She has struck a bull’s-eye that, until this moment, he did not know existed. “That’s right.”
“You were a great detective because, even though you didn’t know it, there was something—something vital—you needed to detect.”
I am a coppiceman, Jack remembers. His own little voice in the night, speaking to him from the other side of a thick, thick wall.
“Something you had to find, for the sake of your own soul.”
“Yes,” Jack says. Her words have penetrated straight into the center of his being, and tears spring to his eyes. “I always wanted to find what was missing. My whole life was about the search for a secret explanation.”
In memory as vivid as a strip of film, he sees a great tented pavilion, a white room where a beautiful and wasted queen lay dying, and a little girl two or three years younger than his twelve-year-old self amid her attendants.
“Did you call it Faraway?” Judy asks.
“I called it the Territories.” Speaking the words aloud feels like the opening of a chest filled with a treasure he can share at last.
“That’s a good name. Fred won’t understand this, but when I was on my long walk this morning, I felt that my son was somewhere in Faraway—in your Territories. Somewhere out of sight, and hidden away. In grave danger, but still alive and unharmed. In a cell. Sleeping on the floor. But alive. Unharmed. Do you think that could be true, Mr. Sawyer?”
“Wait a second,” Fred says. “I know you feel that way, and I want to believe it, too, but this is the real world we’re talking about here.”
“I think there are lots of real worlds,” Jack says. “And yes, I believe Tyler is somewhere in Faraway.”
“Can you rescue him, Mr. Sawyer? Can you bring him back?”
“It’s like you said before, Mrs. Marshall,” Jack says. “I must be here for a reason.”
“Sawyer, I hope whatever you’re going to show me makes more sense than the two of you do,” says Fred. “We’re through for now, anyhow. Here comes the warden.”
Driving out of the hospital parking lot, Fred Marshall glances at the briefcase lying flat on Jack’s lap but says nothing. He holds his silence until he turns back onto 93, when he says, “I’m glad you came with me.”
“Thank you,” Jack says. “I am, too.”
“I feel sort of out of my depth here, you know, but I’d like to get your impressions of what went on in there. Do you think it went pretty well?”
“I think it went better than that. Your wife is . . . I hardly know how to describe her. I don’t have the vocabulary to tell you how great I think she is.”
Fred nods and sneaks a glance at Jack. “So you don’t think she’s out of her head, I guess.”
“If that’s crazy, I’d like to be crazy right along with her.”
The two-lane blacktop highway that stretches before them lifts up along the steep angle of the hillside and, at its top, seems to extend into the dimensionless blue of the enormous sky.
Another wary glance from Fred. “And you say you’ve seen this, this place she calls Faraway.”
“I have, yes. As hard as that is to believe.”
“No crap. No b.s. On your mother’s grave.”
“On my mother’s grave.”
“You’ve been there. And not just in a dream, really been there.”
“The summer I was twelve.”
“Could I go there, too?”
“Probably not,” Jack says. This is not the truth, since Fred could go to the Territories if Jack took him there, but Jack wants to shut this door as firmly as possible. He can imagine bringing Judy Marshall into that other world; Fred is another matter. Judy has more than earned a journey into the Territories, while Fred is still incapable of believing in its existence. Judy would feel at home over there, but her husband would be like an anchor Jack had to drag along with him, like Richard Sloat.
“I didn’t think so,” says Fred. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to pull over again when we get to the top.”
“I’d like that,” Jack says.
Fred drives to the crest of the hill and crosses the narrow highway to park in the gravel turnout. Instead of getting out of the car, he points at the briefcase lying flat on Jack’s knees. “Is what you’re going to show me in there?”
“Yes,” Jack says. “I was going to show it to you earlier, but after we stopped here the first time, I wanted to wait until I heard what Judy had to say. And I’m glad I did. It might make more sense to you, now that you’ve heard at least part of the explanation of how I found it.”
Jack snaps open the briefcase, raises the top, and from its pale, leather-lined interior removes the Brewers cap he had found that morning. “Take a look,” he says, and hands over the cap.
“Ohmygod,” Fred Marshall says in a startled rush of words. “Is this . . . is it . . . ?” He looks inside the cap and exhales hugely at the sight of his son’s name. His eyes leap to Jack’s. “It’s Tyler’s. Good Lord, it’s Tyler’s. Oh, Lordy.” He crushes the cap to his chest and takes two deep breaths, still holding Jack’s gaze. “Where did you find this? How long ago was it?”
“I found it on the road this morning,” Jack says. “In the place your wife calls Faraway.”
With a long moan, Fred Marshall opens his door and jumps out of the car. By the time Jack catches up with him, he is at the far edge of the lookout, holding the cap to his chest and staring at the blue-green hills beyond the long quilt of farmland. He whirls to stare at Jack. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
“I think he’s alive,” Jack says.
“In that world.” Fred points to the hills. Tears leap from his eyes, and his mouth softens. “The world that’s over there somewhere, Judy says.”
“In that world.”
“Then you go there and find him!” Fred shouts. His face shining with tears, he gestures wildly toward the horizon with the baseball cap. “Go there and bring him back, damn you! I can’t do it, so you have to.” He steps forward as if to throw a punch, then wraps his arms around Jack Sawyer and sobs.
When Fred’s shoulders stop trembling and his breath comes in gasps, Jack says, “I’ll do everything I can.”
“I know you will.” He steps away and wipes his face. “I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. I know you’re going to help us.”
The two men turn around to walk back to the car. Far off to the west, a loose, woolly smudge of pale gray blankets the land beside the river.
“What’s that?” Jack asks. “Rain?”
“No, fog,” Fred says. “Coming in off the Mississippi.”
PART THREE
Night’s
Plutonian Shore
15
BY EVENING, the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees as a minor cold front pushes through our little patch of the Coulee Country. There are no thunderstorms, but as the sky tinges toward violet, the fog arrives. It’s born out of the river and rises up the inclined ramp of Chase Street, first obscuring the gutters, then the sidewalks, then blurring the buildings themselves. It cannot completely hide them, as the fogs of spring and winter sometimes do, but the blurring is somehow worse: it steals colors and softens shapes. The fog makes the ordinary look alien. And there’s the smell, the ancient, seagully odor that works deep into your nose and awakens the back part of your brain, the part that is perfectly capable of believing in monsters when the sight lines shorten and the heart is uneasy.
On Sumner Street, Debbi Anderson is still working dispatch. Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski has been sent home without his badge—in fact, suspended—and feels he must ask his wife a few pointed questions (his belief that he already knows the answers makes him even more heartsick). Debbi is now standing at the window, a cup of coffee in her hand and a puckery little frown on her face.
“Don’t like this,” she says to Bobby Dulac, who is glumly and silently writing reports. “It reminds me of the Hammer pictures I used to watch on TV back when I was in junior high.”
“Hammer pictures?” Bobby asks, looking up.
“Horror pictures,” she says, looking out into the deepening fog. “A lot of them were about Dracula. Also Jack the Ripper.”
“I don’t want to hear nothing about Jack the Ripper,” Bobby says. “You mind me, Debster.” And resumes writing.
In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Mr. Rajan Patel stands beside his telephone (still crisscrossed by yellow police tape, and when it will be all right again for using, this Mr. Patel could not be telling us). He looks toward downtown, which now seems to rise from a vast bowl of cream. The buildings on Chase Street descend into this bowl. Those at Chase’s lowest point are visible only from the second story up.