There were two points that destroyed Lewis's illusion of being Daniel Boone striking out through alien wilderness, and he reached the first of these after ten minutes of walking. Midpoint on his walk: he saw the tubular top half of a yellow oil truck, its lower section cut off by the curve of the long field, steaming toward Binghamton. So much for Daniel Boone. He turned down the straight path to the kitchen door.
By now he was hungry, and glad that he had remembered to buy bacon and eggs the last time he was in Milburn. He had coffee beans to grind, stoneground bread to toast, tomatoes to grill. After breakfast he'd call the girls and invite them out for dinner and let them tell him what books to read: Stella would wait.
He was halfway home when he began to smell food. Puzzled, he cocked his head. Unmistakably, it was the smell of breakfast-the breakfast he had just imagined. Coffee, bacon, eggs.
Soon he was close enough to see the house through the last of the trees, and the breakfast smells were stronger. His boots heavy, he trudged forward, thinking of what he could say to Christina. It would be difficult, especially if she were affecting a meek repentant mood, as the breakfast odors seemed to prove she was… then, still in the last section of the woods, he realized that her car was not drawn up before the garage.
And that was where she always put her car: the parking area was out of sight of the road, near the back door: in fact it was where everyone parked. But not only was Christina's station wagon not drawn up on the puddly brick court, no car at all was there.
He stopped walking and looked carefully at the gray stone height of the house. Only a few trees stood in his way, and the size of the house made them insignificant -thin stalks. For a moment the house looked even larger than he knew it was.
As a drift of breeze brought the odors of coffee and bacon to him, Lewis looked at his house as if for the first time: an architect's copy of an illustrator's idea of a Scottish castle, a folly of a kind, the building too appeared to glisten, as the wet trees had. It was the end of a quest in a story. Lewis with his soaking boots and hungry belly looked at the house with a frozen heart. The windows glittered in their casements.
It was the castle of a dead, not a captive, princess.
Slowly Lewis approached the house and left the temporary safety of the woods. He crossed the brick court where the car should have been. The odors of breakfast were maddeningly strong. Lewis cautiously opened the kitchen door; he entered.
The kitchen was empty, but not undisturbed. Signs of occupation and activity lay everywhere. Two plates were laid out on the kitchen table-his best china. Polished silver had been set beside the plates. Two candles, not lighted, stood in silver holders near the plates. A can of frozen orange juice had been set out before his blender. Lewis turned to the stove: empty pans sat atop unlighted burners. The smell of cooking was overwhelming. His kettle whistled, and he turned it off.
Two slices of bread had been placed beside the toaster.
'Christina?' he called, thinking-not very rationally -that it still might be a practical joke. There was no answer.
He turned back to the stove and sniffed the air over the pans. Bacon. Eggs in butter. Superstitiously he touched the cold iron.
The dining room was just as he had left it; and when he went into the living room, that too was undisturbed. He picked up a book on the arm of a chair and looked at it quizzically, though he had put it there the night before. He stood in the living room for a moment, here where no one had come, smelling a breakfast no one had cooked, as if the room were a refuge. 'Christina?' he called. 'Anybody?'
Upstairs a familiar door clicked shut.
'Hello?'
Lewis moved to the base of the stairs and looked up. 'Who's there?' Sunlight drifted in from a window on the landing; he saw dust motes spinning lazily above the stairs. The house was noiseless; for the first time its vast size seemed a threat. Lewis cleared his throat.
'Who's there?'
After a long moment he began to climb the stairs. When he reached the landing he looked out of the little window set in its casement-sunlight, dripping trees- and continued on to the top.
Here the hallway was light, silent, empty. Lewis's bedroom was on the right, two old rooms with the adjoining wall removed. One of the old doors had been sealed off, the other replaced with an elaborately grained slab of monkeywood hand-fashioned into a door. With its heavy brass knob, Lewis's bedroom door closed with a distinctively chunky sound, and that was the sound he had heard.
Lewis stood before the door, unable to make himself open it. He cleared his throat again. He could see the double expanse of his bedroom, the carpet, his slippers beside the bed, his pajamas over a chair, the windows from which he had looked that morning. And he could see the bed. What made him afraid to open the door was that on the bed he envisioned the fourteen years' dead body of his wife. He raised his hand to knock; he held his fist an inch from the door; lowered it again. Lewis touched the doorknob.
He forced himself to turn the heavy knob. The lock disengaged. Lewis closed his eyes and pushed.
He opened them to hazy sunlight from the long windows opposite the door; an edge of a chair, hung with blue-striped pajamas; the reek of rotting flesh.
Lewis bravely stepped around the door and into the pool of early light that was his bedroom. He looked at the empty bed. The foul odor dissipated as quickly as it had come. Now he could smell only the cut flowers on the table before the window. He went to the bed and hesitantly touched the bottom sheet, which was warm.
A minute later he was downstairs holding the telephone. 'Otto. Are you afraid of the game wardens?'
'Ach, Lewis. They run when they see me. On a day like this you want to go out with the dogs? Come for schnapps instead.'
'Then we go out,' Lewis said. 'Please.'
2
Peter walked out of his homeroom when the bell rang and went down the corridor to his locker. While the rest of the school pushed past to various parts of the building and most of his class filed into Miller's room for history, he pretended to search for a book. Tony Drexler, a friend of his, loitered beside him for unbearable seconds and finally asked, 'Heard from Jim Hardie yet?'
'No,' Peter said, burying himself deeper in his locker.
'I bet he's in Greenwich Village already.'
'Yeah.'
'Time to get to History. You read the chapter?'
'No.'
'Bullshit,' Drexler laughed. 'See you there.'
Peter nodded. Not long after he was alone. Leaving his books in his locker but taking his coat, he slammed the metal panel shut and ran down the hall to the bathroom. He shut himself in a toilet and waited for the first period bell to ring.
Ten minutes later he peeked out of the bathroom door. The hallway was empty, and he raced down the corridor. Then he continued unseen down the stairs and out the door.
A hundred yards off to the side, a first-period gym class sweated over calisthenics on the muddy field; two girls were already doing punishment laps around the track. Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.
A block away on School Road, Peter turned off into a sidestreet and from there zigzagged through town, avoiding the square and the shopping district, until he reached Underhill Road, which led to Route 17. He jogged down Underhill Road for half a mile, by now well out of town and in sight only of bare fields ending in stands of trees.
When the highway came in sight, he walked across a squelchy knoll and climbed over a double strip of thick aluminum nailed to a series of white posts. Peter ran across the lanes to the median, climbed another aluminum fence, waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across to the other side of the highway. Then he held out his arm, thumb extended, and began to walk backward down the highway.
