The Third Hill North of Town (38 page)

“I’m coming, Mom,” he murmured aloud in his Cadillac. “Just hang on a little longer.”

The chase after the Hunters and Edgar Reilly had acted like an analeptic in Gabriel Dapper’s bloodstream. His fatigue was entirely gone; he felt like he could stay awake for eternity. The sound of his tires on the road’s surface changed pitch as the asphalt highway gave way to concrete, and the Cadillac whipped past darkened houses and lonely streetlights. He paid no attention to his surroundings, however; he was too busy trying to make sense of the senseless.

The depth of his ignorance appalled him. He didn’t understand why the two little shitheads who had kidnapped and raped his mother had now taken her with them yet again; he didn’t understand what these same two shitheads would have to gain by taking her back to her hometown. As the Cadillac blew through downtown Mullwein, rumbling like thunder over a two-block stretch of cobblestone, Gabriel asked himself the same questions over and over:

Why Pawnee? What were the kidnappers up to? What did they know that he didn’t?

He screeched around the sharp turn at the bottom of the hill by the Dairy Queen. The right rear tire of the Cadillac slammed into the curb with enough force to pop off its hubcap and send the bundle beside him on the passenger seat flying to the floor. Gabriel didn’t really notice the collision; he simply stamped on the accelerator again and resumed his pursuit, leaving two burned-rubber marks on the highway behind him.

He’d never even heard the name of “Pawnee, Missouri,” until his mother got sick and started talking about it all the time. Why had she never said anything about it when she was sane? Why hadn’t he ever pushed her harder about her past? It was
his
past, too, by extension; surely he had a right to know more about it than he did.

On his visits to the Maine State Mental Hospital in Bangor, Julianna had mentioned “Momma and Daddy” and two brothers named Seth and Michael, but that was the extent of what Gabriel knew about the people who were apparently
his
family, as well. He thought back to his own childhood, and to the few times he had attempted to ask Julianna about her parents and siblings. Her answers had always been either evasive or monosyllabic, but it seemed to him now there had also been something in her voice he had missed each time, an undercurrent of emotion he would have noticed right away if he’d only been paying closer attention. He’d heard the same undertone again when she was hallucinating in the hospital, but he was only now beginning to get a glimmer of what it might be:

Enormous love, and an equally powerful grief. Perhaps the knowledge that the best part of her life was over, and things would never be as good again. The end of hope, the end of childhood, the end of faith in a just and moral universe. All of these and more, bound together and spun into a dark, haunting melody, a threnody of loss for anybody who knew how to listen for it.

Gabriel was suddenly blinded by tears. There was no way he could possibly know what had happened to Julianna, yet something was telling him it was a wonder her mind had not broken decades before, split into a million pieces by memory and loss. And now she was apparently being dragged back to where her life had been ruined, the hostage of two criminals who had done unspeakable things to her and had some hidden purpose for taking her there.

Gabriel glanced at the bundle on the floor of the passenger seat. Wrapped up in his suit coat were three souvenirs he’d brought home with him at the end of World War II. One was a Mauser pistol; the other two were German hand grenades (nicknamed “potato mashers” for their long wooden cylinders and brutal-looking metal caps). Until the previous day, all three weapons had been locked up in a trunk in his attic for nearly seventeen years; he had actually forgotten all about them before Edgar Reilly called to tell him that his mother had been kidnapped. Gabriel was not a violent man by nature, but the boys who had taken his mother were no doubt armed, and he would not be caught with his pants down. He would do whatever it took to get Julianna back; he would somehow find a way to make things right for her again, and give her some peace.

“I’m coming, Mom,” Gabriel mourned, accidentally running over a rabbit on the road without feeling the bump.

 

Julianna wandered in the moonlight through the foot-high rows of corn, looking for her home. To all outward appearances, she could have been out for a midnight stroll in the country, stopping every few steps to enjoy the play of shadows on the ground as a light breeze tugged this way and that at the cornstalks surrounding her.

“Julianna?” Elijah was following her at a respectful distance, not wanting to intrude but too worried to stay silent any longer. “Are you all right?”

