York list… and a bunch of question marks. Like fishhooks.' His fingers stopped. 'Let's see what we catch.'
Lines of what I assumed to be code snaked steadily down the screen. Nothing I could make any sense of.
'Here we go.' Stillman hit a few more keys. 'Looks as though your man advertises in a number of niche publications. Gun magazines, adventure publications and the like. Not too smart of him.'
'The smart criminals are all CEOs.'
'No Internet presence that I can-' Stillman's hands flashed to the keyboard. 'There's a watcher.'
I shook my head.
'A sentinel, a special kind of firewall. The question marks I put in, the fishhooks-that was like opening up a gallery of doors. We were entering one when the alarm triggered. I hit the panic button pretty quickly, so chances are good the watcher never got a fix on me. Probably be best if I stayed offline a while, all the same.' He shut the computer off and lowered the lid. 'Sorry. Have a cup of tea before you go?'
We sat on the bench, everyone else gone to bed by this time. I held the mug up close, breathing in the rich aroma, loving the feel of the steam on my face. Stillman touched me on the shoulder and pointed to the sky as a shooting star arced above the trees. Big star fallin', mama ain't long fore day… Maybe the sunshine'll drive my blues away. My eyes dropped to the boards nailed up over the cabin and the legend thereon. Stillman's eyes followed.
'I've been meaning to ask you about that.'
'It went up the moment we moved in.' He sipped his tea with that strange intensity he gave most everything-as though this might be the last cup of tea he'd ever drink. 'From my grandmother's life, like so much else.'
Bending to lift the teapot off the ground (ceramic, thrown by Moira, lavender-glazed), he refilled our mugs.
'Hier ist kein Warum. A guard told her that on her first morning at the camp as he brought her a piece of stale bread. There is no why here. In his own way, she said, he was being kind.'
Mind tumbling with thoughts of kindness and cruelty and the ravage of ideas, I struck out for my newly empty house, fully confident of finding the way without a guide now, though once I could have sworn I saw Nathan off in the trees watching to be sure I made it out all right. Imagined, of course. That same night I also thought I saw Miss Emily in the yard, which could have been only the shadow of a limb: wind and moonlight in uneasy alliance to take on substance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Herb Danziger called that morning to tell me the execution had been carried out and Lou Winter was dead. I thanked him. Herb said come see him sometime before he and his nurse ran away together. I asked how long that would be and he said it probably better be soon. I hung up, and had no idea what I felt.
I sat thinking about a patient I had back in Memphis. He'd come in that first time wearing a five-hundred- dollar suit, silk tie, and cordovan shoes so highly polished it looked as though he were walking on two violins. 'Harris. Just the one name. Don't use any others.' He shook hands, sat in the chair, and said, 'Ammonia.'
1 m sorry?
'Ammonia.'
I looked around.
'Not here. Well, yes: here. Everywhere, actually. That's the problem.'
Light from the window behind bled away his features. I got up to draw the blinds.
'Everywhere,' he said again as I took my seat. His eyes were like twin perched crows.
Eight and a half weeks before, as he rummaged about in stacks of file boxes in the basement looking through old papers, the smell of ammonia had come suddenly upon him. There was no apparent source for it; he'd checked. But the smell had been with him ever since. He'd seen his personal physician, then by referral an internist, an allergist, and an endocrinologist. Now he was here.
I asked the obvious question, which is mostly what therapists do: What papers had he been looking for? He brushed that aside in the manner of a man long accustomed to ignoring prattle and attending to practicalities, and went on talking about the stench, how sometimes it was overpowering, how other times he could almost pretend that it had left him.
From session to session over a matter of weeks, as in stop-motion, I watched dress and demeanor steadily deteriorate. That first appointment had been set by a secretary. When, a couple of months in, with an emergency on my hands, I tried to call to cancel a session, I learned that Harris's phone had been disconnected. The poise and punctuality of early visits gave way to tardiness and to disjunctive dialogue that more and more resembled a single, ongoing monologue. When he paused, he was not listening for my response but for something from within himself. Trains of thought left the station without him. He began to (as a bunkmate back in country had said of the company latrines) not smell so good.
The last time I saw him he peered wildly around the corner of the open door, came in and took his seat, and said, 'I've been shot by the soldiers of Chance.'
I waited.
'Not to death, I think-not quite. Casualties are grave, though.'
He smiled.
'I'm bleeding, Captain. Don't know if I can make it back to camp.' As he smiled again, I recalled his eyes that first time, the alertness in them, the resolve. 'It was a report card,' he said.
Not understanding, I shook my head.
'What I was looking for in the basement. It was a report card from the eighth grade, last one before graduation. Three years in junior high and I had all A's, but some of the teachers put their busy heads together and decided that wasn't such a good idea. I got my report card in its little brown envelope, opened it, and there were two B-pluses, history and math. Just like that.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Sorry. Yeah… You know what I did? I laughed. I'd always suspected the world wasn't screwed down so well. Now I had proof.'
After he left, I sat thinking. The world's an awfully big presence to carry a grudge against, but so many people do just that. Back in prison, the air was thick with such grudges, so thick you could barely breathe, barely make your way through the corridors, men's lives crushed to powder under the weight. On the other hand, maybe that was a part of what had motivated Harris all these years. But it gave out, quit working, the way things do.
Just over a week later, I was notified that Harris had been picked up by police and remanded by the courts to the state hospital. Declaring that he had no family, he'd given my name. I had the best intentions of going to see him, but before I could, he broke into the janitor's supply room and drank most of a can of Drano.
'You okay, Deputy?'
I pushed back from the desk and swiveled my chair around. J. T. had taken to calling me that of late. What began as a passing joke, stuck. I told her about Lou Winter. She came over and put her hand on my arm.
'I'm sorry, Dad.'
Her other hand held a sheaf of printouts.
'So Stillman was able to zap it here.'
'It's not magic, you know.'
To this day I remain unconvinced of that. But I spent most of two hours bent over those sheets, trying to find something in them that Stillman had missed, some corner or edge sticking out a quarter-inch, any possible snag, and remembering what one of my teachers back in college used as an all-purpose rejoinder. You'd come in with some grand theory you'd sewn together and she'd listen carefully. Then when you were done, she'd say, 'Random points of light, Mr. Turner. Random points of light.'
Around eleven I took my random points of light and the butt that usually went along with them down to the diner. The raging controversy of the day seemed to be whether or not the big superstore out on the highway to Poplar Bluff was ever really going to open. The lot had been paved and the foundation laid months ago, walls like
