Firestarter(51)

He kissed Wanless first on one cheek and then on the other. Then he pulled him back onto the bed and threw a sheet over him. It came down softly, like a parachute, and outlined Wanless's jutting and now tideless nose in white lawn.

Rainbird left the room.

That night he thought about the girl who could supposedly light fires. He thought about her a great deal. He wondered where she was, what she was thinking, what she was dreaming. He felt very tender about her, very protective.

By the time he drifted off to sleep, at just past six A.M... he was sure: the girl would be his.

TASHMORE, VERMONT

1

Andy and Charlie McGee arrived at the cottage on Tashmore Pond two days after the burning at the Manders farm. The Willys hadn't been in great shape to start with, and the muddy plunge over the woods roads that Irv had directed them onto had done little to improve it.

When dusk came on the endless day that had begun in Hastings Glen, they had been less then twenty yards from the end of the second-and worse-of the two woods roads. Below them, but screened off by a heavy growth of bushes, was Route 22. Although they couldn't see the road, they could hear the occasional swish and whine of passing cars and trucks. They slept that night in the Willys, bundled up for warmth. They set out again the next morning-yesterday morning-at just past five A.M... with daylight nothing but a faint white tone in the east.

Charlie looked pallid and listless and used up. She hadn't asked him what would happen to them if the roadblocks had been shifted east. It was just as well, because if the roadblocks had been shifted, they would be caught, and that was simply all there was to it. There was no question of ditching the Willys, either; Charlie was in no shape to walk, and for that matter, neither was he.

So Andy had pulled out onto the highway and all that day in October they had jigged and jogged along secondary roads under a white sky that promised rain but never quite delivered it. Charlie slept a great deal, and Andy worried about her-worried that she was using the sleep in an unhealthy way, using it to flee what had happened instead of trying to come to terms with it.

He stopped twice at roadside diners and picked up burgers and fries. The second time he used the five-dollar bill that the van driver, Jim Paulson, had laid on him. Most of the remaining phone change was gone. He must have lost some of it out of his pockets during that crazy time at the Manders place, but he didn't recall it. Something else was gone as well; those frightening numb places on his face had faded away sometime during the night. Those he didn't mind losing.

Most of Charlie's share of the burgers and fries went uneaten.

Last night they had driven into a highway rest area about an hour after dark. The rest area was deserted. It was autumn, and the season of the Winnebagos had passed for another year. A rustic woodburned sign read: NO CAMPING NO FIRES LEASH YOUR DOG $500 FINE FOR LITTERING.

"They're real sports around here," Andy muttered, and drove the Willys down the slope beyond the far edge of the gravel parking lot and into a copse beside a small, chuckling stream. He and Charlie got out and went wordlessly down to the water. The overcast held, but it was mild; there were no stars visible and the night seemed extraordinarily dark. They sat down for a while and listened to the brook tell its tale. He took Charlie's hand and that was when she began to cry-great, tearing sobs that seemed to be trying to rip her apart.

He took her in his arms and rocked her. "Charlie," he murmured. "Charlie, Charlie, don't. Don't cry."

"Please don't make me do it again, Daddy," she wept. "Because if you said to I'd do it and then I guess I'd kill myself, so please... please... never..."

"I love you," he said. "Be quiet and stop talking about killing yourself. That's crazy-talk."

"No," she said. "It isn't. Promise, Daddy."

He thought for a long time and then said slowly: "I don't know if I can, Charlie. But I promise to try. Will that be good enough?"

Her troubled silence was answer enough.

"I get scared, too," he said softly. "Daddies get scared, too. You better believe it."

They spent that night, too, in the cab of the Willys. They were back on the road by six o'clock in the morning. The clouds had broken up, and by ten o'clock it had become a flawless, Indian-summery day. Not long after they crossed the Vermont state line they saw men riding ladders like masts in tossing apple trees and trucks in the orchards filled with bushel baskets of Macs.

At eleven-thirty they turned off Route 34 and onto a narrow, rutted dirt road marked PRIVATE PROPERTY, and something in Andy's chest loosened. They had made it to Granther McGee's place. They were here.

They drove slowly down toward the pond, a distance of perhaps a mile and a half. October leaves, red and gold, swirled across the road in front of the Jeep's blunt nose. Just as glints of water began to show through the trees, the road branched in two. A heavy steel chain hung across the smaller branch, and from the chain a rust-flecked yellow sign: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF COUNTY SHERIFF. Most of the rust flecks had formed around six or eight dimples in the metal, and Andy guessed that some summer kid had spent a few minutes working off his boredom by plinking at the sign with his.22. But that had been years ago.

He got out of the Willys and took his keyring out of his pocket. There was a leather tab on the ring with his initials. A.McG... almost obliterated. Vicky had given him that piece of leather for Christmas one year-a Christmas before Charlie had been born.