whatever that meant, and another deciding, with no prior agreement, upon the echo-phrase ‘no time’? Although he thought such a coincidence was impossible, he still felt mildly uneasy as he rejected it.
Because that left only two options, and both raised the ante. Either the four people who’d sent the e-mails to him were acting together in conspiracy, or the e-mails had all been sent by the same person using four names.
The names, Huffy, presten, rudderless, loumay, suggested no pattern. They were not familiar. A moment later, Tim remembered that back in his hometown, Millhaven, Illinois, a boy named Paul Resten had been his teammate on the Holy Sepulchre football team. Paulie Resten had been a chaotic little fireplug with greasy hair, a shoplifting problem, and a tendency toward violence. It seemed profoundly unlikely that after a silence of forty-odd years Paulie would send him a two-word e-mail.
Tim read the messages over again, thought for a second, then rearranged them:
re member
there wuz
no helo
no time
which could just as easily have been
re member
there wuz
no time
no helo
or
there wuz
no time
no helo
re member
Not much of an advance, was it? The possibility that ‘helo’ could be a typo for ‘help’ came to mind. Remember, there was no time, no help. Whatever the hell that was about, it was pretty depressing. Also depressing was the notion that four people had decided to send him that disjointed message. If Tim felt like getting depressed, he had merely to think of his brother, Philip, who, not much more than one year after his wife’s suicide and the disappearance of his son, had announced his impending marriage to one China Beech, a born-again Christian whom Philip had met shortly after her emergence from the chrysalis of an exotic dancer. On the whole, Tim decided, he’d rather think about the inexplicable e-mails.
They had the stale, slightly staid aura of a Sherlock Holmes setup. Faintly, the rusty machinery of a hundred old detective novels could be heard, grinding into what passed for life. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century any such thing had to be seen as a possible threat. At the very least, a malign hacker could have compromised the security of his system.
When his antivirus program discovered no loathsome substance hidden within his folders and files, Tim procrastinated a little further by calling his computer guru, Myron Dorot-Rivage. Myron looked like a Spaniard, and he spoke with a surprisingly musical German accent. He had rescued Tim and his companions at 55 Grand from multiple catastrophes.
Amazingly, Myron answered his phone on the second ring. ‘So, Tim,’ he said, being equipped with infallible caller ID as well as a headset, ‘tell me your problem. I am booked solid for at least the next three days, but perhaps we can solve it over the phone.’
‘It isn’t exactly a computer problem.’
‘You are calling me about a personal problem, Tim?’
Momentarily, Tim considered telling his computer guru about what had happened that morning on West Broadway. Myron would have no sympathy for any problem that involved a ghost. He said, ‘I’ve been getting weird e-mails,’ and described the four messages. ‘My virus check came up clean, but I’m still a little worried.’
‘You probably won’t get a virus unless you open an attachment. Are you bothered by the anonymity?’
‘Well, yeah. How do they do that, leave out their addresses? Is that legal?’
‘Legal schmegal. I could arrange the same thing for you, if you were willing to pay for it. But what I cannot do is trace such an e-mail back to its source. These people pay their fees for a reason, after all!’
Myron drew in his breath, and Tim heard the clatter of metal against metal. It was like talking to an obstetrician who was delivering a baby.
After hanging up, Tim noticed that three new e-mails had arrived since his last look at his inbox. The first, Monster Oral Sex Week, undoubtedly offered seven days’ free access to a porn site; the second, 300,000 Customers, almost certainly linked to an e-mail database; the third, nayrm, made the skin on his forearms prickle. The Sex and the Customers disappeared unopened into the landfill of deleted mail. As he had dreaded, nayrm proved, when clicked upon, to have arrived without the benefit of a filled-in subject line or identifiable e-mail address. It had been sent at 10:58 A.M. and consisted of three words:
hard death hard
Yo, Willy! You with the funny name! Are we interested in another journey back to the antiseptic corridors of western Massachusetts? An hour or two in the Institute’s game room?
No.
Don’t think about what might be hidden in empty buildings, okay?
That was the whole problem: what might be, could possibly be, and according to every variety of internal registration she possessed actually was at that very moment inside the warehouse located two and two-tenths of a mile north of the Union Street Pathmark. What she was thinking, what she unfortunately believed, was completely crazy. Her daughter, Holly, could not possibly be hiding or kept prisoner inside Michigan Produce. Her daughter was dead. Raw though it was, Holly’s death was not actually all that recent. She had been dead for two years and four months. Along with James Patrick, Willy’s husband, Holly had been gunned down in the back of a car, soaked with gasoline, and set on fire. That was that. No matter how deeply they were loved, children who had been shot to death and set on fire did not come back. As a doctor (whose name, Bollis, Willy wouldn’t wish on a two-headed dwarf) in the Berkshires village of Stockwell could explain to any party in need of explanation, the belief that one’s child had returned from the realm of the dead not as a ghost but a living being could be no more than the product of a wish bamboozled into mistaking itself for fact.
Willy took in the produce warehouse, saw the letters pulse above the high row of windows, and knew beyond any possibility of a doubt—apart, of course, from its not being true—that her daughter was in there. Holly cowered at the back of a storeroom, or she was hidden in a closet, or beneath the desk in an empty office. Or in some other clammy bardo from which her mother alone could rescue her.
Willy grasped the car’s door handle, and sweat burst out across her forehead. If she opened the door, out she would go, her shaky control over her actions vanished altogether. Brainless as a falling meteor would she race toward the warehouse, brave little Willy, searching for a way to break in.
If she were ever to give in to this disastrous impulse, she realized, it would happen at night, when the warehouse was empty.
In the night would she pull the curved spoon of the door handle from its recessed pocket, releasing