She nodded her head, swaying from side to side like a little girl and breaking up a clod of dirt with the toe of her shoe.

Julianna had stepped out of the Beetle a few minutes before, leaving it parked with its headlights pointing at the cornfield and its rear end jutting into the middle of the road. Elijah had chased after her at once, leaving Jon to park the car in a more conventional manner. Elijah heard Jon coming now through the field, walking as fast as his injuries would allow, and he half turned to wait for the older boy.

“I tried to find a place to hide the Bug but there’s no place close by that will work,” Jon muttered to Elijah, catching up. “I couldn’t even put it in the cornfield because there’s no way it would make it through the ditch.”

Elijah glanced back at the road, some fifteen yards behind them. The moonlight was bright enough for him to make out the Volkswagen’s rounded roof with no difficulty. “We’ll see anybody coming from up here a long time before they get here,” he said. “We can always make a run for it if we have to.”

Jon nodded wearily. “What about the guns? You and Julianna left them in the car and I couldn’t decide if I should bring them or not. I thought Julianna might be weird about it.”

Elijah blinked, surprised by Jon’s apparent willingness to follow whatever course he, Elijah, believed to be best. “I guess we can leave them for now,” he said, trying to sound more sure than he felt. “Like I said, no one can sneak up on us here.”

Julianna turned around and motioned for them to join her. The boys obeyed at once, both feeling oddly diffident as they drew closer. She searched their faces when they drew even with her, then gestured at the ground by her feet. “The front porch was right about here,” she said matter-of-factly, sounding like a distracted tour guide at a museum. “Our barn was over there, and a little north of that was Daddy’s tool shed.” She smiled a little. “Seth and Michael always called it ‘The Mouse House.’ ”

Elijah and Jon stared at her. Her voice gave them no clue as to her mental state; she was still speaking in the light manner they associated with her teenager persona, yet it was clear from what she was saying that she was no longer hallucinating, at least for the moment. She didn’t seem to need them to say anything; she simply kept looking around the hilltop.

“Momma’s garden was just over there,” she continued, turning in a slow circle. “About ten feet away from where that fence is. We used to tease her that she loved her garden more than she loved us, because she spent so much time in it.” She bent down to finger a leaf on a cornstalk. “She’d be so mad if she knew they’d plowed it under.”

Jon slapped at a mosquito on his bicep and the quick movement caused a twinge in his shoulder. That he’d been shot earlier that night still felt unreal to him. He kept staring at the bandage taped to the left side of his chest as if it had been put there by mistake, thinking about how easily the bullet had torn through his flesh.

“What happened to your family, Julianna?” Elijah asked quietly, pulling Jon’s attention back to the hilltop. “Do you remember?”

Julianna looked up at the stars in the sky, and then back at the earth. For an instant she thought she heard gunfire and screaming, and the roar of an enormous fire. Her knees began to buckle but then the night went mercifully still again.

“Ben,” she whispered, looking at Elijah as if she were just noticing his presence. “I don’t feel very well.”

 

Coincidence was setting the table for a lavish feast.

Samuel Hunter pulled into the driveway of the first house he saw after Highway 46 changed from asphalt to gravel, to ask for better directions to Pawnee than a traumatized Dottie Buckley had been able to provide. The house was a small one-story home with a flat roof and a yard more dirt than grass; there was an empty chicken coop on the property and an old Chevy Bel Air parked beside it.

“Looks like they’re already asleep,” Sam said, reaching for his door handle. “I’ll go knock.”

Mary shook her head and put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Seeing a black man on the porch at this hour may frighten the poor things to death. I’ll do it.” She turned her head to look at Edgar in the backseat. “It might be best if you come with me, Dr. Reilly. Some folks may not want to talk to me, either, but you’re not as likely to give them the willies.”

The thought of waking potentially hostile strangers in the middle of the night on a deserted country road was not appealing to Edgar, but he nodded in agreement and cleared his throat nervously.

“Whatever you think best, Mary,” he said.

