Even now, glaring at the button box resting securely between her feet, Gwendy believes with all her heart that the bulk of her success can be attributed to hard work and a positive attitude, not to mention thick skin and persistence.
But what if what she believes to be true … simply isn’t?
23
A LIGHT SNOW IS falling from a low-hanging, slate gray sky when Gwendy lands at the Castle County Airport out on Route 39. Nothing heavy, just a kiss on the cheek from the north that will leave yards and roadways coated with an inch or so of slush by dinnertime.
She called ahead before boarding the plane and asked Billy Finkelstein, one of only two full-timers at Castle County Airport, to jump her car battery back to life and pull her Subaru hatchback out of one of the three narrow hangars that run alongside the wooded shoulder of Route 39.
Billy is true to his word, and the car’s waiting for her in the parking lot, both the engine and heater running hard. She thanks Billy, sliding him a tip even though it’s against the rules, and nods hello to his boss, Jessie Martin, one of her father’s old bowling partners. She loads her carry-on into the front passenger seat and tosses her tote bag on top of it.
On her way home, Gwendy makes a pair of quick phone calls. The first is to her father to let him know she landed safely and that she’ll be there for dinner tonight. Mom’s asleep on the sofa, so she doesn’t get to speak to her, but Dad’s pleased as punch and looking forward to seeing Gwendy later.
The second call is to Castle County Sheriff Norris Ridgewick’s cellphone. It rings straight to voicemail, so she leaves a message after the beep: “Hey, Norris, it’s Gwendy Peterson. I just got back into town and figured we ought to touch base. Give me a buzz when you can.”
As she presses the END button on her phone, Gwendy feels the Subaru’s back tires momentarily loosen their grip on the road. She carefully steers back into the center of the lane and drops her speed. That’s all you need, she thinks. Hit a telephone pole, knock yourself unconscious, and have the button box discovered by some nineteen-year-old snowplow driver with a tin of Red Man in his back pocket and frozen snot crusted on his lip.
24
THERE ARE ONLY TWO ways up to Castle View in 1999: Route 117 and Pleasant Road. Gwendy steers the Subaru onto Pleasant, climbing past a winding half-mile stretch of single homes—ranchers, Cape Cods, and saltbox colonials; many of them decorated for Christmas—and takes a left after the new American Legion playground onto View Drive. She drives another couple hundred yards and then makes a right into the snow-covered parking lot of Castle View Condominiums. Several years ago, she and Ryan were among the first half-dozen folks to purchase a unit in the newly built complex. Despite their busy travel schedules, they’ve been happy there ever since.
Gwendy swings into a reserved spot in the front row and turns off the engine. Circling to the passenger side to pull out her suitcase, she glances down a series of gently sloping hills to a fenced-off precipice where she once ran a zigzagging metal staircase called the Suicide Stairs. Standing out like a dark scar on the snowy hillside is the wooden bench where she first met the stranger in the black hat.
Gwendy punches in a four-digit security code to gain entrance to her building and climbs the stairs to the second floor. Once inside Unit 19B, she shrugs off her jacket, leaving it on the foyer floor, unzips her suitcase and takes out the button box, carries it down the hallway to the bedroom, places it on her husband’s side of the bed, and curls up next to it. Thirty seconds later, she’s snoring.
25
GWENDY OPENS HER EYES to the dark silence of her bedroom, disoriented by the lack of daylight at the window, and momentarily forgets where she is. She hustles into the bathroom to pee and experiences a sharp spike of panic in her chest when she remembers dinner with her parents.
After stashing the button box inside a fireproof safe in the office she shares with Ryan, she spends the next five minutes searching for her keys. She finally finds them in the pocket of her jacket on the floor and rushes out the door, determined not to be late.
Driving faster than she should on the slick roads, she’s a block away from her parents’ house when she thinks about the box again. “It should be safe in the safe,” she says out loud and laughs.
