Dave blinked. “You really did? Or are you just saying that now to cover your ass?”
“I really did. Abra started to answer. She said ‘I’m not,’ and then I lost her. I think she was going to tell me she wasn’t at the Deanes’ anymore.”
“Is she alive?” Dave grasped Dan’s elbow with a hand that was dead cold. “Is my daughter still alive?”
“I haven’t heard from her, but I’m sure she is.”
“Of course you’d say that,” Dave whispered. “CYA, right?”
Dan bit back a retort. If they started squabbling, any thin chance of getting Abra back would become no chance.
“It makes sense,” John said. Although he was still pale and his hands weren’t quite steady, he was using his calm bedside manner voice. “Dead, she’s no good to the one who’s left. The one who grabbed her. Alive, she’s a hostage. Also, they want her for . . . well . . .”
“They want her for her essence,” Dan said. “The steam.”
“Another thing,” John said. “What are you going to tell the cops about the men we killed? That they started cycling in and out of invisibility until they disappeared completely? And then we got rid of their . . . their leavings?”
“I can’t believe I let you get me into this.” Dave was twisting the rabbit from side to side. Soon the old toy would split open and spill its stuffing. Dan wasn’t sure he could bear to see that.
John said, “Listen, Dave. For your daughter’s sake, you have to clear your mind. She’s been in this ever since she saw that boy’s picture in the Shopper and tried to find out about him. As soon as the one Abra calls the hat woman was aware of her, she almost had to come after her. I don’t know about steam, and I know very little about what Dan calls the shining, but I know people like the ones we’re dealing with don’t leave witnesses. And when it comes to the Iowa boy, that’s what your daughter was.”
“Call the Deanes but keep it light,” Dan said.
“Light? Light?” He looked like a man trying out a word in Swedish.
“Say you want to ask Abra if there’s anything you should pick up at the store—bread or milk or something like that. If they say she went home, just say fine, you’ll reach her there.”
“Then what?”
Dan didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed to think. He needed to think about what was forgotten.
John did know. “Then you try to reach Billy Freeman.”
It was dusk, with the Riv’s headlight cutting a visible cone up the aisle of the tracks, before Dave got bars on his phone. He called the Deanes’, and although he was clutching the now-deformed Hoppy in a mighty grip and large beads of sweat were trickling down his face, Dan thought he did a pretty good job. Could Abby come to the phone for a minute and tell him if they needed anything at the Stop & Shop? Oh? She did? Then he’d try her at home. He listened a moment longer, said he’d be sure to do that, and ended the call. He looked at Dan, his eyes white-rimmed holes in his face.
“Mrs. Deane wanted me to find out how Abra’s feeling. Apparently she went home complaining of menstrual cramps.” He hung his head. “I didn’t even know she’d started having periods. Lucy never said.”
“There are things dads don’t need to know,” John said. “Now try Billy.”
“I don’t have his number.” He gave a single chop of a laugh—HA! “We’re one f**ked-up posse.”
Dan recited it from memory. Up ahead the trees were thinning, and he could see the glow of the streetlights along Frazier’s main drag.
Dave punched in the number and listened. Listened some more, then killed the call. “Voice mail.”
The three men were silent as the Riv broke out of the trees and rolled the last two miles toward Teenytown. Dan tried again to reach Abra, throwing his mental voice with all the energy he could muster, and got nothing back. The one she called the Crow had probably knocked her out somehow. The tattoo woman had been carrying a needle. Probably the Crow had another one.
You will remember what was forgotten.
The origin of that thought arose from the very back of his mind, where he kept the lockboxes containing all the terrible memories of the Overlook Hotel and the ghosts who had infested it.
“It was the boiler.”
In the conductor’s seat, Dave glanced at him. “Huh?”
“Nothing.”
The Overlook’s heating system had been ancient. The steam pressure had to be dumped at regular intervals or it crept up and up to the point where the boiler could explode and send the whole hotel sky-high. In his steepening descent into dementia, Jack Torrance had forgotten this, but his young son had been warned. By Tony.
Was this another warning, or just a maddening mnemonic brought on by stress and guilt? Because he did feel guilty. John was right, Abra was going to be a True target no matter what, but feelings were invulnerable to rational thought. It had been his plan, the plan had gone wrong, and he was on the hook.