NOS4A2(77)

That great shelf of snow slid a few hundred yards and hit the tree line and exploded in a white blast, a tidal wave of snow thirty feet high.

The father who had an AmEx lifted his boy up and set him on his shoulders to watch.

“We are in the wild now, little guy,” he said, while an acre of mountaintop forest was smothered under six hundred tons of snow.

“Isn’t that a goddamn,” Lou said, and looked down the embankment at Wayne. His father’s face shone with happiness. “Can you imagine being underneath it? Can you imagine all that shit coming down on you?”

Wayne could—and did, all the time. He thought it would be the best way to die: wiped out in a brilliant crash of snow and light, the world roaring around you as it slid apart.

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last.

His mother had been crazy for a while, had believed that the phone was ringing when it wasn’t, had conversations with dead children who weren’t there. Sometimes he felt she had talked more with dead children than she ever had with him. She had burned down their house. She spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, skipped out on a court appearance, and dropped out of Wayne’s life for almost two years. She spent a while on book tour, visiting bookstores in the morning and local bars at night. She hung out in L.A. for six months, working on a cartoon version of Search Engine that never got off the ground and a cocaine habit that did. She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to.

Wayne’s father got sick of Vic’s drinking, Vic’s wandering, and Vic’s crazy, and he took up with the lady who had done most of his tattoos, a girl named Carol who had big hair and dressed like it was still the eighties. Only Carol had another boyfriend, and they stole Lou’s identity and ran off to California, where they racked up a ten-thousand-dollar debt in Lou’s name. Lou was still dealing with creditors.

Bruce Wayne Carmody wanted to love and enjoy his parents, and occasionally he did. But they made it hard. Which was why the papers in his back pocket felt like nitroglycerin, a bomb that hadn’t exploded yet.

He supposed if there was any chance it might go off later, he ought to have a look, figure out how much damage it could do and how best to shelter himself from the blast. He pulled the papers out of his back pocket, took a last secretive glance at his house, and folded the pages open on his knee.

The first newspaper article featured a photo of Charles Talent Manx, the dead serial killer. Manx’s face was so long it looked like it had melted a little. He had protruding eyes and a goofy overbite and a bald, bulging skull that bore a resemblance to a cartoon dinosaur egg.

This man Charles Manx had been arrested above Gunbarrel almost fifteen years ago. He was a kidnapper who’d transported an unnamed minor across state lines, then burned a man to death for trying to stop him.

No one knew how old he was when they locked him up. He didn’t thrive in jail. By 2001 he was in a coma in the hospital wing of the Supermax in Denver. He lingered like that for eleven years before passing away last May.

After that the article was mostly bloodthirsty speculation. Manx had a hunting cottage outside Gunbarrel, where the trees were hung with hundreds of Christmas ornaments. The press dubbed the place the “Sleigh House,” which managed two puns, neither of them any good. The article implied he had been imprisoning and slaughtering children there for years. It mentioned only in passing that no bodies had ever been discovered on the grounds.

What did any of this have to do with Victoria McQueen, mother of Bruce Wayne Carmody? Nothing, as far as Wayne could see. Maybe if he looked at the other articles, he would figure it out. He went on.

“Alleged Serial Killer’s Corpse Vanishes from Morgue” was next. Someone had broken into St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver, slugged a security guard, and made off with dead old Charlie Manx. The body snatcher had swiped a Trans Am from the parking lot across the street, too.

The third piece was a clipping from a paper in Louisville, Kentucky, and didn’t have a damn thing to do with Charles Manx.

It was titled “Boeing Engineer Vanishes; Local Mystery Troubles Police, IRS.” It was accompanied by a photograph of a tanned and wiry man with a thick black mustache, leaning against an old Rolls-Royce, elbows resting on the hood.

Bruce frowned his way through the story. Nathan Demeter had been reported missing by his teenage daughter, who had returned from school to find the house unlocked, the garage open, a half-eaten lunch on the table, and her father’s antique Rolls-Royce gone. The IRS seemed to think Demeter might’ve skipped out to evade prosecution for income-tax evasion. His daughter didn’t believe it, said he was either kidnapped or dead, but there was no way he would’ve run out on her without telling her why and where he was going.

What any of this had to do with Charles Talent Manx, Wayne couldn’t see. He thought maybe he had missed something, wondered if he ought to go back to the start and reread everything. He was just about to flip back to the first of the photocopies when he spotted Hooper, squatting in the yard across the street, dropping turds the size of bananas in the grass. They were the color of bananas, too: green ones.

“Aw, no!” Wayne cried. “Aw, no, big guy!”

He dropped the papers on the sidewalk and started across the street.