swing them to me?”
“Don’t want to disturb the rat.”
“There’s a rat?”
“He’s dead already but…you know.”
“Of course.”
“I’m very dizzy.”
“Then let’s wait a minute, rest a minute.”
“Very, very dizzy.”
“Just take it easy.”
“Goodbye,” he said, and surrendered to a black vortex that spun him around and away. For some reason, as he went, he thought of Dorothy and Toto and Oz.
The back door of the barn opens into a short hallway. I step inside. No lights. No windows. The green glow from the security-system readout—NOT READY TO ARM—in the right-hand wall provides just enough light for me to see that I am alone in the corridor. I don’t ease the door all the way shut behind me but leave it ajar, as I found it.
The floor appears to be black beneath me, but I’m on polished pine. To the left are a bathroom and a room where art supplies are stored. Those doorways are barely discernible in the faint green wash, which is like the unearthly illumination in a dream, less like real light than like a lingering memory of neon. To the right is a file room. Ahead, at the end of the hallway, is the door to the large first-floor gallery, where a switchback staircase leads to my father’s studio. That upper chamber occupies the entire second floor and features the big north-facing windows under which the van is parked outside.
I listen to the hallway darkness.
It doesn’t speak or breathe.
The light switch is to the right, but I leave it untouched.
In the green-black gloom, I ease the bathroom door all the way open. Step inside. Wait for a sound, a sense of movement, a blow. Nothing.
The supply room is also deserted.
I move to the right side of the hall and quietly open the door to the file room. I step across the threshold.
The overhead fluorescent tubes are dark, but there is other light where no light should be. Yellow and sour. Dim and strange. From a mysterious source at the far end of the room.
A long worktable occupies the center of that rectangular space. Two chairs. File cabinets stand against one of the long walls.
My heart is knocking so hard it shakes my arms. I make fists of my hands and hold them at my sides, struggling to control myself.
I decide to return to the house, to bed, to sleep.
Then I’m at the far end of the file room, though I don’t recall having taken a single step in that direction. I seem to have walked those twenty feet in a sudden spell of sleep. Called forward by something, someone. As if responding to a powerful hypnotic command. To a wordless, silent summons.
I am standing in front of a knotty-pine cabinet that extends from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner of the thirteen-foot-wide room. The cabinet features three pairs of tall, narrow doors.
The center pair stand open.
Behind those doors, there should be nothing but shelves. On the shelves should be boxes of old tax records, correspondence, and dead files no longer kept in the metal cabinets along the other wall.
This night, the shelves and their contents, along with the back wall of the pine cabinet, have been pushed backward four or five feet into a secret space behind the file room, into a hidden chamber I’ve never
