Dillon seemed larger during the day, probably because the light helped fill in the background, adding barns and hills to the middle distance, making the whole thing seem less isolated. The people helped as well. It wasn’t exactly a bustling city, but there were cars on the roads, and people at the stores and churches. I realized that it must be Sunday and wondered if Brooke would insist on going to church, like she sometimes did. As we walked down the only major road in town, looking at the one stoplight far in the distance, we passed a church with a slowly filling parking lot. Brooke didn’t say a thing and I realized she must be somebody else right now.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Brooke raised her eyebrow. “You mean, like, philosophically?”
“I mean, are you Brooke or … Lucinda, or whoever?”
A look of hurt flashed across her face, followed almost immediately by a sinking dejection; she looked down, her shoulders drooped, and she took a slow breath. “Sorry, I should have realized that would be a common question. But it’s still me, it’s still Marci.”
I felt relief and despair and confusion, all at once, and tried to hide my grimace. “You’ve never been one person that long. Not since Fort Bruce, I mean.”
“Dr. Trujillo helped keep her grounded,” said Marci, then stopped in place for a moment, frowning. “Who’s Dr. Trujillo?”
“He was our therapist in Fort Bruce,” I said. “Looks like you’re sharing memories, like we wondered last night.”
I didn’t know how to react to the idea that Marci was here long term. It had been hard enough to come to grips with her sudden appearance, and eventually I’d just given up and focused on solvable problems instead: how to get into the theater, how to get rid of the boys, where to find a new place, what to eat. When Marci had finally gone to sleep I’d laid awake for hours, clenching my fists and trying to sort through the situation, but nothing made sense. I didn’t know what I wanted or how to get it; things had been so much easier when all I’d had to do was plan the next kill. Death was so much easier than life. It made me feel weak to prefer the easy one. I couldn’t even light a fire to ease my tension because I didn’t want those boys or the cops or the gardener to come looking for us. Now it was morning, and I’d hoped the problem of Marci’s presence had solved itself, but here she was, and I was at war with myself. I couldn’t live with her but I never wanted her to leave.
And all the while, Brooke was trapped inside, looking out.
Marci raised Brooke’s hand to a sudden breeze, feeling the cushion of air as it swept past our faces. It would be hot today, I could tell by the sky, but the morning was still comfortable. “I like Brooke’s memories,” said Marci, walking forward again. I kept pace with her, watching the town carefully for signs of trouble—the last thing we needed was for Corey or Paul or Derek to see us. Marci mused out loud: “She had a good life, with a good family. And I mean, so did I, but … now I have more, you know? Now I can remember my happiness and hers, without letting go of either one. It’s like … watching a really happy movie.”
“Brooke’s life hasn’t been a very happy movie,” I said.
“Not all of it,” Marci agreed. “But more of it than you think. We’re eighteen years old and she’s only been chased by demons for three of those years. And there’s gaps in the middle when things were calm, and she … got to be with you.”
“I didn’t mean to drag her into this—”
“I like it,” said Marci, reaching for my hand. “I only knew you—only really knew you—for a few months. She’s known you for years and spent every day with you for the last two of them.”
I had never been a physical person, I was leery of personal contact, but when I’d finally held Marci’s hand all those years ago, it had been one of the simplest, most comforting things I’d ever felt. I looked down now at her hand in mine and tried to conjure up those same emotions, but it was still wrong, just like last night. I pulled my hand away. She looked sad, or I thought she did. I wondered how I looked.
“We need to find a bus station,” I said, trying to bring my mind back to more pressing issues. “I seriously doubt they have one in a town this small, but you never know. Normally I’d ask in a bank, because there are fewer repercussions that way, but nothing’s going to be open on a Sunday.”
“So let’s ask back there,” said Marci, turning and pointing at the church.
“We can’t just ask anybody,” I said, realizing I would have to explain my system. “People in small towns—”
“Are nice,” said Marci.
“Not to outsiders.”
“The ones in a church will be.”
“Why?” I asked. “Because they’re in a church?”
“Have you ever been to church?”
“I lived upstairs from a chapel,” I said. “I can quote the Bible all day. But people don’t go to—”
“Only the verses about death,” said Marci.
I stopped, staring at her. “What?”
“You can only quote the verses about death,” Marci repeated. “And, I assume, resurrection, which is really the same category.”
