He kept an eye on the parking lot. Two teenage boys stood smoking and gabbing beneath a lamppost, and there was a woman sitting cross-legged on the hood of a prehistoric Cadillac the color of gunpowder, also smoking a cigarette. Don’t let me down, Tim. If Tim was a no-show, he and Ellie were screwed. They had no transportation, and a guy with a bandaged left arm might draw some suspicion wandering along the shoulder of the highway with an eight-year-old girl. Nine, he reminded himself. She’ll be nine in a few days.
Movement in the periphery of his vision caused him to return his attention to the other row of picnic tables, the ones standing against the backdrop of the woods. He thought it might have been the breeze stirring the leaves in the trees . . . but then he caught sight of a figure sitting on one of the picnic tables, a sizeable fellow dressed in dark, nondescript clothes. The guy had his feet planted on the bench, his buttocks on the tabletop. He was staring at David across the expanse of darkness, and David saw that there was something wrong with his face.
Not his face, he realized then. A mask. He’s wearing a mask.
It was another plain white mask, most likely fashioned out of a paper plate, and for a moment David thought this was the same man he had glimpsed in the field behind the burger joint earlier that day. But of course that was impossible.
As David stared at the man, the man raised a hand. A solemn wave.
Tim in disguise?
Or was it?
“Hey,” David said, bumping Ellie’s head from his arm with a hitch of his shoulder. “Sit here for a second, will you? I’m going to talk to that man.”
“Dad—”
“Just sit tight.”
He got up from the table and proceeded toward the next row of tables. As David approached the halfway mark, the man in the mask got up from the table, his heavy bulk shifting beneath the patchwork fabric of his clothes—his shirt looked like checkered flannel, his pants like camouflaged BDUs. He wore large forester boots.
“Tim?” David called, his voice a half whisper so as to not draw attention from the teenagers and the woman in the parking lot.
The masked man held up that same hand in another wave—or possibly to halt David’s progress—before stepping around the side of the picnic table and heading in the direction of the woods.
David glanced over his shoulder and saw Ellie still perched on the picnic table where he’d left her, half her body silvered in the glow of the lamplights coming from the parking lot. He could not make out her expression from this distance, but he could tell that she was staring straight at him, and the closed, tight shape of her body suggested she was suddenly afraid.
When he turned back around, he saw the masked man enter the woods, cutting between two large trees dense with foliage.
“Wait,” David said, and hurried after him.
Yet when he crossed through the trees, he could find no sign of the masked man. It was dark enough for someone to hide from him with ease . . . yet why would someone want to? Who would wave to him just to get up and hide from him?
He stood there in the lightlessness of the woods, waiting for movement, for the sound of twigs crunching underfoot. But after several seconds, all he heard was his own harsh respiration.
I’m making myself crazy.
He turned around and went back through the trees. When he stepped out into the clearing, he saw someone walking toward Ellie, who still sat watching him from her seat on the picnic table.
“Ellie,” he said, and broke into a run. He reached the girl and gathered her up off the table and into his arms just as the figure approached.
It was a woman—the one who had been sitting on the hood of the Cadillac, smoking. She had shoulder-length dark hair, a slender build, and was dressed in an unassuming pair of blue jeans and a luminous white tank top.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Easy, buddy. Are you David?” she asked.
He just stared at her.
“My name’s Gany,” she said. She had an unlit cigarette between two fingers, which she parked behind one ear now. “Your brother sent me to pick you up.”
47
He thought her name was Candy, and called her as much, for the first twenty minutes of their drive. It was Ellie, seated in the backseat of the Cadillac, who ultimately corrected him. “Dad, it’s Gany. With a G.”
Gany laughed. “It’s short for Ganymede.”
“That’s a cool name,” Ellie said.
“It’s one of the moons of Jupiter.”
“Sorry,” David said. “My mistake.” His head hurt.
“My parents were of the ‘free love’ variety. Big-time granola hippies. And my mom was something of an amateur astronomer.”
“What exactly did Tim tell you?”
“He said to meet you and your little girl here around nine o’clock. I’m supposed to drive you to straight to the Fortress. No stopping.”
“The Fortress?”
“Of Solitude,” Gany said. “Like in the Superman comics? The ice castle in the North Pole where Supe goes when he needs a little R and R?”
David shrugged, not comprehending.
“I thought you were supposed to be an English professor or something,” Gany said.
“Not much room in the curriculum to take on Superman comics, unfortunately,” he said.