always said the good ones did. Her dress was dark blue, moderately expensive. The pendant she wore was either a very good piece of costume jewelry or a very small emerald.
There was a moment then. Some space of time. In it, Charity felt her heart fill with a joy so fierce and complete that she knew there could never be any real question about what this trip had or had not cost her. For now She was free, her son was free. This was her sister and those children were her kin, not pictures but real.
Laughing and crying a little, the two women stepped toward each other, hesitantly at first, then quickly. They embraced. Brett stood where he was. The little girl, maybe scared, went to her mother and wrapped a hand firmly around the hem of her dress, perhaps to keep her mother and this strange lady from flying off together.
The little boy stared at Brett, then advanced. He was wearing Tuffskin jeans and a T-shirt with the words HERE COMES TROUBLE printed on it.
“You’re my cousin Brett,” the kid said.
“Yeah.”
“My name’s Jim. Just like my dad.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re from Maine,” Jim said. Behind him, Charity and Holly were talking rapidly, interrupting each other and laughing at their hurry to tell everything right here in this grimy bus station south of Milford and north of Bridgeport.
“Yeah, I’m from Maine,” Brett said.
“You’re ten.”
“Right.”
“I’m five.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. But I can beat you up. Ka-whud!” He hit Brett in the belly, doubling him up.
Brett uttered a large and surprised “Oof!” Both women gasped.
“Jimmy!” Holly cried in a kind of resigned horror.
Brett straightened up slowly and saw his mother watching him, her face in a kind of suspension.
“Yeah, you can beat me up anytime,” Brett said, and smiled.
And it was all right. He saw from his mother’s face that it was all right, and he was glad.
By three thirty Donna had decided to leave Tad with a baby-sitter and try taking the Pinto up to Camber’s. She had tried the number again and there had still been no response, but she had reasoned that even if Camber wasn’t in his garage, he would be back soon, maybe even by the time she arrived there . . . always assuming she did arrive there. Vie told her last week that Camber would probably have some old junker to loan her if it looked like her Pinto was going to be an overnight job. That had really been the deciding factor. But she thought that taking Tad would be wrong. If the Pinto seized up on that back road and she had to take a hike, well, okay. But Tad shouldn’t have to do it.
Tad, however, had other ideas.
Shortly after talking to his dad, he had gone up to his room and had stretched out on his bed with a stack of Little Golden Books. Fifteen minutes later he had dozed off, and a dream had come to him, a dream which seemed utterly ordinary but which had a strange, nearly terrifying power. In this dream he saw a big boy throwing a friction-taped baseball up and trying to hit it. He missed twice, three times, four. On the fifth swing he hit the ball . . . and the bat, which had also been taped, shattered at the handle. The boy held the handle for a moment (black tape flapped from it), then bent and picked up the fat of the bat. He looked at it for a moment, shook his head disgustedly, and tossed it into the high grass at the side of the driveway. Then he turned, and Tad saw with a sudden shock that was half dread, half delight, that the boy was himself at ten or eleven. Yes, it was him. He was sure of it.
Then the boy was gone, and there was a grayness. In it he could hear two sounds: creaking swing chains . . . and the faint quacking of ducks. With these sounds and the grayness came a sudden scary feeling that he could not breathe, he was suffocating. And a man was walking out of the mist . . . a man who wore a black shiny raincoat and held a stop sign on a stick in one hand. He grinned, and his eyes were shiny silver coins. He raised one hand to point at Tad, and he saw with horror it wasn’t a hand at all, it was bones, and the face inside the shiny vinyl hood