as clear as speech: Let's get out of here, Bobbi, I like that thing almost as much as I like your sister.
'Okay,' Anderson said uneasily. It suddenly occurred to her that she could
not remember ever having lost track of time as she had today, out here.
Peter doesn't like it. I don't, either.
'Come on.' She started up the slope to the path. Peter followed with alacrity.
They were almost to the path when Anderson, like Lot's wife, looked back. If not for that last glance, she might actually have let the whole thing go. Since leaving college before finals - in spite of her mother's tearful pleas and her sister's furious diatribes and ultimatums - Anderson had gotten good at letting things go.
The look back from this middle distance showed her two things. First, the thing did not sink back into the earth as she had at first thought. The tongue of metal was sticking up in the middle of a fairly fresh declivity, not wide but fairly deep, and surely the result of late winter runoff and the heavy spring rains that had followed it. So the ground to either side of the protruding metal was higher, and the metal simply disappeared back into it. Her first impression, that the thing in the ground was the corner of something, wasn't true after all - or not necessarily true. Second, it looked like a plate - not a plate you'd eat from, but a dull metal plate, like metal siding or
Peter barked.
'Okay,' Anderson said. 'I hear you talking. Let's go.'
Let's go ... and let's let it go.
She walked up the center of the path, letting Peter lead them back toward the woods road at his own bumbling pace, enjoying the lush green of high summer ... and this was the first day of summer, wasn't it? The solstice. Longest day of the year. She slapped a mosquito and grinned. Summer was a good time in Haven. The best of times. And if Haven wasn't the best of places, parked as it was well above Augusta in that central part of the state most tourists passed by - it was still a good place to come to rest. There had been a time when Anderson had honestly believed she would only be here a few years, long enough to recover from the traumas of adolescence, her sister, and her abrupt. confused withdrawal (surrender, Anne called it) from college, but a few years had become five, five had become ten, ten had become thirteen, and looky 'yere, Huck, Peter's old and you got a pretty good crop of gray coming up in what used to be hair as black as the River Styx (she'd tried cropping it close two years ago, almost a punk do, had been horrified to find it made the gray even more noticeable, and had let it grow ever since).
She now thought she might spend the rest of her life in Haven, with the sole exception of the duty trip she took to visit her publisher in New York every year or two. The town got you. The place got you. The land got you. And that wasn't so bad. It was as good as anything else, maybe.
Like a plate. A metal plate.
She broke off a short limber branch well plumed with fresh green leaves and waved it around her head. The mosquitoes had found her and seemed determined to have their high tea off her. Mosquitoes whirling around her head . . . and thoughts like mosquitoes inside her head. Those she couldn't wave off.
It vibrated under my finger for a second. I felt it. Like a tuning fork. But when I touched it, it stopped. Is it possible for something to vibrate in the earth like that? Surely not. Maybe ...
Maybe it had been a psychic vibration. She did not absolutely disbelieve in such things. Maybe her mind had sensed something about that buried object and had told her about it in the only way it could, by giving her a tactile impression: one of vibration. Peter had certainly sensed something about it; the old beagle hadn't wanted to go near it.
Forget it. She did.
For a little while.
4
That night a high, mild wind arose and Anderson went out on her front porch to smoke and listen to the wind walk and talk. At one time - even a year earlier -Peter would have come out with her, but now he remained in the parlor, curled up on his