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  But we have stayed here too long. We must take wing again and proceed to our final destination of this early morning. We don’t know everything yet, but we know three important things: first, that French Landing is a town in terrible distress; second, that a few people (Judy Marshall, for one; Charles Burnside, for another) understand on some deep level that the town’s ills go far beyond the depredations of a single sick pedophile-murderer; third, that we have met no one capable of consciously recognizing the force—the slippage—that has now come to bear on this quiet town hard by Tom and Huck’s river. Each person we’ve met is, in his own way, as blind as Henry Leyden. This is as true of the folks we haven’t so far encountered—Beezer St. Pierre, Wendell Green, the Color Posse—as it is of those we have.

  Our hearts groan for a hero. And while we may not find one (this is the twenty-first century, after all, the days not of d’Artagnan and Jack Aubrey but of George W. Bush and Dirtysperm), we can perhaps find a man who was a hero once upon a time. Let us therefore search out an old friend, one we last glimpsed a thousand and more miles east of here, on the shore of the steady Atlantic. Years have passed and they have in some ways lessened the boy who was; he has forgotten much and has spent a good part of his adult life maintaining that state of amnesia. But he is French Landing’s only hope, so let us take wing and fly almost due east, back over the woods and fields and gentle hills.

  Mostly, we see miles of unbroken farmland: regimental cornfields, luxuriant hay fields, fat yellow swaths of alfalfa. Dusty, narrow drives lead to white farmhouses and their arrays of tall barns, granaries, cylindrical cement-block silos, and long metal equipment sheds. Men in denim jackets are moving along the well-worn paths between the houses and the barns. We can already smell the sunlight. Its odor, richly compacted of butter, yeast, earth, growth, and decay, will intensify as the sun ascends and the light grows stronger.

  Below us, Highway 93 intersects Highway 35 at the center of tiny Centralia. The empty parking lot behind the Sand Bar awaits the noisy arrival of the Thunder Five, who customarily spend their Saturday afternoons, evenings, and nights in the enjoyment of the Sand Bar’s pool tables, hamburgers, and pitchers of that ambrosia to the creation of which they have devoted their eccentric lives, Kingsland Brewing Company’s finest product and a beer that can hold up its creamy head among anything made in a specialty microbrewery or a Belgian monastery, Kingsland Ale. If Beezer St. Pierre, Mouse, and company say it is the greatest beer in the world, why should we doubt them? Not only do they know much more about beer than we do, they called upon every bit of the knowledge, skill, expertise, and seat-of-the-pants inspiration at their disposal to make Kingsland Ale a benchmark of the brewer’s art. In fact, they moved to French Landing because the brewery, which they had selected after careful deliberation, was willing to work with them.

  To invoke Kingsland Ale is to wish for a good-sized mouthful of the stuff, but we put temptation behind us; 7:30 A.M. is far too early for drinking anything but fruit juice, coffee, and milk (except for the likes of Wanda Kinderling, and Wanda thinks of beer, even Kingsland Ale, as a dietary supplement to Aristocrat vodka); and we are in search of our old friend and the closest we can come to a hero, whom we last saw as a boy on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. We are not about to waste time; we are on the move, right here and now. The miles fly past beneath us, and along Highway 93 the fields narrow as the hills rise up on both sides.

  For all our haste, we must take this in, we must see where we are.

  4

  THREE YEARS AGO, our old friend traveled down this stretch of 93 in the passenger seat of Dale Gilbertson’s old Caprice, his heart going crazy in his chest, his throat constricting, and his mouth dry, as friendly Dale, in those days little more than a small-town cop whom he had impressed beyond rational measure simply by doing his job more or less as well as he could, piloted him toward a farmhouse and five acres left Dale by his deceased father. “The nice little place” could be purchased for next to nothing, since Dale’s cousins did not particularly want it and it had no value to anyone else. Dale had been holding on to the property for sentimental reasons, but he had no particular interest in it, either. Dale had scarcely known what to do with a second house, apart from spending a great deal of time keeping it up, a task he had found oddly enjoyable but did not at all mind turning over to someone else. And at this point in their relationship, Dale was so in awe of our friend that, far from resenting the prospect of this man occupying his father’s old house, he considered it an honor.

