Ruth fell forward into a tangle of shrubs. She could see thorns in the slanted glow of her flashlight, long and cruel-looking, but the bushes felt as comfy as goosedown pillows.
She tried to call out and could not.
They heard anyway.
Feet approaching. Beams crissing and crossing. Someone
(Jud Tarkington)
bumped into someone else
(Hank Buck)
and a momentary hateful exchange flared between them
(you stay out of my way, strawfoot)
(I'll thump you with this light Buck swear to God I will)
then the thoughts focused on her with real and undeniable
(we all love you Ruth)
sweetness - but oh, it was a grasping sweetness, and it frightened her. Hands touched her, turned her over, and
(we all love you and we'll help you 'become'),
lifted her gently.
(And I love you, too ... now please, find him. Concentrate on that, concentrate on David Brown. Don't fight, don't argue.)
(we all love you Ruth ... )
She saw that some of them were weeping, just as she saw (although she didn't want to) that others were snarling, lifting and dropping their lips, then lifting them again, like dogs about to fight.
5
Ad McKeen took her home and Hazel McCready put her to bed. She drifted off into wild, confused dreams. The only one she could remember when she woke up Tuesday morning was an image of David Brown gasping out the last of his life in an almost airless void - he was lying on black earth beneath a black sky filled with glaring stars, earth that was hard and parched and cracked. She saw blood burst from the membranes of his mouth and nose, saw his eyes burst, and that was when she came awake, sitting up in bed, gasping.
She called the town hall. Hazel answered. Just about every other ablebodied man and woman in town was out in the woods, Hazel said, searching. But if they didn't find him by tomorrow ... Hazel didn't finish.
Ruth rejoined the search, which had now moved ten miles into the woods, at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.
Newt Berringer took a look at her and said, 'You got
(no business being out, Ruth)
land you know it,' he finished aloud.
'It is my business, Newt,' she said with uncharacteristic curtness. 'Now leave me alone to get about it.'
She stayed with it all that long, sweltering afternoon, calling until she was too hoarse to speak. When twilight began to come down again, she allowed Beach Jernigan to ferry her back to town. There was something under a tarp in the back of Beach's truck. She had no idea what it was, and didn't want to know. She wanted desperately to stay in the woods, but her strength was failing and she was afraid that if she collapsed again, they wouldn't let her come back. She would force herself to eat, then sleep six hours or so.
She made herself a ham sandwich and passed up the coffee she really wanted for a glass of milk. She went up to the schoolroom, sat down, and put her small meal on her desk. She sat looking at her dolls. They looked back at her with their glassy eyes.
No more laughing, no more fun, she thought. Quaker meeting has begun. If you show your teeth or tongue ...
The thought drifted away.
She blinked - not awake, precisely, but back to reality - sometime later and looked at her watch. Her eyes widened. She had brought her small meal up here at eight-thirty. There they still were, near at hand, but it was now a quarter past eleven.
And - and some of the dolls had been moved around.
The German boy in his alpine shorts and lederhosen was leaning against the Effanbee lady-doll instead of sitting between the Japanese doll in her kimono and the Indian doll in her sari. Ruth got up, her heart beating too fast and too hard. The Hopi kachina doll was sitting on the lap of a burlap Haitian vudun doll with white crosses for eyes. And the Russian moss-man was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, his head wrenched to one side like the head of a gallows-corpse.
Who's been moving my dolls around? Who's been in here?
She looked around wildly and for a moment her frightened, confused mind fully expected to see the child-beater Elmer Haney standing in the shadowy space of the big upstairs room that had been Ralph's study, smiling his sunken, stupid grin. I told you, woman: you are nothing but a meddling cunt.