nights had not seemed romantic, as she remembered them from when she’d been growing up here. At best, the falling darkness brought with it an air of strangeness, of an alien realm, as if Nature knew of her years in the city, thought her a traitor to the land, and no longer welcomed her. At worst, the nights sometimes seemed full of menace, for the world had deteriorated since her childhood, even here in Pinehaven County. It was easy to imagine a nightmare gallery of decadents—meth-lab operators and half-crazed end-times loners—who had taken refuge deep in the wilderness and might at night venture nearer to watch her from the trees. For the first few months after they moved in, she closed all the draperies and blinds with the setting of the sun.
But the locals welcomed them at once, and in time the land seemed as benign as it had been in her youth. These days Megan no longer suspected the forest of harboring a nastywork of degenerates, and nightfall brought with it only stars and the moon either in full or fragment. For some, the loneliness of widowhood would have been magnified by the solitude of this property, by sharing it only with a boy who never spoke. For Megan, solitude allowed contemplation and introspection, which led to acceptance of her loss, and peace came upon her sooner here than it might have elsewhere.
She finished a chapter in her book and the wine in her glass, closed the former and rinsed out the latter at the sink.
She went through the downstairs, double-checking door locks and turning out the lights in her wake.
In the foyer, at the living room archway, as she reached for the wall switch, she saw that Woody had been here before going to his room. The silver-framed photographs were no longer facedown on the Steinway. They were all facing the piano bench, so she could see them when she played. But they should be turned in this direction, toward the room. She would rearrange them in the morning. Right now, it was enough to know that he had heard her earlier, understood what she’d told him about keeping his father in their memory, and agreed.
She doused the living room lights.
At the front door, the deadbolt was engaged.
On the security-system keypad, a red light glowed under the word Home, just as it did on the control unit by the back door. A third keypad was in the master bedroom.
With her book in hand, intending to read herself to sleep, Megan climbed the stairs.
The wind was a testing wind that rattled sheet tin somewhere above—perhaps the flange on a chimney spark arrester—whistled along empty rain gutters, pillowed its fists against window glass, pressed creaks and muffled groans from attic rafters, collar beams, and joists much as a rolling sea made the timbers of a ship’s hull speak.
After rapping softly on Woody’s door, she opened it. In the light of a nightstand lamp, he was sound asleep, half sitting up against a rampart of pillows, an open hardcover book splayed on his lap.
She plucked a Kleenex from the box on his nightstand, used it to mark his place in the story, and set the book aside. She took two pillows from the stack against which the boy leaned, eased him into a better sleeping posture, and pulled up the blanket.
Although Woody seldom slept more than five or six hours, he was a deep sleeper. Megan’s ministrations failed to wake him.
She kissed his smooth, cool brow and adjusted the three-way lamp to its lowest setting.
As she stepped away from the bed, the boy muttered in his sleep. She turned to study him and listened and decided that his dream, whatever its subject might be, was not a nightmare. He didn’t seem to be distressed. She was almost to the door when she thought she heard a word escape him, not the meaningless murmurs and whimpers of a dreamer, but in fact a word. His first in all his life.
For perhaps a minute, she stood rock still, listening. But if he had spoken, he did not speak again. Indeed, the muttering and murmuring had ceased. He lay in silence.
She must have heard something in his dreamy ramble that hadn’t been there. After all, neither he nor she knew anyone named Dorothy.
46
The guest bedroom at the end of the upstairs hallway lies in darkness, the door ajar. Shacket watches the bitch through the gap as she raps lightly on the