Hide and Seek

passed it before. It seemed out of place on that one good street in

all Dead River.

I parked across from her house and put the pickup in parking gear. It

rumbled: the idle was running high again. I put my arm across the seat

and turned to ask her if she wouldn't like to tell me about it before

she went inside again. I wanted to know. It wasn't just curiosity.

She was putting me through some very fast changes. I felt she'd cut me

off again, done it quickly and thoroughly, and I wanted back in. She

opened the curbside door.

"Wait for me here."

She closed the door carefully, quietly.

I turned off the car and watched her.

She crossed the street and walked up the field stone path that cut the

lawn in two and led up to the porch. There were low shrubs planted in

a rock garden roughly as deep as the porch on either side. They

ascended in height, the symmetry almost too neat to please the eye. She

stopped in front of the first step and looked off to her left. She was

looking for something on the ground.

Now what the hell?

She took a few steps to the left and kept on looking. I had the

ridiculous momentary impression that it was night crawlers she was

after. That we were going fishing. She bent down into the garden and

took something up in each hand, seeming to weigh them before she stood

again.

From that point on her movements were completely economical. The Casey

I was used to, and even more so.

It was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. She took three

steps backward onto the lawn and looked up into the left front window.

There was a light burning inside from a floor lamp. I tried to

remember the layout of the house, and I thought it would have to be the

den, her father's workroom.

There is something terrible to me about the sound of breaking

I remember we had a cat when I was a kid who woke us all one night by

knocking a cheap cut-glass vase off the kitchen table. I was on my

feet and into the kitchen so fast that I wasn't fully awake when