5432852385743

little hysterically. “Mama probably would have loved that old broom.”
“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we
can get on with our lives?’”
“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”
“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”
She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”
I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”
She looked. And then she touched.
12
I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane—but I
got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was
moving around upstairs—it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it
seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with
our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I
WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES
FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.
Thud, clump, thud.
From overhead.
“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like
gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer,
perhaps.
Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.
Clud, thump, clud.
Plaster-dust sifting down.
“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”
Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.
She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the
Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we’re here!”
13
“Wake up, George! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What
time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.
“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously.
“Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’”
“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she
lit a cigarette.
“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”
That was not good. “Like what?”
“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then