“Yeah.”
Bobby is not cruel or insensitive. He meant it was good that the suffering was over for my father.
Between us, we often say a lot with a few words. People have mistaken us for brothers not merely because we are the same height, weight, and body type..
“You got to the hospital in time. So it was cool.”
“It was.”
He didn’t ask me how I was handling it. He knew.
“So after the hospital,” he said, “you sang a couple numbers in a minstrel show.”
I touched one sooty hand to my sooty face. “Someone killed Angela Ferryman, set her house on fire to cover it. I almost caught the great
“Who’s the someone?”
“Wish I knew. Same people stole Dad’s body.”
Bobby drank some beer and said nothing.
“They killed a drifter, swapped his body for Dad’s. You might not want to know about this.”
For a while, he weighed the wisdom of ignorance against the pull of curiosity. “I can always forget I heard it, if that seems smart.”
Orson belched. Beer makes him gaseous.
When the dog wagged his tail and looked up beseechingly, Bobby said, “No more for you, fur face.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“You’re filthy, too. Catch a shower, take some of my clothes. I’ll throw together some clucking tacos.”
“Thought I’d clean up with a swim.”
“It’s nipple out there.”
“Feels about sixty degrees.”
“I’m talking water temp. Believe me, the nip factor is high. Shower’s better.”
“Orson needs a makeover, too.”
“Take him in the shower with you. There’re plenty of towels.”
“Very broly of you,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m so Christian, I don’t ride the waves anymore — I just walk on them.”
After a few minutes in Bobbyland, I was relaxed and willing to ease into my news. Bobby’s more than a beloved friend. He’s a tranquilizer.
Suddenly he stood away from the refrigerator and cocked his head, listening.
“Something?” I asked.
“Someone.”
I hadn’t heard anything but the steadily diminishing voice of the wind. With the windows closed and the surf so slow, I couldn’t even hear the sea, but I noticed that Orson was alert, too.
Bobby headed out of the kitchen to see who the visitor might be, and I said, “Bro,” and offered him the Glock.
He stared dubiously at the pistol, then at me. “Stay casual.”
“That drifter. They cut out his eyes.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Because they could?”
For a moment Bobby considered what I’d said. Then he took a key from a pocket of his jeans and unlocked a broom closet, which to the best of my recollection had never featured a lock before. From the narrow closet, he took a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.
“That’s new,” I said.
“Goon repellent.”
This was not life as usual in Bobbyland. I couldn’t resist: “Stay casual.”
Orson and I followed Bobby across the living room and onto the front porch. The onshore flow smelled faintly of kelp.
The cottage faced north. No boats were on the bay — or at least none with running lights. To the east, the town twinkled along the shore and up the hills.
Surrounding the cottage, the end of the horn featured low dunes and shore grass frosted with moonlight. No one was in sight.
Orson moved to the top of the steps and stood rigid, his head raised and thrust forward, sniffing the air and catching a scent more interesting than kelp.
Relying perhaps on a sixth sense, Bobby didn’t even look at the dog to confirm his own suspicion. “Stay here. If I flush anyone out, tell him he can’t leave till we validate his parking ticket.”
Barefoot, he descended the steps and crossed the dunes to look down the steep incline to the beach. Someone could have been lying on that slope, watching the cottage from concealment.
Bobby walked along the crest of the embankment, heading toward the point, studying the slope and the beach below, turning every few steps to survey the territory between him and the house. He held the shotgun ready in both hands and conducted the search with military methodicalness.
Obviously, he had been through this routine more than once before. He hadn’t told me that he was being harassed by anyone or troubled by intruders. Ordinarily, if he was having a serious problem, he would have shared it with me.
I wondered what secret he was keeping.
19
Having turned away from the steps and pushed his snout between a pair of balusters at the east end of the porch, Orson was looking not west toward Bobby but back along the horn toward town. He growled deep in his throat.
I followed the direction of his gaze. Even in the fullness of the moon, which the snarled rags of cloud didn’t currently obscure, I was unable to see anyone.
With the steadiness of a grumbling motor, the dog’s low growl continued uninterrupted.
To the west, Bobby had reached the point, still moving along the crest of the embankment. Although I could see him, he was little more than a gray shape against the stark-black backdrop of sea and sky.
While I had been looking the other way, someone could have cut Bobby down so suddenly and violently that he had been unable to cry out, and I wouldn’t have known. Now, rounding the point and beginning to approach the house along the southern flank of the horn, this blurry gray figure could have been anyone.
To the growling dog, I said, “You’re spooking me.”
Although I strained my eyes, I still couldn’t discern anyone or any threat to the east, where Orson’s attention remained fixed. The only movement was the flutter of the tall, sparse grass. The fading wind wasn’t even strong enough to blow sand off the well-compacted dunes.
Orson stopped grumbling and thumped down the porch steps, as though in pursuit of quarry. Instead, he scampered into the sand only a few feet to the left of the steps, where he raised one hind leg and emptied his bladder.
When he returned to the porch, visible tremors were passing through his flanks. Looking eastward again, he didn’t resume his growling; instead, he whined nervously.
This change in him disturbed me more than if he had begun to bark furiously.
I sidled across the porch to the western corner of the cottage, trying to watch the sandy front yard but also wanting to keep Bobby — if, indeed, it was Bobby — in sight as long as possible. Soon, however, still edging along the southern embankment, he disappeared behind the house.
When I realized that Orson had stopped whining, I turned toward him and discovered he was gone.
I thought he must have chased after something in the night, though it was remarkable that he had sprinted off so soundlessly. Anxiously moving back the way I had come, across the porch toward the steps, I couldn’t see the dog anywhere out there among the moonlit dunes.
