Roland looked around at the woods on both sides of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it. “I don’t think this is quite the place…?” In his voice was the barest touch of a question.
“Nope, it ain’t quite the place you want to finish up,” John agreed, puffing his pipe. “I passed where you want to finish up on m’way in, and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than there. You go up there, you won’t be able t’do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I ain’t never seen the beat of it.” For a moment his face shone like the face of a child who’s caught his first firefly in a jar and Eddie saw that he meant every word.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a door?” The idea occurred to him…and then seized him. “It
John began to shake his head, then appeared to reconsider. “Might be a door,” he said, stretching the noun out until it became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day:
“What’s Cara Laughs?” Eddie asked.
John shrugged. “A lot of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it’s because they pay s’much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara’s empty right now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it up for sale. They’ve run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she…” He made a bottle-tipping motion.
Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn’t understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they’d find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.
He looked up and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West toward the White Mountains, too — what was almost surely called the Discordia in a world not far from here — and along the Path of the Beam.
Always along the Path of the Beam.
“What do you suggest, John?” Roland asked.
Cullum nodded at the sign reading BECKHARDT. “I’ve care-took for Dick Beckhardt since the late fifties,” he said. “Helluva nice man. He’s in Wasin’ton now, doin something with the Carter administration.”
“Come on,” Roland said. “We’ll all ride down in your cartomobile, if it does ya.”
“Does me just fine,” John said, and got into the back.
Three
Dick Beckhardt’s cottage was half a mile down, pine-walled, cozy. There was a pot-bellied stove in the living room and a braided rug on the floor. The west-facing wall was glass from end to end and Eddie had to stand there for a moment, looking out, in spite of the urgency of their errand. The lake had gone a shade of dead ebony that was somehow frightening—
John Cullum sat at Dick Beckhardt’s table of polished pine, took off his hat, and held it in the bunched fingers of his right hand. He looked at Roland and Eddie gravely. “We know each other pretty damn well for folks who haven’t known each other very damn long,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so?”
They nodded. Eddie kept expecting the wind to begin outside, but the world went on holding its breath. He was willing to bet it was going to be one hellacious storm when it came.
“Folks gut t’know each other that way in the Army,” John said. “In the war.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “ ‘Gunfire makes close relations,’ we say.”
“Do ya? Now I know you gut things to tell me, but before you start, there’s one thing I gut to tell you. And I sh’d smile n kiss a pig if it don’t please you good n hard.”
“What?” Eddie asked.