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"What? Where?" Nathan said, and Audrey felt the fine hairs rise at the back of her neck. Something about his tone, about the way he'd leaned forward in his chair, told her everything she needed to know. Something was afoot in Haven, and it smelled like Trouble.
Nathan scratched a few notes onto the pad in front of him, then dropped his pencil. He looked over at her and she raised her eyebrows, ready to hear the worst, but instead of mouthing something to her silently or lifting his pad to show what he had written, he looked away with an expression of...
Of what? He almost looked embarrassed.
Audrey walked over to his desk. Before she got there he casually turned his pad face down.
"Okay," he said, into the phone. "I'll take care of it." A few words she couldn't make out came from the person at the other end. "I don't know," Nathan said, shooting a glance at her and away again, "but we'll find some— Listen, Benjy, I've got to go." And while the voice was still chirping away in the earpiece he hung up the phone.
"What is it?" Audrey asked.
"Nothing," Nathan said, too quickly. He'd stood up and was putting on his all-weather jacket.
"Didn't sound like nothing," Audrey said, and reached for his pad. He snatched it up before she could get it and slid it into his jacket pocket. "Was that Big Benjy? Something with his cows again?"
"Not his cows," Nathan said, halfway to the door.
"Something else?"
"Yes," Nathan said. "Something else."
"And you're not telling me because...?"
"Because I've got this one. I know how busy you are—"
"I'm not busy."
"There was that case, that one with the dog trainers—"
"Dwight's got it under control," Audrey said. "He's driving them back to Portland in a truck lined with steaks."
"Really?" Nathan said. "Steaks?"
Audrey shrugged. "It was that or have the harpist ride in the back with them, playing nonstop the whole way. Nathan, what's going on?"
He had one hand on the doorknob. In the other he held his service pistol. He seemed uncertain about whether or not to slide it into its holster, but after a moment, in it went. He seemed to make a decision. "It's...you."
"Me."
"Well, not you you. But...yeah. You."
"Me," she said again.
"And I promise, you'll be glad I handled this one without you."
"Without me."
"Well," Nathan said. "Without you you."
"Now I've got to come," Audrey said, and walked out the door ahead of him.
The Bronco pulled to a stop at the edge of Benjy's grazing pasture, where indeed there didn't seem to be anything the matter with the cows. The whole herd was contentedly chewing, from time to time dipping their heads down for another mouthful of grass. But Benjy himself was looking in the opposite direction—he had his head craned back as far as it would go, his hands on his hips and a look of consternation on what Audrey could make out of his face.
"I can't get you to stay in the car, can I?" Nathan asked.
"No."
"You're probably going to wish you had," Nathan said. "Just saying."
She opened the door and climbed down.
Across the way, on a hill just past the fence marking the end of Benjy's land, she saw a small crowd gathered. They were also looking up. One man was pointing, and another had his cell phone out, aimed at the sky.
Audrey looked up.
"Oh my god," she said.
"Yeah," Nathan said. "You want to go back to the station? Get on the horn, maybe talk to Dave and Vince, see if they've got any record of something like this happening before...?"
"Oh my god."
"Yeah."
"What is that?"
"Tomorrow's front page headline photo," a reedy voice said, and Audrey heard the clatter behind them of the Teagues brothers' tandem bike sliding to the ground. Wouldn't need to get on the horn after all. "Though we'll need to choose just the right angle," Vince went on, "so you don't see everything—"
"Guys, no," Nathan said, "this is not— Put the cameras down. You're not running this in the paper."
"Well, you know, Nathan," Vince said, "even if you're right about that, we really ought to have a photo for our files..."
"No."
Dave piped up, "It's important that our archives be complete ..."
Audrey lost track of the conversation as she walked into the field, past Benjy, toward the distant hill. Now she was craning her head like the rest of them, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. It was her, all right—but not her. Someone who looked like her, but that wasn't it either. It was a woman who looked exactly like her, except that instead of being five-foot-two, she was towering over the landscape at, what, eighty feet? Eighty-five?
And not wearing any clothes.
Audrey felt the urge to pull her jacket tighter around herself. It wasn't every day you saw yourself blown up to the size of a building, or one of those balloons in the Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Never mind naked in front of a crowd of friends and neighbors. The two together was not a combination she relished.
