Continued fromhere .
CHAPTER THREE
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“ Welch put you up to this , did n’t he ? ” Stone state . “ The slick son of a beef brought you through the mirror because he thought you might flush out your father . ”
“ It is n’t like that at all , ” Linda Waverly said , and started the taxi and pull away from the check . “ When my forefather inject that char , I was already working here . In this bundle , in New York . I was taken off my job and grilled by Ralph Kohler ’s multitude for six hour straight . They were going to send off me habitation , but David Welch sway them to rent me help out . ”
“ Welch like to act game , Linda . He ’s using you . ”
“ There ’s a good chance my father will seek to make physical contact with me if I ’m out on the street in plain view . What ’s improper with that ? ”
“ you may let me out right here . Then you may turn this taxi around , find David Welch , and tell him that I call up he ’s disturbed . ” Stone try out the door ; it was lock up . He rapped on the formative division and suppose , “ That was n’t a suggestion , by the direction . blockade correctly here . ”
Linda looked at him in the rearview mirror with cool defiance . “ What are you going to do if I do n’t ? Shoot me ? ”
Stone palpate a footling pang of guilt , and wondered if Tom had break one of the golden prescript of clandestine Robert William Service and told his girl about what had happened when SWIFT SWORD had fall asunder . “ I came here because your founding father take for me . Because I ’m his supporter , and because he saved my life history once upon a time , and I still owe him . I do n’t experience why he ’s been doing what he ’s doing , but I do get laid that you do n’t want to get caught up in it . ”
Linda said , “ I thought my father died three years ago , Mr. Stone . Now I know he did n’t , I want to help find him and make for him in dependable and sound . ” “ You ’re being used , Linda . ”
“ We ’re both of us being used , Mr. Stone . peradventure we can figure out how to make the best of it . ”
Stone had to admit that it was a good tip . Linda definitely had a refractory streak a mile wide , just like her founding father , but she also appeared to be sensitive and levelheaded , and she had been act upon right here . She had local cognition . Maybe he could reverse this around , Stone cogitate . pay up back Welch in his own coin . He list forward and talk into the cluster of cakehole drill in the partition . “ you’re able to labour me to the prospect . When I ’ve finished
there , we can taste to work something out . ”
“ You wo n’t regret it , Mr. Stone . ”
“ And you could slow down , too . Before we get a tag . ”
“ You do n’t like my driving ? ”
“ I opine it has been a long clock time since I was in a New York taxi . A long prison term since I last see you , too . What were you doing , before David Welch lend you into this thing ? I take it you ’re work for the party now . ”
“ I ’m part of a team that ’s liaising with the local FBI , trying to break up condemnable gang that are smuggle deserters out of the nation . The desertion rate among our flock is three per centum and wax . A few require to find their doppels , or the doppels of their married woman or sweethearts , but most of them require to get to Canada . Canada is neutral in this sheaf . Once they ’re over the border , they ’re gone . The mob help oneself them get across , and then wedge them for interest payments on the fee . ”
“ So you ’re a field officer , just like your father . ”
“ Actually , at the moment , I ’m more on the analytical side of thing . I was endorse from DI to help run a datamanagement scheme - figurer study , fundamentally . But I get to sit down in on audience with suspects , and I ’ve been on a yoke of raids , too . ”
“ How do you like it , out in the field ? ”
“ I was working with the forensic crew both time . I did n’t come in until after the assault teams had film out the bad guys . But it was still a buzz . ”
“ I guess it must be , ” Stone said , remembering his first field actions . How it had all seemed like good clear sport until he ’d had to shoot someone .
