Buick.
My cell phone rang in my pocket. I dug it out and looked at the number.
“Charley,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Hot pursuit?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I was just calling to invite you up to the Ponderosa for Saturday dinner,” he said. “The Boss said it was past time I offered you a formal invitation.”
It had been too long since I’d eaten Ora Stevens’s fresh-baked bread or shared a hot cup of coffee with Charley while he told me one far-fetched but invariably true yarn after another. And maybe my wise old friend could advise me what to do about Lucas and his notebook. Should I turn it over to the state police with my unprovable suspicions, and if so, to what end? So that the boy would be shunted off into some facility for troubled children? More than ever, I realized, I wanted the benefit of Charley’s considerable wisdom.
The only hesitancy I felt in saying yes to his invitation came when I remembered those jade-green eyes, the most beautiful I’d ever seen.
Charley, as always, was three steps ahead of me. “Stacey will be joining us.”
“What about her fiance? Will he be there, too?”
I could hear the smile in my friend’s voice. “No, I believe Matt is working that night.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, cresting a hill. “But I’ve really got to go. I’ll explain why on Saturday.”
“You damn well better!”
I tucked the cell phone into my shirt pocket, feeling unreasonably hopeful. Stacey might have a fiance, but who knew what was truly possible and impossible?
I braked when I came around the corner, and I braked even harder when I saw the FOR SALE sign in the yard outside Jamie’s house. My patrol truck slid on its brand-new wheels and tires across a sanded stretch of asphalt before it came to rest in front of the driveway.
In the past, Jamie had barely bothered to shovel out a space to park her van, but someone had plowed out a vast expanse of the dooryard to make way for whatever big truck had hauled away her furniture and other possessions. You could tell from the dark, curtainless windows that the Sewall family was long gone. Jamie had sworn to me she’d do anything to hold on to her troubled son, even if it meant spiriting him away in the dead of night. What reason did they have to stay in that haunted house anyway? Who wouldn’t want to escape from this snowbound wasteland?
I tried to remember the story Jamie had told me when we were lying in bed in the motel, the one about Prester John and his legendary African kingdom: “But someday I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until I find my own golden city in the sun.”
I wondered if she would find it.
Does anyone ever?
