Chapter 7
Sunday
The engine idled in that lot for four minutes and eleven seconds.
I know because Rafferty counted it out loud in a whisper against my hair, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, all the way, without stopping, and I have decided that is the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me and I understand that says a great deal about my life.
We didn't move. He had one hand on my wrist and the other one somewhere I couldn't see and didn't ask about.
At four minutes and eleven seconds it quit.
Not faded. Quit.
The lights came back on twenty seconds later — counter, neon, range hood, and the jukebox picking up Roy Orbison at the exact syllable it had dropped him, which is when I stood up and said, "Nope," out loud, in the voice of a woman leaving a building.
There was nothing in the lot. No tire marks, no oil, no heat off the gravel. Rafferty walked the whole perimeter with a flashlight and came back and said one word, which was "nothing," and I said, "Welcome to my field of study."
We were back at the clubhouse by five.
Marlowe was already awake, sitting on the porch rail with a blanket around her shoulders like a woman on the world's worst cruise.
"Something happened," she said.
"Something happened," I agreed.
"No, I mean I felt it happen. Around three. I was in the truck at 74 and every hair on my body stood up and I said a prayer I don't know the words to." She looked at me, then very deliberately at my collar, then at Rafferty, then back at my collar. "Also something else happened."
"Marlowe."
"I'm psychic, not blind, your shirt's buttoned wrong."
"It's a complicated shirt."
"It's a cardigan," Marlowe said.
I spread the map on the chapel table at seven in the morning with four cups of coffee in me and an entire other person's jacket on my shoulders, and I did not intend to solve anything. I want that understood. I intended to make a chart.
I'd been listing the deaths chronologically for two years. Chronological is how reports come, so chronological is how I filed them, and chronological is a prison.
That morning I put them in geographic order for the first time.
Mile 61.4. Mile 62.0. Mile 62.9. Mile 63.1.
"Anybody got a pen that works," I said.
"There's a jar."
"The jar is a lie, Judah, the jar is thirty dead pens and a AA battery."
"It's an aspirational jar," Judah said.
I plotted all thirty-one on the strip by exact milepost, and then I sat back, and then I stood up, and then I went and got the roll of butcher paper from the kitchen because a road map is not the right shape for what I was looking at.
Thirteen miles. Thirty-one marks.
They weren't spread out. That's the thing I'd never seen, because I'd never asked the map that question. They clustered — a tight run of six here, then two miles of nothing, then a run of four, then a single, then a pair, then eight almost on top of each other between 70 and 71.
I drew it out at scale, one inch to a tenth of a mile, and it took the whole roll and most of the floor.
"What are you doing," Rafferty said, from the doorway, at nine.
"Shh."
"Have you eaten?"
"Shh."
At nine-forty Judah brought me toast, which I did not ask for and did not eat and which sat there going cold like a small reproach.
At ten he came back.
"Can I help?"
"You can hold the end of a tape measure and say nothing."
"That's my two best skills."
He held the end of a tape measure for forty minutes and said nothing, which is a thing I have never once had a man do, and at one point I looked up and found him just standing there at the far end of the paper with the tab hooked over his boot, patient as furniture.
"Judah."
"Mm."
"Why is nobody asking me if I'm okay?"
"Bishop said not to."
"Why?"
"Because you're working," Judah said, "and he says people who are working should be let to work, and the asking is usually for us anyway." He shrugged. "He's been right about that maybe six times out of ten, which around here is a landslide."
At ten-forty I stopped, and sat on my heels in the middle of thirty feet of butcher paper, and said a word my mother would not like.
"What," said Rafferty.
"Get Bishop."
"Sunday—"
"Get Bishop."
They all came in. That's the thing about that club that I still can't quite get over. I said get Bishop and eleven men came in and stood along the wall of their own chapel and waited for a tow dispatcher in a stolen cardigan to talk.
"Somebody stand at that end," I said.
Judah stood at that end.
"Okay. So." My hands were shaking, which I noticed distantly, like weather in another county. "I've had these deaths in date order for two years. Date order tells you a story about time. It says: a road killed some people, slowly, over eleven years. That's the story I've been reading."
"And?"
"And it's the wrong story, because the road doesn't care what year it is." I walked the paper. "This is milepost order. Every death, plotted where it physically happened. Six here. Gap. Four here. Gap. One. Gap. Two. Gap. Eight."
"So it's got favorite spots," Judah said.
