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ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm Consolidated had been alerted that Miss
Dunhill’s ex-husband might be dangerous, and Miss Dunhill herself had provided
a photograph of Clayton, but Principal Dockerty said he had disguised his
appearance.
Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.
3
Never a crying man, that’s me, but I made up for it that night. That night I cried myself to sleep, and
for the first time in a very long time, my sleep was deep and restful.
Alive.
She was alive.
Scarred for life—oh yes, undoubtedly—but alive.
Alive, alive, alive.
4
The world was still there, and it still harmonized . . . or perhaps I made it harmonize. When we make
that harmony ourselves, I guess we call it habit. I caught on as a sub in the Westborough school
system, then caught on full-time. It did not surprise me that the principal at the local high school was
a gung-ho football freak named Borman . . . as in a certain jolly coach I’d once known in another place.
I stayed in touch with my old friends from Lisbon Falls for awhile, and then I didn’t. C’est la vie.
I checked the Dallas Morning News archives again, and discovered a short item in the May 29 issue
from 1963: JODIE LIBRARIAN LEAVES HOSPITAL. It was short and largely uninformative.
Nothing about her condition and nothing about her future plans. And no photo. Squibs buried on
page 20, between ads for discount furniture and door-to-door sales opportunities, never come with
photos. It’s one of life’s great truisms, like the way the phone always rings while you’re on the john or
in the shower.
In the year after I came back to the Land of Now, there were some sites and some search topics I
steered clear of. Was I tempted? Of course. But the net is a double-edged sword. For every thing you
find that’s of comfort—like discovering that the woman you loved survived her crazy ex-husband—
there are two with the power to hurt. A person searching for news of a certain someone might discover
that that someone had been killed in an accident. Or died of lung cancer as a result of smoking. Or
committed suicide, in the case of this particular someone most likely accomplished with a
combination of booze and sleeping pills.
Sadie alone, with no one to slap her awake and stick her in a cold shower. If that had happened, I
didn’t want to know.
I used the internet to prep for my classes, I used it to check the movie listings, and once or twice a
week I checked out the latest viral videos. What I didn’t do was check for news of Sadie. I suppose that
if Jodie had had a newspaper I might have been even more tempted, but it hadn’t had one then and
surely didn’t now, when that very same internet was slowly strangling the print media. Besides,
there’s an old saying: peek not through a knothole, lest ye be vexed. Was there ever a bigger knothole in
human history than the internet?