“ I majored in anthropology at NYU before I joined the Company , ” Linda articulate . “ This is my first time through the mirror , and I end up back in New York . It ’s unlike , but not that unlike . There ’s the aftermath of the war , of course , and the Dodgers and the Giants are still here , they did n’t move to the West Coast . But it is n’t like it ’s a strange area . aside from downtown , the streets are more or less the same . They have NYU , they have guys run Bromus secalinus in Washington Square , they have lily-livered taxis and red-hot dog cart . . . . It reminds me of the time I went to Arizona with Mom and Dad . I was fourteen , they ’d just got back together after their first big bustup , and we took a stumble to Arizona for a safe oldfashioned family holiday . We chaffer with my aunt , my female parent ’s babe , in Phoenix . We drove all around . We saw the Grand Canyon . We saw Sedona . You desire to talk about another world , there it is . Sedona . All those red rocks , it ’s like nowhere else on Earth . Like Mars .
But it was still America , all the same . You travel a thousand miles to somewhere completely different , and you find the same TV shows , Coke , McDonald ’s . . . . ”
“ There are all kinds of dissimilar Americas , but they ’re all America . ”
“ One land under many skies . I remember reckon a man in a restaurant in Arizona who kept on his hat while he was eating . An expensive one , blanched , with a strip of snakeskin around the crown . He had these cowboy boots with picayune pointy toe , too . That was different , watch a adult male dressed like a cowboy spoon soup under his hat lip . ” Right in front of them , a motortruck swerved across two lane . Linda hit her automobile horn . “ US Army driver , I swear none of them have licences . ”
pit remember the last sentence he ’d seen Linda . It had been at one of Tom ’s party . A little miss in a bootleg bathing suit , hollo with laugh as she ran through the spray of the sprinklers in the vegetable patch behind the sign of the zodiac . She ’d been , what , ten or eleven . . . . A few weeks after that party , Stone had go away through the mirror again , had spend a twain of long time form on a clandestine operation to overthrow the politics in the American Bund bundle . Toward the end , with everything lined up and the final stage of the surgery about to kick off , Tom had move around up to help out , and the first thing he ’d said to Stone was that he ’d separate up with his wife . He ’d gone back to her that time , the union had staggered on for a few more yr , but there had been no more barbecues at the little house in the woods . Stone had n’t seen Linda Waverly since that party , and now here she was , driving him toward the aspect of a double execution committed by her father . It was the sort of thing , he think , that made a military man feel the years in his bone .
Linda broke the muteness that had get between them . “ Did he really lay aside your life , once upon a time ? ”
“ He was have a medal for it . ”
“ The Intelligence Star ? ”
“ That ’s the one . ”
“ I went to the ceremonial occasion , but he never explain what he ’d done . He liked to distinguish marvellous stories about move around in other sheaf , but he never once talked about his work . His real body of work , I mean , not the cover stories . Even after I joined the Company , he used to say that if he ever secernate me anything about his actions , he ’d have to kill me afterward . With that look that meant you could never tell if he was joking or not . ”
“ I call up that look . ”
“ Of course , I break up up a few bits and pieces during my training . Some of the stuff you oldschool guys were involved in is in the text edition Quran , and one of my teacher knew my don . I get the impression he was something of a rogue wheeler dealer . ”
“ He always had a reason for everything he did . And I ’m certain there has to be a understanding for this . ”
Stone was n’t about to tell her that her Padre might have betray out , or gone bugeyed crazy .
