rule.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll be watching through this little window here, but I still have to lock the door after you.”
The window in the door was about eighteen inches wide and a foot tall, multiple panes with layers of wire between them.
Deputy Fenton looked into the room as he inserted the key in the lock.
He glanced at Carson again. “What they do here is they go in two at a time, never one alone. Usually it’s a nurse and some big guy who’s an orderly or something.”
“I’ll be fine,” Carson assured him.
“Oh, and about how his eyes glow like animal eyes. They think he’s wearing some crazy contacts, like people do at Halloween. They were gonna remove them after they finished everything else with him, but then he came out of the sedative or whatever, came out of it again, tossing his head and fighting the restraints, so they just left the contacts for tomorrow.”
“He tries to spook me,” Carson said, “I’ll put in my wax fangs and give him a scare right back.”
78
Megan and Ben worked well together, cutting a double thickness of painter’s tarp and nailing it over the tall sidelight next to the front door, stretching it taut enough so the wind couldn’t billow it like a sail and thereby either strain the nails or tear the thick plastic. The molding would have to be repaired and painted after the glazier replaced the glass. Because the sidelight wasn’t an operable window, there were no security-system contacts related to it, and the alarm could be set again whenever Megan wanted. They swept up the broken glass and the in-blown debris, cleaned the mess that Shacket had left in the kitchen, and throughout these tasks, they shared their stories.
She hadn’t believed that anything Ben Hawkins needed to tell her could distract her from the terror Lee Shacket had brought into her life and the stain of horror that his assault had left in her memory. However, the incredible story of the golden retriever’s seeming intelligence and his insistence on guiding Ben all the way from Olympic Village to this house outside Pinehaven filled her with wonder and raised countless questions beyond answering. For the moment at least, Lee Shacket faded from immediate consideration.
She made coffee, and they took two mugs upstairs to Woody’s room, where they settled at the small round table at which Megan and the boy sometimes worked a jigsaw puzzle together.
The blustering night pressed its featureless face against the windows, its voice groaning in the glass, seeking admission, and the attic creaked as though some intruding weighty presence coiled among the rafters in that high realm. The night was no less strange than it had been since the hard wind had risen in the latter hours of the previous evening. However, now the rainless storm seemed to be blowing not just a fusillade of threats but also a promise of something amazing and agreeably transformative.
The boy and the dog lay as before. Neither seemed to have moved as much as an inch. This was not necessarily curious behavior for Woody, but it seemed highly unusual for a dog that wasn’t sleeping.
“Woody has some kind of connection with animals,” Megan said. “He feeds deer that come on the property. They almost take apples from his hands. Rabbits, squirrels—small things don’t run from him.”
“I had dogs as a kid. I had Clover until recently. They were wonderful, but they were nothing like this one.”
“What’s happening between them?” Megan wondered.
Ben shook his head. He got up and stepped to the foot of the bed and said softly, “Scooby?”
The dog thumped his tail once, emphatically, but didn’t move otherwise.
Megan went to the bed as well. When she spoke her son’s name and received no response, she said, “Scooby?”
Again the dog responded with one hard slap of his tail against the mattress.
Without breaking eye contact with the retriever, speaking in a whisper, Woody said, “No. His name is Kipp.”
79
Carson Conroy stepped across the threshold. The door fell shut behind him. Deputy Fenton locked it.
The prisoner was on his back, arms at his sides, restricted by wide straps, the upper half of the bed raised at about a thirty-degree angle.
Currently, the only light in the room issued from a sleep-hours luminary on the wall behind the bed, directly above Shacket’s head. Even the low wattage of this lamp streamed down on him in an eerie, mocking approximation of the mystical light that some painters of Christendom had portrayed as descending