small hooked rug by the stove, nose to tail.
Anderson found her mind replaying that last look back at the plate sticking out of the earth, and she later came to believe that there was a moment perhaps when she flicked the cigarette into the gravel drive - when she decided she would have to dig it up and see what it was ... although she didn't consciously recognize the decision then.
Her mind worried restlessly at what it might be, and this time she allowed it to run - she had learned that if your mind insisted on returning to a topic no matter how you tried to divert it, it was best to let it return. Only obsessives worried about obsession.
Part of some building, her mind hazarded, a pre-fab. But no one built Quonset huts out in the woods - why drag all that metal in when three men could throw up a cutter's lean-to with saws, axs, and a two-handed buck-saw in six hours? Not a car, either, or the protruding metal would have been flaked with rust. An engine-block seemed slightly more likely, but why?
And now, with dark drawing down, that memory of vibration returned with unarguable certainty. It must have been a psychic vibration, if she had felt it at all. It
Suddenly a cold and terrible certainty rose in her: someone was buried there. Maybe she had uncovered the leading edge of a car or an old refrigerator or even some sort of steel trunk, but whatever it had been in its aboveground life, it was now a coffin. A murder victim? Who else would be buried in such a way, in such a box? Guys who happened to wander into the woods during hunting season and got lost there and died there didn't carry along metal caskets to pop themselves into when they died ... and even given such an idiotic idea, who would shovel the dirt back in? Cut me a break, folks, as we used to say back in the glorious days of our youth.
The vibration. It had been the call of human bones.
Come on, Bobbi - don't be so fucking stupid.
A shudder worked through her nevertheless. The idea had a certain weird persuasiveness, like a Victorian ghost story that had no business working as the world hurtled down Microchip Alley toward the unknown wonders and horrors of the twenty-first century - but somehow produced the gooseflesh just the same. She could hear Anne laughing and saying You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi, and it's just what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog. Sure. Cabin fever. The hermit complex. Call the doctor, call the nurse, Bobbi's bad ... and getting worse.
All the same, she suddenly wanted to talk to Jim Gardener - needed to talk to him. She went in to call his place up the road in Unity. She had dialed four numbers when she remembered he was off doing readings - those and the poetry workshops were the way he supported himself. For itinerant artists summer was prime time. All those stupid menopausal matrons have to do something with their summers, she could hear Jim saying ironically, and I have to eat in the winter. One hand washes the other. You ought to thank God you're saved the reading circuit, anyway, Bobbi.
Yes, she was saved that - although she thought Jim liked it more than he let on. Certainly did get laid enough.
Anderson put the phone back in the cradle and looked at the bookcase to the left of the stove. It wasn't a handsome bookcase - she was no one's carpenter, nor ever would be - but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up by the Time-Life series of volumes on the old west. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Brian Garfield's early westerns jostled for place with Hubert Hampton's massive Western Territories Examined. Louis L'Amour's Sackett saga lay cheek by jowl with Richard Marius's wonderful two novels, The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land. Jay R. Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen and Richard F. K. Mudgett's Westward Expansion bracketed a riot of paperback westerns by Ray Hogan, Archie Joceylen, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and, of course, Zane Grey - Anderson's copy of Riders of the Purple Sage had been read nearly to tatters.
On the top shelf were her own books, thirteen of them. Twelve