On the way back to Hameln, Lyon pretends to be sleeping so he won’t have to talk to the sheriff, then as soon as they drive onto the county building’s gravel parking lot, Lyon “awakens,” thanks Stone, and gets out of the patrol car without further comment.
He’s just reaching his rental car when the sheriff calls to him. “Hey, were you in a wreck? Looks fresh.”
Lyon glances down at the dents and scrapes where he side-swiped a tree last night trying to get away from the staring eyes of that dog. “Hit a tree,” he tells Stone.
The sheriff walks over and stands next to him, both men now examining the damage. “You do it coming in this morning?” Stone asks.
“No, last night. When I was trying to get off that mountain.”
“You didn’t tell me about that, John. Leaving anything else out?”
Since when did it become John, Lyon wonders. And, yeah, he thinks, I’m leaving out the part where I fondled the woman while she was still in the box, while I was still thinking she was a corpse — I lied to you, Mike, when I said I knew the woman was alive all along, because for the longest time I assumed she was dead but I still fondled her breasts, kneeling there on the kitchen floor feeling her up with one hand and jerking off with the other like the true necrophiliac I apparently am. Lyon experiences a clenching deep in his gut, a sudden anguish.
“John?”
“No, Sheriff, I’m not leaving anything out.”
“What’re your plans now?”
“Get something to eat.”
“There’s a diner just up the street. Why don’t you check back with me after you have breakfast, huh? I’ll give the state police a call, talk to the hospital, check with some local doctors — see if anyone has a line on a young black woman who’s been in a coma or has been reported missing, whatever. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Take care now.”
Lyon bites back the impulse to break down and confess everything.
The day’s already hot, Lyon sweating as he walks three blocks to an old-fashioned greasy spoon containing four booths and a six-stool counter. He orders the kind of breakfast he hasn’t eaten in more than a decade: fried eggs, sausage patties, home fries, buttered white toast, a large glass of whole milk, and cup after cup of strong, black coffee. Looking at the breakfast when it arrives on the bone-gray oval plate, Lyon figures that if the food were scraped into a winepress and squeezed dry, it would easily yield a full cup of grease. But he’s so famished he eats the breakfast the way the four other men in the diner are eating theirs, leaning over his plate and forking it in without looking left or right.
When he’s done, his stomach feels as if it’s been inflated like a basketball. Lyon looks around and notices that the four other patrons, finished with their breakfasts too, have lighted cigarettes and are openly glaring at him. Lyon is accustomed to being recognized of course, but these stares aren’t the usual ones, these are more hostile than curious.
It’s easy enough to catalog the differences between Lyon and the four men watching him. In spite of the duress he was under this morning, Lyon took time to shave and then to comb his seventy-five-dollar haircut; the four men are all bearded and have long hair sticking out from ball caps displaying the logos of farm equipment and cattle feed. Lyon is wearing Dock-Sides without socks, chinos, and a hundred-dollar white shirt; they have on work boots made in Korea, jeans from Mexico, and Taiwan workshirts. Whether they recognize him from television is not the issue — John Lyon is a stranger from the city and, in this part of West Virginia, city strangers have always come here looking for something to take. They’ve taken these men’s land, the coal under their land, the timber growing on their land, taken their labor and their way of life. City strangers mean trouble from the law and from the government. The four men in that diner know instinctively that whatever has brought John Lyon here, it’s not going to do them any good.
Lyon wants to leave — now even the waitress is standing behind the counter with her arms crossed, staring at him — but he hasn’t decided what to do or where to go next.
Sipping his coffee, which has a grease slick over its entire surface, Lyon figures there are two ways of looking at what’s happened. First, assuming that Dr. Quinndell is behind the placement of that woman in the cabin and then her removal, this probably means Quinndell is guilty of something, is running scared, and it’s all going to make for a hell of a story when Lyon finally gets to the bottom of it. The second way of looking at it, however, is that the woman’s disappearance has effectively blocked Lyon’s investigation, because he can’t bring in the resources of the network until Sheriff Stone or some responsible third party confirms what happened last night.
As he downs the last of his greasy coffee Lyon realizes there’s a third way of looking at his situation: that he’s lost his mind.
When Lyon finally moves out of his booth, the diner’s four customers and the waitress suddenly find other places to put their eyes. The bill comes to under four dollars, tax included. Be lucky to get a cup of coffee and bagel for that in New York, Lyon thinks.