“ There ’s a rumour that the Company has an interior situation . That there ’s been a purge , there was some variety of job at White Sands . . . ? ”
“ I ’m retired , Linda . I ’m no longer plugged into the hearsay electric circuit . ”
“ I thought Mr. Welch might have told you something . ”
“ Welch likes to play plot , commend ? Withholding entropy or giving out partial info is part of it . Who was regorge ? ”
“ There are n’t any hard facts , but something ’s definitely blend in on . Where I form , a couple of people due to go on leave have had their leave cancelled , and a duo more have n’t come back from leave- ”
“ In case they ’re taint with rumours . ”
“ There ’s been a hitch in communications through the mirror , too . Also , the station top dog gave us a little peppiness talk a few days ago . Something ’s go away on for sure , and I ca n’t aid thinking that it might have something to do with whatever it is my father has find himself into . ”
North Meadow swung by . The sky was growing dark beyond a line of tree . A chain of streetlights flickered on one by one . rock thought of the whitewashed cabin set on the rooftree above the wild , untravelled Hudson , and marvel what Susan was doing at that precise moment , several miles and two bundle away . All they shared now was time . Whenever history split , time vagabond on at the same focal ratio , one second per second , in the two daughter bundle . In every rendering of America , in every known and unknown bundle , it was September 15 , 1984 , six thirtytwo p.m. Stone thought of Susan moving about in the kitchen where Petey ’s wax crayon draught were tacked to the board wall by the sash window , steam rising from a pot on the woodburning kitchen stove , the cozy , conversant domestic clatter , and felt a sudden yearning ache .
He ’d met Susan ’s husband , Jake Nichols , in the American Bund bundle some ten days ago . Stone and his fellow Special Ops officers had help oneself to actuate a revolution ; Jake had been part of the peacekeeping mission force out that had issue forth in immediately afterward . Stone had hit it off from the offset with straighttalking , cando Lieutenant Nichols , and had been one of the first to visit Jake in the VA hospital a year later on , after Jake had mislay two fingers on his leftover hand , the calf muscleman of his left leg , and five feet of his small bowel to a roadside bomb . afterwards , Jake walk with a hitch and had to take painkillers and sex hormone twice a day , but he did n’t allow his disability slack him down . He quit the army and went to work for the American Red Cross , which was where he met and married Susan . Stone was the best gentleman at their hymeneals .
When Susan became pregnant , Jake invoked the right hand , granted by the Veterans ’ Bill to every honourably discharge extremity of the armed forces , to move to a wild bundle . He and Susan purchase a farm in the First Foot sheaf from a lottery success who ’d had enough of the frontier life , and Stone comply them there after he resigned from the troupe . He paid his community due by working on the railroad , then lease a job as a guide for the Nichols ’ hunt outfit , precede rich clients through the pine forests and fen to the west of the Hudson in hunting of mastodon , elephantine sloths , sabretoothed cats , and other megafaunal species that in the absence of aboriginal human beingness still flourished there . Susan handled the paperwork and Jake had forgotten more about hunt than Stone would ever learn , but they insisted on pee-pee Stone an equal mate in the job .
After Jake ’s fateful stroke out on the ice , Stone did all he could to facilitate Susan keep both the farm and the hunting concern drop dead , and when the snows melted and the growing season began , with fields to plough and crops to plant and lean , it seemed sensible to lead the little cabin he ’d build near the shore of the East River and live on the farm . Just for the summer , he and Susan agree . Just for the summertime , and then for the harvest . Their discussions about the future were strictly practical . They talk about dismantling Stone ’s cabin and rebuilding it nigher to the farm , about hiring supporter , about how they could improve the hunting business . They spill the beans about everything except the mutual feeling that grew between them that summertime , furtive and patient and strong as a flower pushing through the concrete slabs of a pavement . There were minute - one hot , still even when they sat together and watched the Dominicus set over the Hudson , the day they went fishing for striped bass in Stone ’s small boat , a retentive ramble through the woods , picking mushrooms - when Stone had been quick to confess to Susan that he ’d go down in love with her . But it was still too presently after Jake ’s decease . It felt too much like the low subterfuges and betrayals of adultery .
Now , remembering what he and Susan had say to each other in the barn and what had hung unspoken in the air , Stone knew that they would have to sit down and have themselves a hearttoheart talk when he give back to New Amsterdam . It was time he bit the bullet .
The cab had break off at a reddish light at the western delimitation of the car park . Stone told Linda Waverly to take a right .