The two of them got out of the car and walked to the door together, listening to the sound of their shoes on the gravel and the hooting of an owl in a nearby tree. The headlights from Bonnor Tucker’s station wagon allowed Mary to note that the house was old and badly in need of a paint job, but there was a stunning flower garden circling the foundation—she saw poppies, mimosas, cockscombs, African lilies, Bells of Ireland, and several other blossoms she wasn’t familiar with—and she smiled to herself as she knocked on the door. In her experience, people who cared more about their flower gardens than the houses they lived in were not likely to be overly hostile.

“Should we knock again?” Edgar asked, looking back with longing at the station wagon.

Mary shook her head. “Somebody’s already coming.”

The porch light flickered on over their heads a moment later, and Mary, who had not expected to see another dark-skinned face in this part of the world, blinked in surprise when the door opened and an elderly black woman in a pink bathrobe peered out at them. She appeared to be in her mid-seventies, with short white hair and a heavily lined face, but her shoulders were straight and her eyes were more curious than wary.

“We’re very sorry to wake you, ma’am,” Mary said. “But it’s an emergency, and we need directions.”

“I wasn’t sleeping, honey,” the woman answered. She was taller and heavier than Mary, though not by much, and there was no hint of the South in her voice, as there was in Mary’s. “I was just staring up at the ceiling in my bedroom. What are you looking for?”

For some reason, Mary’s spine began to tingle. “We’re trying to find a town that’s not on the map,” she answered. “It’s called Pawnee. Have you heard of it?”

The older woman had been fussing with the waist-tie on her robe but her hands now froze in front of her and she stared hard at Mary for several long seconds before responding.

“Who on earth have you been talking to?” she asked. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

Mary assured her that she was acting on her own behalf, and quite serious.

“I’ll be doggoned,” the woman said, looking dumbfounded. She resumed cinching up her robe but couldn’t seem to make a proper knot. “My husband and I used to have a farm in Pawnee, but the whole town burned to the ground back in twenty-three, and nobody ever took the trouble to rebuild it. How did you ever hear of such a pitiful little place?”

The mysterious tingling in Mary’s spine became a shiver she couldn’t suppress. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Julianna Dapper’s hometown was no longer in existence, but if it had indeed vanished so many years before, it seemed a huge stroke of luck that the first house Sam had stopped at that night just happened to be owned by somebody who not only knew of Pawnee, but was actually a former resident.

“It’s a long story, and we don’t have much time,” she said quietly. “Can you tell us where it was? It’s very important.”

The old woman was clearly baffled; she looked from Mary to Edgar and then back again at Mary before responding.

“Just get back on Route 46 there right behind you,” she pointed past them at the gravel road, “and head west for about two miles. Soon as you see a road going north, hang a right and you’ll be smack in the middle of Pawnee. Nothing’s there now but corn, though.” She paused, still studying Mary’s face with incomprehension. “Were you looking for somebody in particular, honey? I knew every soul in town, and as far as I know I’m the only one left alive these days who can say that.”

Mary glanced at Edgar, who was staring at the old woman with a fascination that equaled her own.

Jung called this sort of thing synchronicity,
Edgar Reilly was reminding himself, taking refuge in psychological theory to calm the goose pimples on the back of his neck. The odds of immediately knocking on the door of perhaps the only living survivor, aside from Julianna, of a town that had ceased to exist four decades ago seemed to be a whopper of a coincidence to Edgar, too, and Edgar did not care for such things—especially late at night on a deserted country road.

Mary looked over her shoulder at Sam in the station wagon, then faced front again. “We’re looking for a woman named Julianna Dapper, who supposedly grew up around here.”

The old woman’s brow wrinkled and she shook her head. “There was only one girl in Pawnee named Julianna, but her last name wasn’t Dapper. It was Larson.”

Edgar started. “But that’s her! Julianna’s maiden name was Larson!” He reached for a cigarette and dropped the whole pack on the porch in excitement. “Did you know her?”

The woman smiled sadly. “My youngest boy and her were thick as thieves their whole lives. But there’s no way in the world we’re talking about the same person. The Julianna Larson I knew died the night of the fire.”