I wanted to argue with her, but for every counter I thought of, I was able to prove myself wrong before I even said it out loud. Could I quote a verse that wasn’t about death? No. Weren’t those the only verses in the Bible? Of course not; there had to be other verses about other topics, I’d just only ever heard the ones they use in funerals. For a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out. Death. “I’ve never thought about religion enough to take it seriously,” I said. “But I don’t remember you being religious, either.”
“Christmas and Easter,” said Marci. “That’s enough to know that the people in a church are good people.”
“But they don’t go to church because they believe it,” I said. “They go because someone died, or because it’s a holiday, or because they’re a pastor and it’s their job.”
“Is it really that hard for you to accept that some people actually believe in something?” asked Marci. “You believe in things—big, build-your-life-around-them things, just like they do. You believe in the Withered. And death.”
“Death’s not a religion.”
“It is for you.”
I scowled and changed the subject. “You haven’t been driven out of a dozen little towns just like this,” I said. “Brooke and I have. Look at us: we’re filthy, we smell horrible, and even those idiots last night could tell we were homeless—what is an adult going to do the instant he sees us like this?”
“Ask if we need help,” Marci insisted.
“And then call the nearest social worker,” I said. “Which means police, which means official reports, which means the FBI finds us.”
“You just don’t know the right people to talk to,” said Marci, and she pulled me back down the street. “Come on, John, this is a church. Have faith.”
I followed her slowly, resolved to run at the first sign of trouble. We had to stay in the town long enough to find a Withered; we had to lay low and arouse as little suspicion as possible, and I’d already threatened three guys with a knife. We needed to contact the locals, but how much contact could we afford?
The church sat on a corner lot, fronting onto the main street, which we were on, and a small cross street ran alongside it. The parking lot was on the far side from us, by the cross street, and I felt my heart rate speed up as we came around the near fence and saw a handful of people moving from their cars to the building.
“I don’t like this,” I said.
“Trust me,” said Marci.
“I wish you’d let me do this my way,” I said. “Brooke did things my way.”
“No wonder you fell in love with me instead.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, stopping at the corner of the fence.
She looked back at me. “Didn’t you?”
I didn’t want her to assume it, I wanted to say it. I wanted it to be a moment. But I’d only ever said it to her corpse, and saying it to someone who could hear me was something I totally wasn’t ready for.
“I have a system worked out,” I said, changing the subject again. “Exposing ourselves like this feels wrong.”
“That’s because it hurts,” said Marci. “You’re not used to it. It’s risky and that hurts. But sometimes the thing that hurts most is the right thing to do.”
I sighed. “Fine.”
“So relax,” said Marci. “Talking is what I do. I haven’t done it in two years, and I’m dying to get … Sorry.” She grinned sadly. “Poor choice of words.”
I expected her to take us straight up the front walk to the main door, but instead she pulled me along the fence, across the lawn, and down the narrow passage between the side wall and the fence. We reached the back and came around the corner, bypassing another door and reaching the rear corner of the parking lot without running into anyone. Marci put a hand on my chest, holding me back, and whispered.
“Wait.”
More people arrived in trucks and small cars: men in cowboy hats and bolo ties; women in bright blouses and floral skirts; little kids in dresses and collared shirts, their hair slicked and combed. I didn’t know what Brooke was waiting for, so I watched the crowd and the way they moved, the way people smiled at neighbors or snapped at an unruly child.
“What if there’s no Withered at all?” she asked softly.
“This town is where Brooke said to go.”
“And is there always a Withered everywhere she says?”
I shook my head. “Her information is old. Some of them haven’t had contact with each other in decades. Even if Attina was here once, he might have left.”
“So then what do we do?”
I watched the people walking into church. Was it one of them?
“We leave,” I whispered.
“And go where?”
“I don’t know.”
Soon the crowd thinned out, and I figured the meeting was either starting soon or had already started and these were the last few stragglers. An old woman pulled up in a wide sedan, her head tilted up so she could see over the dashboard. Marci pulled me out of the shadows.
“Here we go,” she said. “Don’t do anything creepy.”
“Give me a little credit.”
“I’m teasing.” She walked toward the old woman, reaching her just as she was getting out of her car. “Let me help you.” Marci held out her hand, and the old woman smiled and grasped it delicately, pulling herself out of the seat with a grunt.
“Thank you, young lady.” The woman was short and plump, her hair mostly white, flecked here and there with gray. She turned back to reach for her purse, and Marci held the car door open.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said Marci, “but we just got into town, and we don’t really know anybody.”
