“I read in a book about a way of doing the Miser’s Dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.”
“This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”
“Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.”
“Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”
“The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”
“You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”
And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.
This time Shadow got it.
Shadow’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie.
He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigor-mortised fingers, and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above.
Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tiepin in the shape of a tree. He smiled at Shadow when he saw him.
“Ah, Shadow m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep forever.”
“Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Shadow.
“So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato salad?”
“I would not.” Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?”
“Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.”
“We’re leaving?”
“Within the hour.”
“I should say goodbye.”
“Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done with.”
For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go.
So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery.
Wednesday led the way to Shadow’s white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already stacked in the back seat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket.
“I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour before you’re good for anything.”
They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown and white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles and, in moments, was out of sight.
Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.