Moist towelettes were designed for freshening your hands after eating a Big Mac in the car. A single cloth proved insufficient to swab up a significant amount of dried blood.
‘You should buy the extra-large, serial-killer-size towelettes,’ Dylan said.
Jilly rummaged in her purse. ‘I’m sure I have at least one more.’ She unzipped one small interior side compartment, poked around, opened another side compartment. ‘Oh. I forgot about these.’
She produced a bag of peanuts of the size dispensed by vending machines.
Dylan said, ‘Shep would probably like some Cheez-Its if you have any, and I’m a little-chocolate-doughnut sort of guy.’
‘These belonged to Proctor.’
Dylan grimaced. ‘Probably laced with cyanide.’
‘He dropped them in the parking lot outside my room. I picked them up just before I met you and Shep.’
Interrupting his effort at petrification, but continuing to stare into the hard radiation of sun-nuked stone and sand, Shepherd said, ‘Cake?’
‘No cake,’ Dylan said. ‘Peanuts.’
‘Cake?’
‘Peanuts, buddy.’
‘Cake?’
‘We’ll get cake soon.’
‘Cake?’
‘Peanuts, Shep, and you know what peanuts are like – all round and shapey and disgusting. Here, look.’ He took the bag of nuts from Jilly, intending to hold them in front of Shepherd’s face, but the psychic spoor on the cellophane packet, under the pleasant trace left by Jilly, was still fresh enough to bring into his mind an image of Proctor’s dreamy, evil smile. The smile came to him, but much more: an electrical, crackling, pandemoniacal, whirling shadow show of images and impressions.
He didn’t realize he’d gotten up from the rock bench until he was on his feet and moving away from Jilly and Shep. He halted, swung toward them, and said, ‘Lake Tahoe.’
‘Nevada?’ Jilly asked.
‘Yeah. No. That Lake Tahoe, yes, but the north shore, on the California side.’
‘What about it?’
Every nerve in his body seemed to be twitching. He had been seized by an irresistible compulsion to get moving. ‘We’ve got to go there.’
‘Why?’
‘Right now.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Damn, that makes me nervous.’
He returned to Jilly, drew her to her feet, and placed her uninjured hand over the hand in which he held the bag of peanuts. ‘Can you feel it, what I feel, where it is?’
‘Where what is?’
‘The house. I see a house. This sort of Frank Lloyd Wright place overlooking the lake. Dramatic floating roofs, stacked-stone walls, lots of big windows. Nestled in among huge old pine trees. Do you feel where it is?’
‘That’s not my talent, it’s yours,’ she reminded him.
‘You learned how to fold.’
‘Yeah, started to learn, but I haven’t learned this,’ she said, withdrawing her hand.
Shepherd had risen from the rock bench. He put his right hand on the bag of peanuts, on Dylan’s hand. ‘House.’
‘Yes, a house,’ Dylan replied impatiently, his compulsion to act growing more powerful by the second. He danced from foot to foot like a child overcome by an urgent need to go to the bathroom. ‘I see a house.’
‘I see a house,’ said Shep.
‘I see a big house overlooking the lake.’
‘I see a big house overlooking the lake,’ said Shep.
‘What’re you doing, buddy?’
Instead of repeating What are you doing, buddy, as Dylan expected, the kid said, ‘I see a big house overlooking the lake.’
‘Huh? You see a house? You see it, too?’
‘Cake?’
‘Peanuts, Shep, peanuts.’
‘Cake?’
‘You’ve got your hand on it, you’re looking right at it, Shep. You can see it’s a bag of peanuts.’
‘Tahoe cake?’
‘Oh. Yeah, maybe. They probably have cake at this place in Tahoe. Lots of cake. All kinds of cake. Chocolate cake, lemon cake, spice cake, carrot cake—’
‘Shep doesn’t like carrot cake.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that, I was wrong about that, they don’t have any carrot cake, Shep, just every other kind of friggin’ cake in the world.’
‘Cake,’ said Shepherd, and the New Mexico desert folded away as a cool green place folded toward them.
46
Great pines, both conical and spreading varieties, many standing over two hundred feet tall, built sublimely scented palaces on the slopes around the lake, green rooms of perpetual Christmas ornamented with cones as small as apricots and others as large as pineapples.