Burn(76)

His tears had never fallen, perhaps that they’d even reached his eye counted among dragons as weeping. He held up a hand, cutting off the planned comfort he saw on her face.

“The truth is,” he said, “I do not know for sure and almost certainly never will.”

“Then all you can do is your best. Always. That’s it.”

He still faced away from her, but then he cocked his head. “Someone is coming.”

“I don’t hear anything.” Then she did. His ears were unnervingly sharp. A car—not the sheriff’s, not the Inagawas’s—was coming up the road. An Oldsmobile. They watched it pull around a bend and slow as it saw them. A man in a fedora was behind the wheel, a solemn little girl in the passenger seat.

“Hello,” the man said, rolling down his window. “Can you direct me to the Dewhurst farm?”

He seemed so friendly, so confident, that Sarah found herself on the verge of answering, before Kazimir interrupted. “Who might be asking?”

The man still smiled, his little girl watching seriously. She had a book with her. Little House in the Big Woods. “I read that,” Sarah said. “The Long Winter was my favorite, though.”

“Mine, too,” the little girl said, quietly.

“Well, now, see?” said the man. “We’re already friends.”

“People who say that out loud tend to be no man’s friends,” Kazimir said.

The man stuck the tip of his tongue on his top lip, as if thinking, then Sarah saw him turn to his daughter and raise his eyebrows. The little girl shrugged, and her father—if that’s who he was—turned back to her and Kazimir.

“I’m wondering,” the man said, still friendly, “if you two in particular might be people who could tell me a little something about dragons.”

Kazimir and Sarah exchanged a look, then he surprised her by saying, “That depends upon how committed you are to stopping one.”

It had only taken Malcolm four different cars to get all the way to Bellingham. All four drivers had been single men. One of them tried to convert him to Christianity, and two of the others had asked for sex, one obliquely, circling into it through jokes and small attempts at dirty talk, but the other had unzipped his fly and taken himself out before they were five minutes down the road. “You want a ride, you gotta pay,” he’d said and tried to force Malcolm’s face down. A blade held at the man’s jugular was good for silence for another twenty miles, but the whole thing left Malcolm feeling so dirty—for the man’s actions, for his own, however “justified” they might be—that he made the man drop him off long before the promised destination.

What was wrong with this world? There were no dragons. Did men think they needed to take their place?

Fortunately, the fourth man just seemed decent. “I used to travel by thumb,” he said. “I remember it being less fun than I thought it would be.”

“You’re not wrong there, sir,” Malcolm had replied.

After a pleasant final leg of more than two hours, the man had dropped Malcolm off at a phone booth in Bellingham. The man leaned out of the car as Malcolm left it and said, simply, “I hope you find what you’re looking for, son.”

“Me too,” Malcolm said.

He waited until the man drove off, then went into the phone booth and took out the phone book. He was playing a very long shot, but if there was even a chance, even the remotest chance, he had to try. This town, near the border with Canada, had slipped from the mouth of the Mitera Thea more than once over the years, in enough subtle ways that Malcolm came to understand that it was from here he probably came, where his parents were lost, where a Believer—the Mitera Thea always said it was herself—had found him and adopted him into the life of the church.

He was also working on a hunch from a single name mentioned a single time over his seventeen years of life, when the Mitera Thea had a rare cross moment with him, saying he was lucky she didn’t send him back to the “vicious distant relations of poor dead Mr. and Mrs. Ottaviano—” She had caught herself and stopped, refusing any further entreaties from him and never making the slip again.

But he had never forgotten.

Ottaviano wasn’t a common name.

There was one, just one, in the Bellingham phone book.

He walked to the address given, sure it would be a mistake, sure that the phone book would be out of date or that, even if not, this would clearly be a “vicious distant relation,” but he went anyway, to a tidy little house in a nice neighborhood, watching it from across the street.

He hadn’t been waiting more than half an hour, when the front door opened, and Malcolm watched himself walk out.

“Here’s another stranger in my house,” Darlene said, handing a coffee to the man who’d identified himself as Agent Dernovich, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, ma’am.” She handed a hot chocolate to the little girl he had with him, so obviously his daughter she may as well have been wearing a name tag.

“I’m sorry to put you to trouble, Mrs. Dewhurst,” he said, “but I’m guessing my appearance at your farm might not be all that much of a surprise?”

“A day after a dragon flew across my property?” Darlene said, sounding almost amused to the ears of Sarah. “A day after my dead daughter walked right up to my door?”