“That sounds okay,” Carl said, and the boys ran into the house, David and Sam watching them go.
David said, “How are you doing?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Got my tires replaced, although I don’t know how I’ll pay the Visa bill when it comes in. The cops are looking for Ed and my ex-in-laws. They figure they’ll try to sneak back to Boston.”
“You worried they’ll try again?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not right now. Not after what happened. I mean, they have to know everyone’s trying to find them. They’re going to want to disappear for a while. Anyway, I came by to answer your question.”
“My question?”
“The one you left on my voice mail. The answer’s yes.”
“What did I ask you?” he asked.
“You asked if I wanted to go to dinner. The answer is yes.”
David nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“We’re going to do it right this time,” Sam said. “Dinner first.”
Thirty-three
Once I was done talking to the police about Ed Noble’s visit to the Laundromat that morning, I called Lucy Brighton and said I wanted to update her. She invited me to come to her house at eight.
On the way, I had the radio tuned to a local phone-in show.
“Who says we couldn’t be a target of terrorists?” asked the bombastic host. “Are we too insignificant up here? A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts of Americans? Then go to the heart of America. The big cities are the obvious targets. But why not Promise Falls? Why not — I don’t know — Lee, Massachusetts? Saratoga Springs? Middlebury, Vermont? Duluth? Make Americans feel unsafe wherever they happen to be. That’s what those Islamist fanatics are thinking, and you can be damn sure blowing up a drive-in theater is totally their kind of style. Let’s go to the phones. Go ahead, Dudley.”
Dudley?
“Yeah, I think we need to be looking very closely at our neighbors, because these people, what they do is, they hide amongst us.”
“No kidding, my friend, no kidding. And now we’ve got Mr. Twenty-three out there trying to scare us half to death, according to the brilliant cops in Promise Falls. Well, I’m telling you right now, I don’t scare easy. Your shtick with twenty-three might work on some people, but it won’t work on me.”
Mr. Twenty-three? What the hell was that about?
I decided it was something I didn’t need to know right now, and turned off the radio. When I rang the bell at the Brighton house, a young girl answered the door. I remembered Lucy telling me her daughter was eleven.
She was holding a clipboard in one hand, several sheets of paper held down by the metal arm. In the fingers of her other hand, an uncapped, fine-point Sharpie pen. She had straight brown hair that fell below her ears, and bangs across her forehead. She reminded me of the Peanuts character Marcie, minus the glasses.
If she’d been Peppermint Patty, she probably would have offered some kind of greeting.
Crystal offered none. She stared at me.
“Hi,” I said. “You must be Crystal.”
Crystal said nothing.
“My name is Mr. Weaver. I think your mom’s expecting me.”
She turned and shouted: “Mom!”
So, she could speak. She fixed her gaze on me again. I pointed to the clipboard.
“What are you working on?”
Crystal turned the clipboard so I could see it. She had divided the page into six squares, and filled each of them with crudely drawn characters and word bubbles.
“A comic book,” I said.
“No.”
“Sorry, I thought, with the panels, that it looked like a—”
“It’s a graphic novel,” she said. She flipped ahead through the pages. Dozens of them, all drawn in a similar style to the top one. Some of the pages were just scraps; a few were construction paper in red and green. On every one, more squares, more drawings. While the people were simply drawn, I understood what they were about. She’d managed to capture hand gestures and expressions, which seemed odd, given that, so far, Crystal seemed to have very few of her own.
I pointed to one of the panels. “Is that a car?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like a sports car.”
“It’s a Jaguar. My grandfather has one. But it’s flat now. Something big fell on it.”
Suddenly, Lucy was there.
“Sorry!” she said to me, pushing her daughter to one side. “Go on in, sweetheart.” The child withdrew. “I was downstairs putting something into the dryer and didn’t even hear the bell.”
“It’s okay. It gave me a chance to meet Crystal.”
Lucy made a smile that was more a grimace. “If she seemed rude—”
“She wasn’t.”
“If she seemed rude,” Lucy pressed on, “she doesn’t mean to be.”
“She was showing me her graphic novel. I made the mistake of calling it a comic book.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” Lucy said. She led me into the living room, where she’d already put out cups, a plate of cheese and crackers, and a carafe of coffee.
“Whoa,” I said.
“It’s no bother.”
“I like Crystal’s drawing style. Kind of minimalist, but you can tell what’s going on, what people are thinking.”
Lucy smiled, shook her head. “That child. She’s drawing all the time, on any shred of paper she can get her hands on. The other day I’d run out of checks and found out she’d been turning the backs of them into four-panel strips. The perfect size, she said. I try not to get mad, but—”
“She’s a talented kid.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes talent and trouble go hand in hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve just met her, but you can see she lacks certain social graces. She’s challenged that way. Doesn’t quite know how to act. Sometimes” — and almost instantly Lucy began to tear up — “other kids... they can be so cruel to her. She’s the oddball, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “My son, Scott, was kind of like that.”
“Was he diagnosed?”
“Diagnosed?”
“Did they figure out what was wrong with him?”
“It wasn’t quite like that. He just had different interests than other kids. He didn’t fit into the mainstream.”
“So it wasn’t anything like Asperger’s?”
“Is that what Crystal has?”
“I don’t even know. Her GP thinks maybe. She has some of the checkmarks. Poor social communication, repetitive behavior. And this obsession with drawing, doing her doodles on everything. I couldn’t find one of my reports the other day, found Crystal had done ‘The Adventures of Lizardman’ on the backs of the pages.”
“Years from now, she’ll be making a million a year drawing for Marvel,” I offered.
“Yeah, well, I could use some of that cash now. There’s a place I’d like to take her, where they’d test her, and then there’s a school that would be better suited to her needs, where they’d find a way to draw her out, even let her do more of this stuff she’s so good at. But I don’t exactly get paid a fortune. I’d talked to my father about it, whether he could, you know, help out. He said he would think about it...”
“And now...”
“Yeah, and now. Crystal has always been kind of like this, but I think it got worse when her father left us. She needed a male figure in her life. I think that’s why she liked spending time around my dad. She was good with him.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Well, enough about all this,” Lucy said, and then lowered her voice to a whisper. “I take it you called because you’ve found out something? Do you have the discs?”