“My kingdom for a Google, right?” Cooper crumples the paper and tosses it in the trash. “While you’re formulating grand conspiracies, Dawes, I’ve got an actual town to govern.” He grabs one of the week-old pastries and bites into it—it tastes about as good as he expected. Then he searches reflexively for the phantom hat he doesn’t own. “I’ve got to go see a lady about some coydogs that won’t shut up.”
“Anything you want me to do, chief?” says Robinson.
“Maybe learn Latin,” says Cooper. “Then, if you’ve got another spare moment, figure this whole fucking thing out.”
Walking along the sunbaked gravel, out toward the farthest corner of town, Dawes is happy to let Cooper think she’s out here dripping, sweating in agony, being punished, but the truth is she’s never minded heat. Not this kind, anyway. Not Texas heat, not dry heat. Even now, in the first hours of the morning. Where she grew up, in the South, hot meant sticky; hot meant sodden; hot meant barely tickling eighty on the thermometer but with humidity so suffocating that your heart felt like a wet dishrag hung in the cavity of your ribs. Compared to that, this Texas heat can sun-kiss my ass, she thinks. In fact, this whole town can kiss my Georgia-born ass, starting with the sheriff, she thinks.
And she’s happy, too, as she makes a beeline to the north quarter of town, and the former place of residence of one deceased Errol Colfax, to let Cooper assume her real name is some collision of random syllables, like LaToya, like she’s hiding it to outrun some shameful secrets from her past. Truth is, her Atlanta background is all upper-middle-class cul-de-sacs and kente cloth formal wear and faculty parties glimpsed from between the railings of the staircase as a kid. Her real name isn’t LaAnything. It’s Lindy, short for Lindiwe, the Zulu word meaning “I wait.” Her parents chose it for her because it took them so long to have a child, and once they did, she often wondered why they even bothered, given how absent they both were for most of her childhood. They were ambitious academics who tried for a late-life kid, then got one. Good for them. The most vivid memory she has of her childhood is the two of them retreating behind their respective office doors.
She always hated Lindiwe, and hated Lindy even more. It was only once she got older that she learned Lindiwe has another meaning. It means “I wait,” but it can also mean “I watch,” or “I guard.”
That meaning suits her better, she thinks.
And she’s happy, too, to let Cooper think he’s had the last word. She still has a few secrets of her own. For example, she now knows Cooper’s real name.
John—that part he told her already, back at the bar. Got skittish about the last name, given exchanging any information about names or your past is against regulation, but he probably figured, rightly, that John’s a common enough name to share—not like Lindiwe. Then this morning she played a hunch and stole a glance at the inside of his gun belt on his desk while he was reading his precious fax. His lucky gun belt, the one he toted along with him from his previous job. A keepsake like that, she figured, you don’t want to lose it. Don’t want some coworker accidentally walking off with it at the end of a shift.
Might even write your name in it.
Which he did, in block letters, on the inside of the belt.
Barker.
Nice to meet you, John Barker, she thinks.
Not that there’s much she can do with this info, or even that she thinks it adds up to anything. But right now, it feels good to know something about him that he doesn’t know she knows. Just a name, but that’s a little bit of power, and she’ll take it. Just like how she didn’t mention to Cooper when he asked that she knows damn well what Damnatio Memorae means—she slept through enough prep school Latin classes to know that. Damnatio Memorae: the Condemnation of Memory. Now, why someone would scrawl that in spray paint on the wall of Orson Calhoun’s workshop—that’s just another mystery for her to solve. She pulls out her notebook, writes the phrase neatly inside with her pencil stub, right under the name “John Barker,” then stashes the notebook in her breast pocket again, all without breaking stride.
For now, though, she’s got her stupid door-to-door reassurance tour to worry about. Cooper told her to do it, but he didn’t tell her where to start, or with whom, which she figures is tantamount to official clearance to head over to the north quarter and knock on some doors. The north quarter, where they house the so-called mummies: the former home of Errol Colfax and current home of Gerald Dean and, most curiously, the fabled William Wayne. Dawes has never seen him in the flesh and she’s been told many times never to disturb him. In her six short weeks, she’s become well acquainted with the legend of William Wayne, which looms over the Blinds like a long shadow at dusk. Taller than a totem pole and craggier than driftwood, so they say, those few people who’ve glimpsed him. Wayne’s willful retreat from the community breeds all manner of unkind speculation, like he’s some mythological creature sliding along in the shadowed depths beneath the surface of a placid lake. He’s said to have a large scar on his face, or maybe a whole bunch of scars. Some say his face is blood-splashed, permanently marked. Some say he’s a killer whose past is a swath of carnage, while others swear he was a mere accountant, some factotum adjacent to violence, but one who witnessed something so chilling and gruesome that even the head scrubbers at the Fell Institute couldn’t uproot those memories. Now he lives alone with them, haunted.
As she rounds the corner toward his house, she hears footsteps—someone running. She turns and sees a young woman jogging toward her.
“Deputy Dawes!” the woman calls out. She’s carrying a manila envelope. “Sorry to startle you. My name’s Bette Burr. I’m hoping you can help me. I’m looking for someone’s house. William Wayne?”
“I’m headed there right now. You’re welcome to tag along.” Dawes nods to the envelope in Burr’s hand. “What’s in the package?”
“Just something I want to deliver to him,” Burr says.
They walk a bit, not speaking, then mount his steps together. “After you,” Dawes says.
Burr raises a fist to the door, then pauses. She turns to Dawes. “Just knock?”
“Sure. Though if he answers the door for you, that would be a first.”
Burr knocks.
They both wait.
No answer.
Burr knocks again.
Nothing.
Dawes steps to the side and peers as best she can into the bungalow’s large picture window. The curtains are drawn tight and the glare from the early sun turns the glass reflective, into a bright painting of what the window faces: an empty, dusty street, the other quiet houses, the shimmering heat, and Dawes and Burr, standing side by side on the porch.
“No luck, I guess,” says Dawes finally. “Though you’re welcome to keep trying. I’ve got a few dozen more people to call on this morning.” Dawes retreats down the steps, then turns back. “By the way, the sheriff wants me to tell you: Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.”
“What is?” says Burr, confused.