The third bag is for the brown wrapping paper. He holds it up for a moment in the tongs, examining the bogus bird stamps. MANUFACTURED BY DOMINO is printed below each picture, but that's all. No restaurant name, nothing of that sort. Into the Baggie. Zip it closed. Mark the date. Note the nature of the evidence.
He sweeps up the feathers and puts them in a fourth Baggie. There are more feathers in the box. He picks the box up with the tongs, dumps the feathers inside onto the dustpan, and then his heart takes a sudden hard leap in his chest, seeming to knock against the left side of his rib cage like a fist. Something is written on the box's bottom. The same Sharpie marker has been used to make the same straggling letters. And whoever wrote this knew who he was writing to. Not the outer Jack Sawyer, or else he — the Fisherman — would have no doubt called him Hollywood.
This message is addressed to the inner man, and to the child who was here before Jack "Hollywood" Sawyer was ever thought of.
Try Ed's Eats and Dogs, coppiceman. Your fiend,
THE FISHERMAN.
"Your fiend," Jack murmurs. "Yes." He picks up the box with the tongs and puts it into the second wastebasket liner; he doesn't have any Baggies quite big enough for it. Then he gathers all the evidence beside him in a neat little pile. This stuff always looks the same, at once grisly and prosaic, like the kind of photographs you used to see in those true-crime magazines.
He goes inside and dials Henry's number. He's afraid he'll get Mrs. Morton, but it turns out to be Henry instead, thank God. His current fit of Rat-ism has apparently passed, although there's a residue; even over the phone Jack can hear the faint thump and bray of "electrical guitars."
He knows Ed's Eats well, Henry says, but why in the world would Jack want to know about a place like that? "It's nothing but a wreck now; Ed Gilbertson died quite a time ago and there are people in French Landing who'd call that a blessing, Jack. The place was a ptomaine palace if ever there was one. A gut-ache waiting to happen. You'd have expected the board of health to shut him down, but Ed knew people. Dale Gilbertson, for one."
"The two of them related?" Jack asks, and when Henry replies "Fuck, yeah," something his friend would never say in the ordinary course of things, Jack understands that while Henry may have avoided a migraine this time, that Rat is still running in his head. Jack has heard similar bits of George Rathbun pop out from time to time, unexpected fat exultations from Henry's slim throat, and there is the way Henry often says good-bye, throwing a Ding-dong or Ivey-divey over his shoulder: that's just the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook coming up for air.
"Where exactly is it?" Jack asks.
"That's hard to say," Henry replies. He now sounds a bit testy. "Out by the farm equipment place . . . Goltz's? As I recall, the driveway's so long you might as well call it an access road. And if there was ever a sign, it's long gone. When Ed Gilbertson sold his last microbe-infested chili dog, Jack, you were probably in the first grade. What's all this about?"
Jack knows that what he's thinking of doing is ridiculous by normal investigatory standards — you don't invite a John Q. to a crime scene, especially not a murder scene — but this is no normal investigation. He has one piece of bagged evidence that he recovered in another world, how's that for abnormal? Of course he can find the long-defunct Ed's Eats; someone at Goltz's will no doubt point him right at it. But —
"The Fisherman just sent me one of Irma Freneau's sneakers," Jack says. "With Irma's foot still inside it."
Henry's initial response is a deep, sharp intake of breath.
"Henry? Are you all right?"
"Yes." Henry's voice is shocked but steady. "How terrible for the girl and her mother." He pauses. "And for you. For Dale." Another pause. "For this town."
"Yes."
"Jack, do you want me to take you to Ed's?"
Henry can do that, Jack knows. Easy as pie. Ivey-divey. And let's get real — why did he call Henry in the first place?
"Yes," he says.
"Have you called the police?"
"No."
He'll ask me why not, and what will I say? That I don't want Bobby Dulac, Tom Lund, and the rest of them tromping around out there, mixing their scents with the doer's scent, until I get a chance to smell for myself? That I don't trust a mother's son of them not to f**k things up, and that includes Dale himself?
But Henry doesn't ask. "I'll be standing at the end of my driveway," he said. "Just tell me when."