Black House

“What?”

“If you don’t know,” Dale says, “I’m not going to tell you.”

Jack shrugs. “Potter will keep them occupied, which frees us up to do a little actual work. If there’s a bright side to tonight, that’s it.”

“What did you get from him? Anything?”

“A name. Might mean nothing. Charles Burnside. Nicknamed Chummy. Ever heard of him?”

Dale sticks out his lower lip and pulls it thoughtfully. Then he lets go and shakes his head. “The name itself seems to ring a faint bell, but that might only be because it’s so common. The nickname, no.”

“He was a builder, a contractor, a wheeler-dealer in Chicago over thirty years ago. According to Potsie, at least.”

“Potsie,” Dale says. The tape is peeling off a corner of the ONE CALL MEANS ONE CALL sign, and Dale smoothes it back down with the air of a man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. “You and he got pretty chummy, didn’t you?”

“No,” Jack says. “Burnside’s Chummy. And Trooper Black doesn’t own the Black House.”

“You’ve gone dotty. What black house?”

“First, it’s a proper name. Black, capital B, house, capital H. Black House. You ever heard of a house named that around here?”

Dale laughs. “God, no.”

Jack smiles back, but all at once it’s his interrogation smile, not his I’m-discussing-things-with-my-friend smile. Because he’s a coppiceman now. And he has seen a funny little flicker in Dale Gilbertson’s eyes.

“Are you sure? Take a minute. Think about it.”

“Told you, no. People don’t name their houses in these parts. Oh, I guess old Miss Graham and Miss Pentle call their place on the other side of the town library Honeysuckle, because of the honeysuckle bushes all over the fence in front, but that’s the only one in these parts I ever heard named.”

Again, Jack sees that flicker. Potter is the one who will be charged for murder by the Wisconsin State Police, but Jack didn’t see that deep flicker in Potter’s eyes a single time during their interview. Because Potter was straight with him.

Dale isn’t being straight.

But I have to be gentle with him, Jack tells himself. Because he doesn’t know he’s not being straight. How is that possible?

As if in answer, he hears Chicago Potsie’s voice: One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone . . . he said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale.

Memory is a shadow; any cop trying to reconstruct a crime or an accident from the conflicting accounts of eyewitnesses knows it well. Is Potsie’s Black House like this? Something that casts no shadow? Dale’s response (he has now turned full-face to the peeling poster, working on it as seriously as he might work on a heart attack victim in the street, administering CPR right out of the manual until the ambulance arrives) suggests to Jack that it might be something like just that. Three days ago he wouldn’t have allowed himself to consider such an idea, but three days ago he hadn’t returned to the Territories.

“According to Potsie, this place got a reputation as a haunted house even before it was completely built,” Jack says, pressing a little.

“Nope.” Dale moves on to the sign about the A.A. and N.A. meetings. He examines the tape studiously, not looking at Jack. “Doesn’t ring the old chimeroo.”

“Sure? One man almost bled to death. Another took a fall that paralyzed him. People complained—listen to this, Dale, it’s good—according to Potsie, people complained about losing their shadows. Couldn’t see them even at midday, with the sun shining full force. Isn’t that something?”

“Sure is, but I don’t remember any stories like that.” As Jack walks toward Dale, Dale moves away. Almost scutters away, although Chief Gilbertson is not ordinarily a scuttering man. It’s a little funny, a little sad, a little horrible. He doesn’t know he’s doing it, Jack’s sure of that. There is a shadow. Jack sees it, and on some level Dale knows he sees it. If Jack should force him too hard, Dale would have to see it, too . . . and Dale doesn’t want that. Because it’s a bad shadow. Is it worse than a monster who kills children and then eats selected portions of their bodies? Apparently part of Dale thinks so.

I could make him see that shadow, Jack thinks coldly. Put my hands under his nose—my lily-scented hands—and make him see it. Part of him even wants to see it. The coppiceman part.

Then another part of Jack’s mind speaks up in the Speedy Parker drawl he now remembers from his childhood. You could push him over the edge of a nervous breakdown, too, Jack. God knows he’s close to one, after all the goin’s-ons since the Irkenham boy got took. You want to chance that? And for what? He didn’t know the name, about that he was bein’ straight.

“Dale?”

Dale gives Jack a quick, bright glance, then looks away. The furtive quality in that quick peek sort of breaks Jack’s heart. “What?”

“Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

At this change of subject, Dale’s face fills with glad relief. He claps Jack on the shoulder. “Good idea!”

God-pounding good idea, right here and now, Jack thinks, then smiles. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to find a Black House. It’s been a long day. Best, maybe, to let