‘He said this before,’ Dylan revealed, ‘as I was trying to get him out of our motel room last night, just before we met you.’
‘You do your work,’ Shep whispered.
‘This too,’ Dylan said.
Shepherd’s shoulders remained slumped, and his hands lay in his lap, palms up almost as if he were meditating, but his clouded face betrayed an inner storm.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Jilly asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shep? Who’re you talking to, sweetie?’
‘You do your work by the light of the moon.’
‘Whose work, Shep?’
A minute ago, Shepherd had been as connected to them and to the moment as she had ever seen him. Now he had gone away somewhere as surely as he had stepped through the wall to California.
She crouched beside Dylan and gently took one of Shep’s limp hands in both her hands. He didn’t respond to her touch. His hand remained as slack as that of a dead man.
His green eyes were alive, however, as he stared down at his foot, at the floor, perhaps seeing neither, seeming to gaze instead at someone or something that, in memory, profoundly troubled him.
‘You do your work by the light of the moon,’ he whispered once more. This time the suggestion of anger in his face was matched by an unmistakable raw edge to his voice.
No clairvoyant vision settled upon Jilly, no vivid premonition of terror to come, but ordinary intuition told her to be alert and to expect deadly surprises.
26
Shepherd returned from his private moonlit place to the realization that he still needed to shower.
Although Jilly retreated to the bedroom, Dylan remained in the bathroom with his brother. He didn’t intend to leave Shepherd alone anytime soon, not with this latest herethere complication to worry about.
As Shep pulled off his T-shirt, Dylan said, ‘Kiddo, I want you to promise me something.’
Shucking off his jeans, Shep made no reply.
‘I want you to promise me that you won’t fold here to there, won’t go anywhere again like that, unless you clear it with me.’
Shep skinned out of his briefs. ‘Nine minutes.’
‘Can you make me that promise, Shep?’
Sliding the shower curtain aside, Shep said, ‘Nine minutes.’
‘This is serious, buddy. None of this folding until we have a better understanding of what’s happening to us, to all of us.’
Shep turned on the shower, gingerly slipped one hand in the spray, adjusted the controls, and tested the temperature again.
Often people made the mistake of assuming that Shepherd must be severely retarded and that he required far more assistance to take care of himself than was in fact the case. He could groom himself, dress himself, and deal successfully with many simple tasks of daily life other than food preparation. You should never ask Shep to make a flaming dessert or even to toast a Pop-Tart. You didn’t want to hand him the keys to your Porsche. But he was intelligent, and perhaps even smarter than Dylan.
Unfortunately, in his case intelligence remained isolated from performance. He had come into this world with some bad wiring. He was like a Mercedes sports car with a powerful engine that had not been connected to the drive train; you could race that engine all day, and it would sound as pretty as any engine ever built, but you wouldn’t go anywhere.
‘Nine minutes,’ Shep said.
Dylan handed the Minute Minder to him: a mechanical timer made for use in the kitchen. The round white face featured sixty black checks, a number at every fifth check.
Shep brought the device close to his face, scrutinizing it as though he had never seen it before, and carefully set the dial at nine minutes. He picked up a bar of Neutrogena, the only soap he would use in the shower, and he stepped into the tub, holding the Minute Minder by the dial to prevent the timer from engaging.
To avoid an attack of claustrophobia, Shep always showered with the curtain open.
Once he was under the spray, he stood the Minute Minder on the edge of the tub, releasing the dial. The ticking proved audible above the hiss and splash of water.