Firestarter(53)

"You miss Mom, don't you?" Charlie said in a forlorn voice.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I do."

"Me too," Charlie said. "You had fun here, didn't you?"

"We did," he agreed. "Come on, Charlie."

She held back, looking at him.

"Daddy, will things ever be all right for us again? Will I be able to go to school and things?"

He considered a lie, but a lie was a poor answer. "I don't know," he said. He tried to smile, but it wouldn't come; he found he could not even stretch his lips convincingly. "I don't know, Charlie."

2

Granther's tools were all still neatly racked in the toolshed portion of the boathouse, and Andy found a bonus he had hoped for but had told himself not to hope for too much: nearly two cords of wood, neatly split and time-seasoned in the bay beneath the boathouse. Most of it he had split himself, and it was still under the sheet of ragged, dirty canvas he had thrown over it. Two cords wouldn't take them through the winter, but by the time he finished carving up the blowdowns around the camp and the birch back on the road, they would be well set.

He took the bucksaw back up to the fallen tree and cut it up enough to get the Willys through. By then it was nearly dark, and he was tired and hungry. No one had bothered to rip off the well stocked pantry, either; if there had been vandals or thieves or snowmobiles over the last six winters, they had stuck to the more populous southern end of the lake. There were five shelves packed with Campbell's soups and Wyman's sardines and Dinty Moore beef stew and all sorts of canned vegetables. There was also still half a case of Rival dog food on the floor-a legacy of Granther's good old dog Bimbo-but Andy didn't think it would come to that.

While Charlie looked at the books on the shelves in the big living room, Andy went into the small root cellar that was three steps down from the pantry, scratched a wooden match on one of the beams, stuck his finger into the knothole in one of the boards that lined the sides of the little dirt floored room, and pulled. The board came out and Andy looked inside. After a moment he grinned. Inside the cobweb-festooned little bolt-hole were four mason jars filled with a clear, slightly oily looking liquid that was one-hundred-percent pure white lightning-what Granther called "father's mule-kick."

The match burned Andy's fingers. He shook it out and lit a second. Like the dour New England preachers of old (from whom she had been a direct descendant), Hulda McGee had no liking, understanding, or tolerance for the simple and slightly stupid male pleasures. She had been a Puritan atheist, and this had been Granther's little secret, which he had shared with Andy the year before he died.

Besides the white lightning, there was a caddy for poker chips. Andy pulled it out and felt in the slot at the top. There was a crackling sound, and he pulled out a thin sheaf of bills-a few tens and fives and some ones. Maybe eighty dollars all told. Granther's weakness had been seven-card stud, and this was what he called his "struttin money."

The second match burned his fingers, and Andy shook it out. Working in the dark, he put the poker chips back, money and all. It was good to know it was there. He replaced the board and went back through the pantry.

"Tomato soup do you?" he asked Charlie. Wonder of wonders, she had found all the Pooh books on one of the shelves and was currently some where in the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and Eeyore.

"Sure," she said, not looking up.

He made a big pot of tomato soup and opened them each a tin of sardines. He lit one of the kerosene lamps after carefully drawing the drapes and put it in the middle of the dining table. They sat down and ate, neither of them talking much. Afterward he smoked a cigarette, lighting it over the chimney of the lamp. Charlie discovered the card drawer in Grandma's Welsh dresser; there were eight or nine decks in there, each of them missing a jack or a deuce or something, and she spent the rest of the evening sorting them and playing with them while Andy prowled through the camp.

Later, tucking her into bed, he asked her how she felt.

"Safe," she said with no hesitation at all. "Goodnight, Daddy."

If it was good enough for Charlie, it was good enough for him. He sat with her awhile, but she dropped off to sleep quickly and with no trouble, and he left after propping her door open so he would hear her if she became restless in the night.

3

Before turning in, Andy went back down to the root cellar, got one of the jars of white lightning, poured himself a small knock in a juice glass, and went out through the sliding door and onto the deck. He sat in one of the canvas director's chairs (mildewy smell; he wondered briefly if something could be done about that) and looked out at the dark, moving bulk of the lake. It was a trifle chilly, but a couple of small sips at Granther's mule-kick took care of the chill quite nicely. For the first time since that terrible chase up Third Avenue, he too felt safe and at rest.

He smoked and looked out across Tashmore Pond.

Safe and at rest, but not for the first time since New York City. For the first time since the Shop had come back into their lives on that terrible August day fourteen months ago. Since then they had either been running or hunkering down, and either way there was no rest.

He remembered talking to Quincey on the telephone with the smell of burned carpeting in his nostrils. He in Ohio, Quincey out there in California, which in his few letters he always called the Magic Earthquake Kingdom. Yes, it's a good thing, Quincey had said. Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free... I bet they'd just want to take that child and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that's all I want to say, old buddy, except... keep your head down.