“ quick if I go straight across . ”
Stone was looking out of the taxi ’s rearward window at the vehicle in line behind it . “ Go right , then take Duke Ellington Boulevard , or whatever they call it here . ”
“ They call it Duke Ellington Boulevard . ” The light change . Linda bend veracious . “ If the guys following us know where we ’re going , what ’s the percentage point of trying to misplace them ? ”
“ I desire to show them that we sleep together they ’re there , ” Stone said .
When Linda turned the taxi onto Duke Ellington Boulevard , he saw the saloon that had followed them through Central Park make the same manouevre .
“ You see it ? ” Linda order . “ The ashen Ford four cars back ? ”
“ I see it . ”
“ He took over from a red Chrysler on Madison and East EightyFifth . ”
“ I guess I ’m out of practice , ” Stone say .
This miss who ’d once scampered about in summertime twilight wearing a white taffeta dress with fagot wing pinned to the back calmly telling him about a switch he had n’t check .
“ Who do you suppose they are ? ” she said . “ Locals , or Company ? ”
“ Does it matter ? ”
Up in the low one C , thing did n’t look that unlike from Stone ’s retentiveness of New York in the Real . A little less neon , the shopfront shabby but homelier . Not as many highrise apartment blocks , that was for certain . Most of the walker were civilian , and there seemed to be more white people here than in the Real . They were head home , buying fruit and bottled piss in superettes , walk their dogs . A fat man in an vest stood at the doorway of a drycleaning situation , smoking a cigar with the equable , absolute authority of the Emperor of all Time and Space . Then the taxicab turn onto Riverside Drive , with brownstones and taller apartment buildings look the long park , and glimpses of the river through the trees .
This sheaf ’s doppel of Eileen Barrie must have been doing well : she owned a turnofthecentury brownstone right on Riverside Drive , a few block in the south of her work at Columbia University . Sawhorses jam off the sidewalk and a uniformed fuzz bear by the railings at the bottom of the steps up to the front door . Most of the window were break , and weed had blackened their lintels .
Stone told Linda to wait in the taxi . She say she did n’t take care , she ’d already scoped the view .
“ Welch brought you here , I bet . ”
He ’d shown her what her father had done , Stone consider , and put her on the spot , in unpatterned sight . David Welch and his insincere magical spell , his locoweed and mirrors , his sly little tricks .
Linda say , “ I can walk you through it , show you how it go down . ”
“ I read the report . ride out there while I figure a few things out . It should n’t take long . ”
Stone did n’t want to discuss the slaying with Linda and talk about the different shipway her father had wipe out six doppels of the same woman . Also , he wanted her to model right in front of the business firm . If Tom Waverly was hiding close by , she might pass him out or at least make him careless . When it came down to it , Stone consider as he swung out of the taxi , he was n’t any serious than Welch .
He show his ID to the cop , adopt the man ’s flashlight and the keys to the house , and told him to go find a cup of coffee . The splintered front door was chained and padlocked , and sashed with yellow crimescene tape . There were spray patterns of bloodline on its green key , pip and spatters of blood on the editorial on either side , and plenty of smears and boot prints leave by constabulary , paramedics , and firefighters who ’d stepped in pools of blood that were now dry out to flaky crusts on the steps .
According to the preliminary write up in the file Welch had given Stone , the hit had happened just before dawn . Tom Waverly had climbed onto the roof , removed the protective interlocking from the top of one of the disused chimneys , and lowered into it a flexible plastic tubing containing a mix of petrol and liquid max . When this homemade napalm had ignited , probably trigger by a time boot , it had blown out most of the window and bug out a fire in the kitchen at the rear of the house . Nathan Tate had brought Eileen Barrie out the front , sandwiched between two police from the mayor ’s protection squad , and that had been where they ’d both exit , shot by a .308 rifle from a position across the route in Riverside Park . Nathan Tate had been properly in front of Eileen Barrie when he ’d been shot . And before he ’d hit the ground , before the police officers had cleared their artillery from their holsters , Eileen Barrie had been shot too , once in the chest , once in the point , and then a burst of fire from a simple machine shooting iron had mail everyone diving for covert , and two smoke grenade had ignited in the middle of the street . It had been all over in less than a minute . fast , beastly , exhaustively planned , sedately execute .
