Nor was I the only one who felt that. Shirley and Arky exchanged an uneasy glance.
'What do you mean?' I asked him.
'Roach was reading a newspaper, wasn't he? And from the way you described him, that probably took most of his concentration. So how do you know the guy didn't come back to his car?'
I'd had twenty years to think about that day and the consequences of that day. Twenty years, and the idea of the Roadmaster's driver coming back (perhaps even sneaking back) had never once occurred to me. Or, so far as I knew, to anyone else. Brad Roach said the guy hadn't returned, and we'd simply accepted that. Why? Because cops have built-in bullshit detectors, and in that case none of the needles swung into the red. Never even twitched, really. Why would they? Brad Roach at least thought he was telling the truth. That didn't mean he knew what he was talking about, though.
'I guess that it's possible,' I said.
Ned shrugged as if to say, Well there you go.
'We never had Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Columbo working out of D Troop,' I said. I thought I sounded rather defensive. I felt rather defensive. 'When you get right down to it, we're just the mechanics of the legal system. Blue-collar guys who actually wear gray collars and have a slightly better than average education. We can work the phones, compile evidence if there's evidence to compile, make the occasional deduction. On good days we can make fairly brilliant deductions. But with the Buick there was no consistency, hence no basis for deduction, brilliant or otherwise.'
'Some of the guys thought it came from space,' Huddle said. 'That it was . . . oh, I don't know, a disguised scout-ship, or something. They had the idea Ennis was abducted by an ET
disguised to look at least passably human in his - its - black coat and hat. This talk was at the picnic - the Labor Day picnic, okay?'
'Yeah,' Ned said.
'That was one seriously weird get-together, kiddo,' Huddie said. 'It seems to me that everyone got a lot drunker'n usual, and a lot faster, but no one got rowdy, not even the usual suspects like Jackie O'Hara and Christian Soder. It was very quiet, especially once the shirts-and-skins touch football game was over.
'I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire - only a few years before, that was - and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance ramps and exit ramps both.'
'Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?'
'No,' Shirley said. 'Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so fucking awful. . .'
'What?' Ned asked. 'For God's sake, what?
Shirley ignored the question. I don't think she even heard it. 'A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn't matter.'
Ned looked as if he hadn't heard her correctly. 'It didn't matter?'
'That's what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn't matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said, 'I think it's forgotten.' I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about ... I don't know . . . something as important as a king's treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. 'Having a wonderful time, wish you were here' and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . . misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said,
'Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean?
And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?''
We were all silent for a moment, thinking about this.
'I was considering quitting the job,' Shirley said at last. 'I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about poor old Mister Dillon, and in my mind quitting was almost a done deal. It was Curt who talked me into staying, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it. 'I think it's forgotten,' he said, and that was good enough for me. I stayed, and I've never been sorry, either.
This is a good place, and most of the guys who work here are good Troops. That goes for the ones who are gone, too. Like Tony.'
'I love you, Shirley, marry me,' Huddie said. He put an arm around her and puckered his lips.
Not a pretty sight, all in all.
She elbowed him. 'You're married already, foolish.'
Eddie J. spoke up then. 'If your dad believed anything, it was that yonder machine came from some other dimension.'
'Another dimension? You're kidding.' He looked at Eddie closely. 'No. You're not kidding.'
'And he didn't think it was planned at all,' Eddie went on. 'Not, you know, like you'd plan to send a ship across the ocean or a satellite into space. In some ways, I'm not even sure he thought it was real.'
'You lost me,' the kid said.
'Me, too,' Shirley agreed.
