3
After Labor Day, Teenytown closed at 3 p.m. on Sundays. This afternoon, at quarter to six, three giants sat on benches near the end of the mini–Cranmore Avenue, dwarfing Teenytown Drug and the Teenytown Music Box Theater (where, during tourist season, you could peek in the window and see teeny film clips playing on a teeny screen). John Dalton had come to the meeting wearing a Red Sox hat, which he placed on the head of the teeny Helen Rivington statue in the teeny courthouse square. “I’m sure she was a fan,” he said. “Everybody up this way is a fan. Nobody spares a little admiration for the Yankees except exiles like me. What can I do for you, Dan? I’m missing supper with the family for this. My wife’s an understanding woman, but her patience only stretches so far.”
“How would she feel about you spending a few days with me in Iowa?” Dan asked. “Strictly on my dime, you understand. I have to make a Twelfth Step call on an uncle who’s killing himself with booze and cocaine. My family’s begging me to step in, and I can’t do it alone.”
AA had no rules but many traditions (that were, in fact, rules). One of the most ironclad was that you never made a Twelfth Step call on an active alcoholic by yourself, unless the alkie in question was safely incarcerated in a hospital, detox, or the local bughouse. If you did, you were apt to end up matching him drink for drink and line for line. Addiction, Casey Kingsley liked to say, was the gift that kept on giving.
Dan looked at Billy Freeman and smiled. “Got something to say? Go ahead, feel free.”
“I don’t think you got an uncle. I’m not sure you’ve got any family left at all.”
“Is that it? You’re just not sure?”
“Well . . . you never talk about em.”
“Plenty of people have family and don’t talk about them. But you know I don’t have anyone, don’t you, Billy?”
Billy said nothing, but looked uneasy.
“Danny, I can’t go to Iowa,” John said. “I’m booked right into the weekend.”
Dan was still focused on Billy. Now he reached into his pocket, grabbed something, and held out his closed fist. “What have I got?”
Billy looked more uneasy than ever. He glanced at John, saw no help there, then back to Dan.
“John knows what I am,” Dan said. “I helped him once, and he knows I’ve helped a few others in the Program. You’re among friends here.”
Billy thought about it, then said: “Might be a coin, but I think it’s one of your AA medals. The kind they give you every time you get in another year sober.”
“What year’s this one?”
Billy hesitated, looking at Dan’s fisted hand.
“Let me help you out,” John said. “He’s been sober since the spring of 2001, so if he’s carrying a medallion around, it’s probably a Year Twelve.”
“Makes sense, but it ain’t.” Billy was concentrating now, two deep vertical lines grooving his forehead just about his eyes. “I think it might be . . . a seven?”
Dan opened his palm. The medallion had a big VI on it.
“Fuckaroo,” Billy said. “I’m usually good at guessing.”
“You were close enough,” Dan said. “And it’s not guessing, it’s shining.”
Billy took out his cigarettes, looked at the doctor sitting on the bench next to him, and put them back. “If you say so.”
“Let me tell you a little about yourself, Billy. When you were small, you were great at guessing things. You knew when your mother was in a good mood and you could hit her for an extra buck or two. You knew when your dad was in a bad one, and you steered clear of him.”
“I sure knew there were nights when bitchin about having to eat leftover pot roast would be a goddam bad idea,” Billy said.
“Did you gamble?”
“Hoss-races down Salem. Made a bundle. Then, when I was twenty-five or so, I kinda lost the knack of picking winners. I had a month when I had to beg an extension on the rent, and that cured me of railbirding.”
“Yes, the talent fades as people grow older, but you still have some.”
“You got more,” Billy said. No hesitation now.
“This is real, isn’t it?” John said. It really wasn’t a question; it was an observation.
“You’ve only got one appointment this coming week you really feel you can’t miss or hand off,” Dan said. “It’s a little girl with stomach cancer. Her name is Felicity—”
“Frederika,” John said. “Frederika Bimmel. She’s at Merrimack Valley Hospital. I’m supposed to have a consult with her oncologist and her parents.”
“Saturday morning.”
“Yeah. Saturday morning.” He gave Dan an amazed look. “Jesus. Jesus Christ. What you have . . . I had no idea there was so much of it.”
“I’ll have you back from Iowa by Thursday. Friday at the latest.”
Unless we get arrested, he thought. Then we might be there awhile longer. He looked to see if Billy had picked up that less-than-encouraging thought. There was no sign that he had.
“What’s this about?”
“Another patient of yours. Abra Stone. She’s like Billy and me, John, but I think you already know that. Only she’s much, much more powerful. I’ve got quite a lot more than Billy, and she makes me look like a fortune-teller at a county fair.”
