NOS4A2 A Novel

25 BLOCH LANE





SUGARCREEK, PENNSYLVANIA 16323





That was going to be a hard one to explain. Four hours was not enough time to get to Pennsylvania from New Hampshire, not even with the hammer down all the way. Then it occurred to her that she didn’t need to explain it. Other people could worry about explanations.

She dialed. She knew the number by heart.

“Yes?” Lou said.

She had not been sure that Lou would answer—she had expected Hutter. Or possibly the other one, the ugly cop with the bushy white eyebrows, Daltry. She could tell him where to find his lighter.

The sound of Lou’s voice made her feel a little weak, robbed her momentarily of her certainty. She felt she had never loved him the way he deserved—and that he had always loved her more than she deserved.

“It’s me,” she said. “Are they listening?”

“Ah, shit, Vic,” Lou said. “What do you think?”

Tabitha Hutter said, “I’m here, Vic.” Jumping onto the line and into the conversation. “You’ve got a lot of people here pretty upset. Do you want to talk about why you ran away?”

“I went to go get my kid.”

“I know there are things you haven’t told me. Maybe things you were afraid to tell me. But I need to hear them, Vic. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours, I’m sure you think you had to do it. I’m sure you thought it was right—”

“Twenty-four hours? What do you mean . . . twenty-four hours?”

“That’s how long we’ve been looking for you. You pulled one heck of a disappearing act. We’ll have to talk about how you did that sometime. Why don’t you tell me where—”

“It’s been twenty-four hours?” Vic cried again. The idea that she had lost a whole day seemed, in its own way, as incredible as a car that ran on human souls instead of unleaded.

Hutter said, quietly, patiently, “Vic, I want you to stay where you are.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to—”

“No. Shut up. Just listen. You need to locate a girl named Michelle Demeter. She lives in Brandenburg, Kentucky. Her father has been missing for a while. She’s probably out of her mind with worry. He’s here. Downstairs. In the basement. He’s dead. Been dead for a few days, I think. Do you have that?”

“Yes, I—”

“You treat him well, goddamn it. Don’t just stick him in a drawer in some f*cking morgue. Get someone to sit with him until his daughter shows up. He’s been alone long enough.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was killed by a man named Bing Partridge. Bing was the guy in the gasmask who shot at me. The man you didn’t think existed. He was working with Manx. I think they have a long history together.”

“Vic. Charlie Manx is dead.”

“No. He isn’t. I saw him, and so did Nathan Demeter. Demeter will back up my story.”

“Vic,” Tabitha said. “You just told me Nathan Demeter is dead. How is he going to back up your story? I want you to slow down. You’ve been through a lot. I think you’ve had a—”

“I have not had a f*cking break with reality. I have not been having imaginary conversations with a dead man. Demeter left a note, all right? A note naming Manx. Lou! Lou, are you still on the line?”

“Yeah, Vic. I’m here. Are you okay?”

“I talked to Wayne this morning, Lou. He’s alive. He’s still alive, and I’m going to get him back.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, and his voice went rough with emotion, and she knew he was trying not to cry. “Oh, Jesus. What did he say?”

“He hasn’t been hurt,” she said.

“Victoria,” Tabitha Hutter said. “When did you—”

“Hang on!” Lou cried. “Vic, dude. You can’t do this alone. You can’t cross this bridge alone.”

Vic readied herself, as if she were aiming a rifle on a distant target, and said, as calmly and clearly as she could manage, “Listen to me, Lou. I have to make one stop, and then I’m going to see a man who can get some ANFO for me. With the right ANFO, I can blow Manx’s world right off the map.”

“What info?” Tabitha Hutter said. “Victoria, Lou is right. You can’t deal with this on your own. Come in. Come in and talk to us. What man are you going to see? What is this information you need?”

Lou’s voice was slow and ragged with emotion. “Get out of there, Vic. We can horseshit around some other time. They’re coming for you. Get out of there and go do what you have to do.”

“Mr. Carmody?” Tabitha said. There was a sudden note of tension underlying her voice. “Mr. Carmody?”

“I’m gone, Lou. I love you.”

“Back atcha,” he said. He sounded choked with emotion, barely hanging on.

She set the phone gently in its cradle.

She thought he understood what she was telling him. He had said, We can horseshit around some other time, a sentence that almost made sense in context. Almost but not quite. There was a second meaning there, but no one besides Vic would have been able to detect it. Horseshit: a principal component of ANFO, the substance her father had been using to blow up shelf rock for decades.

She limped on her bad left leg to the sink and ran some cool water, splashed it onto her face and hands. Blood and grime circled the drain in pretty pink swirls. Vic had bits of Gasmask Man all over her, drops of liquefied Bing dripping down her shirt, splattered up her arms, probably in her hair. In the distance she heard the wail of a police siren. The thought crossed her mind that she should’ve had a shower before calling Lou. Or searched the house for a gun. She probably needed a gun more than she needed a shampoo.

