there was anything he wouldn't have done. I respect our soldiers, I want you to know, and I think what we did to those boys was a damn shame. But this fella, he was something special.'
'What did he say to you?'
'He said I had to forget I ever saw him. If I ever let on anything about him or his doings, he'd burn my house down. And he meant it. He looked like he'd burned down a few houses in his time, like you saw them on the news, with their Zippos.' Frank moved closer to me, and I could smell his stale breath. 'See, he said there'd never be any trouble as long as I acted like he didn't exist.'
'Oh,' I said. 'I see.'
'You get the picture?'
'He's the man Hannah sees at night,' I said.
He nodded wildly, as if his head were on a,ball bearing. 'I keep telling her she's making it all up. Maybe it's not him—that was all the way back in '73, when he warned me off. But I tell you one thing, if it is him, I don't know what he's doing in there, but he sure as hell isn't crying.'
'Thanks for telling me,' I said.
He looked at me doubtfully, wondering if he had made a mistake. 'I was thinking you might know who he is.'
'He was in uniform when you met him?'
'Sure. I kind of had the feeling he didn't have civilian clothes yet.'
'What kind of uniform was it?'
'He had on a jacket with brass buttons, but all the stuff, the insignia was torn off.'
That was no help. 'And then there was no sign of him until Hannah saw him in the house at night.'
'I was hoping he died. Maybe it's someone else she sees in there?'
I said that I didn't know, and he walked slowly back to his house. He looked back at me a couple of times, still wondering if he'd done the right thing.
I got into the white Pontiac and drove back onto Livermore and through the shadow of the valley. I left the freeway at the Elm Hill turnoff and drove randomly through a succession of quiet streets, looking for Bayberry Lane. In Elm Hill, they liked two-story imitation colonials and raised ranch houses with elaborate swing sets in the long backyards and ornate metal nameplates on posts next to the driveway—THE HARRISONS. THE BERNHARDTS. THE REYNOLDS. Almost all of the mailboxes were half the size of garbage cans and decorated with painted ducks in flight, red barns by millponds, or leaping salmon. At the center of Elm Hill, I drove into the parking lot of a semicircle of gray colonial shops. You could tie your car to a hitching rail, if you had a rope. Across the street was the hill where the elms had grown. Now it had a historical marker and two intersecting paths with granite benches. I bought a map at the Booky, Booky Bookshoppe and took it across the street to one of the benches. Bayberry Lane began just behind the shopping center at Town Hall, curved around a pond and wandered for about half a mile until it intersected Plum Barrow Way, which banged straight north back to the freeway.
The first half-dozen houses closest to squat Town Hall, modest, rundown wooden boxes with added porches, were the oldest buildings I had seen in Elm Hill, dating from the twenties and thirties. Once Bayberry Lane got past the pond, I was back among the white and gray colonials. I kept checking the addresses as the numbers went up. Finally I came to a long straight line of oak trees that had once marked the boundary of a farm.
On the other side of the oak border stood a two-story, slightly ramshackle farmhouse with a screen porch, utterly out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. Two gray propane tanks clung to the side of the house, and a rutted driveway went straight from me road to a leaning clapboard garage with a hinged door. The fading number on the plain mailbox matched the number on my piece of paper. The Sunchanas had bought the original farmhouse on this land and then watched an optimistic re-creation of Riverwood grow up around them. I drove up the ruts until I was in front of the garage, turned off the engine, and got out of the car.
I walked along the screen porch and tried the door, which opened. I stepped onto the long narrow porch. Sunbleached wicker chairs stood beneath a window in the middle of the porch. I knocked on the front door. There was no answer. I knew there wouldn't be. After all, I was just getting away from the Ransoms. I turned around and saw a man staring at me from beside the straight row of oaks across the street.
The mesh of the screen door turned him into a standing arrangement of black dots. I felt an instant of absolute threat, and without thinking about it at all, moved sideways and crouched next to one of the wicker chairs. The man had not moved, but he was gone.
I stood up, slowly. My nerves shrieked. The man had vanished into the column of oaks. I went back out the screen door and walked toward Bayberry Lane, looking for movement in the row of great trees. It could have been a neighbor, I thought, wondering what I was doing on the Sunchanas' porch.
But I knew it wasn't any neighbor.
There was no movement in the row of oak trees. I walked across the street on a diagonal, so that I could see between the trees. About six feet of grass separated them. There wasn't another human being in sight. The row of oaks ended at the street behind Bayberry, which must have been the property line of the old farm. Out of sight in the tangled lanes of eastern Elm Hill, a car started up and accelerated away. I turned toward the noise, but all I saw were swing sets and the backs of houses. My heart was still pounding.
I went back across the street and waited in the Pontiac for half an hour, but the Sunchanas did not come home. Finally, I wrote my name and John's phone number at the bottom of a note saying that I wanted to talk with them about Bob Bandolier, tore the page from my notebook, and went back up onto the screened porch. I turned the knob of their front door, and the door opened. A residue of the sense of danger I had just experienced went through me, as if the empty house held a threat. 'Hello, anybody home?' I called out, leaning into the room, but I didn't expect an answer. I put the note on the polished floorboards in front of the brown oval rug on the living room floor, closed the door, and went back to the car.
Two exits east of the stadium, I took Teutonia Avenue and slanted north, deep into Millhaven's wide residential midsection. I wasn't quite sure of the location of Fond du Lac Drive, but I thought it intersected Teutonia, and I drove along a strip of little shops and fast-food restaurants, watching the street signs. When I came to the traffic light at Fond du Lac Drive, I made a quick guess and turned right.
Fond du Lac Drive was a wide six-lane street that began at the lake before crossing central Millhaven on a diagonal axis. This far west, no trees stood along the white sidewalks, and the sun baked the rows of 1930s apartment buildings and single-family houses that stood on both sides of the street. As I had been doing since leaving Elm Hill, I looked in my rearview mirror every couple of seconds.
One of three identical poured concrete houses, 5460 had black shutters and a flat roof. All three had been painted the same pale yellow. The owners of the houses on either side of it had tried to soften the stark exteriors by planting borders of flowers along their walks and around their houses, but Oscar Writzmann's house looked like a jail with shutters.
Before I knocked on the door, I checked up and down the empty block.
'Who's there?' said a voice on the other side of the door.
I gave my name.
The door opened part of the way. Through the screen I saw a tall, heavyset bald man in his seventies taking a good look at me. Whatever he saw didn't threaten him, because he pulled the door open the rest of the way and came up to the screen. He had a big chest and a thick neck, like an old athlete, and was wearing khaki shorts and a tired blue sweatshirt. 'You looking for me?'
'If you're Oscar Writzmann, I am,' I said.
He opened the screen door and stepped forward far enough to fill the frame. His shoulder held the door open. He looked down at me, curious about what I was up to. 'Here I am. What do you want?'
