Way in the background, like a radio turned down but endlessly droning, the man at the checkout was still staring at the dirty magazine.
Sam pushed the cart to the next aisle. Rachel followed. She’d found she didn’t like getting too far away from him. Compared to everyone else she’d been near today—even people in other cars on the highway—Sam’s thoughts were unique. No matter what he was thinking at any one moment, there was a feeling that was always there, a feeling that seemed to be pointed right at her. It made her think of the warmth near a fireplace. That was how Sam’s thoughts felt. Like protective heat. Like arms around her.
*
They were heading north through the city, ten minutes later, when it happened. They had two more stops to make: an electronics store here in Bakersfield, to buy an audio recorder, and a specialty shop in the city of Visalia, an hour away. What they needed in Visalia were two unusual items—Sam had spent ten minutes on a pay phone, calling places to ask about them. These items would be for emergency use only; Rachel hoped like crazy they wouldn’t need them.
Sam made a left toward a Best Buy half a mile down a cross street. The moment he’d completed the turn, Rachel felt her breath catch. It was like someone had driven an elbow hard into her chest. A choked little sound came out of her mouth.
Sam turned to her. Concern flared in his thoughts.
“What’s wrong? Rachel?”
She forced out a breath, sucked in another.
“I’m fine,” she said. She heard how she sounded, though. She didn’t sound fine. She didn’t really feel fine, either. For another second she had no idea what she did feel. Fear, it seemed like, but why? What was she afraid of?
Then her eyes locked onto it. Just north of the Best Buy, rising out of the city sprawl: a cell phone tower. There was nothing special about it. It was just standing there, its red beacon lights hardly visible in the sun. Yet she could barely make herself look at the thing. It was like staring at a close-up picture of an insect face. Everything about it made her skin prickle.
“Rachel, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She didn’t want to tell him. He’d think she was crazy.
Sam put the Toyota’s blinker on and pulled off the road into a strip mall. He put it in park.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was soft. The fireplace feeling was stronger than ever. She looked away from the tower and let that sensation drive the fear away.
“You can tell me,” Sam said. “Whatever it is.”
Rachel nodded. She took a deep breath and explained it the best she could. She expected to hear judgment in his mind when she finished, but there was none there. All he did was stare at the tower and try to make sense of what she’d described.
“Maybe the drugs just made me paranoid,” Rachel said.
Sam was still looking ahead through the windshield.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“What else is there? Why would I be afraid of something like that?”
Now that she’d kept her eyes off of it this long, she found herself unwilling to even glance at it again.
“It sounds like a conditioned response,” Sam said.
“What’s that?”
“It means if there was something you were afraid of before you lost your memory—something you were really afraid of—you’d still be scared of it now, even if you couldn’t remember why.”
The word Pavlov flickered through his thoughts.
“But even before I lost my memory,” Rachel said, “why would I have been scared of cell phone towers?”
“Maybe we’ll know soon enough.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The last good time Owen Carter could remember having, before the Gravel Man started talking in his head, was a day last year when he took his grandfather’s pickup out into the desert and found a turtle, and drew sketches of it all afternoon while it sunned itself. There was peace in drawing. He’d known that since high school, ten years back. He liked the simplicity of the task: Make the drawing look as much like the real thing as you could. Make it feel like the real thing even, the way it felt to be looking at it in person. It was work he could escape into when other things in his life got too hard to get his head around. Which happened all the time.
He’s not stupid, he had heard his grandfather say once, years back. Owen had been coming in from the pole barn, his hands greasy from changing out the gearbox on an old Suburban, and he’d caught the end of the conversation from outside the screen door. Grandpa was talking to his friend Carl, who ran the grocery store in Cold Spring, a few miles down the road. That was where Owen always bought his sketch pads and his pencils.