‘Where are we?’
‘Nebraska, Billy.’
‘How did we get here?’
‘Never mind. Close your eyes. Rest up.’
He frowns. ‘Robin? Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I love you, Robin.’
‘I love you, too, Billy.’
‘Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.’
7
Another knot pops in the woodstove. Alice gets up, walks to the refrigerator, and gets a beer. She twists off the cap and drinks half of it.
‘That was the last thing he said to me. When I parked with the RVs at the Kearney Walmart, he was still alive. I know, because I could hear him breathing. Rasping. When I woke up the next morning at five, he was dead. Do you want a beer?’
‘Yes. Thanks.’
Alice brings him a beer and sits down. She looks tired. ‘“Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.” Maybe talking to Robin, or to his friend Gad. Not much of an exit line. Life would be better if Shakespeare wrote it, that’s what I think. Although … when you think about Romeo and Juliet …’ She drinks the rest of her beer and some color comes into her cheeks. Bucky thinks she looks a little better.
‘I waited until the Walmart opened, then went inside and bought some stuff – blankets, pillows, I think a sleeping bag.’
‘Yes,’ Bucky says. ‘There was a sleeping bag.’
‘I covered him up and got back on the highway. Keeping no more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, just like he told me. Once a Colorado State Patrol car came up behind with its flashers going and I thought I was cooked but it went by and on down the road, lickety-split. I got here. And we buried him, along with most of his things. There wasn’t much.’ She pauses. ‘But not too near the summerhouse cabin. He didn’t like it. He worked there but he said he never liked it.’
‘He told me he thought it was haunted,’ Bucky says. ‘What comes next for you, darlin?’
‘Sleep. I just can’t seem to get enough. I thought it would be better when I finished writing his story, but …’ She shrugs, then stands up. ‘I’ll figure it out later. You know what Scarlett O’Hara said, don’t you?’
Bucky Hanson grins. ‘“I’ll think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.”’
‘That’s right.’ Alice starts toward the bedroom where she has spent most of her time since coming back here, writing and sleeping, then turns back. She’s smiling. ‘I bet Billy would have hated that line.’
‘You could be right.’
Alice sighs. ‘I can never publish it, can I? His book. Not even as a roman à clef. Not five years from now, not ten. No sense fooling myself.’
‘Probably not,’ Bucky agrees. ‘It’d be like D.B. Cooper writing his autobiography and calling it Here’s How I Did It.’
‘I don’t know who that is.’
‘No one does, that’s the point. Guy hijacked a plane, got a bunch of money, jumped out with a parachute, was never seen again. Kind of like Billy in your version of his story.’
‘Do you think he’d be glad that I did it? That I let him live?’
‘He’d fucking love it, Alice.’
‘I think so, too. If I could publish it, you know what I’d call it? Billy Summers: The Story of a Lost Man. What do you think?’
‘I think it sounds about right.’
8
There’s snow in the night, just an inch or two, and it’s stopped by the time Alice gets up at seven, the morning sky so clear it’s almost transparent. Bucky is still asleep; she can hear him snoring even through the bedroom door. She puts on the coffee, gets wood from the pile beside the house, and builds up the fire in the stove. By then the coffee is hot and she drinks a cup before putting on her coat, boots, and a wooly hat that covers her ears.
She goes into the room set aside for her use, touches Billy’s laptop, then picks up the paperback lying beside it and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans. She lets herself out and walks up the path. There are deer tracks in the fresh snow, lots of them, and the weird hand-shaped tracks of a raccoon or two, but the snow in front of the summerhouse is conspicuously unmarked. The deer and coons have steered clear of the place. Alice does, too.
There’s an old cottonwood with a split trunk not too far from where the path ends. It’s her marker. Alice turns into the woods and starts walking, counting the steps off under her breath. It was two hundred and ten on the day they brought Billy here, but because the going is a trifle slippery this morning she’s up to two hundred and forty before she comes to the little clearing. She has to clamber over a fallen lodgepole pine to get into it. In the center of the clearing there’s a square of brown earth upon which they have scattered a mixture of pine needles and fallen leaves. Even with the light fall of snow added to the needles and leaves, it’s pretty clear it’s a grave. Time will take care of that, Bucky has assured her. He says that by next November a random hiker could walk over that patch with no idea of what lay beneath.