She peered up at her doppelganger. The figure wasn't doing anything, just staring off into the distance with a serious expression on her enormous face, as though she was watching for something with a sort of guarded anxiety. Do I really look like that? Audrey wondered, but only for a moment. Of course she looked like that, only not quite so tall and not quite so naked.
She noticed a sound then, quiet at first but rapidly getting louder, the coughing and sputtering of a single-engine plane whose single engine wasn't doing too well. Audrey turned toward the sound—both Audreys did, the larger one causing some amount of damage underfoot as she did so, if the sound of snapping timber was anything to go by. The plane came into view, an ancient, rust-stained crop-duster flying low and getting lower by the second. A tail of inky smoke was pouring out of the engine, and through the windscreen Audrey could see the pilot struggling with the controls. And with something else, something blue fluttering around his face, like a billowing scarf.
He took both hands off the throttle to bat at his face, and the plane banked perilously, its left wing dipping. It stabilized a moment later, but it was still losing altitude—and now was aimed directly at the fence and the hill beyond. Screams rose from the crowd as they realized the plane wasn't going to pull up. They turned to run, shoving each other in a desperate attempt to get out of the way. One man fell, pushed over in the panic. He tried to get back on his feet but went down again when he collided with the woman beside him.
Audrey was running at full speed, her arms pumping at her sides, breath coming fast and ragged, and off to her left she saw Nathan racing toward the hill as well. If they could get there before the plane hit, there was a chance, at least, that they could get some of the people clear, that—
A shadow dropped over Audrey, over Nathan, over the hill.
Looking up, she saw the other her, directly overhead—saw the plane coming in—saw a giant arm swing toward it—saw a hand pluck the plane from the sky, giant fingers pinching down on the fuselage—saw the enormous figure fight against the plane's forward momentum and almost overbalance, almost go down herself, but then steady and remain upright. Very gently, she set the plane down.
"Stay back! Back!" Audrey shouted. "Stay clear!" She arrived at the side of the plane at the same time as Nathan, who had his gun drawn and was glancing from the plane door to the figure overhead and back again. Audrey went to the cabin door and yanked it open. The pilot came tumbling out, surrounded by a flittering blizzard of blue-winged butterflies. They sped for an instant around his head and then flew off. Only once the butterflies were gone was Audrey able to make out the pilot's face.
"Duke?" she said, and Nathan grabbed both his arms from behind. Duke angrily shook himself loose. "What are you doing here?"
"That," Duke said, raising a forefinger and using it to gesture at nothing in particular, "is an excellent question."
"I didn't know you could fly a plane," Nathan said, taking hold of his arms again.
"I didn't know that either," Duke said. "I still don't know it. Or how I wound up in a plane, trying to fly it. The last thing I remember, I was in my bed, which as you know is on a boat, not a plane—" He stopped cold. "Hang on. Isn't there something we're missing here? Isn't there an elephant in the room—" Duke patted the air in Audrey's direction "—no offense, that we're not talking about?"
They all looked up then—but Audrey's giant double was gone.
The plane was still there, though, and behind her Audrey could hear the moans of the people who'd been injured in the panic. A few blue butterflies were still darting in the wind.
Audrey and Nathan exchanged a glance.
"What?" Duke said. "Someone want to tell me what's going on?"
"Bobby Mueller?" Audrey said.
"Who?" Duke said.
"I'll go," Nathan said.
Hannah Driscoll came to the door with her hands in oven mitts. "Officer Wuornos," she said, her voice caught between warmth and concern. "Is there something wrong?" She took the mitts off, dropped them on a table. "I was just getting some dinner ready—"
"Sorry to bother you, Hannah," Nathan said, stepping inside. He'd have preferred for Audrey to have come with him, but for a visit to Reverend Driscoll's daughter...Hannah hadn't gotten along with her father, but that didn't mean she'd wanted him shot or that she'd react well to a visit from the police officer who'd killed him.
"It may be a false alarm," Nathan said, "but there was an incident just now that...well, it was a lot like the ones we went through last year, when Bobby wasn't sleeping well—"
"But Bobby's sleeping fine now," Hannah insisted. "He's on the imipromine, just like Dr. Carr said, two times a day. He's been very good about it—hasn't missed a day. I promise!"
"There were butterflies," Nathan said.
Hannah closed her eyes. "But—"
"Are you sure Bobby's not having nightmares again? About crashes, specifically...?"
"Absolutely not," Hannah said. "We talk about it. He hasn't had a nightmare in a year. He'd tell me if he had. He's a good kid."
