He was forty-one years old. He had lived all of those forty-one years right here in the little backwater of Clover, Wyoming, ten miles from the somewhat larger backwater of Red City. For much of the early part of his life, he had struggled to stay out of trouble. The trouble had been brawling, mostly, always a result of drink or bad manners—the one led to the other, of course. Around thirty he’d left all that behind; you could only wake up in so many jail cells before you started to do some thinking. He had gone to work for his uncle in the woodshop, making custom cabinets and furniture for building contractors over in Cheyenne. Something in the work had appealed to Marcus at once. He liked putting in a day’s effort and having a new thing to show for it at the end, a desk or maybe a bookshelf. He liked to stay alone in the shop after hours, turn on this light or that one, and see how a newly finished piece gleamed from different angles. He had expected the rest of his life to play out on this clean, simple track he’d gotten it onto. He wasn’t going to be rich, but he also wasn’t going to wake up in jail ever again, and that was fine with him. Everything had been fine, really, until just shy of a year ago when the Ghost had gotten into his head. All these rotten months later—months of denying and resisting and finally giving in like a beaten dog with his snout turned down—here he was, following his orders. What else could he do?
They were strange, the orders he’d gotten today. They were always strange—and now and again they were as god-awful as anything Marcus could imagine—but these were especially unusual. Until today, the Ghost’s commands had always involved doing things right here in town, give or take a few miles. Now, out of the blue, the voice had commanded him to get in his car, get on the freeway, and head for Kansas. The instructions had specified a particular motel in a particular town, where he was to check in and stay and await further orders.
What those orders would be, he couldn’t guess. They’d be nothing good—he knew that much. Still, he would follow them. God help him, he would follow them.
CHAPTER FORTY
Just before midnight Dryden put aside the book he’d been reading and stepped out onto the farmhouse’s porch. The breeze coming in off the fields was warm and humid. He went to the top of the steps and looked out at the night. In front of the house, the land fell away in a long slope to the road, two hundred yards south. The driveway cut straight down the middle, the fields on either side lying fallow and choked with short grass. The same held for the land on all sides of the place: a vast zone of open visibility stretching at least six hundred feet in each direction, without so much as a tree growing in it. No doubt this geometry had been part of Gaul’s reason for choosing the site.
The house itself was probably a hundred years old, biding the decades out here in the sticks while Topeka grew north to meet it. It wasn’t far off—the busy street Gaul had spoken of lay directly south, running east-west across the near horizon like a scar of neon and sodium-lit parking lots. Rachel could be there right now; Dryden and Holly had been in the farmhouse for ten days.
In the darkness to Dryden’s right, the porch swing creaked in the wind. The swing was a big rough-beam construction, maybe as old as the house itself. He stood listening to it and watching the fields a while longer, then went back inside.
Holly was in her room, asleep. For the sake of staying vigilant, they’d staggered their schedules so they were never both sleeping at the same time. Gaul had given them very few instructions when they’d said good-bye to him, but among them were Stay close to each other and Stay alert. He’d given them each a cell phone, with his own number on the contact list. The first sign of anything happening, you call me, he’d said. That’d been it.
Dryden went to the kitchen. The big pantry leading off of it was stocked with easily two months’ worth of nonperishable food. In the attached garage were three giant chest freezers, also chock-full. There were two vehicles in the garage as well, a Ford Escape and a Chevy Malibu. Keys had been left in both ignitions, though Gaul had said nothing about leaving the place. Dryden had started both vehicles to make sure they ran and had found each to have a full tank of gas.
Holly’s laptop was on the counter, plugged in and charging. Gaul hadn’t objected to her bringing it, or even using it to stay in touch with friends and colleagues; it was a way of maintaining some semblance of normalcy, for what it was worth.
Earlier in the evening Holly had used the laptop to check e-mail. Afterward she’d closed it and gone out to sit on the porch swing, and through the screen door Dryden thought he’d heard her crying. She’d stayed out there for over an hour and gone to bed soon after coming back in.
Dryden slid the laptop aside and started making a sandwich. He got a brick of cheese from the fridge, took a chef’s knife from a block on the counter, and cut two slices. He held the knife a moment longer, studying its edge, its point. What would it be like if Rachel locked him right now? How would it feel to suddenly, inexplicably want this knife in his throat? To want it badly enough to put the tip under his Adam’s apple and shove. He set it in the sink and went back to making the sandwich.
*
Holly woke four hours later. Dryden went to his room and lay down. He had the window open to the screen, and lay listening to the sounds of crickets and katydids and the wind sliding over the grass. He began to drift, and in the vague space near sleep Rachel came to him. They were sitting in the dark town house again, and she was leaning against him, warm and shapeless and fragile. He tried not to move. Tried to keep the moment from changing as long as he could.
*
“That’s Arcturus,” Holly said.
It was two nights later. They were sitting side by side on the porch steps, looking at the stars. Even with the city’s outskirts so close, the night sky here was almost ink black.
“You can’t tell, but Arcturus is a giant star,” Holly said. “If you put our sun next to it, it would look like a cherry beside a beach ball.”
“You’ve studied astronomy?” Dryden asked.
Holly shook her head. “I knew someone who wanted to study it. She told me a lot of these little facts.”