  As for the man in the passenger seat, he was too caught up in his response to the landscape—too caught up by the landscape—to be embarrassed by Dale’s awe. Under ordinary circumstances, our friend would have urged his admirer into a quiet bar, bought him a beer and said, “Look, I know you were impressed by what I did, but after all, Dale, I’m just another cop, like you. That’s all. And in all honesty, I’m a lot luckier than I deserve to be.” (It would be the truth, too: ever since we last saw him, our friend has been blessed, if it is a blessing, with such extravagantly good luck that he no longer dares to play cards or bet on sporting events. When you win almost all the time, winning tastes like spoiled grape juice.) But these were not ordinary circumstances, and in the swarm of emotion that had been threatening to undo him since they left Centralia on the flat straightaway of Highway 93, Dale’s adulation barely registered. This short drive to a place he had never seen before felt like a long-delayed journey home: everything he saw seemed charged with remembered meaning, a part of him, essential. Everything seemed sacred. He knew he was going to buy the nice little place, no matter what it looked like or how much it cost, not that price could in any way have been an obstacle. He was going to buy it, that was all. Dale’s hero-worship affected him only to the extent that he realized he would be forced to keep his admirer from undercharging him. In the meantime, he struggled against the tears that wanted to fill his eyes.

  From above, we see the glacial valleys dividing the landscape to the right of 93 like the imprint of a giant’s fingers. He saw only the sudden narrow roads that split off the highway and slipped into mingled sunshine and darkness. Each road said, Nearly there. The highway said, This is the way. Gazing down, we can observe a roadside parking area, two gasoline pumps, and a long gray roof bearing the fading legend ROY’S STORE; when he looked to his right and saw, past the gas pumps, the wooden stairs rising to a wide, inviting porch and the store’s entrance, he felt as though he had already mounted those stairs a hundred times before and gone inside to pick up bread, milk, beer, cold cuts, work gloves, a screwdriver, a bag of tenpenny nails, whatever he needed from the practical cornucopia crowded onto the shelves, as after that day he would do, a hundred times and more.

  Fifty yards down the highway the blue-gray sliver of Tamarack Creek comes winding into Norway Valley. When Dale’s car rolled across the rusting little metal bridge, the bridge said, This is it!, and the casually but expensively dressed man in the passenger seat, who looked as though all he knew of farmland had been learned through the windows next to first-class seats on transcontinental flights and in fact was incapable of telling wheat from hay, felt his heart shiver. On the other side of the bridge, a road sign read NORWAY VALLEY ROAD.

  “This is it,” said Dale, and made the right turn into the valley. Our friend covered his mouth with his hand, stifling whatever sounds his shivering heart might cause him to utter.

  Here and there, wildflowers bloomed and nodded on the roadside, some of them audacious and bright, others half-hidden in a blanket of vibrant green. “Driving up this road always makes me feel good,” Dale said.

  “No wonder,” our friend managed to say.

  Most of what Dale said failed to penetrate the whirlwind of emotion roaring through his passenger’s mind and body. That’s the old Lund farm—cousins of my mother. The one-room schoolhouse where my great-grandmother taught used to be right over there, only they tore it down way back. This here is Duane Updahl’s place, he’s no rela
tion, thank goodness. Buzz blur mumble. Blur mumble buzz. They once again drove over Tamarack Creek, its glittering blue-gray water laughing and calling out, Here we are! Around a bend in the road they went, and a wealth of luxuriant wildflowers leaned carousing toward the car. In their midst, the blind, attentive faces of tiger lilies tilted to meet our friend’s face. A ripple of feeling distinct from the whirlwind, quieter but no less potent, brought dazzled tears to the surface of his eyes.

  Tiger lilies, why? Tiger lilies meant nothing to him. He used the pretense of a yawn to wipe his eyes and hoped that Dale had not noticed.

  “Here we are,” Dale said, having noticed or not, and swerved into a long, overgrown drive, hedged with wildflowers and tall grasses, which appeared to lead nowhere except into a great expanse of meadow and banks of waist-high flowers. Beyond the meadow, striped fields sloped upward to the wooded hillside. “You’ll see my dad’s old place in a second. The meadow goes with the house, and my cousins Randy and Kent own the field.”

