“Everything,” says Dawes. Then she smiles, turns away, and walks off toward the next house.
Burr stays on the porch and stares at the window, toward her reflection again. Still clutching her manila envelope. At least I found you, William Wayne, she thinks, and she contemplates the door again. Now all you need to do is open up. Maybe this will help—and she pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolds it. She’s already affixed a piece of tape to it; already written the note. It reads:
I am John Sung’s daughter.
She places the note against the plate-glass window, tapes it there, and smoothes it flat against the glass, so that the words she’s written face the darkness inside.
9.
GINGER VAN BUREN is, at sixty-eight, one of the oldest living residents of Caesura. The oldest known resident is William Wayne, who’s well past seventy, and their respective presences in the town couldn’t be more different. Wayne is whispered about, never seen, and barely ever heard from. Ginger Van Buren, on the other hand, is seen, and heard from, often. She’s well known to everyone in town. And, for the most part, what she’s known for is her dogs.
Not dogs, exactly. Coydogs, actually. Bastard offspring of dogs and coyotes. Just four of them, though you’d never know that from the amount of noise they make.
Cooper still remembers the day, six years back, when Ginger arrived for her intake. She came with no name and no past and no worldly possessions, save for a lime-colored polyester pantsuit, Jackie O sunglasses, and her dog. The dog was a short-haired, long-limbed, and vocal hybrid of a Doberman and whatever lesser breed her Doberman ancestor managed to pin down and force himself upon. At the time, there were absolutely no pets allowed in Caesura—there still aren’t—but Cooper’s overlords at the Institute explained that they’d made an arrangement with the Justice Department. The agents in charge of the investigation for which Ginger had served as a crucial and indispensable witness had made it clear that taking her dog was a nonnegotiable part of her amnesty deal. It made sense, sort of. Because if she left her beloved hound behind in the outside world, whoever sought to punish Ginger for whatever it was she said could simply find and enact their revenge on her precious pooch, which, to her, would be a much worse punishment than anything they might do to her. So the town made room for the lady and her dog. They’ve regretted it ever since.
They’d located her and her dog in a bungalow at the farthest end of the final street in town, in a cul-de-sac, a stone’s throw from the outer perimeter fence, the thinking being that the dog, in her mature years, might live another two or three years, tops. Unbeknownst to Cooper, however, Ginger started squirreling away food scraps from the commissary and leaving them out by the fence. Pork chops. Raw hamburger. Left by the fence as bait. Hoping to attract some of the area’s wilder denizens. And she used some pliers borrowed from Orson Calhoun—himself easily hoodwinked under any pretense—to snip a small doggie-door in the bottom of the fence. All in hopes, to her credit, of midwifing exactly the kind of amorous union that eventually took place. Coyote meets dog. Coyote mounts dog. Dog births litter. And the tangled lineage of her beloved pooch became even more compromised.
Her bitch got pregnant, birthed four mewling coydog hybrids, then passed on from the stress of the delivery. The coydog pups were small, cute, loud, wild, and nasty—naturally, Cooper submitted a request to the Institute to eject the whole brood. Ginger protested to her overseers, successfully, claiming emotional support. Of course, no one at the Institute who approved the coydogs’ continued presence had to actually live with them, or listen to them crooning every night.
Eventually, a compromise was reached. The pups got neutered, the illicit doggie-door got sewn back up with plastic ties, and the town built a small, fenced-in kennel adjacent to Ginger’s bungalow, right by the perimeter fence, where the four coydogs could howl and paw the dirt and gaze longingly at the wild expanse just beyond. Sometimes Cooper sees the arch of that sewn-up doggie-door in the fence and it looks to him like a hellmouth, the portal by which the town was invaded by these infernal, yapping beasts. Once the coydogs grow to adulthood—or Ginger passes from this world—they will be released back into the wild, or, in Cooper’s secret fantasy, shot. The beasts are half-wild already, he figures, with no hope of domestication. Ginger thought she could tame them; she was wrong. Now they live as accidental bastards, the untamable offspring of the ersatz civilization that exists within the fenced-off confines of the Blinds and the acres of empty nothingness on the other side. Robinson once joked that the Blinds should adopt the coydog as its mascot and form an official football team: the Caesura Coydogs. Cooper never saw the humor in all that. To him, the coydogs were snarly, mean-spirited mistakes, an ill-advised experiment gone wrong. True, most people get used to their howling—eventually. You can get used to almost anything, he’s found. But not if you’re brand-spanking-new to the town, spending your very first week in the Blinds.
Cooper knocks, and waits patiently, until Vivien King answers the door. Her hair’s tousled and she looks tired and pissed off and desperate, standing in the doorway, wearing a chiffon robe.
“Morning, ma’am. I’m Sheriff Cooper. I understand you had a complaint.”
“Those dogs,” she says, nearly in tears.
“Technically, they’re coydogs. Part coyote, part—”
“Whatever they are, they were barking. All. Night.” She looks wrecked.
“I do apologize.”
“I’m not—look, I love animals.”
“Trust me, these animals are not lovable,” says Cooper. “The best thing is to just move you clear across town. We’ll have to fill out a few forms, but I can get you moved to a different bungalow, in the north end, where it’s quieter.”
King smiles, then says in a ragged voice, “It went on all night. I didn’t sleep at all. Just lay there—thinking.”
“I understand.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing here, Sheriff.”
“It’s a common reaction on the first few nights.”
She stares out past him, past the fence. “I thought it would be liberating, you know? Not to remember? But I just feel”—she pauses, searching—“untethered.” She looks back at him. “I remember some of it. I remember my childhood. Everything up to a certain point.”
“The experience is different for everyone. The goal of the Institute—”
“But then it just stops,” she says. “Like a whole portion of my life is just . . . missing.”