an Exxon gas station and convenience store, a two-story brick building with an-ti-qu-es spelled out in peeling white paint between the upper windows—and suddenly we were at a stop sign, a four-way intersection that looked like it marked the center of town. I hadn’t seen even a welcome to olympia sign.
“Which way?” O’Connell said. It didn’t seem to matter: left, right, and forward, the buildings petered out, giving way to open fields. Unfortunately, nothing looked familiar. I didn’t need a voice whispering to me like in Field of Dreams, but I thought I deserved something. Some sign. At least a vague sense of deja vu. A Toyota pickup much newer than O’Connell’s pulled up to the intersection opposite us, stopped. The driver, a round-faced woman with long brown hair, waited for us to pull forward.
“A Toyota’s a Toyota,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Just drive up to the edge and then we’ll turn around.” Drawn onward.
As we passed the other driver, she waved, and I waved back. It seemed like the Kansas thing to do.
We covered the entire town in ten minutes. The stores tended toward the practical and cheap: Tire store, used bookstore, fabric shop, pizza place, bars. A tiny grocery. The biggest commercial enterprise was a John Deere dealership: a long sheet-metal building on a gravel lot stocked with a dozen old and new tractors and many large, seriouslooking bladed attachments that, as an American male, I ought to have been able to identify. We only saw a few people on the street, and maybe a dozen parked cars, most of those near the elementary school, a new-looking building a few hundred yards south of the center of town.
“Anything ring a bell?” O’Connell said.
“Not really.” I ran a hand through my hair.
“Pick a direction,” O’Connell said.
“You think I made this up?”
She sighed. “Which way do you want me to go?”
“The town’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean Dr. Awkward’s secret laboratory is under the John Deere distributor, but it’s got to mean something. You’re the Jungian mystic—you should be digging all this synchronicity. This is your cue to jump into spiritual guide mode. Do some priest stuff.”
“Priest stuff.”
“I don’t know—pray or something. Dish out some ancient wisdom.”
“Fine. You start chanting, and I’ll get out the I Ching and throw some coins. Now which fucking way?”
I pointed north.
The problem was that I didn’t know what we were looking for. My whole thinking was this: the Painter kept drawing the farm; I drew the farm; therefore the farm is important. Back in the Waldheims’ library this had seemed like irrefutable logic. And when I opened that copy of RADAR Man, Olympia was waiting for me like a promise. Jesus. First I’d hung all my hopes on shrinks, then Dr. Ram, then O’Connell. Now I was clinging to a fucking comic book. We passed the mailbox-marked entrances to two farms, both with the name Johnson stenciled on the box. The houses and barns were set far back from the road, but the silos were silver and the configurations of buildings were all wrong.
A mile or so later we came upon a suburban subdivision plopped down in the middle of a field. Eight or nine houses, each of them newer and larger than any of the homes we’d seen so far, huddled together for protection against the wind. The stone and cement slab at the entrance said, castle creek.
I didn’t see any creek, though a quarter mile later the road crossed a narrow cement bridge over a wide, rocky ditch. In the middle of the dry bed was a large round boulder like a hippo’s rump.
“What is it?” O’Connell said. “Did you see something?”
“What? No.”
“Do you want to keep going?”
“Forget it.” I gestured toward the building up ahead. At the top of a slight rise was a square gray building that had to be the hospital.
“Let’s turn around up there and then try to find lunch.”
The circle drive took us up to a 1920s Greek temple: three stories of stone, with a jutting, peaked entrance propped up by white columns. The wooden sign posted out front read olympia sanatorium.
“Does that mean crazies or TB?” I asked. “I can never keep them straight.”
“TB, I think.”
We rolled back down the drive, past a small parking lot that held about a dozen cars, and came out at the highway again. “So I guess . . . pizza,” I said. It was the only type of restaurant we’d seen in Olympia. O’Connell pointed us back toward town. She’d almost gotten up to speed when we passed a dirt road that I hadn’t noticed from the other side of the highway. The fields were unmown, and dried brush nearly engulfed an old mailbox. If it had been summer I never would have seen it through the foliage.
“Wait! Go back!” I said.
She pulled over without arguing. I hopped out and jogged back toward the dirt road. O’Connell put the truck in reverse and backed up to follow me.
I looked at the name on the mailbox again, then scanned the fields. In the distance, a picket of blackened timbers and a gleam that could have been the tin roof of a house. No silo. O’Connell stepped out of the truck.
I showed her the name on the mailbox, a palindrome spelled out in faded blue paint: noon.
“We’re here,” I said.
O’Connell maneuvered the pickup slowly down the uneven road. Tall grass whisked the doors.
Forms took shape. The line of thick posts became the charred bones of a barn, without roof or walls. And stretching away from the barn, a ragged jumble of curled and twisted sheet metal, half hidden by weeds and small trees: the silo’s cylinders, knocked apart and rusted by rain and years.
“You’re sure about this?” O’Connell said.
“Not a bit.”
She parked in a patch of former lawn that hadn’t grown quite as wild as the fields.
I stepped out of the truck, holding one of the plastic sheets from the Painter binder, and slowly turned: the gray farmhouse and its rusting tin roof, two stories tall but cringing against the wind. The outline of the barn, the disassembled remains of the silo. I kept lifting the sheet, measuring it against the scene in front of me. The Painter’s drawings captured a vibrant, living farm, and this place was long dead. The barn and silo had burned, and the heat must have been tremendous. All that was left were the massive posts and beams of the barn, the heat- twisted skins of the silo. The damage had been done long ago—decades maybe.
But the bones were right. The buildings were the right distance from each other. In my mind’s eye, the silhouettes matched. The house’s windows were unbroken except for one in the center of the second floor: a starburst of cracks that caught the light, and a small hole in the middle like a dark pupil.
I stepped up onto the porch and looked back at O’Connell. She leaned against the hood of the truck, arms crossed, watching me. Behind her, the highway was hidden by the high grass, but the top floors of the hospital were visible a quarter mile away. I grinned and tried the front door. The knob rattled but didn’t turn all the way. I moved along to a window, cupped a hand to the dirty glass. It was too dark inside to see anything. I pushed up against the window frame, but it didn’t budge. “Have you got a hammer or something?” I called.
O’Connell fished under the truck bed’s tarp and brought me a jack handle. “Now you’re adding breaking and entering to your list,” she said.
“No, we are.”
A couple weeks ago I might have hesitated to break the law. Mom had raised me to be a good boy. Or at