Nathan heard the sound of a shower going on in another room. "Is he here?"
"Yes. He was just resting a bit, playing Xbox—"
"Resting," Nathan said. "Maybe napping?"
"No, I don't think so..."
"Bobby?" Nathan walked back, through the passthrough kitchen and into a small den, where a videogame controller lay on the floor beside a leather couch. One of the pillows resting against the couch's arm showed an indentation roughly the size of a teenage boy's head. "Bobby?" Nathan rapped a knuckle against the bathroom door, through which he could hear the shower going full blast. "This is Nathan Wuornos."
After a moment, the water turned off. He heard footsteps padding toward him. The door opened a crack, showing a bedraggled fifteen-year-old in a too-large bathrobe, his hair still dripping. He looked hangdog, like he'd been caught at something.
"Bobby, I'm sorry but I need to ask you something," Nathan began. "You having nightmares again?"
"No," Bobby said, shaking his head firmly enough that a few drops spattered Nathan's face. "I'm not, I swear."
"There was almost a plane crash, just half a mile from here," Nathan said. "People could have been badly hurt."
"Was anyone?" Bobby's voice cracked as he asked it. He sounded genuinely upset at the prospect.
"No," Nathan said, "but only because—because Officer Parker—because someone looking like Officer Parker—"
"Caught the plane," Bobby said. His voice was a whisper.
"Caught the plane, that's right," Nathan said. "You want to tell me about it?"
"I can't," Bobby said. "I—"
"Bobby," Nathan said.
The boy looked over Nathan's shoulder to where his mother was standing in the doorway to the den.
"Hannah," Nathan said, "maybe Bobby and I could talk about this alone?"
"Think," Audrey said. "You must have seen him somewhere." Behind them, Lewis Pufahl was carefully supervising the crane operator lifting the plane onto the bed of his car carrier. He had one hand on the side of the plane and was whispering to it softly.
"Sure, Audrey, probably at Kids Drink Free Night at the Gull."
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
"Come on, I'm joking," Duke said. "You know I never let anyone drink free."
"But you do have kids at the Gull sometimes," Audrey said.
"Only on Movie Matinee Mondays," Duke said, "and I haven't done one of those since the summer—" He stopped dead, and Audrey saw something in his eyes, something like realization.
"What?"
"Audrey, the last time—it was when Dave had his idea for a Cary Grant festival."
"Really? Dave likes Cary Grant?"
"Loves him. Says he reminds him of himself as a young man. But that's not the point. The movies were Only Angels Have Wings and North by Northwest." He waited for her to say something. She didn't. "In one he's a pilot, Audrey, and in the other there's this scene where he's chased by a guy flying a—" He walked over and banged his palm against the side of the plane, causing Lewis to wince. "A crop duster."
"Maybe Bobby was there..."
"...and naturally associated me in his mind with Cary Grant, sure. It's an easy enough mistake to make."
Audrey looked at her phone, which had stubbornly not rung once since Nathan had driven off and didn't ring now. "I don't understand why Bobby would be having nightmares again. He's on medication."
"Is that what the medication does? Stop you from having nightmares?"
"That's what Eleanor said."
"Not from dreaming, just from having nightmares."
"Night terrors, yeah. Why?"
"Oh, I don't know," Duke said. "I'm just thinking. I mean, it was a nightmare for me, waking up in a plane I didn't know how to fly and almost crashing into a bunch of people. And it was a nightmare for them, almost getting hit by a plane. And it was a nightmare for you, I guess, although really, you shouldn't be the least bit embarrassed, you have a really nice body. When did you start to, you know, shave, by the way?"
"Your point...?"
"Right," Duke said. "My point. My point is, it was a nightmare for us, but who's to say it was a nightmare for him? I mean, no one got hurt, not seriously. You saved the day. And looked fabulous doing it. It might've been pretty exciting for someone watching from the outside."
"Exciting."
"Giant naked lady saves a crowd of people from a crashing plane?" Duke said. "Would've excited me when I was his age."
"You're saying..."
"I'm saying fifteen-year-old boys have other sorts of dreams, Audrey, not just nightmares. Remember health class in high school?"
Audrey's phone went off.
She lifted it to her ear. "Nathan." She listened for a moment. "Yeah. Yeah. Fifteen-year-old boys, right. Duke was just telling me—yeah. That's okay, I really don't need to know the details."
