—Here, he said, placing a finger on the spot where the faintest outline of the sculpture’s base could be seen.
As Billy waited by the kitchen door, Emmett locked the doors to the front porch and the muck room and then made a final swing through the house.
Returning to the bedroom upstairs, he stood in the doorway. His intention had been to leave everything exactly as he’d found it. But seeing the empty brown bottle, Emmett picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he said one last goodbye to Wallace Woolly Martin.
As he was closing the door Emmett noticed his old book bag on a chair and realized that the one he had loaned Duchess must be somewhere in the house as well. After checking all the bedrooms, Emmett searched the living room and found it lying on the floor next to a couch where Duchess must have spent the night. Only as he was headed for the kitchen to join Billy did Emmett remember and retrieve the fedora from the high-back chair.
As they walked from the kitchen past the dock, Emmett showed Billy that Duchess was safe and sound. In the front seat of the Cadillac, he tossed Duchess’s book bag and the hat. In the trunk of the Studebaker, he put two paper bags—one with the trash from the kitchen, the other with their share of Woolly’s trust. As he was about to close the trunk, he was reminded that just nine days before, he had been standing in the same spot when he received his father’s legacies: the money, and the quote from Emerson, which was half excuse, half exhortation. Having come fifteen hundred miles in the wrong direction, on the verge of traveling three thousand more, Emmett believed that the power within him was new in nature, that no one but he could know what he was capable of, and that he had only just begun to know it himself.
Closing the trunk, he joined Billy in the front seat, turned the key, and pushed the starter.
—I had originally been thinking that we’d spend the night up here, Emmett said to his brother. What do you say we pick up Sally and hit the road, instead?
—That’s a good idea, said Billy. Let’s pick up Sally and hit the road.
As Emmett backed the car in an arc in order to face it toward the driveway, Billy was already studying his map—with a furrowed brow.
—What is it? asked Emmett.
Billy shook his head.
—This is the fastest route from where we are.
Placing his fingertip on Woolly’s big red star, Billy moved it along various roads headed in a southwestern trajectory from the Wolcotts’ to Saratoga Springs and Scranton, then westward to Pittsburgh, where they would finally rejoin the Lincoln Highway.
—What time is it? asked Emmett.
Looking at Woolly’s watch, Billy said that it was one minute to five.
Emmett pointed to a different road on the map.
—If we went back the way we came, he said, we could start our journey in Times Square. And if we hurry, we could get there just as all the lights are coming on.
Billy looked up in his wide-eyed way.
—Could we, Emmett? Could we, really? But wouldn’t that take us out of our way?
Emmett made a show of thinking for a second.
—A little out of our way, I suppose. But what day is it?
—It’s the twenty-first of June.
Emmett put the Studebaker in gear.
—Then we’ve got thirteen days to make the crossing, if we mean to be in San Francisco by the Fourth of July.
Duchess
I returned to consciousness with a sensation of drifting—like one who’s sitting in a boat on a sunny afternoon. And as it turned out, that’s exactly where I was: sitting in a boat on a sunny afternoon! Giving my head a shake in order to clear it, I put my hands on the gunwales and hoisted myself up.
The first thing I noted, I’ll readily admit, was the natural beauty before me. Though I was never much of a country mouse—finding the great outdoors to be generally uncomfortable and occasionally inhospitable—there was something deeply satisfying about the scenery. What with the pine trees rising from the lakeshore, and the sunlight cascading from the sky, and the surface of the water stirred by a gentle breeze. One couldn’t help but sigh at the majesty of it all.
But thanks to the ache in my keister, I was brought back to reality. Looking down, I could see that I was sitting on a pile of painted stones. Picking one of them up in order to consider it more closely, I realized that not only was there dried blood on my hand, there was dried blood all down the front of my shirt.
Then I remembered.
Emmett had hit me with the butt of the rifle!
He had burst through the door while I was trying to open the safe. We’d had a difference of opinions, something of a scuffle, and a bit of tit for tat. In the interest of theatrics, I had brandished a gun, waving it in the general direction of Billy. But having leapt to the wrong conclusion about my intentions, Emmett had grabbed the rifle and let me have it.