She pushed open the screen door and went carefully down the back steps, keeping the weight off her left knee. She would have to keep it extended while she rode. She had a bad moment, wondering how she would shift gears with the left foot—then remembered it was a British bike. Right. The gearshift was on the right side of the bike, a configuration that hadn’t been legal in the United States since before she was born.

Vic walked up the hill, face turned to the sun. She closed her eyes, to concentrate her senses on the good warmth against her skin. The sound of the siren grew louder and louder behind her, the Doppler effect causing the shriek to rise and fall, swell and collapse. Tabitha Hutter would lop off heads when she found out they had approached the house with their sirens blaring, giving Vic plenty of advance notice they were coming.

At the top of the hill, as she lurched into the parking lot of the New American Faith Tabernacle, she looked back and saw a police car swerving onto Bloch Lane, sliding to a stop in front of Bing’s house. The cop didn’t even swing into the driveway, just slewed to a halt with the car at an angle, blocking half the road. The cop behind the wheel flung himself out so quickly his head bumped the doorframe and his hat was knocked into the road. He was so young. Vic couldn’t imagine dating him, let alone being arrested by him.

She continued on and in three more steps could no longer see the house below. She had a moment to wonder what she would do if her bike wasn’t there, if some kids had discovered it with the keys in the ignition and taken it for a ride. But the Triumph was right where she had left it, tilted over on its rusted kickstand.

It wasn’t easy to stand it up. Vic made a small sobbing sound of pain, pushing with her left leg to straighten it.

She turned the key over, flipped the switch to RUN, and stomped on the gas.

The bike had been rained on and sat out all night, and it would’ve been no surprise to her if it didn’t want to start, but the Triumph boomed right away, seemed almost impatient to go.

“I’m glad one of us is ready,” she said.

She turned it in a circle and rolled it out of the shadows. She took it around the ruin of the church, and as she glided along, it began to rain. Water fell glittering and brilliant from the sunlit sky, raindrops as cold as October. It felt good on her skin, in her dry, bloody, dirty hair.

“Rain, rain,” she said softly. “Come again and wash this mess away.”

The Triumph and the woman upon it inscribed a great hoop around the charred sticks that had once been a house of worship.

When she had returned to the place where she started, the bridge was there, set back in the woods, just as it had been the day before. Only it had turned itself around, so as she drove onto it, she entered from what she thought of as the eastern side. There was green spray paint on the wall to her left.

HERE it said.

She rolled onto the old rotten boards. Planks rattled beneath her tires. As the sound of the engine faded in the distance, a crow landed at the entrance to the bridge and stared into its dark mouth.

When the bridge disappeared two minutes later, it went all at once, popped out of existence like a balloon pricked by a pin. It even banged like a balloon and emitted a clear, shimmering shockwave that hit the crow like a speeding car, blew off half its feathers, and threw it twenty feet. It was dead by the time it hit the ground—just another piece of roadkill.





Laconia, New Hampshire


HUTTER SAW IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DID, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HAPPENING right in front of all of them. Lou Carmody began to go down. His right knee buckled, and he put a hand against the big oval table in the conference room.

“Mr. Carmody,” she said.

He sank into one of the rolling office chairs, fell into it with a soft crash. His color had changed, his big grizzled face taking on a milky pallor, a sweat shining greasily on his forehead. He put one wrist to his brow as if feeling for a fever.

“Mr. Carmody,” Hutter said again, calling down the table and across the room to him.

There were men all around him; Hutter didn’t understand how they could stand there and not see that the guy was having a heart attack.

“I’m gone, Lou,” Vic McQueen said, her voice coming through the Bluetooth headset in Hutter’s ear. “I love you.”

“Back atcha,” Carmody said. He wore a headpiece identical to Tabitha Hutter’s own; almost everyone in the room was wearing one, the whole team listening in on the conversation.

They were in a conference room at the state police headquarters outside Laconia. It could’ve been the conference room at a Hilton or a Courtyard Marriott: a big, bland space with a long, oval central table and windows looking out on an expanse of parking lot.

McQueen hung up. Hutter tore out her earpiece.

Cundy, her lead tech, was on his laptop, looking at Google Maps. It was zoomed in on Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania, to show Bloch Lane. Cundy rolled his eyes up to look at Hutter. “We’ll have cars there in three minutes. Maybe less. I just spoke with the locals, and they’re on the way with sirens blasting.”

Hutter opened her mouth, meant to say, Tell them to turn their f*cking sirens off. You didn’t warn a federal fugitive that the cops were closing in. That was fundamental.