Stone crossed the street and stepped into the park . Trees slop down toward the river . His new , thinsoled shoe slipped on leaf mulch . He could find out the warm wind moving through the trees , the hum of traffic on the Hudson Parkway .
Twenty proceedings before the bomb had gone off , Tom Waverly had knifed one of the uniformed cops who had been patrol the park , the city manager ’s nephew , and dragged his body under a laurel bush . And then he ’d taken up his position in a marvelous oak tree that was now ring off by police force tape , whiling away the sentence before his napalm bomb pass off by pare a message into the barque of the tree .
I ’ll sing to Stone .
The underwood around the tree diagram had been trample flat . Tom Waverly had taken the machine pistol with him , but the boltaction Winchester .308 had been encounter at the foot of the tree diagram , and the rope he ’d used to slide to the earth after the hit was still in lieu .
Stone hooked his suit jacket on a ramification and used the rope to climb as eminent as he could . Splintered rips in the tree diagram tree trunk suggested that Tom had worn spiked overshoes to help him climb through the canopy , almost to the top of the tree . Stone could n’t get that high , but thirty feet up he had a pretty safe view of the brownstone . The yellow hack was park right on in front , Linda Waverly dimly seeable through the side windowpane , sitting there like a target . Stone realised that he should have postulate her if she was carrying a pistol before he left her there , just in case Tom took the bait - but even if she was armed , she was hardly probable to draw down on her own father .
He straddled a branch and thought about angle , figured that if he climb up another twenty feet he would have been able-bodied to wait over the top of the move motortruck Nathan Tate had used to screen the front doorway of the brownstone from the street . Tom must have scoped out the picture sometime before he made the hit . He ’d brought rope and spiked overshoe because he ’d recognise that he would have had to go up this high to make the hit . And he ’d known that there was a elbow room out through the back yard , so he ’d set the fire in the kitchen to squeeze everyone in the house out the front doorway . Stone smiled . Tom might have gone softheaded , but he could still coiffe up a hit with punctilious precision . Leave anything to chance , he used to say , and you ’ll most probably cease up in a boxwood like Schrödinger ’s Caterpillar , wondering when you ’re going to initiate smelling almonds .
Dick Knightly ’s cowman holy man had learnt about the fundamental principles of the Many Worlds theory during their training . Their physics instructor , Fred Lehman , introduced the concept with Schrödinger ’s “ ridiculous case , ” a thought experiment designed to challenge the assertion that measurement draw a quantum system to adopt a specific state , and any observer make measurements could not be sequestrate from the system he remark . In Schrödinger ’s thought experiment , a kat was placed in a boxful equipped with a flask of nitrile gas pedal , a mechanics that would founder the flask if a detector was spark by the random decay of an mote , and a author of radiation so weak that there was only a fifty percent chance that a individual atom would dilapidate in any given hour . The cat and the chemical mechanism were seal inside the box , and the experimentation ended after exactly an time of day , when the loge was open again .
“ Schrödinger ’s question was this , ” Fred Lehman said . “ With a fifty percent chance that an speck has decayed and triggered the mechanism that discharge the nitrile , what ’s the state of the cat now before the boxwood is open ? ”
Tom Waverly put up his helping hand , saying that he had a interrogation of his own . What , he wanted to know , did this Schrödinger guy have against African tea ?
This was in the lecturing theater at Brookhaven . Fifteen new men and one vernal fair sex were spread across tiers of seats , some assiduously hold notes , some hopelessly lost , all of them palpate the same galvanizing thrill of participating in something enormously secret and important . Tom Waverly was sprawled in a seat in the front course , his arms stretch out across the backs of the seats to either side , smiling while he expect for Fred Lehman ’s answer .
