wasn’t looking at anything now. He waved his hand, dismissing us. We half rose. He was far away. He steepled his hands together and lowered his forehead to rest against his fingers. We edged past him to the door, quietly moved the chair, and undid the dead bolt. We shut the door carefully and then we walked over to our bikes. The wind was blowing harder now. Beating the hood of the yard light so it flickered. The pines groaned. But the air was warm. A south wind, brought by Shawanobinesi, the Southern Thunderbird. A rain-bearing wind.
Chapter Six
Datalore
The wind passed over us in a rolling mass of clouds that just kept moving until the sky went clear. Just like that, as if nothing had happened between us, my father and I began to talk. He told me he’d had an interesting conversation with Father Travis, and I froze up. But it was all about Texas and the military; Father Travis hadn’t ratted on us. Whatever suspicions my father had expressed that night to Edward were gone, or submerged. I asked my father if he’d talked to Soren Bjerke.
The gas can? I asked.
Pertinent.
Now that Father Travis was off the list, I’d been thinking about the cases and bench notes my father and I had pulled. I asked my father if Bjerke had questioned the Larks, brother and sister.
He’s talked to Linda.
My father tensely frowned. He had promised himself not to involve me, or confide in me, or collaborate with me. He knew where it went, what I might get into, but he didn’t know the half of it. And here was the thing I didn’t understand then but do now—the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before. So he had no choice, not really. Eventually, he had to talk to me.
I should visit Linda Wishkob, he said. She stonewalled Bjerke. But maybe . . . you want to come?
Linda Wishkob was magnetically ugly. Her pasty wedge of a face just cleared the post office counter. She regarded us with mooncalf, bulging eyes; her wet red lips were curls of flesh. Her hair, a cap of straight brown floss, quivered as she pulled out commemoratives. She displayed them for my father. She reminded me of a pop-eyed porcupine, even down to her fat little long-nailed paws. My father chose a set of fifty states of the union and asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee.
There’s coffee in back here, said Linda. I can drink it free. She regarded my father warily, although she knew my mother. Everyone knew what had happened but nobody knew what to say or what not to say.
Never mind about the coffee, said my father. I’d like to have a word with you. Why don’t you get someone to cover for you? You aren’t busy.
Linda opened her wet lips to protest but could not think of a good excuse. In a few moments she had cleared things with her supervisor and came from around the counter. We walked out of the post office and across the street to Mighty Al’s, which was a little soup can of a place. I couldn’t believe my father was going to question someone in the close quarters of Mighty’s, which had six scrounged tables crammed together. And I was right. My father asked no questions of Linda but proceeded to have a useless conversation about the weather.
My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I’d even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. Dad and Linda Wishkob talked about the weather for quite a while and then she got up