But then Lou Carmody leaned all the way forward, so his face was resting on the table, his nose squashed to the wood. He grunted softly and clutched at the tabletop as if he were at sea and clinging to a great chunk of driftwood.

And so what Hutter said instead was, “Ambulance. Now.”

“You want . . . an ambulance to go to Bloch Lane?” Cundy asked.

“No. I want an ambulance to come here,” she said, moving swiftly away from him and around the table. She raised her voice, “Gentlemen, give Mr. Carmody some air, please. Step back. Step back, please.”

Lou Carmody’s office chair had been slowly rolling backward, and at that exact moment it slid out from beneath him and Carmody went straight down, as if dropped through a trapdoor.

Daltry was the closest to him, standing just behind the chair with a mug that said WORLD’S BEST GRANDDAD. He leaped aside and slopped black coffee down his pink shirt.

“The f*ck hit him?” Daltry asked.

Hutter went down on one knee next to Carmody, who was half under the table. She put her hands on one big sloping shoulder and pushed. It was like trying to flip a mattress. He slumped onto his back, his right hand grabbing his Iron Man T-shirt, twisting it into a knot between his man tits. His cheeks were loose, and his lips were gray. He let out a long, ragged gasp. His gaze darted here and there, as if he were trying to get his bearings.

“Stay with us, Lou,” she said. “Help will be here soon.”

She snapped her fingers, and his gaze found her at last. He blinked and smiled uncertainly. “I like your earrings. Supergirl. I would’ve never figured you for Supergirl.”

“No? Who would you have figured me for?” she asked, just trying to keep him talking. Her fingers closed on his wrist. There was nothing for a long moment, and then his pulse whapped, a single big kick, and then another stillness, and then a flurry of rapid beats.

“Velma,” he said. “You know? From Scooby-Doo.”

“Why? Because we’re both dumpy?” Hutter asked.

“No,” he said. “Because you’re both smart. I’m scared. Will you hold my hand?”

She took his hand in hers. He gently moved his thumb back and forth over her knuckles.

“I know you don’t believe anything Vic told you about Manx,” he said to her in a sudden, fierce whisper. “I know you think she’s out of her mind. You can’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”

“Jinkies,” she said. “What’s the difference?”

He surprised her by laughing—a rapid, helpless, panting sound.

She had to ride to the hospital with him in the ambulance. He wouldn’t let go of her hand.





Here, Iowa


BY THE TIME VIC CAME OUT OF THE OTHER END OF THE BRIDGE, SHE had slowed to almost nothing and the bike was in neutral. She remembered acutely her last visit to the Here Public Library, how she had rushed headlong into a curb and been flung for a knee-scraping slide across a concrete path. She didn’t think she could take a crash in the state she was in now. The bike didn’t care for neutral, though, and as it thumped down onto the asphalt road that ran behind the library, the engine died with a thin, dispirited wheeze.

When Vic had last been Here, the strip of park behind the library had been raked and clean and shady, a place to throw down a blanket and read a book. Now it was half an acre of mud, gouged with tread marks from loaders and dump trucks. The century-old oaks and birch had been plucked from the ground and bulldozed into a twelve-foot-high mound of dead wood, off to one side.

A single park bench remained. Once it had been dark green, with wrought-iron arms and legs, but the paint had peeled and the wood beneath was splintery, sun-baked almost to colorlessness. Maggie dozed upright, chin on chest, in one corner of the bench, in the direct, unforgiving light of day. She held a carton of lemonade in one hand, a fly buzzing around its mouth. Her sleeveless T-shirt exposed scrawny, withered arms, spotted with the scars from dozens of cigarette burns. She had at some point blasted her hair with fluorescent orange dye, but the brown and gray roots were showing. Vic’s own mother had not looked so old when she died.

The sight of Maggie—so worn, so emaciated, so ill used, and so alone—hurt Vic more sharply than the ache in her left knee. She forced herself to remember, in careful detail, how in a moment of anger and panic she had thrown papers in this woman’s face, had threatened her with police. Her sense of shame was exquisite, but she did not allow herself to shove it aside. She let it burn, the tip of a cigarette held firmly against skin.

The front brake shrilled as Vic settled to a stop. Maggie lifted her head, pushed some of her brittle-looking sherbet hair back from her eyes, and smiled sleepily. Vic put the kickstand down.

Maggie’s smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She rose unsteadily to her feet.

“Oh, V-V-Vic. What did you do to yourself? You’ve got blood all over you.”

“If it makes you feel better, most of it isn’t mine.”

“It doesn’t. Makes me f-f-f-feel ffff-fffaint. Didn’t I have to put Band-Aids on you last time you were here?”