The safe was originally her husband’s idea. Convinced that they both needed a place to store their valuables, he supervised the purchase and installation of the SentrySafe a few months after they moved into the condo. Of course, several years later, there was nothing inside the thing except for a handful of contracts, old insurance papers, an envelope containing a small amount of cash, and a signed Ted Williams baseball inside a plastic cube—and now the button box.
I can’t keep lugging it around with me everywhere I go, Gwendy thinks, turning onto Carbine Street. Can’t keep it in the condo either, not when Ryan gets back. She’d stored the button box in a safe deposit box at the Bank of Rhode Island during her four years at Brown, and that worked out just fine. Maybe she’d drop by Castle Rock Savings and Loan at the beginning of next week, see what they have available.
Gwendy spots her parents’ Cape Cod ahead in the distance and breaks into a smile. Her father has really outdone himself this year. Green and red and blue Christmas bulbs outline the gutters of the roof and spiral up and down the front porch railings. A huge inflatable Santa Claus, illuminated by a series of bright spotlights, dances in the breeze at the center of the front yard. An inflatable red-nosed reindeer grazes in the snow at Santa’s feet.
He did all this for Mom, Gwendy realizes, pulling into the driveway and parking behind her father’s truck. Still smiling, she gets out and walks to the door. She’s home again.
26
MR. PETERSON IS PREPARING chicken and dumplings for dinner, Gwendy’s favorite, and the three of them catch up on everything from the two missing girls to across-the-street neighbor Betty Johnson’s sudden conversion to bleach blonde to the New England Patriots three-game losing streak. Mrs. Peterson, looking better than Gwendy has seen her look in months, complains about still needing to take daily naps and her husband’s constant coddling, but she does so with a grateful smile and an affectionate squeeze of Mr. Peterson’s forearm. She’s wearing a different wig tonight—a shade darker and a couple inches longer—than the one she was wearing the last time Gwendy was home, and it not only makes her look healthier, it makes her appear years younger. Her face lights up when Gwendy tells her so.
“Any more news from Ryan?” Mrs. Peterson asks, as her husband gets up and goes into the kitchen to silence the oven timer.
“Not since he called two nights ago,” Gwendy says.
“You still think he’ll make it home in time for Christmas?”
Gwendy shakes her head. “I don’t know, Mom. It all depends on what happens over there. I’ve been keeping an eye on the news but they haven’t reported much yet.”
Mr. Peterson walks into the dining room carrying a plate stacked high with biscuits. “Saw President Hamlin on the tube earlier this evening. I still can’t believe our Gwendy gets to work with the Commander-in-Chief.”
Mrs. Peterson gives her daughter a smile and rolls her eyes. She’s heard this spiel before. Many times. They both have.
“Have you spoken with him lately?” he asks eagerly.
“A bunch of us were in a meeting with him and the vice president last week,” Gwendy says.
Her father beams with pride.
“Trust me, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.”
As is often the case, she’s tempted to tell her father the reality of the situation: that President Hamlin is a sexist bore of a man who rarely looks Gwendy in the eyes, instead focusing on her legs if she’s wearing a dress or her chest if she’s wearing pants; that she purposely never stands too close to the Commander-in-Chief because of his tendency to touch her on the arms and shoulders when he speaks to her. She’s also tempted to tell him that the President’s as dumb as a donut and has horrible breath, but she doesn’t
say any of these things. Not to her father, anyway. Now her mother is a different story.
“I liked what he said about North Korea,” Mr. Peterson says. “We need a strong leader to deal with that madman.”
“He’s acting more like a petulant child right now than a leader.”
Her father gives her a thoughtful look. “You really don’t like him, do you?”
“It’s not that …” she says. Careful, girl. “I just don’t care for his policies. He’s cut healthcare funds for the poor every year he’s been in office. He cut federal funding for AIDS clinics and reinforced anti-gay legislation across the board. He spearheaded a movement to reduce budgets for the arts in public schools. I just wish he cared more about people and less about winning every argument.”
Her father doesn’t say anything.
Gwendy shrugs. “What can I say? He’s just a muggle, Dad.”
“What’s a muggle?” he asks.
