Chapter 4
Rafferty
The clubhouse at ten in the morning smells like last night, and last night smelled like a fryer.
I got there early because I wanted to be leaning on something when Bishop came in, which is a small tactical thing I've done since I was a prospect and which has never once worked.
"You're leaning," Bishop Cardell said, without looking at me.
"I'm resting."
"You're leaning, which means you want something, which means I'm going to want coffee." He got coffee. He is the only man alive who can make getting coffee feel like a ruling. "Go."
"I found somebody who's been tracking Route 9 for two years."
"Good."
"She sees how people die."
Bishop stopped with the pot in his hand.
"Say the second part again."
"She looks at your face," I said, "and she sees your death. Not a feeling. Not a vibe. The room, the light, what's in your hand. She did Emmett last night cold and got the bike he's got in the back and the paint job on it and the fact that Delgado didn't sand it."
Bishop set the pot down.
"And she's been putting crosses on that road," I said. "Thirty-one. One for every death. Nobody asked her to and nobody knows she did it."
"For how long?"
"Two years."
"Why?"
"That's what I said."
"And?"
"And she said, because nobody else was going to."
Bishop drank his coffee and looked out the window for a while at the yard, where Judah was doing something to a fence post that the fence post did not deserve.
"Call it," he said. "Full run of Route 9. Chapel at noon."
"You don't want to meet her first?"
"I'm going to meet her at noon," Bishop said. "In front of everybody. Because if she's real, I want eleven witnesses, and if she's not, I want eleven witnesses."
He was on his way out when he stopped.
"Rafferty."
"Yeah."
"Marlowe's coming."
I closed my eyes. "Bishop."
"She's already in the truck."
"Bishop, I'm asking you—"
"You brought me a woman who reads deaths off people's faces," he said. "I'm bringing the one who talks to them after. That's not a punishment, that's arithmetic."
"It's going to be a scene."
"It's going to be a scene," Bishop agreed, pleasantly, and left.
Here's what I've got against putting two of them in a room, and it's not superstition, it's memory: last spring, Marlowe Quinn stood in a hallway in Idaho and talked a dead man out of a wall, and afterward she sat on the porch and shook for an hour and made three jokes about it, and I sat next to her and could not do one useful thing except hold a cup steady.
That's my whole role with the gifted ones. Cup-holder. Doorframe.
I don't love it.
Sunday showed up at eleven-forty with a cardboard box.
She'd dressed for it, which got me for some reason — she was in a real coat instead of the parka, and she'd done something with her hair, and she stood in the gravel lot of an outlaw motorcycle club holding a cardboard box like she was returning something to a store.
"That the wall?" I said.
"That's the wall."
"You took it down."
"I took it down," she said. "It's very strange. There's a rectangle of clean paint in my apartment now and it's staring at me like a dog."
"You want me to carry it?"
"I want you to not say what's in it before I do."
"Okay."
"And I want to know how many people are in there."
"Eleven."
"Eleven." She looked at the door. "How many of them are going to think I'm lying?"
"Honestly?"
"Please."
"Nine."
"That's better than I usually do."
"They'll come around fast," I said. "That's the one thing about this club.
Everybody in that room has personally watched something happen that they can't explain, and most of them have been the guy standing there saying that's not possible while it happened anyway.
Judah spent a whole winter arguing with Deacon about it and then walked into a house in Idaho and hasn't argued since. "
"And the two who won't come around?"
"Delgado's just quiet. And the other one's me."
She turned her head.
"You?"
"I believe you completely," I said. "I've believed you since the garage.
I'm the one who's not going to come around to you standing on that road, and I want that said out loud before you walk in there, because in about an hour Bishop's going to ask you to and I'm going to have to keep my mouth shut. "
Inside, eleven men turned around.
I've watched a lot of people walk into that room. Cops, lawyers, a bishop who was not our Bishop, a woman with a shotgun and a grievance. Nobody has ever done it the way Sunday Marsh did, which was: eyes at chest height, dead level, moving across the room like a woman crossing a creek on stones.
"That's her?" Judah said.
"That's her."
"She's not looking at anybody."
"No," I said, "she's not," and something in my chest got weirdly hot about it.
Bishop stood up. "Miss Marsh."
"President Cardell."
"Just Bishop."
"Then just Sunday."
"Sunday." He gestured at the table. "Everything on it."
She put the box down and started unpacking it, and I watched eleven grown men go quiet in stages.
