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.The real her.“Listen,” George Orson said.“What if I told you that you could leave your old self behind? Right now.What if I told you we could bury George Orson and Lucy Lattimore, right here.Right in this little dead town.”He wasn’t dangerous, she thought.He wouldn’t hurt her.And yet his face, his eyes had such an odd, unnerving intensity.She wouldn’t have been surprised if he was going to tell her that he had done something terrible.Murdered someone, maybe.Would she still love him, would she still stay with him, if he had committed some awful crime?“George,” she said, and she could hear how hoarse and uncertain her voice sounded, down in this valley.“Are you trying to scare me?”“Not at all,” George Orson said, and he took her palms in his and held them firmly and drew his face close to hers, so that she could see how bright and avid and earnest his eyes were.“No, honey, I swear to God, I would never try to scare you.Never.”And then he smiled at her, hopefully.“It’s just that—oh, sweetheart, I don’t think I can be George Orson for much longer.And if we’re going to stay together, you can’t be Lucy Lattimore much longer, either.”Across the weedy lake bed, the clouds were stacked above the opposite shore, dirty white fading upward into dark gray.A vapor of dust stirred up across the valley where there were once fathoms of water.13Miles was sitting in a bar in Inuvik when his phone rang.He was hovering over his fourth beer, and at first he wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from—just a tiny computerized twitter of birdsong that seemed to be emanating from an undisclosed location in the air around him.He glanced at the bartender, and then over his shoulder, and then at the floor below his bar stool, and then at last he discovered the chirping was actually the phone in his jacket pocket.This was the phone he had purchased at the local wireless place—Ice Wireless, it was called—since he had realized his own phone couldn’t get reception.One of the many things he hadn’t taken into account when he left Cleveland.One of the many expenditures that had been added to his credit card over the years, in search of Hayden.But here: this time it turned out to be worth it.The phone was actually ringing.“Hello?” he said, and there was a blank sound.“Hello? Hello?” he said.He wasn’t used to this phone yet, wasn’t sure if he was operating it correctly.Then there was a woman’s voice.“I’m calling about the poster?” she said, and at first he was so flustered to encounter a voice at the other end of the phone that synapses in his brain stumbled over one another.“The poster …?” he said.“Yes,” the woman said.“There was a flyer—a missing person—and this was the number that it said to call.I think I have information about the person on the poster.” She had an American accent, the first one he’d heard in a while, and he straightened, patting his pockets for a pen.“I believe I know the person you’re looking for,” she said.He was a terrible detective.That was one of the things he had been thinking about on the drive to Inuvik.He had spent the entire decade of his twenties looking for Hayden—sleepwalking through various odd jobs and attempts at higher education—and all the while thinking that his “real” vocation was elsewhere.His real vocation was “detective,” his real vocation was looking for Hayden, he’d thought, his every attempt at normalcy punctuated—punctured—by periods of intense Hayden-obsession: gathering and sifting through data, spending his money and charging up credit cards so that he could go on these long, fruitless trips.Though in fact, the truth was, in all these years, he’d done little but accumulate endless notebooks full of unanswered questions:Is Hayden schizophrenic? Does he have a mental illness, or is that an act?Unknown.Does Hayden really believe in his “past lives,” and if so, how is that related to his study of “ley lines,” “geodesy,” and “spirit cities”? Or is this, too, a scam?Unknown.Was Hayden responsible for the house fire that killed our mother and Mr.Spady?Unknown.Why was Hayden in Los Angeles, and what was the nature of his “residual income stream consultant” business?Unknown.What was the nature of his graduate work in mathematics at the University of Missouri, Rolla? How did he get accepted into graduate school when he hadn’t even completed an undergraduate degree?Unknown.What happened to the young woman he was dating in Missouri?Unknown [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]