Chapter 10

Bruno lived in a trailer out in the pines. It was set in a small clearing off a dirt road with no name. There was no house number and no mail service (he maintained a post office box in nearby Tabernacle). Propane heat. Well water. Septic system. Electricity from the county backed up by a Honda generator. And, of course, satellite TV, a hot tub, and cell phone service. A redneck Shangri-La.

This was his fortress against the welter of people’s thoughts and emotions. The bereaved relatives, beleaguered cops, and the skeptical press. It was a dangerous business. When bad guys find out the cops are getting clues from a psychic, they tend to come after the psychic. No reason to make it easy for the bad guys to find him.

Bruno lived with Maggie, a beautiful two-year-old German Shepherd cross with an intelligent face. She had a thick coat and an impressive tail that she carried aloft like a sail. Bruno liked to talk to her and watch her changing facial expressions as she listened. She’d furrow her brow and cock her ears, clearly working hard to make out what he was saying: an admirable—and unusual—characteristic, in his view. Maggie would respond with a remarkable vocabulary of her own consisting of barks, whines, grunts, growls, licks, and pokes with her snout.

He carefully hung up his business suit and dressed for work. Boxer shorts and a tattered old Princeton sweatshirt. “Ah yes. Good old Princeton,” Bruno hummed to himself.

Maggie whined in response and Bruno stopped humming.

Things seemed to be going OK, he reflected. Chief Black seemed like a good guy. The borscht belt shtick seemed to be working when he needed it. But now there was this dead girl with no name, and his ex-wife’s sister’s kid, Mimi, had been the one who found the body.

“Maggie, you know I sure hope we can solve this thing without talking to her. Because I really don’t want to see Judy Cohen or her husband, Bill McRae—that shmuck—again.”

Maggie’s whines grew more persistent, and Bruno let her run outside. “Just stay away from that Carmine,” he joked, referring to the neighbor’s Australian Cattle Dog and Shepherd cross. Carmine’s owners, the Terranovas, lived on the other side of the bog. Bruno didn’t know them well, but they seemed to be authentic Pineys, judging from the light blue rusted-out 1974 Cadillac with official “classic car” license plates that was always parked in their driveway.

He heard Maggie barking excitedly. Had she run into that raccoon again? Then it stopped. Must’ve scared it off.

Now he was ready. He darkened the room and sat in his special chair. Not the one where he ate, read, and watched TV, but the other one, which was reserved for work. He opened the plastic evidence bag and took out a few strands of the girl’s hair. He cradled them in the palm of his hand. He could barely sense that they were even there. With his other hand, he touched the hair with his fingertips, cleared his mind and waited.

Nothing came to him.

He shifted his position to imitate the posture he’d assumed in the meeting house, slumped over to the right. He pictured her soulless expression as he’d seen it at the morgue.

But all he felt was cold. Emptiness. Nothing.

“Like Adam,” Bruno thought. It wasn’t a vision, but a memory of something he’d read. He got up and turned on the light. On his bookshelf was a copy of Kabbalah for the Complete Shmegegge that he’d just picked up at the used bookstore. He sat in his all-purpose chair and looked for the chapter he’d been reading the other night. There it was. The Golem. Nothing like the one in Tolkien. The Golem was actually a figure from the Middle Ages. Made from clay by the Rabbi of Prague to protect the Jews from anti-Semites in Europe. The Rabbi traced the Hebrew word for truth, EMET, on his forehead to bring the Golem to life. When the anti-Semites tried to start a pogrom, the giant Golem routed them with ease. That scared the Emperor and he begged the Rabbi to deactivate the Golem. The Rabbi graciously complied by crossing out the first letter, leaving MET, which means death. That was a good story.

Reading further, Bruno spotted a passage that described how Adam was a Golem before God breathed life into him. That was it. That was the feeling he got from the girl. He couldn’t explain it, because she was dead. Plain and simple. Just like any other corpse. Nobody could breathe life into her again, ever. What did he expect?

The difference was nobody knew who she was. Nobody claimed her. Where were her parents? Could they have killed her? What kind of parents, what kind of people, would do something like that?

He quickly picked up the hair between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it lightly. He felt grit, like grains of sand mixed with hair. He squeezed hard. Vague images entered his consciousness, building on events of the day. The old brick meeting house. The Lenape King Tavern. He saw a group of figures, a man and a woman and a third figure prostrate with exhaustion. They were fugitives hiding in subterranean tunnels, waiting to proceed to the next stage on their journey. Nothing relevant.

Frustrated, he put the hair in a separate envelope and went to get a Rolling Rock from the fridge. He switched on the TV. The Big 5 sports channel. Beach volleyball, Penn against Temple. That was different. Where’d they find a beach this time of night in Philly? Lots of diving in the sand. Tattoos. Sunscreen. Bruno grabbed another beer at the start of the third match, but fell asleep before it ended.

Then he had a dream. The statue of William Penn came to life. He climbed down from City Hall and walked to a dark field where he captured an owl by the wings. It is a life or death struggle. The owl keeps saying, “Who, Who, Who?” while William Penn sings in a funny singsong chant, “What’s the score? What’s the score? What’s the score?” And the owl replies, “50-3-2-60 …” over and over again.

At last, he wakes up to find that it’s not an owl, but Big Bird singing. And it’s not William Penn, but Peaches Cromwell sitting on his bed, holding a steaming hot grande Starbucks latte in the vicinity of his head.