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Crow . . . put into her.”<br />
“Soon,” Dave said. “You’ll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if<br />
she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.<br />
“I can start on the way back to your grandmother’s,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come<br />
on.”<br />
8<br />
He had time to tell her how a lost man had ridden a northbound bus out of Massachusetts, and how—<br />
just over the New Hampshire state line—he’d tossed what would turn out to be his last bottle of<br />
booze into a trash can with IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE stenciled on the side.<br />
He told them how his childhood friend Tony had spoken up for the first time in years when the bus<br />
had rolled into Frazier. This is the place, Tony had said.<br />
From there he doubled back to a time when he had been Danny instead of Dan (and sometimes doc,<br />
as in what’s up, doc), and his invisible friend Tony had been an absolute necessity. The shining was only<br />
one of the burdens that Tony helped him bear, and not the major one. The major one was his alcoholic<br />
father, a troubled and ultimately dangerous man whom both Danny and his mother had loved deeply<br />
—perhaps as much because of his flaws as in spite of them.<br />
“He had a terrible temper, and you didn’t have to be a telepath to know when it was getting the<br />
best of him. For one thing, he was usually drunk when it happened. I know he was loaded on the night<br />
he caught me in his study, messing with his papers. He broke my arm.”<br />
“How old were you?” Dave asked. He was riding in the backseat with his wife.<br />
“Four, I think. Maybe even younger. When he was on the warpath, he had this habit of rubbing his<br />
mouth.” Danny demonstrated. “Do you know anyone else who does that when she’s upset?”<br />
“Abra,” Lucy said. “I thought she got it from me.” She raised her right hand toward her mouth,<br />
then captured it with her left and returned it to her lap. Dan had seen Abra do exactly the same thing<br />
on the bench outside the Anniston Public Library, on the day they’d met in person for the first time.<br />
“I thought she got her temper from me, too. I can be . . . pretty ragged sometimes.”<br />
“I thought of my father the first time I saw her do the mouth-rubbing thing,” Dan said, “but I had<br />
other things on my mind. So I forgot.” This made him think of Watson, the caretaker at the<br />
Overlook, who had first shown the hotel’s untrustworthy furnace boiler to his father. You have to watch<br />
it, Watson had said. Because she creeps. But in the end, Jack Torrance had forgotten. It was the reason<br />
Dan was still alive.<br />
“Are you telling me you figured out this family relationship from one little habit? That’s quite a<br />
deductive leap, especially when it’s you and I who look alike, not you and Abra—she gets most of her<br />
looks from her father.” Lucy paused, thinking. “But of course you share another family trait—Dave<br />
says you call it the shining. That’s how you knew, isn’t it?”<br />
Dan shook his head. “I made a friend the year my father died. His name was Dick Hallorann, and<br />
he was the cook at the Overlook Hotel. He also had the shining, and he told me lots of people had a<br />
little bit of it. He was right. I’ve met plenty of people along the way who shine to a greater or lesser<br />
degree. Billy Freeman, for one. Which is why he’s with Abra right now.”<br />
John swung the Suburban into the little parking area behind Concetta’s condo, but for the time<br />
being, none of them got out. In spite of her worry about her daughter, Lucy was fascinated by this<br />
history lesson. Dan didn’t have to look at her to know it.<br />
“If it wasn’t the shining, what was it?”