The woman smiled. “Well, dear, you’ve come at a beautiful time. Dillon in June is absolutely lovely.” She closed the car door and faced us directly, getting her first really good look at our faces and clothes. I braced myself for a judgmental stare followed by a lecture or a curt dismissal, but instead she smiled again. “My,” she said, “you’re so young! It’s nice to meet you, dear, what’s your name?”
“Marci,” said Marci, smiling back.
“Everyone in there will call me Mrs. Potter,” said the woman, “but please just call me Ingrid. It’s not my name, but I like it so much.”
“I … okay,” said Marci, apparently as surprised as I was by the comment. The old woman laughed.
“Of course it’s my name, it’s just a joke I like to tell because so many people don’t. I’ve always loved it, but then, I got it from my grandmother, and I always loved her—and I figured any man who didn’t like my name wasn’t worth chasing anyway, no matter how good he looked in his uniform.” She laughed again and looked at me. “And you, young man, what’s your name?”
“David,” I said, sticking to the same fake name I’d used the night before. I watched the woman in awe, wondering how Marci had managed to pick exactly the right person to talk to: she was kind, she was accepting or somehow ignorant of how filthy we were, and with the last few churchgoers streaming into the building, we were practically alone. If Ingrid was willing to talk, we could get all kinds of information out of her without raising any alarms or red flags.
“Like I said before,” said Marci, “we’re new here and we don’t know anyone. Do you mind if we sit with you at church today?”
“No,” I said, “we can’t—”
“He’s a little embarrassed that we haven’t had a chance to clean up,” said Marci, shushing me with a finger on my lips. I backed away from the contact but stayed silent. “Normally we’d never go to church without dressing up—he looks so handsome in a shirt and tie—but I think if we were sitting with someone nice, it might help us feel a little less self-conscious.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Ingrid, “is that all you’re worried about? Half the boys in there can’t be bothered to cut their hair, let alone comb it. You’ll be fine.” She grabbed Marci’s arm and started walking toward the door. “Stick with me, and if anyone starts anything, I’ll fight them off with a cane.”
“You don’t have a cane,” said Marci, looking back at the car. “Should we go back and get it?”
“Oh, I don’t use a cane,” said Ingrid. “But we’re going to sit next to Beth and hers has a great big handle on the end. It fell on my foot once and I limped all day.”
“We can’t go inside,” I said, as firmly as possible. “We have a dog.”
“So does Pastor Nash,” said Ingrid. “Come on!”
I clenched my teeth, following them with Boy Dog at my heels. This was stupid—this was reckless and dangerous and completely unnecessary. We could have asked all the questions we needed right there in the parking lot, then disappeared into a back street and never seen Ingrid again. Why expose ourselves like this? Ingrid walked to a bench near the back, where a skinny, wrinkled woman with a blue dress and a matching hat sat. There was even a flower on it. She had a cane, so I assumed this was Beth; she moved it for us and Ingrid sat down, pulling Marci with her. I sat on the end of the pew, shrugging off my backpack, and Boy Dog flopped gratefully to the floor.
I leaned close to Marci and whispered: “What are you doing?”
“We’re going to be in Dillon for a while, right? I’m establishing connections.”
“They don’t want to connect with us,” I said. “We’re dirty and weird and we’re here to kill someone.” I said the last part so softly even I could barely hear it. “Don’t think I haven’t tried churches before—you ask them for information, and they give it because they’re polite, but then they call their friends, and their friends call their friends, and soon everyone is going to know about the creepy vagrants slinking around town.”
The man in the pew in front of us turned and glared; the pastor was droning on in the front of the room. I lowered my voice again, making sure absolutely no one could understand a word we were saying. “Getting shunned is a best-case scenario now—worst case: someone files a report or looks us up on a missing-persons database.”
