then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.' She smiled at Gardener's expression. 'I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service ... that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long ... let's see ... four days ago. That I do remember.'
'Bobbi - '
'There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.' Anderson laughed - the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. 'There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's market thinks I've gone nuts - I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.
'Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?' She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. 'I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988, hit about seven different stores, came back with hundreds of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.'
The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again - of course she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and how deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk - books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands
Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had seen it.
' - that one,' Anderson said, and laughed.
'What, Bobbi?'
'I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.'
'What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?'
'Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.' Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just want to tell but tales they must tell - from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated Pequod, who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: 'Only I am left to tell you.' Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so ... knew so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.
Anderson lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly, making the matchflame quiver momentarily. It was the sort of thing you would have seen only if you were looking for it.
'I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes -there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is - and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know ... nests?'
Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through to the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drink would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.
'But the batteries kept failing over anyway.' She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. 'They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.'
They?
'I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?'
Gardener shook his