  Our friend could not see the white two-story farmhouse that stands at the end of the last curve of the drive until the moment Dale Gilbertson swung halfway into the curve, and he did not speak until Dale had pulled up in front of the house, switched off the engine, and both men had left the car. Here was “the nice little place,” sturdy, newly painted, lovingly maintained, modest yet beautiful in its proportions, removed from the road, removed from the world, at the edge of a green and yellow meadow profuse with flowers.

  “My God, Dale,” he said, “it’s perfection.”

  Here we will find our former traveling companion, who in his own boyhood knew a boy named Richard Sloat and, once, too briefly, knew yet another whose name was, simply, Wolf. In this sturdy, comely, removed white farmhouse we will find our old friend, who once in his boyhood journeyed cross-country from ocean to ocean in pursuit of a certain crucial thing, a necessary object, a great talisman, and who, despite horrendous obstacles and fearful perils, succeeded in finding the object of his search and used it wisely and well. Who, we could say, accomplished a number of miracles, heroically. And who remembers none of this. Here, making breakfast for himself in his kitchen while listening to George Rathbun on KDCU, we at last find the former Los Angeles County lieutenant of police, Homicide Division, Jack Sawyer.

  Our Jack. Jacky-boy, as his mother, the late Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, used to say.

  He had followed Dale through the empty house, upstairs and down, into the basement, dutifully admiring the new furnace and water heater Gilbertson had installed the year before his father’s death, the quality of the repairs he had made since then, the shining grain of the wooden floors, the thickness of the insulation in the attic, the solidity of the windows, the many craftsmanlike touches that met his eye.

  “Yeah, I did a lot of work on the place,” Dale told him. “It was pretty shipshape to begin with, but I like working with my hands. After a while it turned into sort of a hobby. Whenever I had a couple of hours free, weekends and such, I got in the habit of driving over here and puttering around. I don’t know, maybe it helped me feel like I was staying in touch with my dad. He was a really good guy, my dad. He wanted me to be a farmer, but when I said I was thinking of getting into law enforcement, he supported me straight down the line. Know what he said? ‘Go into farming halfhearted, it’ll kick you in the tail sunrise to sundown. You’d wind up feeling no better than a mule. Your mom and I didn’t bring you into this world to turn you into a mule.’ ”

  “What did she think?” Jack had asked.

  “My mom came from a long line of farmers,” Dale had said. “She thought I might find out that being a mule wasn’t so bad after all. By the time she passed away, which was four years before my dad, she’d gotten used to my being a cop. Let’s go out the kitchen door and take a gander at the meadow, okay?”

  While they were standing outside and taking their gander, Jack had asked Dale how much he wanted for the house. Dale, who had been waiting for this question, had knocked five thousand off the most he and Sarah had ever thought he could get. Who was he kidding? Dale had wanted Jack Sawyer to buy the house where he had grown up—he’d wanted Jack to live near him for at least a couple of weeks during the year. And if Jack did not buy the place, no one else would.

  “Are you serious?” Jack had asked.

  More dismayed than he wished to admit, Dale had said, “Sounds like a fair deal to me.”

  “It isn’t fair to you,” Jack had said. “I’m not going to let you give this place away just because you like me. Raise the asking price, or I walk.”

  “You big-city hotshots sure know how to negotiate. All right, make it three thousand more.”

  “Five,” Jack said. “Or I’m outta here.”

  “Done. But you’re breaking my heart.”

  “I hope this is the last time I buy property off one of you low-down Norwegians,” Jack said.

  He had purchased the house long-distance, sending a down payment from L.A., exchanging signatures by fax, no mortgage, cash up front. Whatever Jack Sawyer’s background might have been, Dale had thought, it was a lot wealthier than the usual police officer’s. Some weeks later, Jack had reappeared at the center of a self-created tornado, arranging for the telephone to be connected and the electricity billed in his name, scooping up what looked like half the contents of Roy’s Store, zipping off to Arden and La Riviere to buy a new bed, linens, tableware, cast-iron pots and pans and a set of French knives, a compact microwave and a giant television, and a stack of sound equipment so sleek, black, and resplendent that Dale, who had been invited over for a companionable drink, figured it must have cost more than his own annual salary. Much else, besides, had Jack reeled in, some of the much else consisting of items Dale had been surprised to learn could be obtained in French County, Wisconsin. Why would anyone need a sixty-five-dollar corkscrew called a WineMaster? Who was this guy, what kind of family had produced him?