"That's what I thought. That's what anybody would think — bad curve, bad sightline, whatever. Except there is no curve. There is no sightline. It's straight, Judah, it's the straightest thirteen miles in the state, there is nothing physically different about Mile 70 than Mile 65."
Bishop hadn't said a word. He was looking at the paper.
"Stand up," he said. "Everybody stand up. Get off the floor and look down at it."
We stood up.
It took about four seconds.
"Oh," said Marlowe, from the doorway, quietly. "Oh, that's a W."
"It's not a W," I said. "Keep going."
Because it isn't a W. Six marks in a tight run is a stroke. Four is a stroke. One is a dot. Two is a crossbar.
Thirty-one deaths, laid out along thirteen miles of highway, in order, spelling out four letters in a hand like somebody dragging a stick through dirt.
D. A. W. N.
Nobody said anything for a while.
"That's the diner," Rafferty said.
"That's the diner," I said.
"Sunday, that's the diner we were in—"
"I know what diner we were in, Rafferty, I was there for a lot of it."
Judah opened his mouth, looked at Bishop, and closed it again with tremendous discipline.
"Somebody explain to me what we're looking at," Bishop said. "Slowly. Because what I'm hearing is that a road has handwriting."
"It's not the road."
"Then what."
"I don't know yet." I crouched at the D. "But look at how it's written. Every stroke runs south to north. Every single one. You don't write a letter that way unless the pen only goes one direction, and the pen only goes one direction because—"
"Because it's driving," Delgado said.
The room went very quiet.
"Yes," I said. "Thank you. Yes. Something is driving north over and over and every time it goes it takes somebody with it, and where it takes them is where the stroke goes, and it has been doing that since 2011."
"Why 2011?" Bishop said.
"That's the second thing I can't answer."
"What's the first?"
"Why a name," I said. "Ghosts don't sign things. Marlowe's been telling me that for a week. The dead repeat, they don't compose."
Marlowe, from the doorway: "Unless somebody's making them."
"Eight more to go," I said.
"What?"
"Look at the N." I crouched down and put my finger at Mile 71, at the eight clustered marks, where the last stroke ran out and stopped clean.
"It's not finished. The last leg's missing.
Whatever this is, it's writing a name, and it's got one stroke left, and it needs — " I counted the strokes against the deaths, and my mouth went dry — "somewhere between six and eight more people to finish it. "
The chapel got very quiet.
"How long's it been since the last one?" Bishop said.
"Fourteen months."
"That's a long gap."
"It's the longest gap in eleven years," I said.
"The average is four and a half months. It hasn't taken anyone since June of last year.
" I stood up. "It's hungry, Bishop. It's been sitting out there hungry for fourteen months with four letters almost done, and this week it took a twenty-four-year-old and started idling in parking lots. "
Somebody swore. I didn't see who.
"Dawn who," Bishop said.
"That's the next question."
"That's the only question," Bishop said. "Marlowe—"
"Way ahead of you." Marlowe already had her jacket. "The diner's got a name on a health permit and a health permit's got a licensee, and a licensee's got a paper trail, and I've been bored for two days."
"Take Judah."
"I'd rather take her."
Everyone looked at me.
"We can't be in the same car," I said.
"We can be in the same building," Marlowe said, "and county records is a big building, and frankly I'm curious how bad it gets, aren't you? Scientifically?"
"You are a menace."
"I'm a researcher."
County records let us in at one o'clock and told us we could have forty minutes because of a thing with the boiler.
The drive over was forty-one minutes of two women in separate vehicles talking on the radio, because we couldn't be in a car together, which sounds absurd and which we had both accepted with the weary practicality of people who have each spent their lives working around one impossible fact.
"You're quiet," Marlowe said, somewhere on the 95.
"I'm driving."
"You're quiet. There's a difference and I've been in a truck with Judah for two days so I know the whole range."
"I'm thinking about 2011."
"Say it out loud, then. That's what the radio's for."
"Something ended in 2011," I said. "That's what a gap like that means. Seventeen years of nothing and then eleven years of a name. Something was holding it and then stopped, or something was keeping it quiet and went away."
"Or somebody stopped remembering," Marlowe said.
I didn't answer that, because I was going about eighty and my hands had gone strange on the wheel.
DAWN'S DINER, State Route 9, Mile 68. Licensed 1979. Licensee: Dawn Ellery Marsh.
I read it three times before it went in.
"Sunday?" Marlowe said.
I couldn't get my mouth to do anything.
"Sunday. Hey. What."
"That's my aunt," I said.