read my mind, his mother sometimes said. People smiled at this, but she wasn’t kidding. And maybe not just her mind. Richard got A’s on tests he hadn’t even studied for. He knew when his father was going to come home in a good mood and when he was going to come home fuming about something at the plumbing supply company he owned. Once the boy begged his mother to play the Pick Six lottery because he swore he knew the winning numbers. Mrs. Gaylesworthy refused—they were good Baptists—but later she was sorry. Not all six of the numbers Richard wrote down on the kitchen note-minder board came up, but five did. Her religious convictions had cost them seventy thousand dollars. She had begged the boy not to tell his father, and Richard had promised he wouldn’t. He was a good boy, a lovely boy.
Two months or so after the lottery win that wasn’t, Mrs. Gaylesworthy was shot to death in her kitchen and the good and lovely boy disappeared. His body had long since rotted away beneath the gone-to-seed back field of an abandoned farm, but when Rose the Hat opened the valve on the silver canister, his essence—his steam—escaped in a cloud of sparkling silver mist. It rose to a height of about three feet above the canister, and spread out in a plane. The True stood looking up at it with expectant faces. Most were trembling. Several were actually weeping.
“Take nourishment and endure,” Rose said, and raised her hands until her spread fingers were just below the flat plane of mist. She beckoned. The mist immediately began to sink, taking on an umbrella shape as it descended toward those waiting below. When it enveloped their heads, they began to breathe deeply. This went on for five minutes, during which several of them hyperventilated and swooned to the ground.
Rose felt herself swelling physically and sharpening mentally. Every fragrant odor of this spring night declared itself. She knew that the faint lines around her eyes and mouth were disappearing. The white strands in her hair were turning dark again. Later tonight, Crow would come to her camper, and in her bed they would burn like torches.
They inhaled Richard Gaylesworthy until he was gone—really and truly gone. The white mist thinned and then disappeared. Those who had fainted sat up and looked around, smiling. Grampa Flick grabbed Petty the Chink, Barry’s wife, and did a nimble little jig with her.
“Let go of me, you old donkey!” she snapped, but she was laughing.
Snakebite Andi and Silent Sarey were kissing deeply, Andi’s hands plunged into Sarey’s mouse-colored hair.
Rose leaped down from the picnic table and turned to Crow. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, grinning back at her.
Everything’s cool, that grin said, and so it was. For now. But in spite of her euphoria, Rose thought of the canisters in her safe. Now there were thirty-eight empties instead of thirty-seven. Their backs were a step closer to the wall.
5
The True rolled out the next morning just after first light. They took Route 12 to I-64, the fourteen RVs in a nose-to-tail caravan. When they reached the interstate they would spread out so they weren’t quite so obviously together, staying in touch by radio in case trouble arose.
Or if opportunity knocked.
Ernie and Maureen Salkowicz, fresh from a wonderful night’s sleep, agreed those RV folks were just about the best they’d ever had. Not only did they pay cash and bus up their sites neat as a pin, someone left an apple bread pudding on the top step of their trailer, with a sweet thank-you note on top. With any luck, the Salkowiczes told each other as they ate their gift dessert for breakfast, they’d come back next year.
“Do you know what?” Maureen said. “I dreamed that lady on the insurance commercials—Flo—sold you a big insurance policy. Wasn’t that a crazy dream?”
Ernie grunted and splooshed more whipped cream onto his bread pudding.
“Did you dream, honey?”
“Nope.”
But his eyes slid away from hers as he said it.
6
The True Knot’s luck turned for the better on a hot July day in Iowa. Rose was leading the caravan, as she always did, and just west of Adair, the sonar in her head gave a ping. Not a head-blaster by any means, but moderately loud. She hopped on the CB at once to Barry the Chink, who was about as Asian as Tom Cruise.