Gerald Dean—the same guy Dawes decided to focus all her attention on. That’s got to be a coincidence, right? There’s no way Dawes—no, she’s on the wrong scent. Still, the connection—Colfax, Gable, now Dean—makes Cooper uneasy. If Dean and Gable were drinking buddies, maybe they did know each other in their previous lives. Maybe they were drawn to each other, without knowing exactly why.
What did you do in your past life, Gerald? Cooper thinks, studying the photo. What evil deed brought you to this place?
Either way, it doesn’t matter to Cooper, or to what he knows comes next. Besides, he’ll find out all about Dean’s past soon enough.
He’s about to feed the paper into the shredder, but he stops and folds it up instead. He slips it into the breast pocket of his shirt, just under where his sheriff’s star is pinned.
Then he sits again in the silent gloom of the shuttered office. He’s got one more decision to make. Not about Gable, not about Dean—about Fran Adams and her son. He’s considered this option before—his final option, really—but hesitated to pursue it, knowing it was the last and only card he had to play. But he’s out of ideas now and, frankly, after tomorrow night, after Gerald Dean, all this will come to an end. He’s decided that already. Recent events have only made him more sure. He’s honestly not certain what happened at the repair yard—drunkards, vandals, roustabouts—it wouldn’t be the first time a few boisterous residents got out of hand. Right now, it’s just a distraction to him. But what he sees more clearly than ever is that there’s no good reason for Fran and Isaac to stay.
He takes another moment to talk himself out of it, fails, and so he scribbles his note on a sheet of paper. He feeds the paper into the fax machine. He dials a number that only he knows. His belly gives another painful twang. He recalls the bullet he swallowed last night.
He sends the fax.
His note bears a simple message:
We need to meet.
An unusual request. But these are unusual times.
He sits back in his chair and waits. He thinks about a little boy on the other side of town, and all the years that boy has spent here, and all the years he has ahead of him.
Then Cooper thinks about another little boy, from long ago.
Maybe a minute later, maybe two, maybe twenty, Cooper can’t tell, he loses count, the machine whines back to life, and his answer comes stuttering out. Handwritten on official Fell Institute letterhead.
It’s been a long time, Calvin, but I’m always happy to see you—come by the ranch tomorrow afternoon.
There’s no signature, but the long, looping letters are unmistakably written in Dr. Holliday’s impeccable hand.
Bette Burr waits on his porch again.
Knocks again.
Still no answer.
No worries. It’s only the second day. She’s still got one more day—that’s what they told her. Three days to find him and deliver the news.
Don’t think I can’t wait you out, Mr. William Wayne. Or that I’m going away.
She knocks again.
Then she steps back and peers into Wayne’s window, but sees nothing. The curtains are still drawn tight. Only her searching face reflects back to her in the rectangular pane of glass.
She does notice one thing, though. Something encouraging.
The faint residue of the Scotch tape she used to leave her note, lingering in a tacky rectangle on the glass.
Someone took that note down. Must have read it, too.
I am John Sung’s daughter.
And I’m still out here, she thinks.
She knocks again.
No answer. Again.
That’s okay. Neither of them is going anywhere.
In her other hand, she clutches her manila envelope. Inside is a photo of her father.
Once William Wayne opens up, she’ll show it to him.
To see if he remembers.
11.
FRAN SLIDES OPEN THE DRESSER DRAWERS in Isaac’s bedroom and lays in the folded laundry. The dresser looks like a baby’s dresser, she thinks, still covered in appliqué and painted baby blue. The whole room is now years out of date, she realizes, with a Noah’s Ark mural and a zoo-animal mobile hanging from the ceiling. She feels a sudden flush of embarrassment, ashamed that she’s kept the room frozen in time like this. As if that would keep him from growing up and save her from making her decision. When he was born, she thought she had a year to decide. At a year, she gave herself two more. When he reached age five, she wondered if this life would ruin him, but also admitted to herself that what lay beyond the fences was far too scary for her to contemplate. She dreamed of Jean Mondale and Jacob nightly; in her dream, they were both in a school bus, trapped, submerged underwater, drowning and pounding the glass. Then the bus filled with blood. Then she woke up. Sometimes she dreamed a man was watching the whole thing on his computer, his back turned to her, so she could never see his face. That same dream, night after night, for years. How could she plan to move away with Isaac after that?
In the meantime, as she waffled, frightened, Isaac turned six, seven, eight—he’s got race-car posters taped up over the rainbow in the Noah’s Ark mural now. Is that how the story of Noah ends? With a rainbow? She struggles, but she can’t recall. She remembers the part about the storm, and the flood, and everyone piling into the boat to seek salvation, but not how it all ends. A rainbow? And dry land somewhere. A mountaintop. Maybe a dove.
She lays the clothes in the drawers carefully, creating neat little piles. At the bottom of the laundry basket, she finds one lonely sock. Shit. She searches the basket, then the carpet around her feet. Socks, especially kids’ socks, are so fucking hard to get in this town, mostly because shipments of kids’ clothes are so infrequent, since there’s only one kid. She has to beg and plead with Spiro just to get what few provisions they can. He does his best, but Isaac outgrows everything so fast. These clothes. This room. This town.
She gets down on her hands and knees to check under the dresser. No luck. And there’s something else missing, she realizes: Isaac’s box, the one where he keeps all his treasures. The one where he put his trading cards. The one she was telling Cooper all about. The wooden cigar box, covered in shiny NASCAR stickers that arrived one blessed Wednesday morning years back, on the supply truck, ordered specially by Spiro for Isaac as a surprise. She remembers Isaac bringing the stickers home; she remembers him sitting patiently, applying each one to his cigar box as lovingly as an attending nurse might apply bandages to a suffering patient.
He keeps that box tucked under his dresser, she’s sure of it. She’s cleaned around it a hundred times, each time sliding it out carefully, then placing it back just so, for fear of upsetting him.
His treasure chest.
Now it’s gone. No box, no cards, no bubblegum, no treasures, no nothing.
She can even see the faint impression in the shag carpet where the corners of the box once lay.
Well, that’s about the worst news you could get right now, she thinks.
Then she stands back up, dusts off her jeans, and resolves, quite easily and with surprisingly little internal dissension, to share this information with precisely no one else.
Dawes finds Cooper alone in the police trailer, in his swivel chair, boots up on his desk.