“I know.”
He gave me a quick one-armed squeeze and a kiss on the jaw. As he backed down the driveway, I held up my hand in a stop gesture and ran to the driver’s side window. He lowered it. “Did I forget something?”
“No, I did.” I leaned in, hugged him around the neck, and kissed his cheek.
He gave me a puzzled smile. “What was that for?”
“I just love you. That’s all.”
“Same here, Charlie.” He patted my cheek, backed into the street, and took off toward the goddam bridge. I watched him go until he was out of sight.
I guess that, down deep, I knew something.
7
I took Radar out back. Our yard wasn’t much compared to Mr. Bowditch’s acre-plus, but it was big enough to give Rades some room to limber up. Which she eventually did, but I knew her time was getting short. If there was something I could do for her, it would have to be soon. We went back in and I gave her a few spoonfuls of the leftover meatloaf from last night, hiding an extra pill in it. She wolfed it down, then curled up on the living room rug, a place that she’d already staked out as her own. I rubbed her behind her ears, which always made her close her eyes and grin.
“I have to check something out,” I said. “Be a good girl. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay? Try not to shit in the house, but if you have to, do it someplace where it’ll be easy to clean up.”
She flapped her tail on the rug a couple of times. That was good enough for me. I rode my bike up to Number 1, keeping my eye out for a funny little man with a funny way of walking and talking. I saw no one, not even Mrs. Richland.
I let myself in, went upstairs, opened the safe, and buckled the gunbelt around my waist. I didn’t feel like a gunslinger in spite of the fancy conchos and the tie-downs; I felt like a scared kid. If I slipped on those spiral stairs and fell, how long would it be before someone found me? Maybe never. And if they did, what else would they find? On the tape, Mr. Bowditch had said what he was leaving me wasn’t a gift but a burden. I didn’t fully understand that then, but as I took the flashlight from the kitchen cupboard and shoved the long barrel into the back pocket of my jeans, I sure did. I went out to the shed hoping that I’d get to the bottom of those steps and find not a corridor leading to some other world but only a pile of blocks and a scummy pool of groundwater.
And no big cockroaches. I don’t care if they’re harmless or not, no roaches.
I went into the shed, shone the light around, and saw that the roach Mr. Bowditch had shot was subsiding into a dark gray puddle of goo. As I put the flashlight beam on it, one of the plates on what remained of its back slid off, making me jump.
I turned on the battery lights, went to the boards and blocks covering the well, and shone my light through one of the six-inch cracks. I saw nothing but the steps, winding down into darkness. Nothing moved. There were no scuttering sounds. This did not soothe me; I thought of a line from a dozen cheap horror movies, maybe a hundred: I don’t like it. It’s too quiet.
Be sensible, quiet is good, I told myself, but looking into that stone pit, the idea didn’t have much force.
I understood that if I hesitated for long I’d back out, making it twice as hard to get even this far again. So I stuck the flashlight in my back pocket once more and lifted away the cement blocks. I slid the boards aside. Then I sat down on the lip of the well, my feet on the third step. I waited for my heart to slow down （a little）， then stood on that step, telling myself there was plenty of room for my feet. This wasn’t precisely true. I armed sweat from my forehead and told myself everything was going to be all right. This I didn’t precisely believe.
But I started down.
8
A hundred and eighty-five stone steps of varying heights, Mr. Bowditch said, and I counted them as I went down. I moved very slowly, with my back planted against the curving stone wall, facing the drop. The stones were rough and damp. I kept the flashlight trained on my feet. Varying heights. I didn’t want to stumble. A stumble might be the end of me.
On number ninety, not quite halfway, I heard rustling beneath me. I debated shining my light toward the sound and almost decided not to. If I startled a colony of giant bats and they flew up all around me, I probably would fall.
That was good logic, but fear was stronger. I leaned out a bit from the wall, shone my light along the descending curve of the steps, and saw something black crouching two dozen steps below. When my light hit it, I had just enough time to see it was one of the jumbo roaches before it fled, scuttering into the black.