“Can I join you?”
It was Jeannie, with her own cup of coffee.
Ralph gestured for her to sit down.
“If we woke you, I’m very sorry,” Holly said. “You were so kind to let me stay.”
“Ralph woke me, tiptoeing out like an elephant,” Jeannie said. “I might have gone back to sleep, but then I smelled coffee. Can’t resist that. Oh good, you brought out the half and half.”
Holly said, “It wasn’t the doctor.”
Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Beg pardon?”
“His name was Babineau, and he went off the rails, all right, but he was forced off them, and he didn’t kill Mrs. Babineau. Brady Hartsfield did that.”
“According to what I read in the news stories my wife found online, Hartsfield died in the hospital before you and Hodges tracked Babineau down.”
“I know what the news stories said, but they’re wrong. May I tell you the real story? I don’t like to tell it, I don’t even like to remember those things, but you might need to hear it. Because we’re going into danger, and if you keep believing that it’s a man we’re going after—twisted, perverse, murderous, but still just a man—you’re going to be putting yourself into greater danger.”
“The danger is here,” Jeannie protested. “This outsider, the one who looks like Claude Bolton . . . I saw him here. I said that last night, at the meeting!”
Holly nodded. “I think the outsider was here, I might even be able to prove it to you, but I don’t think he was completely here. And I don’t think he’s here now. He’s there, in Texas, because Bolton is there, and the outsider will be close to him. He’ll have to be close, because he’s been . . .” She paused, chewing her lip. “I think he’s been exhausting himself. He’s not used to people coming after him. Of knowing what he is.”
“I don’t understand,” Jeannie said.
“May I tell you the story of Brady Hartsfield? That might help.” She looked at Ralph, again making an effort to meet his eyes. “It may not make you believe, but it will make you understand why I can.”
“Go ahead,” Ralph said.
Holly began to speak. By the time she finished, the sun was rising red in the east.
3
“Wow,” Ralph said. It was all he could think of.
“This is true?” Jeannie asked. “Brady Hartsfield . . . what? Somehow jumped his consciousness into this doctor of his?”
“Yes. It might have been the experimental drugs Babineau was feeding him, but I never thought that was the only reason he was able to do it. There was something in Hartsfield already, and the knock on the head I gave him brought it out. That’s what I believe.” She turned to Ralph. “You don’t believe it, though, do you? I could probably get Jerome on the phone, and he’d tell you the same thing . . . but you wouldn’t believe him, either.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “This rash of suicides brought on by subliminal messages in video games . . . the newspapers reported it?”
“Newspapers, TV, the Internet. It’s all there.”
Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability （if not genuine mental health） had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were friends.
She spoke without looking at either of them now, looking off into the distance instead. “Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time the business with Babineau and Hartsfield happened. He was in the hospital for awhile afterwards, but then he came home. By that time all of us knew how it was going to end . . . including him, although he never said so, and he fought that fracking cancer right to the finish. I used to go over almost every night, partly to make sure he was eating something, partly just to sit with him. To keep him company, but also to . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Fill yourself up with him?” Jeannie said. “While you still had him?”
The smile again, the radiant one that made her look young. “Yes, that’s it. Exactly. One night—this wasn’t long before he went back into the hospital—the power went out in his part of town. A tree fell on a line, or something. When I got to Bill’s house, he was sitting on the front step and looking up at the stars. ‘You never see them like this when the streetlights are on,’ he said. ‘Look at how many there are, and how bright!’