shadows of the elms were one shade of purple short of black.
As he approached his Ford Explorer, he saw a note under the windshield wiper.
Although neither a dead blonde nor an elderly cadaver had been reported, Billy halted short of the Explorer, hesitant to proceed, reluctart to read this second message.
He wanted nothing more than to sit with Barbara for a while and then to go home. He didn’t see her seven times a week, but he visited more days than not.
His stops at Whispering Pines were one of the blocks with which the foundation of his simple life had been built. He looked forward to them as he looked forward to quitting-time and carving.
He was not a stupid man, however, and not even merely smart. He knew that his life of seclusion might easily deteriorate into one of solitude.
A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.
Slipping the note from under the wiper, crumpling it in his fist, and tossing it aside unread would surely constitute the crossing of the first of those lines. And perhaps there would be no going back.
He did not have much of what he wanted in life. But by nature he was prudent enough to recognize that if he threw away the note, he would also be throwing away everything that now sustained him. His life would be not merely different but worse.
In his trance of decision, he had not heard the patrol car enter the lot. As he plucked the note off the windshield, he was surprised by Lanny Olsen’s sudden appearance at his side, in uniform.
“Another one,” Lanny declared, as though he had been expecting the second note.
His voice had a broken edge. His face was lined with dread. His eyes were windows to a haunted place.
Billy’s fate was to live in a time that denied the existence of abominations, that gave the lesser name horror to every abomination, that redefined every horror as a crime, every crime as an offense, every offense as a mere annoyance. Nevertheless, abhorrence rose in him before he knew exactly what had brought Lanny Olsen here.
“Billy. Dear sweet Jesus, Billy.”
“What?”
“I’m sweating. Look at me sweating.”
“What? What is it?”
“I can’t stop sweating. It’s not that hot.”
Suddenly Billy felt greasy. He wiped one hand across his face and looked at the palm, expecting filth. To the eye, it appeared to be clean.
“I need a beer,” Lanny said. “Two beers. I need to sit down. I need to think.”
“Look at me.”
Lanny wouldn’t meet his eyes. His attention was fixed on the note in Billy’s hand.
That paper remained folded, but something unfolded in Billy’s gut, blossomed like a lubricious flower, oily and many-petaled. Nausea born of intuition.
The right question wasn’t what. The right question was who, and Billy asked it.
Lanny licked his lips. “Giselle Winslow.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Neither do I.”
“Where?”
“She taught English down in Napa.”
“Blond?”
“Yeah.”
“And lovely,” Billy guessed.
“She once was. Somebody beat her nearly to death. She was messed up really bad by someone who knew how to draw it out, how to make it last.”
“Nearly to death.”
“He finished by strangling her with a pair of her pantyhose.”
Billy’s legs felt weak. He leaned against the Explorer. He could not speak.
“Her sister found her just two hours ago.”
Lanny’s gaze remained fixed on the folded sheet of paper in Billy’s hand.
“The sheriff’s department doesn’t have jurisdiction down there,” Lanny continued. “So it’s in the lap of the Napa police. That’s something, anyway. That gives me breathing space.”
Billy found his voice, but it was rough and not as he usually sounded to himself. “The note said he’d kill a schoolteacher if I didn’t go to the police, but I went to you.”
“He said he’d kill her if you didn’t go to the police and get them involved.”
“But I went to you, I tried. I mean, for God’s sake, I tried, didn’t I?”
Lanny met his eyes at last. “You came to me informally. You didn’t actually go to the police. You went to a friend who happened to be a cop.”
“But I went to you,” Billy protested, and cringed at the denial in his voice, at the self-justification.
Nausea crawled the walls of his stomach, but he clenched his teeth and strove for control.
“Nothing smelled real about it,” Lanny said.
“About what?”
“The first note. It was a joke. It was a lame joke. There isn’t a cop alive with the instinct to smell anything real in it.”
“Was she married?” Billy asked.
A Toyota drove into the lot and parked seventy or eighty feet from the Explorer.
In silence they watched the driver get out of the car and go into the tavern. At such a distance, their conversation couldn’t have been overheard. Nevertheless, they were circumspect.
Country music drifted out of the tavern while the door was open. On the jukebox, Alan Jackson was singing about heartbreak.
“Was she married?” Billy asked again.
“Who?”
“The woman. The schoolteacher. Giselle Winslow.”
“I don’t think so, no. At least there’s no husband in the picture at the moment. Let me see the note.”
Withholding the folded paper, Billy said, “Did she have any children?”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters,” Billy said.
He