“Yeah. I guess you did,” Vic said. She looked past Maggie at the library. The first-floor windows were covered over with plywood sheeting. The iron door at the rear was crisscrossed with yellow police tape. “What happened to your library, Maggie?”

“S-s-seen better days. Like muhmuhmuh-mmm-mmme,” Maggie said, and grinned to show her missing teeth.

“Oh, Maggie,” Vic said, and for an instant she felt very close to crying again. It was Maggie’s uneven grape-soda-colored lipstick. It was the dead trees in a pile. It was the sun, too hot and too bright. Maggie deserved some shade to sit in. “I don’t know which one of us needs a doctor more.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m okay! Just m-muh-my s-stuh-stammer is worse.”

“And your arms.”

Maggie looked down at them, squinting in puzzlement at the constellation of burns, then looked back up. “It helps me talk normal. Helps me with other s-s-st-st-stuff, too.”

“What helps you?”

“P-p-p-puh-puh-pain. C’mon. Let’s go in. Mama Maggie will fffffffix you up.”

“I need something besides fixing, Maggie. I have questions for your tiles.”

“M-m-muh-might not have answers,” Maggie said, turning up the path. “They don’t work s-ss-so well anymore. They st-st-st-stammer, too, now. But I’ll try. After we get you cleaned up and I muh-muh-mother you some.”

“I don’t know if I have time for mothering.”

“Sure you do,” Maggie said. “He hasn’t muh-muh-muh-made it to Christmasland yet. We both know you can’t catch him before then. Be like trying to grab a handful of fffff-fffog.”

Vic gingerly descended from the bike. She was almost hopping to keep the weight off her left leg. Maggie put an arm around her waist. Vic wanted to tell her she didn’t need a crutch, but the truth was she did—she doubted she could make it to the back of the library without help—and her arm went automatically over Maggie’s shoulders. They walked a step or two, and then Maggie paused, twisting her head to look back at the Shorter Way, which once again spanned the Cedar River. The river seemed wider than Vic remembered, the water boiling right up to the edge of the narrow road that looped behind the library. The thicket-covered embankment that had once lined the water had been washed away.

“What’s on the other end of the bridge this time?”

“Couple of dead people.”

“Will anyone ff-f-ffuh-ffollow you through?”

“I don’t think so. There are police looking for me back there, but the bridge will pop out of existence before they find it.”

“There were p-p-puh-police here.”

“Looking for me?”

“I don’t know! Muh-mm-mmmmmaybe! I was coming back from the drugstore and s-s-saw ’em parked out f-f-f-front. So I took off. I stuh-st-stay here s-s-s-sometimes, s-s-sometimes other puh-p-places.”

“Where? I think the first time we met, you said something about living with relatives—an uncle or something?”

Maggie shook her head. “He’s gone. Whole trailer p-puh-park is gone. Washed away.”

The two women limped toward the back door.

“They’re probably looking for you because I called you. They might be tracking your cell phone,” Vic said.

“Thought of that. Dumped it after you called. I knew you wouldn’t need to call again to f-find m-m-mmme. No worries!”

The yellow tape across the rusting iron door read DANGER. A sheet of paper, slipped inside a clear plastic envelope and stuck to the door, identified the structure as unsound. The door was not locked but held ajar by a chunk of concrete. Maggie ducked the tape and pushed it inward. Vic followed her into darkness and ruin.

The stacks had once been a vast, cavernous vault that smelled fragrantly of ten thousand books, aging gently in the shadows. The shelves were still there, although banks of them had been toppled like twelve-foot-tall iron dominoes. Most of the books were gone, although some remained in rotting heaps scattered here and there, stinking of mildew and decay.

“The big f-f-flood was in 2008, and the walls are st-st-still wet.”

Vic brushed one hand against the cold, moist concrete and found that it was true.

Maggie held her as they picked their way carefully through the debris. Vic kicked a pile of beer cans. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that the walls had been tagged with graffiti, the usual assortment of six-foot cocks and dinner-plate-proportioned tits. But there was also a grand message, scrawled in dripping red paint:

PLEEZ BE QUITE IN THE LIBERY PEPLE R TRYING TO GET HI!

“I’m sorry, Maggie,” Vic said. “I know you loved this place. Is anyone doing anything to help out? Were the books moved to a new location?”

“You bet,” Maggie said.

“Nearby?”

“P-p-pretty close. The town dump is just a m-m-mm-mile downriver.”

“Couldn’t someone do something for the old place?” Vic said. “What is it? A hundred years old? It must be a historical site.”

“You got that right,” Maggie said, and for an instant there was no trace of a stammer in her voice at all. “It’s history, baby.”

Vic caught a glimpse of her expression in the shadows. It was true: Pain really did help Maggie with her stammer.