“Oh my God, the spoons.”
It took Dan a second, then he remembered. “She hung them on the ceiling.”
John stared at him, wide-eyed. “You read that in my mind?”
“A little more mundane than that, I’m afraid. She told me.”
“When? When?”
“We’ll get there, but not yet. First, let’s try for some authentic mind-reading.” Dan took John’s hand. That helped; contact almost always did. “Her parents came to see you when she was just a toddler. Or maybe it was an aunt or her great-gram. They were concerned about her even before she decorated the kitchen with silverware, because there was all sorts of psychic phenomena going on in that house. There was something about the piano . . . Billy, help me out here.”
Billy grabbed John’s free hand. Dan took Billy’s, making a connected circle. A teeny séance in Teenytown.
“Beatles music,” Billy said. “On the piano instead of the guitar. It was . . . I dunno. It made em crazy for awhile.”
John stared at him.
“Listen,” Dan said, “you have her permission to talk. She wants you to. Trust me on this, John.”
John Dalton considered for almost a full minute. Then he told them everything, with one exception.
That stuff about The Simpsons being on all the TV channels was just too weird.
4
When he was finished, John asked the obvious question: How did Dan know Abra Stone?
From his back pocket Dan produced a small, battered notebook. On the cover was a photo of waves crashing against a headland and the motto NO GREAT THING IS CREATED SUDDENLY.
“You used to carry this, didn’t you?” John asked.
“Yes. You know Casey K.’s my sponsor, right?”
John rolled his eyes. “Who could forget, when every time you open your mouth in a meeting, you start with ‘My sponsor, Casey K., always says.’?”
“John, nobody loves a smartass.”
“My wife does,” he said. “Because I’m a studly smartass.”
Dan sighed. “Look in the book.”
John paged through it. “These are meetings. From 2001.”
“Casey told me I had to do ninety-in-ninety, and keep track. Look at the eighth one.”
John found it. Frazier Methodist Church. A meeting he didn’t often go to, but one he knew. Printed below the notation, in elaborate capital letters, was the word ABRA.
John looked up at Dan not quite unbelievingly. “She got in touch with you when she was two months old?”
“You see my next meeting just below it,” Dan said, “so I couldn’t have added her name later just to impress you. Unless I faked the whole book, that is, and there are plenty of people in the Program who’ll remember seeing me with it.”
“Including me,” John said.
“Yeah, including you. In those days, I always had my meeting book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. They were my security blankets. I didn’t know who she was then, and I didn’t much care. It was just one of those random touchings. The way a baby in a crib might reach out and brush your nose.
“Then, two or three years later, she wrote a word on a scheduling blackboard I keep in my room. The word was hello. She kept in contact after that, every once in awhile. Kind of touching base. I’m not even sure she was aware she was doing it. But I was there. When she needed help, I was the one she knew, and the one she reached out to.”
“What kind of help does she need? What kind of trouble is she in?” John turned to Billy. “Do you know?”
Billy shook his head. “I never heard of her, and I hardly ever go to Anniston.”
“Who said Abra lives in Anniston?”
Billy cocked a thumb at Dan. “He did. Didn’t he?”
John turned back to Dan. “All right. Say I’m convinced. Let’s have the whole thing.”
Dan told them about Abra’s nightmare of the baseball boy. The shapes holding flashlights on him. The woman with the knife, the one who had licked the boy’s blood off her palms. About how, much later, Abra had come across the boy’s picture in the Shopper.
“And she could do this why? Because the kid they killed was another one of these shiners?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s how the initial contact happened. He must have reached out while these people were torturing him—Abra has no doubt that’s what they did—and that created a link.”
“One that continued even after the boy, this Brad Trevor, was dead?”
“I think her later point of contact may have been something the Trevor kid owned—his baseball glove. And she was able to link to his killers because one of them put it on. She doesn’t know how she does it, and neither do I. All I know for sure is that she’s immensely powerful.”
“The way you are.”
“Here’s the thing,” Dan said. “These people—if they are people—are led by the woman who did the actual killing. On the day Abra came across the picture of Brad Trevor on a missing-children page in the local rag, she got in this woman’s head. And the woman got in Abra’s. For a few seconds they looked through each other’s eyes.” He held up his hands, made fists, and rotated them. “Turn and turn about. Abra thinks they may come for her, and so do I. Because she could be a danger to them.”
“There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Billy asked.
Dan looked at him, waiting.
“People who can do this shining thing have something, right? Something these people want. Something they can only get by killing.”
“Yes.”
John said, “Does this woman know where Abra is?”