Mrs. Peterson touches his arm. “From Harry Potter, dear.”
He looks around the table. “Harry who?”
This time his wife smacks him on the arm. “Oh, stop it, you smart aleck.”
They all crack up laughing.
“Had you going for a minute,” he says, winking.
For the next several hours, Gwendy relaxes and the button box hardly crosses her mind. There’s one brief moment, when she’s standing at the kitchen window overlooking the back yard, and she spots the old oak tree towering in the distance and remembers once hiding the box in a small crevice at the base of its thick trunk. But the memory’s gone from her head as quickly as it arrives, and within seconds, she’s back in the den watching Miracle on 34th Street and working on a crossword puzzle with her father.
27
“… INITIALLY OCCURRED WHEN ANTI-INDEPENDENCE militants launched an attack on a crowd of unarmed civilians.”
An expression of grim sincerity is etched on the Channel Five newscaster’s face, as a banner headline reading BREAKING NEWS: CRISIS IN TIMOR scrolls across the bottom of the screen. “There are early reports of violence and bloodshed spreading throughout the countryside, the worst of the fighting centered in the capital city of Dili. The fighting erupted after a majority of the island’s eligible voters chose independence from Indonesia. Over two hundred civilian casualties have already been reported with that number expected to rise.”
Gwendy sits at the foot of the bed, dressed in a long flannel nightgown, the button box propped up on a pillow beside her, its twin rows of multi-colored buttons looking like teeth in the glow of the television.
The anchorman promises more breaking news from Timor just as soon as it becomes available, and then Channel Five goes to commercial.
At first, Gwendy doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe, and then she turns to the box and in an odd, toneless voice says, “Curiosity killed the cat.” She uses her pinky to pull the lever on the right side of the box.
A narrow wooden shelf slides out from the center with a silver dollar on it. Gwendy picks up the shiny coin and, without looking at it, places it beside her on the bed. The shelf slides back in without a sound.
“But satisfaction brought it back,” she recites in that same odd voice and pulls the other lever.
The wooden tray slides out again, this time dispensing a tiny piece of chocolate in the shape of a horse.
She picks up the chocolate with two steady fingers and looks at it with amazed wonder. Lifting it to her face, she closes her eyes and breathes in the sweet, otherworldly aroma. Her eyes open lazily and gaze at the chocolate with a look of naked desire. She licks her lips as they begin to part—
—and then she’s fleeing to the bathroom, hot tears streaming from her eyes, and flushing the chocolate horse down the toilet.
28
THE FIRST PERSON GWENDY sees when she walks into the Castle Rock Diner on Sunday morning is Old Man Pilkey, the town’s retired postmaster. Hank Pilkey is going on ninety years old and has a glass left eye as the result of a fly-fishing accident. Rumor has it his second wife, Ruth, got drunk on moonshine and caused the injury while they were honeymooning in Nova Scotia. When Gwendy was young, she was terrified of the old man and dreaded tagging along with her parents to the post office on Saturday mornings. It wasn’t that she was spooked or even grossed out by the shiny prosthetic eyeball. She was simply a nervous wreck that she’d go into some kind of weird staring trance and cause the old guy discomfort or, even worse, embarrassment.
Fortunately, years of practice have helped to ease Gwendy’s fears, and when she swings open the diner’s front door—a pair of HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? posters taped to the outside of the thick glass—at a few minutes before ten and Old Man Pilkey spots her with a toothless grin, hops down from his stool in front of the long Formica counter and opens his saggy arms in greeting, Gwendy looks him in the eye and hugs him back with genuine affection.
“There’s our hometown hero,” he croaks, gripping her shoulders with bony fingers and holding her at arm’s length so he can get a good look at her.
Gwendy laughs and it feels good after the long night she’s just had. “How are you, Mr. Pilkey?”
“Fair to middling,” he says, easing back onto the stool. “Fair to middling.”
“And how’s Mrs. Pilkey?”
“Ornery as ever, and twice as sweet.”
