do nothin’ to him. An’ I cain’t even swear it were him. He didn’t look nothin’ at all like George. George warn’t old.”
“All right, Amelie. I won’t argue with you about that anymore. But do you know what happened to him?”
Amelie’s jaw set stubbornly, and Kitteridge felt her shudder under his touch. Now, in the face of her obvious fear, he repeated back to her once more the words she herself had spoken to Marty Templar the night before. “What did you mean, Amelie? Who is this Dark Man?”
Her face draining of color, Amelie shrank back into her pillow. “Don’t ask me,” she pleaded. “If you’re gonna ask anyone, ask Clarey Lambert. Or Jonas!”
“Jonas?” Kitteridge repeated. “Who’s Jonas?”
“He’s one of ’em,” Amelie breathed. “Just like George was.”
Kitteridge reached out to take Amelie’s hand, but she snatched it away. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Amelie,” the police chief told her. “What are they?”
Amelie gazed bleakly at him. “Dead,” she breathed. “They be the Dark Man’s children, and they all be dead!”
8
“This is pretty,” Kelly said, stretching languidly on the thick mat of grass that spread across the deserted picnic ground. They were twenty miles away from Villejeune, and they’d just finished the lunch they’d bought at a little store-and-bait shop that was all but hidden in the wilderness five miles away. When Michael had turned into the narrow lane leading to the picnic ground, Kelly had wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have come at all—the place was deserted, and she had the creepy feeling that if something happened to her, nobody would find her for years. But when she’d seen the pond that had been dredged out of the lagoon, and the sandy beach that edged it, she’d changed her mind.
“How come nobody ever comes here?” she asked now.
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know—I guess most people don’t like the swamp, and hardly anyone even knows about this place. Since I got the bike, I’ve been coming here a lot, and I’ve never seen anyone else.”
Kelly fell silent for a moment, then grinned mischievously. “Want to go for a swim?”
Michael cocked his head, wondering if she was kidding. “We didn’t bring any bathing suits.”
“So? Haven’t you ever heard of skinny dipping? You said no one ever comes out here, didn’t you?”
As Michael’s face turned scarlet, Kelly wished she hadn’t suggested the idea, even though she herself had intended to back out if Michael took her up on it. “I was just kidding,” she said quickly. “I just wanted to see if you’d do it.”
Michael gazed curiously at her. He still wasn’t used to the way she looked, and when she’d suggested taking off their clothes and going into the pond, he’d been certain she meant it. “Did your friends in Atlanta go skinny dipping?”
Kelly started to tell him that of course they did, but then found herself telling him the truth instead. “I—I didn’t really have any friends in Atlanta. There were some kids I hung out with, but I hardly even knew them. You know what I mean? I always felt like …” Her voice trailed off, and there was a silence for a moment before Michael, his eyes fixed on the ground a few feet away, finished the thought for her.
“… like you were different from them? Like they were sort of all together, but you weren’t part of the group?”
Kelly stared at him. “How did you know?”
“ ’Cause that’s the way I always feel, too.” For some reason he didn’t quite understand, he felt that Kelly would know exactly what he meant, even though he’d never talked about the strange emptiness inside him before. “I always feel like everyone else knows something I don’t know, like there’s part of me missing.”
“But that’s the way I feel, too,” Kelly breathed. “It’s been that way ever since I can remember. I’ve always felt like there’s something wrong with me, you know? Like I can’t—” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “ … like I can’t connect with other people.”
Michael said nothing for a few minutes, as he sorted out her words, examining them carefully. That was exactly how he’d always felt, too—as if he was missing some connection with everyone else.
Except in the swamp. When he was out there, all by himself, he sometimes felt that he wasn’t alone after all, that somewhere very close to him there were people who understood him. But he’d never seen or met anyone during his wanderings, and he’d finally decided the