of the Coulee Country. There are no thunderstorms, but as the sky tinges toward violet, the fog arrives. It’s born out of the river and rises up the inclined ramp of Chase Street, first obscuring the gutters, then the sidewalks, then blurring the buildings themselves. It cannot completely hide them, as the fogs of spring and winter sometimes do, but the blurring is somehow worse: it steals colors and softens shapes. The fog makes the ordinary look alien. And there’s the smell, the ancient, seagully odor that works deep into your nose and awakens the back part of your brain, the part that is perfectly capable of believing in monsters when the sight lines shorten and the heart is uneasy.
On Sumner Street, Debbi Anderson is still working dispatch. Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski has been sent home without his badge—in fact, suspended—and feels he must ask his wife a few pointed questions (his belief that he already knows the answers makes him even more heartsick). Debbi is now standing at the window, a cup of coffee in her hand and a puckery little frown on her face.
“Don’t like this,” she says to Bobby Dulac, who is glumly and silently writing reports. “It reminds me of the Hammer pictures I used to watch on TV back when I was in junior high.”
“Hammer pictures?” Bobby asks, looking up.
“Horror pictures,” she says, looking out into the deepening fog. “A lot of them were about Dracula. Also Jack the Ripper.”
“I don’t want to hear nothing about Jack the Ripper,” Bobby says. “You mind me, Debster.” And resumes writing.
In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Mr. Rajan Patel stands beside his telephone (still crisscrossed by yellow police tape, and when it will be all right again for using, this Mr. Patel could not be telling us). He looks toward downtown, which now seems to rise from a vast bowl of cream. The buildings on Chase Street descend into this bowl. Those at Chase’s lowest point are visible only from the second story up.
“If he is down there,” Mr. Patel says softly, and to no one but himself, “tonight he will be doing whatever he wants.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and shivers.
Dale Gilbertson is at home, for a wonder. He plans to have a sit-down dinner with his wife and child even if the world ends because of it. He comes out of his den (where he has spent twenty minutes talking with WSP officer Jeff Black, a conversation in which he has had to exercise all his discipline to keep from shouting), and sees his wife standing at the window and looking out. Her posture is almost exactly the same as Debbi Anderson’s, only she’s got a glass of wine in her hand instead of a cup of coffee. The puckery little frown is identical.
“River fog,” Sarah says dismally. “Isn’t that ducky. If he’s out there—”
Dale points at her. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”
But he knows that neither of them can help thinking about it. The streets of French Landing—the
“I won’t say it,” she allows. “That much I can do.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“How does chicken pot pie sound?”
Ordinarily such a hot dish on a July evening would strike him as an awful choice, but tonight, with the fog coming in, it sounds like just the thing. He steps up behind her, gives her a brief squeeze, and says, “Great. And earlier would be better.”
She turns, disappointed. “Going back in?”
“I shouldn’t have to, not with Brown and Black rolling the ball—”
“Those pricks,” she says. “I
Dale smiles. He knows that the former Sarah Asbury has never cared much for the way he earns his living, and this makes her furious loyalty all the more touching. And tonight it feels vital, as well. It’s been the most painful day of his career in law enforcement, ending with the suspension of Arnold Hrabowski. Arnie, Dale knows, believes he will be back on duty before long. And the shitty truth is that Arnie may be right. Based on the way things are going, Dale may need even such an exquisite example of ineptitude as the Mad Hungarian.
“Anyway, I shouldn’t
“You have a feeling.”
“I do.”
“Good or bad?” She has come to respect her husband’s intuitions, not in the least because of Dale’s intense desire to see Jack Sawyer settled close enough to reach with seven keystrokes instead of eleven. Tonight that looks to her like—pardon the pun—a pretty good call.
“Both,” Dale says, and then, without explaining or giving Sarah a chance to question further: “Where’s Dave?”
“At the kitchen table with his crayons.”
At six, young David Gilbertson is enjoying a violent love affair with Crayolas, has gone through two boxes since school let out. Dale and Sarah’s strong hope, expressed even to each other only at night, lying side by side before sleep, is that they may be raising a real artist. The next Norman Rockwell, Sarah said once. Dale—who helped Jack Sawyer hang his strange and wonderful pictures—has higher hopes for the boy. Too high to express, really, even in the marriage bed after the lights are out.
With his own glass of wine in hand, Dale ambles out to the kitchen. “What you drawing, Dave? What—”
He stops. The crayons have been abandoned. The picture—a half-finished drawing of what might be either a flying saucer or perhaps just a round coffee table—has also been abandoned.
The back door is open.
