Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, "Chad. Let it go." There was a cloud in the man's mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning.
"Chad," he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, "this town is going to change now. It's not going to be the only good town in a depressed region anymore. It's going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There's going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you." And then he said, "Marguerite needs you."
Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man's head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen's practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half smiled when she was amused. "She's waiting for you," said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it.
"Margie?" said Chad Mulligan.
And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached into Chad Mulligan's mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon out from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picks an eye from roadkill.
The creases in Chad's forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily.
"Go see Margie," said Shadow. "It's been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself."
"Sure," yawned Chad Mulligan.
A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.
Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water.
Soon, Alison would float to the surface…
As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann's place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail.
He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye.
Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.
She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with secondhand bookstores.
She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone.
A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of about Sam's age, with pig-tailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie.
"Hello," said Natalie. She went up on tiptoes and kissed Sam, depositing the kiss snugly between Sam's cheek and the corner of her mouth. You can say a lot of things with a kiss like that. "You done?"
"Nearly."
"You want to see a movie?"
"Sure. Love to. I've got a good five minutes left here, though. Why don't you sit and read the Onion?"
"I saw this week's already." She sat on a chair near the door, ruffled through the pile of newspapers put aside for recycling until she found something, and read it while Sam bagged up the last of the money in the till and put it in the safe.
They had been sleeping together for a week now. Sam wondered if this was it, the relationship she'd been waiting for all her life. She told herself that it was just brain chemicals and pheromones that made her happy when she saw Natalie, and perhaps that was what it was; still, all she knew for sure was that she smiled when she saw Natalie, and that when they were together she felt comfortable and comforted.
"This paper," said Natalie, "has another one of those articles in it. 'Is America Changing?' "
"Well, is it?"
"They don't say. They say that maybe it is, but they don't know how and they don't know why, and maybe it isn't happening at all."
Sam smiled broadly. "Well," she said, "that covers every option, doesn't it?"
"I guess." Natalie's brow creased and she went back to her newspaper.
Sam washed the dishcloth and folded it. "I think it's just that, despite the government and whatever, everything just feels suddenly good right now. Maybe it's just spring coming a little early. It was a long winter, and I'm glad it's over."
"Me too." A pause. "It says in the article that lots of people have been reporting weird dreams. I haven't really had any weird dreams. Nothing weirder than normal."
Sam looked around to see if there was anything she had missed. Nope. It was a good job well done. She took off her apron, hung it back in the kitchen. Then she came back and started to turn off the lights. "I've had some weird dreams recently," she said. "They got weird enough that I actually started keeping a dream journal. I write them down when I wake up. But when I read them, they don't mean anything at all."
She put on her street coat and her one-size-fits-all gloves.
"I did some dream work," said Natalie. Natalie had done a little of everything, from arcane self-defense disciplines and sweat lodges to feng shui and jazz dancing. "Tell me. I'll tell you what they mean."
"Okay." Sam unlocked the door and turned the last of the lights off. She let Natalie out, and she walked out onto the street and locked the door to the Coffee House firmly behind her. "Sometimes I have been dreaming of people who fell from the sky. Sometimes I'm underground, talking to a woman with a buffalo head. And sometimes I dream about this guy I kissed in a bar last month."
Natalie made a noise. "Something you should have told me about?"
"Maybe. But not like that. It was a Fuck-Off Kiss."
"You were telling him to f**k off?"
"No, I was telling everyone else they could f**k off. You had to be there, I guess."
Natalie's shoes clicked down the sidewalk. Sam padded on next to her. "He owns my car," said Sam.
"That purple thing you got at your sister's?"
"Yup."
"What happened to him? Why doesn't he want his car?"
"I don't know. Maybe he's in prison. Maybe he's dead."
"Dead?"
"I guess." Sam hesitated. "A few weeks back, I was certain he was dead. ESP. Or whatever. Like, I knew. But then, I started to think maybe he wasn't. I don't know. I guess my ESP isn't that hot."
"How long are you going to keep his car?"
"Until someone comes for it. I think it's what he would have wanted."
Natalie looked at Sam, then she looked again. Then she said, "Where did you get those from?"
"What?"
"The flowers. The ones you're holding, Sam. Where did they come from? Did you have them when we left the Coffee House? I would have seen them."
Sam looked down. Then she grinned. "You are so sweet. I should have said something when you gave them to me, shouldn't I?" she said. "They are lovely. Thank you so much. But wouldn't red have been more appropriate?"
They were roses, their stems wrapped in paper. Six of them, and white.
"I didn't give them to you," said Natalie, her lips firming.
And neither of them said another word until they reached the movie theater.
When she got home that night Sam put the roses in an improvised vase. Later, she cast them in bronze, and she kept to herself the tale of how she got them, although she told Caroline, who came after Natalie, the story of the ghost-roses one night when they were both very drunk, and Caroline agreed with Sam that it was a really, really strange and spooky story, and, deep down, did not actually believe a word of it, so that was all right.
Shadow had parked near a pay phone. He called information, and they gave him the number.
No, he was told. She isn't here. She's probably still at the Coffee House.
He stopped on the way to the Coffee House to buy flowers.
He found the Coffee House, then he crossed the road and stood in the doorway of a used bookstore, and waited, and watched.
The place closed at eight, and at ten past eight Shadow saw Sam Black Crow walk out of the Coffee House in the company of a smaller woman whose pigtailed hair was a peculiar shade of red. They were holding hands tightly, as if simply holding hands could keep the world at bay, and they were talking-or rather, Sam was doing most of the talking while her friend listened. Shadow wondered what Sam was saying. She smiled as she talked.
The two women crossed the road, and they walked past the place where Shadow was standing. The pigtailed girl passed within a foot of him; he could have reached out and touched her, and they didn't see him at all.
He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him.
It had been a good kiss, Shadow reflected, but Sam had never looked at him the way she was looking at the pig-tailed girl, and she never would.
"What the hell. We'll always have Peru," he said, under his breath, as Sam walked away from him. "And El Paso. We'll always have that."
Then he ran after her, and put the flowers into Sam's hands. He hurried away, so she could not give them back.
Then he walked up the hill, back to his car, and he followed the signs to Chicago. He drove at or slightly under the speed limit.
It was the last thing he had to do.
He was in no hurry.
He spent the night in a Motel 6. He got up the next morning and realized his clothes still smelled like the bottom of the lake. He put them on anyway. He figured he wouldn't need them much longer.
Shadow paid his bill. He drove to the brownstone apartment building. He found it without any difficulty. It was smaller than he remembered.
He walked up the stairs steadily-not fast, that would have meant he was eager to go to his death, and not slow, that would have meant he was afraid. Someone had cleaned the stairwell: the black garbage bags had gone. The place smelled of the chlorine smell of bleach, no longer of rotting vegetables.
The red-painted door at the top of the stairs was wide open: the smell of old meals hung in the air. Shadow hesitated, then he pressed the doorbell.
"I come!" called a woman's voice, and, dwarf-small and dazzlingly blonde, Zorya Utrennyaya came out of the kitchen and bustled toward him, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked different, Shadow realized. She looked happy. Her cheeks were rouged red, and there was a sparkle in her old eyes. When she saw him her mouth became an O and she called out, "Shadow? You came back to us?" and she hurried toward him with her arms outstretched. He bent down and embraced her, and she kissed his cheek. "So good to see you!" she said. "Now you must go away."