“Abra doesn’t think so, but you have to remember she’s only thirteen. She could be wrong.”
“Does Abra know where the woman is?”
“All she knows is that when this contact—this mutual seeing—occurred, the woman was in a Sam’s Supermarket. That puts it somewhere out West, but there are Sams in at least nine states.”
“Including Iowa?”
Dan shook his head.
“Then I don’t see what we can accomplish by going there.”
“We can get the glove,” Dan said. “Abra thinks if she has the glove, she can link to the man who had it on his hand for a little while. She calls him Barry the Chunk.”
John sat with his head lowered, thinking. Dan let him do it.
“All right,” John said at last. “This is crazy, but I’ll buy it. Given what I know of Abra’s history and given my own history with you, it’s actually kind of hard not to. But if this woman doesn’t know where Abra is, might it not be wiser to leave things alone? Don’t kick a sleeping dog and all that?”
“I don’t think this dog’s asleep,” Dan said. “These
(empty devils)
freaks want her for the same reason they wanted the Trevor boy—I’m sure Billy’s right about that. Also, they know she’s a danger to them. To put it in AA terms, she has the power to break their anonymity. And they may have resources we can only guess at. Would you want a patient of yours to live in fear, month after month and maybe year after year, always expecting some sort of paranormal Manson Family to show up and snatch her off the street?”
“Of course not.”
“These assholes live on children like her. Children like I was. Kids with the shining.” He stared grimly into John Dalton’s face. “If it’s true, they need to be stopped.”
Billy said, “If I’m not going to Iowa, what am I supposed to do?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Dan said. “You’re going to get very familiar with Anniston in the week ahead. In fact, if Casey will give you time off, you’re going to stay at a motel there.”
5
Rose finally entered the meditative state she had been seeking. The hardest thing to let go of had been her worries about Grampa Flick, but she finally got past them. Got above them. Now she cruised within herself, repeating the old phrases—sabbatha hanti and lodsam hanti and cahanna risone hanti—over and over again, her lips barely moving. It was too early to seek the troublesome girl, but now that she’d been left alone and the world was quiet, both inside and out, she was in no hurry. Meditation for its own sake was a fine thing. Rose went about gathering her tools and focusing her concentration, working slowly and meticulously.
Sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti: words that had been old when the True Knot moved across Europe in wagons, selling peat turves and trinkets. They had probably been old when Babylon was young. The girl was powerful, but the True was all-powerful, and Rose anticipated no real problem. The girl would be asleep, and Rose would move with quiet stealth, picking up information and planting suggestions like small explosives. Not just one worm, but a whole nest of them. Some the girl might detect, and disable.
Others, not.
6
Abra spoke with her mother on the phone for almost forty-five minutes that night after she’d finished her homework. The conversation had two levels. On the top one, they talked about Abra’s day, the school week ahead, and her costume for the upcoming Halloween Dance; they discussed the ongoing plans to have Momo moved north to the Frazier hospice (which Abra still thought of as the “hot spice”); Lucy brought Abra up-to-date on Momo’s condition, which she said was “actually pretty good, all things considered.”
On another level, Abra listened to Lucy’s nagging worry that she had somehow failed her grandmother, and to the truth of Momo’s condition: frightened, addled, racked with pain. Abra tried to send her mother soothing thoughts: it’s all right, Mom and we love you, Mom and you did the best you could, for as long as you were able. She liked to believe that some of these thoughts got through, but didn’t really believe it. She had many talents—the kind that were wonderful and scary at the same time—but changing another person’s emotional temperature had never been one of them.
Could Dan do that? She thought maybe he could. She thought he used that part of his shining to help people in the hot spice. If he could really do that, maybe he would help Momo when she got there. That would be good.
She came downstairs wearing the pink flannel pajamas Momo had given her last Christmas. Her father was watching the Red Sox and drinking a glass of beer. She put a big smackeroo on his nose (he always said he hated that, but she knew he sort of liked it) and told him she was off to bed.
“La homework est complète, mademoiselle?”
“Yes, Daddy, but the French word for homework is devoirs.”
“Good to know, good to know. How was your mother? I ask because I only had about ninety seconds with her before you snatched the phone.”
“She’s doing okay.” Abra knew this was the truth, but she also knew okay was a relative term. She started for the hall, then turned back. “She said Momo was like a glass ornament.” She hadn’t, not out loud, but she’d been thinking it. “She says we all are.”
Dave muted the TV. “Well, I guess that’s true, but some of us are made of surprisingly tough glass. Remember, your momo’s been up on the shelf, safe and sound, for many, many years. Now come over here, Abba-Doo, and give your Dad a hug. I don’t know if you need it, but I could use one.”