flakes of snow falling into the headlights. Cell-phone reception sucked. It was a rotten drive. There was nothing to do but talk.
“Tell me about the sleeper,” Christian said, like a child asking for a favorite bedtime story.
Peter could never decide if he loved Christian or secretly kind of despised him. There was something almost otherworldly about him, about his shining gold hair and shining joyful eyes, about the easy grace with which he carried himself, and the easy pleasure with which he attacked his studies, and the infuriating skill with which he drew. He even smelled good. They had shared a dorm room for the last four years, and the door was often open, and the room was frequently half full with honor-roll kids and girls in pleated skirts on their way to Vassar, and when Peter stood next to Christian, he felt like a gnome lurking in the shadows a few steps from a blazing torch. Yet Christian adored him, and Peter accepted this somewhat as his due. After all, no one else was going to take Christian to Milan or Athens or Africa—or through the little door.
“That’s the other side of the river,” Stockton said. “She stays on her side, and we stay on ours.”
“But do you have any idea who—what—she is?”
Peter’s father unscrewed the cap on an airline-size bottle of Jim Beam. He had cadged it off the flight attendant on the jump from Toronto to Portland, Maine, which was where they’d met up with Fallows. He took a nip.
“You can see her if you go down to the riverbank. She’s in a clearing, beneath what you would call a dolmen, which is a little like a prehistoric . . . shed. A stone house with open walls. And there she is . . . this girl, holding a bouquet of flowers.”
Peter leaned forward and asked the question Christian wouldn’t. “What kind of girl, Dad? The kind of girl who goes to third grade? Or the kind of girl who goes to third base?”
Christian laughed. That was something else Christian got out of his friendship with Peter. Peter got help with his history final; Christian had someone to say the things and do the things a polite boy wouldn’t say or do.
“What do you think would happen if someone crossed the river to look at her?” Fallows asked.
“Don’t even joke. Remember your smart-ass line about going to shoot a dinosaur?”
“Sure. I said I’d be careful not to step on a butterfly. Because of the story, the Ray—”
“I know the story. Everyone knows the story. Walking across the river? That’s stomping on the fucking butterfly. We stay in the hills. We stay on our side of the river.”
Stockton abruptly switched on the radio and tuned it to a country-and-western station. Eric Church sang through a thin, grainy layer of static.
Fallows was his father’s most interesting friend. Peter wanted to know how he’d killed people in the war. He wanted to know what it was like to sink a knife into someone. Peter had read about soldiers who killed the enemy and then raped their wives and daughters. Peter thought that sounded like a pretty exciting reason to enlist.
He was daydreaming about soldiering when they slowed at a military-style barrier, a mechanical arm lowered across the road at a gap in a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Fallows rolled down the driver’s window. Peter’s father leaned across him and saluted the fish-eye lens of a security camera. The barrier went up. The car went on.
“Charn forgot to install a machine-gun nest,” Fallows said.
Peter’s father finished his bottle of Beam and let it drop onto the floor of the rental car. He burped softly. “You just didn’t see it.”
They carried their own bags in across a wide porch that stretched around two sides of the house. There was a Mrs. Charn, it turned out: a short, heavy, shuffling woman who didn’t make eye contact with them but continuously looked at the floor. The coolest thing about her was the big, gross, red wart below her right eye. It was like a belly button in her face.
She said Mr. Charn wouldn’t be home till later but that she would be glad to show them around. Peter hated the way the house smelled, of old paperbacks and dusty drapes and mildew. Some of the floorboards were loose. The doorframes had settled over the centuries (centuries?), and some of them were crooked, and all of them were too low for a twenty-first-century-size man. The bedrooms