  He’d noticed a bag bearing an unfamiliar logo filled with compact discs—at fifteen, sixteen dollars a pop, he was looking at a couple hundred dollars’ worth of CDs. Whatever else might have been true of Jack Sawyer, he was into music in a big way. Curious, Dale bent down, pulled out a handful of jewel boxes, and regarded images of people, generally black, generally with instruments pressed to or in their mouths. Clifford Brown, Lester Young, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Desmond. “I never heard of these guys,” he said. “What is this, jazz, I guess?”

  “You guess right,” Jack said. “Could I ask you to help me move furniture around and hang pictures, stuff like that, in a month or two? I’m going to have a lot of stuff shipped here.”

  “Anytime.” A splendid idea bloomed in Dale’s mind. “Hey, you have to meet my uncle Henry! He’s even a neighbor of yours, lives about a quarter mile down the road. He was married to my aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who died three years ago. Henry’s like an encyclopedia of weird music.”

  Jack did not take up the assumption that jazz was weird. Maybe it was. Anyhow, it probably sounded weird to Dale. “I wouldn’t have thought farmers had much time to listen to music.”

  Dale opened his mouth and uttered a bray of laughter. “Henry isn’t a farmer. Henry . . .” Grinning, Dale raised his hands, palms up and fingers spread, and looked into the middle distance, searching for the right phrase. “He’s like the reverse of a farmer. When you get back, I’ll introduce you to him. You’re going to be crazy about the guy.”

  Six weeks later, Jack returned to greet the moving van and tell the men where to put the furniture and other things he had shipped; a few days afterward, when he had unpacked most of the boxes, he telephoned Dale and asked if he was still willing to give him a hand. It was 5:00 on a day so slow that Tom Lund had fallen asleep at his desk, and Dale drove over without even bothering to change out of his uniform.

  His first response, after Jack had shaken his hand and ushered him in, was undiluted shock. Having taken a single step past the doorway, Dale froze in his tracks, unable to move any f
arther. Two or three seconds passed before he realized that it was a good shock, a shock of pleasure. His old house had been transformed: it was as if Jack Sawyer had tricked him and opened the familiar front door upon the interior of another house altogether. The sweep from the living room into the kitchen looked nothing like either the space he remembered from childhood or the clean, bare progression of the recent past. Jack had decorated the house with the wave of a wand, it seemed to Dale, in the process somehow turning it into he hardly knew what—a villa on the Riviera, a Park Avenue apartment. (Dale had never been to New York or the south of France.) Then it struck him that, instead of transforming the old place into something it was not, Jack had simply seen more in it than Dale ever had. The leather sofas and chairs, the glowing rugs, the wide tables and discreet lamps, had come from another world but fit in perfectly, as if they had been made specifically for this house. Everything he saw beckoned him in, and he found that he could move again.

  “Wow,” he said. “Did I ever sell this place to the right guy.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Jack said. “I have to admit, I do, too. It looks even better than I expected.”

  “What am I supposed to do? The place is already organized.”

  “We’re going to hang some pictures,” Jack said. “Then it’ll be organized.”

  Dale supposed Jack was talking about family photographs. He did not understand why anyone would need help to hang up a bunch of framed photos, but if Jack wanted his assistance, he would assist. Besides that, the pictures would tell him a considerable amount about Jack’s family, still a subject of great interest to him. However, when Jack led him to a stack of flat wooden crates leaning against the kitchen counter, Dale once again got the feeling that he was out of his depth here, that he had entered an unknown world. The crates had been made by hand; they were serious objects built to provide industrial-strength protection. Some of them were five or six feet tall and nearly as wide. These monsters did not have pictures of Mom and Dad inside them. He and Jack had to pry up the corners and loosen the nails along the edges before they could get the crates open. It took a surprising amount of effort to lever the tops off the crates. Dale regretted not stopping at his house long enough to take off his uniform, which was damp with sweat by the time he and Jack had pulled from their cocoons five heavy, rectangular objects thickly swaddled in layers of tissue. Many crates remained.