Jolene turned off Elkhorn Road onto the road she called Danville Pike — which apparently became Lexington Road when it came out the other side of the intersection in the Middle of Nowhere. The road signs merely identified it as County Road 278. Stuart tried to fight his way through the haze in his mind by adding up how many hours of sleep he’d lost since he’d left Chicago a lifetime ago. He gave up, decided it’d be easier to figure out how many hours of sleep he’d actually gotten — that was a smaller number.
He had slept remarkably well Friday night, all things considered, after the back-to-back gut-punch phone calls — one from the rental agency in the Lexington Airport saying Charlie had not returned the car she rented two weeks before, and the second from Charlie’s publisher saying she’d missed two book-cover conference calls. But then, after all, he could explain. He really could explain.
So let’s say Friday night — six hours, and that was generous because he’d been sipping coffee in the executive lounge at O’Hare Airport by 6 a.m. Still, call it six.
Saturday night on the lumpy cot at Cotton Jackson’s house, he had likely gotten two or three hours before he woke up in the grip of the worst nightmare he’d ever experienced — the one where Charlie and Merrie were corpses …
He pushed the images out of his mind.
Say three hours on Saturday night and that was generous, too.
Last night … if he’d slept a wink, he’d been unaware of it. He’d never even gone to bed, just sat drinking coffee with Cotton at his kitchen table. He did nod off every now and then; his chin would fall forward and he’d jerk awake with a start, images of his wife and daughter filling his mind with horror.
So do the math. Six Friday, three Saturday, none last night. Nine hours of sleep between Friday night and Monday morning. That was worse than the double-dipper all-nighters he used to pull in law school.
“… ran over a striped unicorn the size of a sperm whale—”
He turned to Jolene.
“What did you say?”
“Ahhhh, finally. I’ve been sending out ‘Earth to Stuart, do you read me?’ messages for the past two miles.”
“I’m sorry. Did you say a unicorn with purple—?”
“Just trying to get your attention. Are you with me now?”
Stuart shook his head. “Not fair — you’ve just missed one night of sleep. Last night was my second.”
“I didn’t miss the whole night. Just the part after I woke up screaming.”
“You never said what the nightmare was—”
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Ohhhh, snappy and short-tempered. Cotton was right about the irritable part. If you had let me finish, I was going to say I didn’t blame you for not wanting to share your dream. You don’t have to. I’ve seen that film, could likely quote the dialogue.”
“Nobody was talking.”
“Because they were dead.”
She shot him a look, but changed the subject. “Since we’re discussing dead people, think we’ll be seeing the Tibbits family today?”
“Reece and his charming wife and daughters — I didn’t catch their names. I’m hoping they don’t put in an appearance, but I think we ought to be ready for it.”
“And how, exactly, does one prepare oneself to encounter a dead man with bugs dropping off his tongue and the corpse of a homicidal child?”
Jolene almost managed the right dismissive tone to hide her fear. Almost. Stuart reached down to the floorboard and picked up the tire iron he’d put there. He’d felt mildly foolish when he’d gotten it out of the trunk of his rental Lexus. But when he curled his fingers around the cold metal now, he was glad he’d brought it.
“I’m not going unarmed this time.”
“You think a tire iron will stop a dead man?”
“We’ll find out. I played football, not baseball, but I can put some muscle behind this thing if I have to.”
“I figure we get in and out of there fast.”
“Copy that. You wait in the van, keep the engine running, while I search the—”
“No way, José, you’re not going in there alone.”
“Okay, you unhook the equipment while I fend off the meanies.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. It took both of us a couple of trips to haul all that stuff in there. If the various Tibbitses try to stop us, we’ll be outnumbered … with our hands full.”
Stuart turned the tire iron over in his hand.
“And I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to kill somebody who’s already dead.”
“Well, there is that.”
Stuart couldn’t manage a smile, but a hint of one skittered across his lips.
“All the equipment is important — I get that — but can we prioritize what we risk our lives to retrieve? Are there a couple of things that—?”
“A couple, yes. The GaussMaster EMF meter and the—” She caught his look. “Two or three of my thingys have the most impressive data. I’ll show you which ones. In a pinch, we grab those and boogie.”
As it turned out, they didn’t have to boogie. Didn’t have to rush at all. Nobody was home.
They could tell the difference as soon as they pulled up in front of Reece Tibbits’s ramshackle house. There was no … sense of foreboding. The hairs on the back of Stuart’s neck remained resolutely in place instead of snapping to attention. When they got out of the van, the air was cool, the reasonable cool temperature of an overcast day with storm clouds. It wasn’t cold.
They exchanged an encouraged look, then went inside what was left of the building. They sensed no … presence. They might as well have walked into some random old building, decomposing into nothingness on the side of the road.
Stuart’s head was on a swivel, surveying his surroundings, his nerves frayed, his muscles tensed. He reluctantly laid aside the tire iron he’d been clutching like a little kid’s security blanket so he could help carry the equipment to the van.
He was going back in for a second load when he heard Jolene cry out. He whirled and found her fiddling with the dials on the piece of equipment she’d just set on the floor in the back of the van.
“No!” she cried. “No, no, no, no!”
She slammed her fist down on the metal casing on the whatever-it-was and turned to the smaller gizmo beside it that had several dials and knobs.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s gone. It’s all gone!”
She rushed past him back into the building to the large machine on the rolling equipment tray, pushed buttons, turned knobs, then let out a sigh and turned toward him. She was leaned against the equipment cart and having trouble keeping the tremor out of her voice.
“The data. It’s gone.”
“And that means …”
“I set everything back to its default settings when we brought it all in here. The data, the readings we got at my father’s house, it was all recorded, stored … except it wasn’t. It was all backed up … except it wasn’t that either.”
He’d crossed the overgrown yard when she ran past him and he now stood in the doorway.
“So we don’t have any—?”
“Proof? No, we don’t. We have nothing. All my grandiose plans to lure teeming hordes of people here to see what happened … gone.”
“How could—?”
“I don’t know how it happened, I can only tell you what happened. All the data has been erased.”
Stuart heard himself say the words before he thought them. “Like my memories when I crossed the county line.”
Her head snapped up and their eyes met. Hers were wide with shock.
“You’re not saying you think it … the Jabberwock can …?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She was silent, calculating. He watched the look on her face shift from shock through anger to resolve.
“Let’s find out.” She turned and picked up a machine, gesturing with her chin toward the one sitting on the floor beside it. “We’ll get some new readings and see what happens to them when we take the equipment across the county line.”
“New readings where?”
She paused, then looked him full in the eye. And he knew.
“At Charlie’s mother’s house.”