“ We ’re not talk about a literal cat in a real experimentation , ” the physicist said . “ The cat is a metaphor Schrödinger used to ridicule the hint that quantum theory could be used to make a all over description of forcible reality . He arrogate that before the box is opened , the cat must be in some undetermined state , half stagnant , half animated . Since no sustenance brute can be awake and dead at the same time , there must be something wrong with quantum theory . ”
“ Of course it ca n’t be a real experiment , ” Tom Waverly say . appear around , taking his fourth dimension , building to his punchline . “ I mean , have you ever adjudicate to get a computerized tomography inside a boxful ? ”
In the warm dark , gamy above the reason in the branches of the oak tree , Stone smiled , remembering that Fred Lehman had waited out the laugh before explaining that the premiss on which the thought experimentation had been based was wrong , that the cat in the unopened box did not exist an undetermined State Department , neither whole alive nor altogether dead , as Schrödinger had maintain . Instead , the experiment have the state of the observer to split into two - and it did n’t matter if the observer was the experimenter , the cat , or the radioactivity detector , as long as something or someone took a measurement that forced the quantum organisation of computerized tomography and box and cyanide apparatus to adopt a definite body politic . In one universe the beholder opened the box and discovered a springy cat ; in the other , the box contained a cadaver .
And this pass off with every choice we ever make , Fred Lehman had separate his course of instruction . In most cases the split was little and the two sibling universes cursorily recombined . But if the observation caused a variety giving enough to affect other observers , recombination was detain , and more and more divergence compile in the state of the sibling universes until the rip became permanent . A exclusive probability bundle part into two ; history went in two unlike directions . In one the cat was alive ; in the other , it was utter . In one , Khrushchev was assassinated and the Soviet general regularise an atomic strike against the United States ; in another , the assassination attempt flush it or was abortive , and Khrushchev recede the Soviet missiles and battlefield nuclear weapon from Cuba . Each sheaf was thread from billions of nearly related microhistories that furcate and recombine and branched again as gazillion of observers made their trivial choices . But although most microhistories recombined almost immediately , a significant number did not , and in a few of those the rent finally became lasting .
Tom Waverly had have it away the weirdness of quantum theory , but on a job he ’d always done everything he could to avoid the dichotomous portion of Schrödinger ’s cat , project his hits to the last detail . It was pure uncollectible fate that the cop had stumble across him when he was moving into position . If he had snap only Eileen Barrie and Nathan Tate , the local anesthetic would have call for that a twain of NYPD execution investigator intermediate with the Company team , strictly as a formality , and left it at that . But Tom had kill a cop , the bull had been the city manager ’s nephew , and now every one of New York ’s finest was looking for him . Because one of their own had been mutilate , they had permit to blast on heap , and they were ready and unforced to take care of business .
I ’ll blab to Stone . But where , and when ? Stone knew that he would have to think firmly and fast , and hope for a lot of good luck , if he was exit to catch up with Tom before the topical anaesthetic did .
He slip down the rope , put on his jacket , and walked back to the edge of the common and stood there for a few moments , looking at Eileen Barrie ’s brownstone and the monovular brownstone on either side , their curtain call windows , the balustrades that ran along the edges of their flat roof . He slapped a lone , late mosquito and walked across the street . When he reached the hack , Linda crank down her windowpane and call for if he had determine anything .
“ The report said that he get onto the roof of the house from one of the neighbouring brownstone . ”
“ The one on the rightfulness . He receive in through the back , picked the lock chamber of the fire door in the basement , then pick the lock of the access doorway to the roof . The forensic squad found refreshed scratch on both of them . You think they missed something ? ”
“ I ’m wondering why he did n’t stay up on the roof after he planted the napalm . He had an easy guessing of the front door from across the street , but he had to evade police patrol to get into position . And in fact he did n’t evade them - he ran into that cop . If he ’d stay up on the cap , the shot would have been harder , but he would n’t have had to take the peril of move into the park . ”
“ He could n’t stay up there because there were adult male posted on the roof of Dr. Barrie ’s brownstone . ”
“ There were ? How many ? ”
It had n’t been in the report .
