"Are you afraid?"
"Not really," I said, although I was more afraid than I'd ever been, just not for any reason he knew about. "Fear is a ... it's a weird thing, when you think about it. People are only afraid of other things, they're never afraid of themselves."
"Should people be afraid of themselves?"
"Fear is about things that you can't control," I said, "the future, or the dark, or someone trying to kill you. You don't get scared of yourself because you always know what you're going to do."
"Are you afraid of yourself?"
I looked out the window and saw a woman on the sidewalk, standing in a beaten snowdrift and watching the traffic. "It's like that woman," I said, pointing at her. "She could be afraid that a car might hit her, or that the ice might make her slip, or that the other side of the street won't have anywhere to stand, but she's not afraid of crossing the street—crossing is her own decision, and she's already made it, and she knows how to do it, and it should be pretty easy. She's going to wait until there are no cars, and step carefully on the ice, and do everything within her control to keep herself safe. But it's the things she can't control that scare her. Things that could happen to her, not things that she does. She doesn't lie in bed in the morning and say 'I hope I don't come to any streets today, because I'm afraid I might try to cross them.' Here she goes."
The woman saw a break in traffic and hurried across the street. Nothing happened.
"Safe," I said. "Nothing happened at all. Now she's going back to work, where she's going to think about other things she's afraid of—'I hope my boss doesn't fire me; I hope the letter makes it there on time; I hope the check doesn't bounce.'"
"You know her?" asked Neblin.
"No," I said, "but she's on foot in this part of town at four in the afternoon, so there's only a couple of things she could be doing—probably not picking something up, because she wasn't carrying anything but a purse, so the bank or the post office seem like the most obvious guesses." I stopped suddenly, and looked back at Neblin. I'd never theorized about people in front of him before—my rules had never let me think that much about a random stranger. I wanted to accuse him of tricking me, but he hadn't done anything, just let me talk. I watched his eyes, looking for some sign that he knew the significance of what I'd been doing. He was staring straight back, thinking. Analyzing.
"Good guesses," said Neblin. "I don't know her either, but I'd bet you're right about most of those things." He was waiting for something—for me to admit what I'd done, maybe, or tell him why my rules were so different today. I said nothing.
"The latest news on the killing last weekend was about a 911 call," he said.
Uh oh.
"Apparently somebody called in from a pay phone—one just up on Main Street—and reported an attack by the Clayton Killer. The theory right now is that the killer got GrcA Olson, some witness called it in, and when the dispatcher sent the police, the killer got them, too."
"I hadn't heard about that," I said. "Makes sense, though.
Do they know who the caller was?"
"He wouldn't identify himself," said Neblin, "or she wouldn't, maybe. The voice was kind of high, so they think it was either a woman or a child."
"I hope it was a woman," I said.
Neblin raised an eyebrow.
"Whatever happened that night," I said, "I'm sure it's not the kind of thing a child should ever have to see. It could really mess him up."
11
Mr. Crowley woke up every morning around sixthirty.
He didn't use an alarm, he just woke up— decades of working at the same job, day after day, had conditioned him until it was second nature, and now, long after retirement, he couldn't help himself. I knew this because I watched from my window across the street for a few days, seeing which lights turned on when, and once I knew where to go I crouched and listened outside of his house. Normally I couldn't have done that without leaving incriminating footprints in the snow, but, as luck would have it, someone kept Mr. Crowley's walks remarkably clean. I could come and go as I pleased.
At sixthirty in the morning Mr. Crowley woke up and swore. It was like clockwork—he was an old, vulgar cuckoo you could practically set your watch to. It was the only time he swore all day, as far as I could tell; I suppose it helped him cleanse his mind and start the day fresh, gathering the night's dark thoughts into a plug of mental mucus and spitting it out in a single word. His bedroom was in the back right corner of the house, and after his daily cuss, he walked in the dark to the bathroom and washed,