Joe glanced into the rear-view mirror. Judy’s eyes were open again and she looked quite normal.
She said: “Do you think the police are ever going to find him? They don’t have a single real clue, do they?”
They had reached the plowed section of the cemetery roads by now. The gate was only a quarter mile or so ahead. Joe said: “If you want the truth, I don’t think they’ll ever get him back alive.”
“There you are. But we can. He’s in a white house, out in the country just a few miles west of here. I think the roof has shingles.”
“I think you better go home.”
“If you try to take me home I’ll jump out of the car before we get there. I’ll fight and scream. If you humor me a little I’ll be just fine.”
Joe slowed, indecisively. Half angry, half pleading for help, he turned to the old man. “Doctor?”
Corday’s face was altered by a smile, small, confident, and almost irresistibly comradely. Softly he said: “Turn west.”
ELEVEN
“Your hour’s almost up,” Joe commented. Almost an hour after leaving Lockwood Cemetery, they had at last penetrated the western belt of suburbs and were entering real countryside. The two-lane highway, coated in salted slush, ran northwest. On the left were cornfields, snowy stubble now, and on the right at the moment was a new apartment development, decorated barracks that seemed to have been extruded against the road’s shoulder by the congestion to the east.
“Keep going,” Judy urged. Again, as happened every time Joe so much as hinted at giving up, there was an underlevel of panic in her reply. “Joe, he’s so badly hurt. We’ve got to get to him right away. There’s a man in the house with Johnny, but he’s not helping Johnny at all. I can feel how close it is. We’re almost there.”
“Six more minutes,” said Joe firmly. “Then we’re going to find a phone and call your home and tell ‘em you’re all right. I agreed to spend an hour at this, and we will, and then you’re going home. Right, Doctor?”
No answer came from Corday, who had his hands in his coat pockets, and was gazing fixedly ahead, as if he were lost in his own thoughts.
Joe did not repeat the question. There had been moments during the ride when mentally he swore at himself for being taken in by Judy’s hysterics and Corday’s strange act, and came very close to turning the car around at once. These moments were followed by others in which he nursed the feeling, hardly suitable for a cop but inextinguishable anyway, that weird things in the field of ESP did sometimes happen. His own mother and father had testified to mutual experiences. And the rational part of his mind suggested that the best way to cure Judy of this dream-idea might be to let her see that there was nothing in it. And, again, to get a kidnapping victim back, any effort at all was worth a try.
They were approaching a highway intersection. “What do I do here?” he asked his guide.
“Turn left,” Judy ordered. Give her credit, she was always decisive in giving directions. “We’re very close now. Another mile should do it.”
“Left it is,” Joe agreed. He could just picture himself talking to the sheriff’s office on the phone: Yessir, we know where the boy is now. His teenage sister saw it in a dream, and sure enough . . .
The new highway ran ahead of him almost straight, and almost empty. The sun, after almost breaking through the clouds a little earlier, had been smothered again in thick gray masses from which it did not seem likely to emerge again today. Although theoretically it was still daylight, Joe had already flicked his headlights on.
The last housing developments had now fallen behind. To right and left the road was bordered by snowy farm fields, brown hedgerows, patches of woods, wire farm fences. A narrow highway bridge came leaping up to bear the Volkswagen over a still narrower stream, a country creek that twisted its way in a frozen course to right and left. For just a moment the engine stuttered—
“Here!” The word burst out of Judy in a shriek. Joe looked wildly around for some impending accident. He braked, avoiding a skid in the freezing slush by fancy footwork on the pedals.
Judy’s fingers were biting like claws at his shoulder. “That next drive on our left,” she agonized. “Take that, he’s in a house back there.”
Joe had brought the small car to a complete stop on the shoulder of the highway. Now he eased it forward. Looking ahead on the left, he could now see that there was a driveway, a small unpaved road, a something, and he turned into it, between patches of hedgerow. A rural mailbox planted beside the highway was capped with snow, making any name that it might bear invisible.
Trackless snow also covered the narrow lane or drive. But the surface beneath was evidently solid and level, for going was not difficult. Almost at the start the drive turned, taking them out of sight of the highway among wintry thickets and small trees. It ran straight for fifty yards or so, then turned again, at the same time topping a small rise of ground.
Just before reaching this second turn, Joe eased the Rabbit to a stop. Directly ahead there had just come into his view the upper portion of one end of what he would later learn was a sprawling, white brick, ranch-style house. Now, squinting into the dusk, he thought he could make out cedar roof-shingles under a partial covering of snow.
Oddly, Joe felt almost cheated. He looked at the calm, unreadable face beside him for several seconds before he spoke. “I don’t know what this game is, mister.”
Corday’s thin lips parted, this time not in a smile. “It is a very serious game indeed. And I assure you that you and I are playing it on the same side.” Peering toward the house, the old man added, as if to himself: “The sun has not yet set.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Judy said in a tight voice: “Do something, please, Joe. You’re a policeman. My brother is in there.”
Joe looked at them both. Then he put the car in reverse and backed it up a few yards, getting it completely out of sight of the house. He turned the ignition off. He looked at them both again, and shook his head. “Judy, you know I’ve got no authority, outside the city. I’ll do this much: walk up to the front door and see who’s home, if anyone. You two stay here, just sit tight.”
Judy started to demand that he do more than that, but Corday reached back to touch her wrist and she fell silent. Joe got out of the car and, with a last look at Corday, took the keys with him. “Be back in a minute or so.”
Readying a story about car trouble and needing to use a phone, he trudged the last yards toward the house, following the curve of the drive through completely untracked snow. It was all crazy, of course. Somehow Judy must have glimpsed from the highway a white house and shingle roof . . .
The only sign of life that Joe could see ahead was the subtle wavering of heated air above a chimney. Not a great brick one that would have a fireplace at its base, but the small metal tube that would vent the house’s furnace to the air. The furnace was turned on, then. But the garage door and the front door under its shingled overhang were both sealed along their bases with unbroken snow. No light showed in any window. There were no Christmas decorations, either, if that meant anything, which it probably did not.
When he reached the front door he alternately pushed the bell button and knocked, police style, keeping up a steady barrage in a way that almost always got results, making whoever was inside think that there was some real emergency. The doorbell worked, for he could faintly hear the chime. It wasn’t answered, though.
A full minute of such thorough treatment got no results. Joe tried to peer into a large window on the porch beside the door, but the drapes were too tightly shut inside. Not quite ready to give up yet, he started around the house, looking for tracks or other signs of occupancy, and finding nothing that seemed consequential. A couple of imperfectly draped windows let him peek into a couple of rooms, which were empty of furniture. He did see some new-looking paint and shiny floors, as if some remodeling or refinishing project might recently have been completed; but it was too dark inside to be sure of even that much. It might be that the owners had moved out during the remodeling, but had left the heat turned on to protect the water pipes and the new plaster.