“I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading.”
“Something particular I can do for you, Chief?”
“Not a darn thing, pal. Thought I’d stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for him. Well, I’m not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. How’s the Purple Gunther-mobile doing?”
“Good,” said Shadow. “It’s good. Running fine.”
“Pleased to hear it.”
“I saw my next-door neighbor in the library,” said Shadow. “Miz Olsen. I was wondering . . .”
“What crawled up her butt and died?”
“If you want to put it like that.”
“Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I’ll tell you all about it.”
Shadow thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.
“Darren Olsen met Marge at U.W. Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful . . . that black hair . . .” he paused. “Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little one—Leon, is it?—was just a babe in arms.
“Darren Olsen wasn’t a brave man. He’d been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn’t find the courage to tell Margie that he’d lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, he’d drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he’d had at the motel.”
“What was he doing?” asked Shadow.
“Mm. Couldn’t say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured out—there we go!”
He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy.
The rogue Iowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.
“Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody battle. That’s what they call ’em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. Wouldn’t let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house—had a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came back every six months to make everybody miserable.
“This went on for a few years. He’d come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he’d never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said they couldn’t take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant—at one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.
“I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, t
old him to shape up. That he’d hurt her enough . . . Next day he left town.”
“Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn’t get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that he’d be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobody’s seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. It’s tough to find a kid who doesn’t want to be found, y’see?”
Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew how obvious it was.
Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn’t ticket them, “just put the fear of God in them.”
That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like “then vanish the penny in the usual way,” occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was “the usual way”? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting “Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion!” and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience’s attention was diverted?
He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught it, remembering the moon and the woman who gave it to him, then he attempted the illusion. It didn’t seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. The trick as written simply didn’t work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped open the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884. The type, in two columns, was so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and battered hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them, peculiarly familiar. He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and he’d be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his—what, great-great-grandson? He wondered if Hinzelmann’s pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping from photograph to photograph, but it eluded him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type made Shadow’s eyes ache.
He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment . . .
Darkness roared.
He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.
They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.
“Tell me about the thunderbirds,” said Shadow. “Please. It’s not for me. It’s for my wife.”