She nodded and waited.
He said, “It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them.”
She looked at Wednesday, and said, “I think this one’s a keeper.” She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadow’s arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying—and failing—not to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked.
In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. “What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about?”
“You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she’s short.”
“What the hell do you care?” Wednesday seemed genuinely irate.
Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me. She hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“No?” Wednesday stared off into the middle-distance, and said, “When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the back yard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmother’s bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash.”
“I get the idea,” said Shadow.
“She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea,” said Wednesday. “She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again.”
“This isn’t necessary,” said Shadow. “I said I get the idea. You could do this to anyone, couldn’t you? Tell me bad things about them.”
“Of course,” agreed Wednesday. “They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.”
“And that makes it okay for you to steal ten bucks from her?”
Wednesday paid the taxi and the two men walked into the airport, wandered up to their gate. Boarding had not yet begun. Wednesday said, “What the hell else can I do? They don’t sacrifice rams or bulls to me. They don’t send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn’t that fair?”
“My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’” said Shadow.
“Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’”
“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do, and I did it.”
Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said, and once again, he sounded totally sincere.
It’s true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off, in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A.M. and -5° F as they drove through the town.
It was 9:30 A.M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern.
“I don’t think so,” said Shadow, sleepily.
“This is her picture,” said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend.
“Oh yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town.”
“Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel?”
Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (You’re a parole-violating felon living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. Isn’t that enough?).
“San Francisco,” he said. “California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed.”
“You got any way of proving it? Ticket stubs? Anything like that?”
“Sure.” He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. “What’s going on?”
Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. “Alison McGovern’s vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. She’d come out for a few hours after school. One of those animal kids. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, she’d always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there.”
“She’s vanished.”
“Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It’s out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn’t the kind of place where things happen…people here don’t lock their doors, you know? And you can’t tell kids. So, look at the photo again.”
Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue.
“You can honestly say you didn’t kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that?”
“I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn’t do that shit.”
“That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her?”
“Me?”
“You. We’ve had the K-9 guys out this morning—nothing so far.” He sighed. “Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend.”
“You think it’s likely?”
“I think it’s possible. You want to join the hunting party?”
Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Henning’s Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she was going to be one day. “I’ll come,” he said.
There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were several police officers, dressed in blue, and some men and women from the Lumber County sheriff’s department, dressed in brown.
Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woolen hat under the hood of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, god forbid, they found Alison’s body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came.
They were dropped off out on County W.
Hinzelmann, Brogan and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek. Each group of three had been issued a small hand-held walkie-talkie before they left.