I folded the note around the key to my room, printed her name on it, and pushed it under her door. Goodbye, Alice.
I slung my laptop over my right shoulder, picked up my suitcase in my right hand, and left by the side door. Half a mile down the road I stopped to rest, and to do one other thing. I opened the suitcase and took out the two guns – my Glock and the ACP Marge had shot me with. I unloaded them and threw them as far as I could. The bullets would go into one of the trashcans at the truck stop.
With that taken care of, I started walking toward the lights and the big trucks and the rest of my life. Maybe even toward some kind of atonement, if that’s not too much to ask for. Probably it is.
CHAPTER 24
1
It’s November 21, 2019, a week from Thanksgiving, but the occupants of the house at the end of Edgewood Mountain Drive aren’t in a Thanksgiving frame of mind. It’s cold outside – colder than a welldigger’s belt-buckle, Bucky says – and snow is on the way. He has lit a fire in the kitchen stove and sits in one of his rocking chairs dragged in from the porch with his sock feet up on the fender. He’s got an open laptop, rather scratched and battered, balanced on his thighs. A door opens behind him and footsteps approach. Alice comes into the kitchen and sits at the table. She’s pale and at least ten pounds lighter than the first time Bucky saw her. Her cheeks are hollowed out, giving her the look of a half-starved fashion model.
‘Finished, or still reading?’
‘Finished. Just looking at the end again. That part doesn’t make much sense.’
Alice says nothing.
‘Because if he left you the thumb drive, the part about him walking down the road and throwing away the guns couldn’t be on it.’
Alice says nothing. Since she arrived at Bucky’s place, she has said very little, and Bucky hasn’t pushed her. What she’s done, mostly, is sleep and write on the laptop Bucky now closes and holds up.
‘MacBook Pro. Nice gadget, but this one has been around the block a few times.’
‘Yes,’ Alice says. ‘I guess that’s true.’
‘So in the story Billy took his laptop with him, but here it is. Add the stuff that couldn’t be on the thumb drive and it’s kind of a science fiction – type story.’
The young woman sitting at the kitchen table says nothing.
‘Still, there’s no reason it shouldn’t hold together. No reason for people who read it to think he didn’t just walk away and is living out west somewhere. Or in Australia, he always talked about that. Maybe writing a book. Another one. He always talked about that too, but I never thought it would come to anything.’
He looks at her. Alice looks back. Outside a cold wind is blowing and it looks like snow, but it’s warm here in the kitchen. A knot pops in the stove.
At last Bucky says, ‘
‘I don’t know … I’d have to change the names …’
He shakes his head. ‘Klerke’s murder was world-wide news. Still …’ He sees her disappointment and shrugs. ‘They’d maybe think it was a
‘Is it any good, do you think?’
He puts the laptop – Billy’s old standby – on the kitchen table. ‘I think so, but I’m no literary critic.’
‘Does it sound like him?’
Bucky laughs. ‘Sweetheart, I never read anything he wrote, so I can’t say for sure, but it sure sounds like his voice. And the voice stays the same all the way through. Put it this way, I can’t tell for sure where you took over.’
Smiles have been in short supply since Alice came back, but she gives him one now. ‘That’s good. I think it’s the most important part.’
