“I don’t know where he put them,” said Shadow.
“Hell,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Sorry about this, Hinzelmann,” and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle, and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with the smell of charring flesh.
“It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense,” said Shadow.
“I know what it was,” said Mulligan, flatly. He had already turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame.
“Get outside,” said Chad Mulligan.
He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it.
Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet. Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry by now.
“We can get you some boots at Henning’s Farm and Home,” said Chad Mulligan.
“How much did you hear in there?” asked Shadow.
“Enough,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Too much.”
They drove to Henning’s Farm and Home in silence. When they got there the police chief said, “What size feet?”
Shadow told him.
Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm boots. “All they had left in your size,” he said. “Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn’t.”
Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. “Thanks,” he said.
“You got a car?” asked Mulligan.
“It’s parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge.”
Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Henning’s parking lot.
“What happened to Audrey?” asked Shadow.
“Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart.”
“Makes sense,” said Shadow. “And it wasn’t personal. Hinzelmann didn’t need her here any more.”
They drove back past Hinzelmann’s house. A thick plume of white smoke was coming up from the chimney.
“She only came to town because he wanted her here. She was something to help him to get me out of town. I was bringing attention he didn’t need.”
“I thought she liked me.”
They pulled up beside Shadow’s rental car. “What are you going to do now?” asked Shadow.
“I don’t know,” said Mulligan. His normally harassed face was starting to look more alive than it had at any point since Hinzelmann’s den. It also looked more troubled. “I figure, I got a couple of choices. Either I’ll…” And he made a gun of his first two fingers, and put the fingertips into his open mouth, and removed them. “…put a bullet through my brain. Or I’ll wait another couple of days until the ice is mostly gone, and tie a concrete block to my leg and jump off the bridge. Or pills. Sheesh. Maybe I should just drive a while, out to one of the forests. Take pills out there. I don’t want to make one of my guys have to do the clean-up. Leave it for the county, huh?” He sighed, and shook his head.
“You didn’t kill Hinzelmann, Chad. He died a long time ago, a long way from here.”
“Thanks for saying that, Mike. But I killed him. I shot a man in cold blood, and I covered it up. And if you asked me why I did it, why I really did it, I’m darned if I could tell you.”
Shadow put out a hand, touched Mulligan on the arm. “Hinzelmann owned this town,” he said. “I don’t think you had a lot of choice about what happened back there. I think he brought you there. He wanted you to hear what you heard. He set you up. I guess it was the only way he could leave.”
Mulligan’s miserable expression did not change. Shadow could see that the police chief had barely heard anything that he had said. He had killed Hinzelmann and built him a pyre, and now, obeying the last of Hinzelmann’s desires, or simply because it was the only thing he could do to live with himself, he would commit suicide.
Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, “Chad. Let it go.” There was a cloud in the man’s mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning. “Chad,” he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, “this town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a depressed region any more. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you.” And then he said, “Marguerite needs you.”
Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man’s head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen’s practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half-smiled when she was amused. “She’s waiting for you,” said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it.
“Margie?” said Chad Mulligan.
And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached in to Chad Mulligan’s mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picking an eye from roadkill.
The creases in Chad’s forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily.
“Go see Margie,” said Shadow. “It’s been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself.”
“Sure,” yawned Chad Mulligan.
A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.
Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water.
Soon, Alison would float to the surface…
As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann’s place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail.
He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye.
Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.