As he waits at the counter for his change, Lyon notices a local telephone book, which strikes him as a child-size version of a “real” phone book, not big enough to list New York City’s podiatrists. He flips through the pages, finding three names under Q, the last of those “Quinndell, Dr. Mason, 650 S. 16th St.”
After the waitress hands him his change, Lyon gives her back a dollar tip and asks, “Can you tell me where six-fifty Sixteenth Street is, can I walk there from here?”
“We don’t go by street numbers.”
“Dr. Quinndell’s house.”
She looks momentarily panicked, glancing at one particularly hairy customer sitting three stools down from the cash register — then the waitress shakes her head and turns away from Lyon.
He leaves the diner and stands out on the sidewalk looking for street signs, seeing none. When someone grasps his arm, Lyon whirls around to confront the heavily bearded, shaggy-haired man who was sitting at the counter. “Don’t put your hands on me,” Lyon says, unsure why he’s reacting with such hostility.
The man immediately releases Lyon’s arm. “Sorry.” He seems to be about forty years old but it’s difficult to tell for sure with all that hair coming down to his eyes and then the bushy beard covering the lower part of his face.
“What do you want?” Lyon asks, his voice still edged.
“People in there ain’t going to help you. Quinndell’s got ’em buffaloed. You’re here from TV, right?”
Lyon nods.
“I’d like to see you hang that bastard out to dry. Hell, I was even rooting for the nigger woman to nail his ass. He raped my daughter.”
“Quinndell?”
“Yeah Quinndell. She had a job working for him, stopping by after school cleaning his house, and he got her cornered in a room one afternoon, ripping her clothes and getting her down on the floor. Then after he did it he warned her if she told anybody he’d ruin her. That’s the way he operates. She told her mom anyway and her mom told me. We’re separated. She was only fourteen.”
“Did you bring charges?”
“Well, first I went over to see him my own self and he came at me with a spoon.”
“A spoon?”
The man pushes back his cap and lifts the hair from his forehead to show Lyon a vivid scar just above his right eyebrow. “You wouldn’t think a spoon could do so much damage, would you? If you let him get close enough he’ll go for your eyes ever time.” The man releases his hair and pulls his cap down low.
“Why didn’t you report this to Sheriff Stone?”
“I did. But Quinndell got to Stone first, accused me of attacking him, said he had to defend himself. Stone never even arrested him for what he did to my little girl and then I was the one ended up doing thirty days on the county, lost my job and was out of work six months because of it. I say go get him, mister — put his ass on TV and make him sweat. His street is four blocks down, then hang a right and his house is that big three-story white job in the middle of the block, red shutters, you can’t miss it, only house in town with a fresh paint job.”
The man turns to leave but Lyon stops him. “I’ll have a camera crew here in a few days, if you’d give me your name perhaps we could —”
“I ain’t going on TV, not against Quinndell I ain’t. I got to live here.”
“Let me ask you about something else then. Last night I was staying at a rental cabin about eighteen miles —”
“Yeah, I know where you’re staying, everbody in town does. Man at the hardware store been talking about it for a couple of days now. That cabin was owned by the nigger nurse who went after Quinndell.”
“Claire Cept, it’s her cabin?”
“Used to be. She lost it when she went bankrupt, lost everthing when she and Quinndell was suing each other back and forth, hell he sued her black ass three or four different ways.”
Lyon takes a moment to digest this but then speaks quickly when he notices that the man is nervously shifting his weight, eager to leave. “Do you know anything about a strange little man who lives out in those mountains? He —”
“Randolph Welby.”
Lyon is astonished. “Does he have any connection to Claire Cept or Dr. Quinndell? Can you take me to his house?”
The man laughs. “Mister, you don’t want to be visiting that old hermit, guarantee you don’t. He’ll feed you to his dogs.”
“But I think he might have been sent to the cabin to harass me — and maybe Dr. Quinndell was the one who sent him.”
“I don’t know about any of that.” The man pauses, weighing a decision. “But I know who might know. Come on, Charlie’s place ain’t far from here, I’ll take you there.”
“Charlie?”
“Yeah,” the man replies, laughing, “he’ll tell you all about Randolph and the owl eaters.”