She reacted as if I had said nothing more startling than that I had played baseball in high school, liked English classes, but had no aptitude for math.
“Alfred Hitchcock has been dead more than thirty years, child. Do the lingering ones hang around here that long?”
“Not always. Not usually. Though Elvis Presley lingered even longer.”
“You helped Elvis cross over?”
“Eventually, ma’am.”
“Good for you. Heath knew his mother.”
“Mr. Fischer knew Gladys Presley?”
“He thought she was the sweetest God-fearing woman. Reasonably smoothed out and partway blue. Elvis’s daddy—not so much.” She looked around the diner. “Is Alfred Hitchcock here right now?”
“No, ma’am. He comes and goes. He’s … different from others that have sought my help before.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, he’s very easygoing, even amused. There’s no anxiety in him.”
“Are the others anxious?”
“To one extent or another.”
“The poor dears. They don’t need to be.”
“No, ma’am. Another thing, the dead always want me to help them. But it seems more as if Mr. Hitchcock wants to help me.”
“Help you what, dear?”
“Maybe … find the rhinestone cowboy. I don’t know. I’m missing something, and that worries me.”
We ate in silence for a couple of minutes.
Beyond the window, under the low gray sky, the desert day came to night through the briefest twilight.
As here in Barstow, for a couple of weeks each spring, the desert around Pico Mundo suddenly bloomed bright with heliotrope and fiddlenecks, poppies and red maids and more. I hoped that I might live to see the land around my hometown thus enraptured one more time.
I said, “You didn’t for a moment think I was crazy when I told you that I see the dead.”
“Of course not, child. The world now is crazy. You are as sane as the world once was.”
Mrs. Fischer insisted that the treat was on her, and she left a 100 percent tip in cash. With the money, she put down a business card that had no name, address, or phone number. The small white rectangle presented only one of those perfectly round iconic cartoon faces with dots for the eyes and nose, and a big arc of a smile. Instead of traditional yellow, the face was blue. And very smooth.
Carrying the check, Mrs. Fischer led me through the diner to the cashier’s station. As we arrived, Sandy finished pouring a refill for one of the customers seated at the counter, returned the coffeepot to the warmer, and took time to ring up our bill.
As the waitress and Mrs. Fischer exchanged pleasantries, I spotted the stack of flyers on the counter beside the cash register. MISSING! the headline declared. Under that, a question: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE CHILDREN?
Here they were—the three faces from my vision. Now the flyer gave me names to go with them. The eight-year-old boy was Jessie Payton, the six-year-old was his sister Jasmine, and the ten-year-old girl was Jordan.
Having noticed my interest in the flyer, Sandy said, “Makes me sick to think about it.”
When I looked up, unshed tears stood in her sea-green eyes. I said, “When did they disappear?”
“Between seven and eight-thirty yesterday evening. It’ll soon be twenty-four hours. That can’t be good, no trace of them by now.”
“How did police figure the time?”
“A neighbor, Ben Samples, saw the back door open, knew something wasn’t right, went to check. Eight-thirty he found poor Agnes.”
“Agnes?”
The salt tide in Sandy’s eyes overflowed. She couldn’t speak. I understood why, earlier, she’d felt that laughter was not appropriate and why her voice had contained a note of sorrow not commensurate to her description of the desert carpeted in bright flowers.
From a nearby stool, a burly man in khakis and a checkered-flannel shirt, whose coffee had been refilled a moment earlier, spoke up. “Agnes Henry. Reverend Henry’s widow. Sweet lady. Did babysittin’ to stretch her Social Security. Paytons’ trash cans are kept to one side of their back porch. Ben Samples, he notices a lid is half off one. Just enough porch light, so when he happens to look down, he sees a face in there. Agnes. Stabbed through the heart, stuffed in the can like garbage.”
Wiping her eyes with a Kleenex, Sandy said, “Chet, good Lord, what’s the world coming to, helpless children all over snatched away the same day?”
“It’s comin’ to the bad end it’s always been comin’ to,” Chet said solemnly.
For a beat, I didn’t understand them, and then I did but wished that I had it wrong. “All over? Other children? Where?”