“In a bottom row like this, the horizontal stability, frame to frame, declines faster with the loss of each masonry unit.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“My grandpa. In other words, the bricks in this row not only hold up the bricks above them, but they also hold each other in place, more than the mortar does.”
“What’re the odds I’d be locked in here with a kid who knows masonry?”
“What’re the odds I’d be locked in with a Jane Hawk clone?”
The second brick came loose in maybe three minutes, and the next one in about two.
Frame to frame, there were nine bricks in the bottom row. The blade dug at the rotten mortar, which had so little bond strength that it was less like bricklayer’s batter than like the crisp substance of a fresh-baked biscotti. In quick succession, four additional units were removed.
With a brick in hand, Colson said, “Bad sand and too much lime. He’s a total amateur. Stand back, out of the way.”
“Why? What’re you doing?”
“If he didn’t know about mixing mortar, for sure he didn’t know squat about anchors and ties. Now that the bottom row is gone except for the two end units, this thing is held up with spit and a wish.”
The window started two feet off the floor and continued almost five feet above Colson’s head. He wished that he had a sledgehammer with a long handle, but he didn’t. This was going to be risky. If a single falling brick beaned him just right, it could maybe crack his skull, and an avalanche could do worse damage.
Ophelia stepped back, and Colson slammed the brick in his hand against the remaining window infill. The sound was a flat clap, not as loud as he expected, but still maybe loud enough to have been heard by Optime if the freak was on the veranda of the saloon rather than inside. He rapped the hanging curtain of masonry again, and a single unit fell out of the second row. Shock waves were starting to numb his hands, but he struck a third time, a fourth, and then he danced back as a cracking-grinding noise warned of collapse. Bricks cascaded out of the window, clattered onto the sill, spilled onto the floor, clouding the air with clay dust and cement dust and powdered lime.
There had been no glass in the window in perhaps more than a century, and the muntins had broken out a long time ago. Nothing barred their way to freedom. As Colson climbed the brickfall that shifted under his feet and clambered across the windowsill after Ophelia, into the last hour of daylight, he wondered if he would hear the shot that killed him or if the bullet would be faster than the sound.
49
The 1955 Studebaker E7 pickup was a pleasure to drive, a time machine that left the troubled twenty-first century behind. Wyatt Rider almost wished that it was taking him to a quieter past, sans the internet and the insane ideologies of the modern world, where life moved slow enough to be savored. He drove too far, more miles than he intended, because Hector Alvarez, proud of the truck, encouraged him to go faster, then even faster, as did the open road and the endless vistas.
When at last he turned and headed back the way they had come, he was overtaken by an urgent intuitive sense that he should not have left Joanna alone with Jimmy Two Eyes for this long. He sought reassurance when he said to Hector, “She tells me that she and your boy were best friends back in the day.”
Hector’s sun-leathered and time-seamed face looked less old than wise, and his smile was that of a contemplative mystic. “I’m not surprised Jojo made a life in books like she did. Even as a little girl, she had the colorful mind of a story writer, shaping the world into a better place than ever it was. What friendship she had with my Jimmy was her imagination. Whatever goes on in his mind, it has little to do with other people or this world. Annalisa and I, we liked to think that even though Jimmy’s flesh and bones are in this sorry world, his soul is already in the next, so he sees and travels through that sweet and better place, waiting for his poor twisted body to catch up with him.”
That response didn’t soothe Wyatt’s concern. He said, “Has he really never spoken a word in all these years?”
“From time to time, he makes sounds that maybe mean something to him, but they make no sense to us. His mother and I . . . we sinned against the boy. So caring for him and loving him is my penance, loving him and not knowing if he can love me in return at all, not knowing in this world if he can forgive Annalisa and me, though I hope to hear him say so in the next.”
They had encountered a little traffic on the way out, but on the return trip, the county road was as deserted as if the world had passed through an eerily quiet apocalypse. The pavement curved to the north, past descending meadows off to the right, with serried ranks of conifers ascending on the left. Coming out of the curve, Wyatt braked to a stop when he saw a family of deer—an antlered buck, a doe, two spotted fawns—blocking the straightaway ahead.