Motel 6. There was no dial-up, let alone WiFi, which made my laptop unable to touch the world outside my room, but I didn’t need WiFi to find The Latches; Bree had done that for me. It was four miles east of downtown Latchmore, on Route 27, an estate home once owned by an old-money family named Vander Zanden. Around the turn of the twentieth century the old money had apparently run out, because The Latches had been sold and turned into a high-priced sanitarium for overweight ladies and soused gentlemen. That had lasted almost until the turn of the twenty-first century. Since then it had been for sale or lease.
I thought I would have a hard time sleeping, but I went under almost immediately, in the midst of trying to plan what I’d say to Jacobs when I saw him. If I saw him. When I woke early on another bright fall day, I decided that playing it by ear might be for the best. If I hadn’t laid down tracks to run on, I reasoned (perhaps fallaciously), I couldn’t be derailed.
I got in my rental car at nine, drove the four miles, found nothing. A mile or so farther on I stopped at a farmstand loaded with the season’s last produce. The potatoes looked mighty paltry to my country boy’s eye, but the pumpkins were wowsers. The stand was being presided over by a couple of teenagers. The resemblance said they were brother and sister. Their expressions said they were bored brainless. I asked for directions to The Latches.
“You passed it,” the girl said. She was the older.
“I figured that much. I just don’t know how I managed. I thought I had good directions, and it’s supposed to be pretty big.”
“There used to be a sign,” the boy said, “but the guy who’s renting the place took it down. Pa says he must like to keep himself to himself. Ma says he’s probably stuck up.”
“Shut up, Willy. Mister, you gonna buy anything? Pa says we can’t shut down for the day until we get thirty dollars’ worth of custom.”
“I’ll buy a pumpkin. If you can give me some decent directions.”
She gave a theatrical sigh. “One pumpkin. A buck-fifty. Big whoop.”
“How about one pumpkin for five dollars?”
Willy and his sister exchanged a look, then she smiled. “That’ll work.”
• • •
My expensive pumpkin sat in the backseat like an orange moonlet as I drove back the way I had come. The girl had told me to watch for a big slab of rock with METALLICA RULES sprayed on it. I spotted it and slowed to ten miles an hour. Two tenths of a mile after the big rock, I came to the turnoff I’d missed before. It was paved, but the entrance was badly overgrown and heaped with fallen autumn leaves. It looked like camouflage to me. When I’d asked the farmstand kids if they knew what the new occupant did, they had simply shrugged.
“Pa says he probably made his money in the stock market,” the girl said. “He must have a lot of it, to live in a place like that. Ma says it must have fifty rooms.”
“Why you goin to see him?” This was the boy.
His sister threw him an elbow. “That’s rude, Willy.”
I said, “If he’s who I think he is, I knew him a long time ago. And thanks to you guys, I can bring him a present.” I hefted the pumpkin.
“Make a lot of pies with that, f’sure,” the boy said.
Or a jack-o’-lantern, I thought as I turned into the lane leading to The Latches. Branches brushed the sides of my car. One with a bright little electric light inside instead of a candle. Right behind the eyes.
The road—that’s what it was once you got past the intersection with the highway, wide and well-paved—climbed in a series of S-turns. Twice I had to stop while deer lolloped across ahead of me. They looked at my car without concern. I guessed no one had hunted these woods in a long, long time.
Four miles up, I came to a closed wrought-iron gate flanked by signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY on the left and NO TRESPASSING on the right. There was an intercom box on a fieldstone post with a video camera above it, cocked down to look at callers. I pressed the button on the intercom. My heart was beating hard, and I was sweating. “Hello? Is anybody there?”
Nothing at first. At last: “How may I help you?” The