Black House

quickly opens the passenger door. “Guess I need to do a little more thinking after all,” he says.

She looks at him with that expression of discontented suspicion which is, Jack suspects, love. She knows that Jack has brightened Henry Leyden’s life, and for that alone he believes she loves him. He likes to hope so, anyway. It occurs to him that she never mentioned the baseball cap he’s holding, but why would she? In this part of the world, every man’s got at least four.

He starts up the road, hair flopping (his days of styled cuts at Chez-Chez on Rodeo Drive are long behind him now—this is the Coulee Country, and when he thinks of it at all, he gets his hair cut by old Herb Roeper down on Chase Street next to the Amvets), his gait as loose and lanky as a boy’s. Mrs. Morton leans out her window and calls after him. “Change out of those jeans, Jack! The minute you get back! Don’t let them dry on you! That’s how arthritis starts!”

He raises a hand without turning and calls back, “Right!”

Five minutes later, he’s walking up his own driveway again. At least temporarily, the fear and depression have been burned out of him. The ecstasy as well, which is a relief. The last thing a coppiceman needs is to go charging through an investigation in a state of ecstasy.

As he sights the box on the porch—and the wrapping paper, and the feathers, and the ever-popular child’s sneaker, can’t forget that—Jack’s mind turns back to Mrs. Morton quoting that great sage Henry Leyden.

I can’t help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there’s such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total joy.

Total joy. Jack has felt this from time to time as a detective, sometimes while investigating a crime scene, more often while questioning a witness who knows more than he or she is telling . . . and this is something Jack Sawyer almost always knows, something he smells. He supposes carpenters feel that joy when they are carpentering particularly well, sculptors when they’re having a good nose or chin day, architects when the lines are landing on their blueprints just right. The only problem is, someone in French Landing (maybe one of the surrounding towns, but Jack is guessing French Landing) gets that feeling of joy by killing children and eating parts of their little bodies.

Someone in French Landing is, more and more frequently, waking up as the Fisherman.

Jack goes into his house by the back door. He stops in the kitchen for the box of large-size Baggies, a couple of wastebasket liners, a dustpan, and the whisk broom. He opens the refrigerator’s icemaker compartment and loads about half the cubes into one of the plastic liners—as far as Jack Sawyer is concerned, Irma Freneau’s poor foot has reached its maximum state of decay.

He ducks into his study, where he grabs a yellow legal pad, a black marker, and a ballpoint pen. In the living room he gets the shorter set of fire tongs. And by the time he steps back onto the porch, he has pretty much put his secret identity as Jack Sawyer aside.

I am COPPICEMAN, he thinks, smiling. Defender of the American Way, friend of the lame, the halt, and the dead.

Then, as he looks down at the sneaker, surrounded by its pitiful little cloud of stink, the smile fades. He feels some of the tremendous mystery we felt when we first came upon Irma in the wreckage of the abandoned restaurant. He will do his absolute best to honor this remnant, just as we did our best to honor the child. He thinks of autopsies he has attended, of the true solemnity that lurks behind the jokes and butcher-shop crudities.

“Irma, is it you?” he asks quietly. “If it is, you help me, now. Talk to me. This is the time for the dead to help the living.” Without thinking about it, Jack kisses his fingers and blows the kiss down toward the sneaker. He thinks, I’d like to kill the man—or the thing—that did this. String him up alive and screaming while he filled his pants. Send him out in the stink of his own dirt.

But such thoughts are not honorable, and he banishes them.

The first Baggie is for the sneaker with the remains of the foot inside it. Use the tongs. Zip it closed. Mark the date on the Baggie with the marker. Note the nature of the evidence on the pad with the ballpoint. Put it in the wastebasket liner with the ice in it.

The second is for the cap. No need for the tongs here; he’s already handled the item. He puts it in the Baggie. Zips it closed. Marks the date, notes the nature of the evidence on the pad.

The third bag is for the brown wrapping paper. He holds it up for a moment in the tongs, examining the bogus bird stamps. MANUFACTURED BY DOMINO is printed below each picture, but that’s all. No restaurant name, nothing of that sort. Into the Baggie. Zip it closed. Mark the date. Note the nature of the evidence.

He sweeps up the feathers and puts them in a fourth Baggie. There are more feathers in the box. He picks the box up with the tongs, dumps the feathers inside onto the dustpan, and then his heart takes a sudden hard leap in his chest, seeming to knock against the left side of his rib cage like a fist. Something is written on the box’s bottom. The same Sharpie marker has been used to make the same straggling letters. And whoever wrote this knew who he was writing to. Not the outer Jack Sawyer, or else he—the Fisherman—would have no doubt called him Hollywood.

This message is addressed to the inner man, and to the child who was here before Jack “Hollywood” Sawyer was ever thought of.

Try Ed’s Eats and Dogs, coppiceman. Your fiend,

THE FISHERMAN.

“Your fiend,” Jack murmurs. “Yes.” He picks up the box with the tongs and puts it into the second wastebasket liner; he doesn’t have any Baggies quite big enough for it. Then he gathers all the evidence beside him in a neat little pile. This stuff always looks the same, at once grisly and prosaic, like the kind of photographs you used to see in those true-crime magazines.

He goes inside and dials Henry’s number. He’s afraid he’ll get Mrs. Morton, but it turns out to be Henry instead, thank God. His current fit of Rat-ism has apparently passed, although there’s a residue; even over the phone Jack can hear the faint thump and bray of “electrical guitars.”

He knows Ed’s Eats well, Henry says, but why in the world would Jack want to know about a place like that? “It’s nothing but a wreck now; Ed Gilbertson died quite a time ago and there are people in French Landing who’d call that a blessing, Jack. The place was a ptomaine palace if ever there was one. A gut-ache waiting to happen. You’d have expected the board of health to shut him down, but Ed knew people. Dale Gilbertson, for one.”