“ Two sharpshooters . They were watch the back yards and the roof on either side . ”
“ Were they in side all the time ? ”
“ Only when Dr. Barrie was at home . When she pass to work , a brace of officers stayed behind in her apartment , but the rest of the tribute team live on with her . When she desire to go home , the squad travel into location and checked everything out before they let her come back . ”
“ She descend home at around halfeight in the eve , ” Stone said . “ So Tom had plentitude of fourth dimension to get up on the roof and plant the bomb and get out . But how did he know when she ’d be come in home ? ”
“ He did n’t have to recognize the exact metre . She always work late . ”
“ Are you sure ? ”
“ I tracked down one of the bozo who ’d been part of the protection squad and had a minuscule chat with him . He said that the naming was a nightmare because Dr. Barrie kept dotty 60 minutes . Where are you going ? ”
“ I ’m fall out a train of cerebration . Wait there . It wo n’t take long . ”
Tom Waverly had give a message at his sniper ’s view . He ’d also expend some time on the cap of Eileen Barrie ’s house , so he might well have left a content there , too . endocarp unlocked the padlock and stripped away police force tape , switched on the borrowed flashlight , and step into the dark hall . The ceiling had fare down and there was a strong smell of hummer and fire paint and charred wood . He pick his way through return plaster and puddle of pee to the stairway and climb up all the direction to the top , where the room access to the building ’s flat roof hung on a single hinge .
The cluster of brick lamp chimney had been collapsed by the explosion and the roof had caved in around them , exposing melanize beams . Stone skirted the hole , played the beam of the flashlight over the waisthigh brickwork at the front of the cap but found nothing of interest , then clambered onto the ceiling of the neighbouring brownstone , the one that Tom Waverly had broken into .
rock pace the perimeter of the roof , shoes scranch on crushed rock , and flicked the beam of the flashlight this way of life and that . There were fresh coffin nail butt and a crumpled softdrink can by the dividing bulwark , in all probability dropped by the law sharpshooters . There was a junked air conditioner . And there was an aluminium lawn chair set beside the balustrade at the front of the roof .
Although there could be a perfectly average ground why there was a chairman up here - perhaps someone liked to sit on the ceiling on fine summer days , taking in the purview across the river to New Jersey and catching some rays - Stone develop a trivial shivering when he saw it . He walked over to the balustrade and look down at the road , the strand of streetlights , the sawhorses blocking off the pavement in front of the brownstone , the taxi park in front . In the sodium lamplight its roof was the gloss of an old bruise . He sat in the death chair and looked at the trees in the long narrow park , the streetlights of the Hudson Parkway , the New Jersey shoring twinkle across the river . . . and remembered Tom Waverly sitting in a similar chair on his lawn at one or another of his barbecues , a drunkenly benevolent potentate watching his girl hunting on her hands and knees for the coins he ’d hidden in the grass . The chair go under in what Tom claimed to be his preferred spot on Earth , where he liked to drink beer while watching the sunlight go down beyond the little lake ; the search for coins scattered around it a little game that he and Linda loved to recreate .
A treasure hunt .
gem trail his fingers in the gravel on either side of the hot seat , then dug deeper , his fingertips scrap tar paper beneath the crushed rock , finding nothing . But Tom had enshroud coin under his chair too . Stone set the chair to one side and started to sift through the patch of gravel . Almost now , he found a rubbish of lean bill : the cover torn off a book of match . It must have been placed there recently , because it was unwrinkled by time and atmospheric condition . Chills chased up and down Stone ’s spine when he held it in the irradiation of the flashlight and hear what was written there .
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