her pad. After some bickering between Floyd and Eileen over Eileen’s penmanship, the caffeine arrived and I sipped while Harnett gulped. The whiskers around his mouth darkened.
“Now what?” I ventured.
“Now,” he said, swallowing. “Now we wait. We see what kind of rain clouds move in. Or we wait for night. She can’t make it another whole night.” His hand shook and the surface of his coffee swayed. “No way she can.”
For a while nothing interrupted the listless sputter of the grill. No customers came in or out. Eileen and Floyd were silent and unseen.
“So.” He eyed me briefly before staring out the window. “School going okay, I guess.”
I marveled at his ability to avoid asking a real question. All sorts of responses bubbled to the surface. Yeah, it’s going okay. Only I get drop-kicked in the balls about once a week and an insane teacher stabs me with a metal poker on a routine basis and I’ve been forced to take trumpet lessons in secret and the only person who even remotely resembles a friend recently suggested that I start referring to myself as Crotch. Aside from that, yeah. It’s going great.
Instead I held my tongue as Harnett rubbed at his pink eyes. I realized that while I had slept and drooled, he had kept watch on both me and the Woman in Black. All at once I felt weak and discouraged—I didn’t have it in me, this man’s mental and physical stamina. But when he scraped an unsteady hand over his weary face, I also saw that he was getting old. His muscles would soon lose definition. His bones would winnow and weaken. My mother was already gone; I wasn’t sure I could take another desertion.
“Yeah, it’s going all right,” I said.
He nodded out the window. “We’ll get you back by Monday morning, don’t you worry,” he said. “No way she can lie there another whole night. No way.”
But after another seven hours spent pacing the stacks at the Lancet County Library, wandering around a hardware store for so long the proprietor began dialing his phone, grabbing another meal from Eileen and Floyd, and sitting silently beneath a gazebo in the town square to watch the ceaseless downpour, we returned to the soggy cemetery at dusk to find the Woman in Black still there, alone and slumped against Nathaniel Merriman’s stone. I didn’t have to look at Harnett to feel his frustration, nor did I want to—after all, this was all my fault. If Simmons and Diamond hadn’t created a situation preventing Harnett from abandoning me, he could’ve visited Lancet County weeks ago.
We stood against our mausoleum for a minute, our shoes submerging into mud.
“Stay here,” said Harnett. “I’m getting our bags. Another hour and she’ll be gone. No one lies in the rain at night. I don’t care how crazy they are.”
It didn’t sound as though he believed what he was saying, but regardless, he took off, his narrow shape parting silver curtains of rain. I turned my attention back to the Woman in Black and after only a moment’s hesitation began to approach.
She was older than I had guessed, at least my father’s age. Up close her body revealed itself to be more bony than slender, and what had looked like fair skin instead was blue and veined. Her black dress clung to some sort of cream-colored undergarment that flopped from below her disheveled hem. Everything she wore was stained; even her hands and neck and face were spotted with mud.
I gripped the cold stone and lowered myself to both knees.
“Hello,” I said. The rainfall made it practically inaudible.
Her eyes opened, releasing either rain or tears. Both of her hands automatically contracted, raking in handfuls of mud.
“Daddy,” she croaked in a voice coarsened by days of continuous sobbing. Almost magically all the relationships became clear. Nathaniel Merriman was the vaunted patriarch; here writhing on his grave was his daughter. The man who had briefly joined her had been her brother, Merriman’s son, though his sorrow had reached limits more quickly. There was no telling why she suffered as she did. Perhaps her father had been tremendously kind to her and the world was repellent in his absence. Perhaps he had been cruel and her lament was for the amends she had been denied. Perhaps he had been missing and she grieved for being cheated of shoulders to grasp and cheeks to kiss. Or perhaps she was lost in pain entirely her own and so reached for a