"Here, Audrey, let me have that." Duke snatched the phone from her hand. "Nathan, buddy, listen. Do you think our boy Bobby might be—uh-huh, right. That's what I'm talking about. I'm going to put you on speaker, buddy."
He tapped the screen and Nathan's voice came booming out. "—that he's having wet dreams about Audrey, since after all she was the one who saved him last year. I mean, what kid wouldn't get a crush on...wait, did you say speaker? You didn't put me on—"
Duke tapped the screen again, raised the phone to his ear. "Okay, bad idea. Sorry." He glared at the people who'd turned to look at them. "Hey! Don't you have things to do?"
Audrey firmly took her phone back.
"Nathan," she said, pitching her voice low, "we need to get him on some different medication, there's got to be something that puts him under deep enough that he doesn't dream at all— I don't know, someone at the hospital must know of one. Or maybe Dr. Lucasi?" She looked around. People were still staring, curious. "What?" she said. "Come on. A little privacy?"
"Audrey. Audrey." Duke took her by the arm, led her off to a slightly less public spot. "There are other ways."
"Hold on, Nathan." She took the phone away from her ear. "What other ways? Other ways of what?"
Duke started to say something, then seemed to think better of it and started on another tack. That one didn't make it past the first syllable either.
"Duke?"
"It's a little personal, Audrey. But there are ways every guy knows, or at least every guy learns them, to stop having, well..." Audrey crossed her arms over her chest and he petered out again. "Look. Let me talk to him."
"You," Audrey said.
"Or, I suppose, you could talk to him, Audrey, but don't you think that would a little...uncomfortable for both of you?"
"Nathan's over there already," Audrey said.
"Yes, yes he is. Mr. Numb. The perfect guy to help a kid deal with all these new sensations he's feeling—"
"All right, all right, go," Audrey said. "Just...be sensitive."
Duke headed off. But when he reached the road, he turned back. "When have I ever been less than sensitive...?"
"Go," Audrey said.
The sun was setting behind the Gull when Audrey heard the sound of the Bronco coming down the incline that led to the front door. One door slammed, then the other. Footsteps landed on the porch.
"How'd it go?" she asked. Nathan was slipping out of his jacket while Duke headed for the bar.
"Not the easiest conversation I've ever had," Nathan said.
"You didn't have it," Duke said. "You sat there looking like a hall monitor while I did all the work."
"The work?" Nathan said. "You told a fifteen-year-old kid to...relieve himself each night before going to sleep."
"And you think that's bad advice why...?" Duke said. "Tell me, Nathan, who doesn't sleep more soundly after—"
"Guys," Audrey said sharply, and they both looked over at her. "Just tell me...is it going to work?"
They spoke at the same time: "Yes," Duke said, and Nathan said, "Maybe."
"Great," Audrey said. "First thing in the morning I'm calling Dr. Lucasi." She shook her head. "I just hope it holds him for tonight."
"I think he'll be okay tonight," Nathan said. "A visit from the police would put a dent in any boy's libido."
"That depends," Duke said, as he poured tequila into the third of the three shot glasses he'd lined up on the bar. "There was this one officer in Macao, her name was Madalena..."
"Well, Madalena wasn't there with us just now, so I don't think she'll be on Bobby's mind," Nathan said.
Duke held up a glass in each hand and gestured for Nathan and Audrey to take them. "He'll be fine," he said. "He'll sleep like a baby, just as long as he follows my advice before going to bed."
"And doesn't fall asleep on the couch again in the meantime," Nathan said.
Audrey took the glass from Duke and tossed back the liquor. She fanned herself with one hand. "I hope you guys are right," she said. "I don't want to think about what might happen otherwise." She turned to Duke. "Do you always keep it this warm in here?" She undid the top two buttons of her shirt.
"It does feel a little warm, doesn't it?" Duke said. He peered curiously into his glass, as though the explanation might be inside it. But nothing was inside it, not even the ounce of tequila he'd poured into it a moment earlier. He shrugged. "Ah, well. We're all friends here, no reason we can't get comfortable. Just let me lock up so no one will walk in on us." That made sense to Audrey and Nathan, who nodded as he headed over to the door to lock it.
"There," Duke said, and pulled down the shade over the door's glass panels. "Where were we?"
"You were telling us about Madalena," Audrey said, smiling.
Outside, very quietly, a butterfly beat its wings against the glass.