The map first, folded to the strip, red between two dots. Then the reports — thirty-one of them, in order, each one paper-clipped to an index card in small neat handwriting. Then a photograph of a cross by a mile marker, and another, and another, until there were thirty-one of those too.
"Dates," she said, laying them out. "Times.
Weather. Vehicle. Direction of travel. Whether the radio was on when they found it, which is in about half the reports and which matters, and I'll tell you why in a minute.
" She kept going. "Age. Sex. Occupation, where I could get it.
Whether they were local. Whether they'd driven it before. "
"How'd you get accident reports?" Judah said.
"Public records requests."
"Thirty-one of them?"
"Ninety-four of them," Sunday said. "Sixty-three came back denied. I'm very annoying by mail."
Judah looked at me. "I like her."
"Everybody shut up," Bishop said. "Sunday. What's the pattern?"
"Four things." She didn't look up. "One: they're always alone.
Not one passenger in eleven years, which shouldn't be possible.
Two: they're always northbound. All thirty-one.
Southbound traffic on that road has a completely normal safety record, which is the single strangest fact I own.
Three: it's always between eleven at night and about four in the morning. "
"And four?"
Sunday straightened up.
"Four," she said, "is that eleven of them had the radio on when they were found, and in nine of those eleven reports the responding officer noted that the radio was tuned to static.
Not a station. Static. Which — nobody would think twice, except one of them's a state trooper who wrote a whole extra paragraph about it because he said the volume was all the way up and he had to reach in and turn it down before he could hear himself think. "
Nobody said anything.
"That's when I started the crosses," she said.
Judah leaned over the table. "Can I ask something?"
Sunday's eyes went to his collar. "Yes."
"Thirty-one crosses. How long does one take?"
"About twenty minutes. Longer if the ground's frozen. There's a stretch around 70 where it's caliche and I broke two hammers."
"And you did that at night."
"I work nights. That's when I'm awake."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"On the road that's killing everybody."
Sunday looked up at him — at his collar, then, after a second, at his chin, which for her is practically an embrace.
"I've been out on that shoulder at two in the morning forty-some times," she said, "and nothing has ever come for me, and I'd love to tell you I have a theory about why, but I don't, and it's kept me up."
"Huh," said Judah.
"That's spreading," Rafferty said.
"Miss Marsh." That was Delgado, down the end. "The reports. You said direction of travel."
"All thirty-one northbound."
"That's the part I can't get past," Delgado said. "A bad road's bad both ways. Ice doesn't care. A curve doesn't care."
"No."
"So whatever it is, it's not the road."
"That's the first useful sentence anybody's said in eleven years," Sunday said, "and I'd like to point out that a man got there in four minutes who has been in this room the entire time and whose name I don't know."
"Delgado."
"Delgado," she said. "Thank you."
"He doesn't sand," said three men at once.
The door opened.
"Well," said Marlowe Quinn, "I can already tell you the coffee's bad and something's very wrong, and I've been here four seconds."
I want to describe what happened next accurately, because I've now told it twice and both times somebody accused me of embellishing.
Marlowe came in shaking rain off a jacket that had no business being wet in that county. Sunday turned around. And they looked at each other — actually looked, both of them, straight on — and both women flinched like they'd grabbed a fence.
Sunday sat down. Not gracefully. She just went down onto the bench with a hand out for the table.
Marlowe put her back against the doorframe and said, in a bright and completely unconvincing voice, "Nope."
"Marlowe—" Bishop started.
"Nope, nope, give me a second, everybody stay where they are." She had her eyes shut. "Bishop, what did you bring me."
"What's happening?" I was already moving. "Sunday. Hey."
"I'm fine." She was not fine. She was gray. "It's fine. It's just loud."
"What's loud?"
"She is."
"Oh, that's rich," Marlowe said, eyes still closed. "That's very rich, coming from — do you know what you feel like? You feel like standing in a room where somebody's about to break bad news to everyone and hasn't yet. That's a real fun sensation to walk into at noon on a Thursday."
"You feel like a crowded bus," Sunday said.
"I feel like a what."
"A crowded bus. Everyone talking. Nobody getting off."
Marlowe opened her eyes and stared at her.
"Okay, that's accurate," she said. "I hate it. That's accurate."
"Can you two work?" Bishop said.
"Yes," they said, at the same time, in the same flat voice, and then looked at each other with the exact same expression of profound irritation, and Judah laughed so hard he had to leave the room.