“Fair words to describe the both of you,” Gwendy says and gives him a wink. “Enjoy your Sunday, Mr. Pilkey.”
“You do the same, young lady. My best to your folks.”
Gwendy walks to an empty table by the window, nodding hello to several other townspeople, many of them dressed in church clothes, and sits down. Gazing around the diner, she estimates she knows two-thirds of the people in there. Maybe more. She also estimates that maybe half of them voted for her last November. Castle Rock’s her hometown, but it’s still—and probably always will be—a Republican hotspot.
“I thought that was you.”
Gwendy looks up, startled.
“Jesus, Norris. You scared me.”
“Sorry about that,” he says. “Whole damn town’s on edge.” He gestures to the empty chair. “Mind if I sit?”
“Please,” Gwendy says.
The sheriff sits down and adjusts his gun belt on his hip. “I got your message. Was planning to call you back this morning, but I needed coffee first. Late night.”
Norris Ridgewick is two years older than Gwendy and has occupied the Castle County Sheriff’s Office since taking over for Alan Pangborn in late 1991. Standing a hint over five-foot-six and weighing in at an even one hundred and fifty pounds (wearing his uniform, shoes, and sidearm), the sheriff doesn’t make much of a physical impression, but he more than makes up for it by being resourceful and kind. Gwendy has always believed that Norris carries a deep well of sadness within him—most likely due to losing his father when he was just fourteen years old and his mother a decade later. Gwendy likes him a lot.
“Why so late?” she asks. “Anything new with the girls?”
The sheriff’s eyes wander around the diner. Gwendy follows his gaze and notices many of the other diners have stopped eating and are staring at them. “Not much,” he says, lowering his voice. “We’re checking out some leads with the Tomlinson girl. A part-time teacher at her school. A custodian at the dance studio she attended. But neither are exactly what I’d call … prime suspects.”
“And the Hoffman girl?”
He shrugs and waves to get a waitress’s attention. “That one’s even tougher. We’ve got the timeframe down to just under fourteen minutes. That’s how long the brother was out of the house. In those fourteen minutes, someone smashed the glass on the back door, entered the house, took Carla Hoffman from her bedroom, and disappeared without a trace.”
“Without a trace,” Gwendy repeats in a whisper.
He nods. “Or much of a struggle, evidently. No prints on the door or anywhere inside the house. It’d snowed that morning but the kids had a snowball fig
ht in the yard, so it was a mess. No chance of boot- or footprints. Could’ve come by car, but none of the neighbors saw or heard anything.”
“Anything coming in on the tip-line?” she asks. “I saw the Hoffmans put up a reward.”
“Bunch of calls … but only a handful worth following up on, which we’re doing.”
“Nothing else?”
The sheriff shrugs. “We’re trying our damnedest to find a connection between the two girls, but so far it’s not there. They live in different neighborhoods, attend different schools, have different hair color, body types, hobbies. No sign that they knew each other or had close mutual friends. Neither has a boyfriend or has ever been in any kind of trouble.”
“What are the chances the two disappearances aren’t related?”
“Doubtful.”
“What’s your gut say?”
“My gut says I need coffee.” He glances around for the waitress again.
Gwendy gives him an irritated look.
“What?” he asks. “You believe in all that gut instinct mumbo jumbo?”
“I do,” she says.
The sheriff pulls in a deep breath, lets it out. He glances out the window before meeting Gwendy’s eyes again. “Lotta weird shit has happened in the Rock over the years, you know that. The Big Fire in ’91, boogeyman Frank Dodd murdering those folks, Sheriff Bannerman and those other men getting killed by that rabid Saint Bernard, hell, even the Suicide Stairs. You believe it was an earthquake that knocked them down, I got a bridge to sell you.”
Gwendy sits there and offers up her best poker face, an expression she’s nearly perfected after less than a year in Washington D.C.
“I hope to hell I’m wrong,” he says, sighing heavily, “but I have a feeling we’re never gonna see those girls again. Not alive anyway.”
Gwendy's Magic Feather Page 5