“So don’t slink around town,” Marci whispered back, “and people won’t have anything to warn each other about. And if all you do is ask a bunch of questions and leave, it’s no wonder people get suspicious. Church is about community: if you take from it, they resent you, but if you participate they protect you. We’re part of the group now—”
“Shhhh!” We looked over and saw Beth raising a shaky finger to her lips. Several other people were glaring at us as well; they couldn’t hear what we were saying, but they didn’t want us whispering. I nodded and closed my mouth, staring at the pastor but ignoring his words while I analyzed our situation. Marci might be right—if we had to stay in Dillon for a while, being part of the community might make a lot of things easier, even if it did expose us. In the past we’d always stayed on the edges, studying things from the outside, trying to make sure that no one saw or heard us enough to think twice about us. But that strategy meant that when they did think about us it was always bad. This way we’d stay more visible, more present in people’s minds, but they’d be more likely to think well about us, as friends or neighbors instead of suspicious travelers. It made me nervous, but these days everything made me nervous. I couldn’t hunt demons and run from more demons and keep a low profile and pump people for information and find food and take care of a dog and a crazy girl all at the same time without something starting to crack. Even just sitting here, in an air-conditioned building, felt like a luxury, and that only made me more nervous. I couldn’t afford to relax; I had to stay focused. For all I knew the demon was right here in this room, and more demons were converging on the building. I had to be alert and ready.
I closed my eyes, forcing myself to surrender, just for a moment, and relax. I didn’t have to do everything, all the time, completely by myself. Marci was showing herself to be just as competent as I remembered, maybe even more so, and even Brooke had surprised me with her cleverness in Yashodh’s farmhouse. I needed to treat them … or her … like a partner and not a burden. I had to let go.
I opened my eyes, checking the windows and the doors with one quick sweep of my head. Letting go sounded good in theory, right up until we were captured or killed. I could relax when our enemies were dead.
The sermon went on for about a half an hour, interspersed with hymns that sounded every bit as dirgelike as the ones we’d sung in the mortuary. When the meeting ended we split into groups, the kids going to a basement room and the adults breaking out into groups for Sunday school. I even saw Corey, but if he saw us he didn’t say anything. We stayed with Ingrid, and she introduced us to her friends, most of them as old as she was. The pastor walked over to shake our hands as well, and we lied our way through a minute or two of small talk while our dogs sniffed each other’s butts. I mostly stayed quiet, speaking only to answer direct questions, letting Marci charm the crowd with her easy wit and Brooke’s clear smile. Most of the questions were simple—where were we from, why were we in town—and we answered them with the same vague story about taking a year off from college. Then the pastor asked the question I’d been dreading:
“Do you have a place to stay?”
It meant he’d seen how dirty we were and guessed we’d slept outside last night. It meant he knew we were homeless, and despite our stories, he was worried for our well-being. He might even be wondering if someone missed us, if our parents knew where we were, if we’d run away from something terrible and needed help, or even from something good because we were too young and foolish to see it for the blessing it was. Adults who were scared of me made my job harder, but adults who tried to help could make my job impossible.
Before we’d gone to Baker, we’d spent two months in a town called Bunnell, close enough to a state park that it had a campground right outside of town. We’d gotten a tent from one of Potash’s depots, so we’d set it up in the campground and explained our long-term presence that way, which had been enough for most people to ignore us. Dillon didn’t have anything like that, and it was much smaller than most of the town’s we’d visited, so I didn’t think I could fall back on my “staying with a cousin” excuse. Everyone in this town was likely to know everyone else.
“We’re just passing through,” I said. “We’re doing fine.”
“You don’t have a place to stay?” asked a woman on the edge of the circle. “Does that mean you don’t have anything to eat?”
“We’re fine,” I said, feeling like a noose was tightening around our necks. “Thank you, but we’re actually totally set up, and you don’t need to worry about us at all—”
“Ridiculous,” said the woman. She was younger than the others, with black hair that had only just started to gray, strands of wispy silver floating above the rest like a halo. “You’re eating at my house today. I made a bacon-pecan pie last night, and it’d be a downright shame if I had to eat it all myself.”
“I’m vegetarian,” I said quickly.
“All the more for me,” said Marci, and she turned to the woman. “Thank you, that’s incredibly kind.”
“It’s the least I can do for a fellow child of God,” said the woman, putting out her hand. “Sara Glassman, it’s nice to meet you.”
“She’s the librarian,” said Ingrid. “Used to run the bookstore, but nobody in this town buys books, so they closed it five years ago.”
“That was when the new highway bypassed us,” said Beth. “We used to be right on—”
“That was fifty years, not five,” said Ingrid. “She gets lost in the past sometimes.”
“I know how she feels,” said Marci, and she looked at me with wide, helpless eyes. She looked scared, and I knew in an instant that she had flipped again—Marci had gone and a new personality had taken over, completely unaware of where we were or what we were doing.
Marci was gone.
I’d lost her again.