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CHIPPER’S BACKGROUND we know Alice arrived at Maxton’s fro house on Gale Street, the old part of Gale Street, where she outlived two husbands, raised five sons, and taught piano to four generations of French Landing children, none of whom ever became professional pianists but who all remember her fondly and think of her with affection Alice came to this place as most people do, in a car driven by one of her children and with a mixture of reluctance and surrender She had beco house in the old section of Gale Street; she had two grown, h, but she could not tolerate adding to their cares Alice Weathers had spent her entire life in French Landing, and she had no desire to live anywhere else; in a way, she had always known that she would end her days in Maxton’s, which though not at all luxurious was agreeable enough On the day her son Martin had driven her over to inspect the place, she had realized that she knew at least half the people there

Unlike Alice, Charles Burnside, the tall, skinny oldcovered by a sheet before us in his metal bed, is not in full possession of his wits, nor is he drea of Fred Astaire The veiny expanse of his bald, narrow head curves down to eyebrows like tangles of gray wire, beneath which, on either side of the fleshy hook of his nose, two narrow eyes shine at his north-facingand the expanse of woods beyond Maxton’s Alone of all the residents of Daisy wing, Burny is not asleep His eyes gleam, and his lips are wormed into a bizarre s, for Charles Burnside’s mind may be as empty as his room Burny has suffered from Alzheiressive form of pleasure could be no more than physical satisfaction of a very basic kind If we had failed to guess that he was the origin of the stench in this roo into the sheet that covers him make it clear He has just evacuated, massively, into his bed, and the very least we can say about his response to the situation is that he does not mind a bit; no sir, shame is not a part of this picture

But if ¡ª unlike delightful Alice ¡ª Burny no longer has a firrasp on all of his marbles, neither is he a typical Alzhei into his oatmeal like the rest of Chipper’s zoain When not un-dead, he usually et down the hall to the bathroo off on his own or patrolling the grounds, being unpleasant ¡ª in fact, offensive ¡ª to all and sundry Restored from zombiehood, he is sly, secretive, rude, caustic, stubborn, foul-tongued, mean-spirited, and resentful, in other words ¡ª in the world according to Chipper ¡ª a blood brother to the other old men who reside at Maxton’s Some of the nurses, aides, and attendants doubt that Burny really does have Alzhei low, deliberately athers his strength for yet another episode of unpleasantness We can hardly blanosed, he is probably the only advanced Alzheied spells of rehth year, the man known as Charles Burnside arrived at Maxton’s in an ambulance from La Riviere General Hospital, not in a vehicle driven by a helpful relative He had appeared in the e two heavy suitcases filled with dirty clothing and loudly de medical attention His demands were not coherent, but they were clear He claimed to have walked a considerable distance to reach the hospital, and he wanted the hospital to take care of hi ¡ª ten miles, fifteen hts sleeping in fields or by the side of the road His general condition and the way he s the countryside and sleeping rough for perhaps a week If he had once had a wallet, he had lost it on his journey La Riviere General cleaned hiave him a bed, and tried to extract a history Most of his statements trailed off into disjointed babble, but in the absence of any documents, at least these facts seemed reliable: Burnside had been a carpenter, fra for hieneral contractors An aunt who lived in the town of Blair had given hihteen miles from Blair to La Riviere, then? No, he had started his walk somewhere else, he could not remember where, but it was ten miles away, no, twenty-five ood jackass asswipes What was the name of his aunt? Althea Burnside What were her address and telephone number? No idea, couldn’t remember Did his aunt have a job of any kind? Yes, she was a full-time jackass asswipe But she had permitted him to live in her house? Who? Permitted what? Charles Burnside needed no one’s permission, he did what he damn anted Had his aunt ordered hi about, you jackass asshole?

The adnosis of Alzhei the results of various tests, and the social worker got on the telephone and requested the address and telephone nu in Blair The telephone co for a person of that name in Blair, nor was she listed in Ettrick, Cochrane, Fountain, Sparta, Onalaska, Arden, La Riviere, or any other of the towns and cities within a fifty- her net, the social worker consulted the Records Office and the departments of Social Security, Motor Vehicle License, and Taxation for information about Althea and Charles Burnside Of the two Altheas that popped up out of the system, one owned a diner in Butternut, far to the north of the state, and the other was a black woman orked in a Milwaukee day-care center Neither had any connection to the man in La Riviere General The Charles Burnsides located by the records search were not the social worker’s Charles Burnside Althea seemed not to exist Charles, it seeh life without ever paying taxes, registering to vote, applying for a Social Security card, opening a bank account, joining the ar a couple of seasons at the state farm

Another round of telephone calls resulted in the elusive Charles Burnside’s classification as a ward of the county and his admission to the Maxton Elder Care Facility until accommodation could be found at the state hospital in Whitehall The ambulance conveyed Burnside to Max-ton’s at the expense of the generous public, and gru Six weeks later, a bed opened up in a ward at the state hospital Chipper received the telephone call a few ht him a check, drawn by an Althea Burnside on a bank in De Pere, for Charles Burnside’s maintenance at his facility Althea Burnside’s address was a De Pere post office box When the state hospital called, Chipper announced that in the spirit of civic duty he would be happy to continue Mr Burnside’s status at Max-ton Elder Care The old fellow had just becoh any of the usual shenanigans, Burny had doubled his contribution to the income stream

For the next six years, the old man slid relentlessly into the darkness of Alzheiave a brilliant perfor way stations of incontinence, incoherence, frequent outbursts of anger, loss of memory, loss of the ability to feed himself, loss of personality He dwindled into infancy, then into vacuity, and spent his days strapped into a wheelchair Chipper mourned the inevitable loss of a uniquely cooperative patient Then, in the su resuscitation occurred Anian to utter vehe! He wanted to feed hier around and re-acquaint hilish words to insist on wearing his own clothes and going to the bathrooain became a nuisance Now, often in the sae Alzhei surliness so healthy in a ht be called robust Burny is like a man ent to Lourdes and experienced a cure but left before it was co as the old creep stays alive, who cares if he is wandering the grounds or drooping against the restraining strap in his wheelchair?

We nore the stench We want to see e can glean from the face of this curious fellow It was never a pretty face, and now the skin is gray and the cheeks are sunken potholes Proray scalp, spotted as a plover’s egg The rubbery-looking nose hooks slightly to the right, which adds to the impression of slyness and conceal s a burning building ¡ª that rirant, a creature of shabby rooms and cheap diners, of aimless journeys resentfully taken, a collector of wounds and injuries lovingly fingered and refingered Here is a spy with no cause higher than himself Burny’s real name is Carl Bierstone, and under this nao, froe, an unofficial war, during which he committed wretched deeds for the sake of the pleasures they afforded hireat secret, for he cannot allow anyone to know that this former incarnation, this earlier self, still lives inside his skin Carl Bierstone’s awful pleasures, his foul toys, are also Burny’s, and he must keep them hidden in the darkness, where only he can find them

So is that the answer to Chipper’s h a seam in Burny’s zo ship? The human soul contains an infinity of rooer than a brooht We bow closer to the veiny scalp, the wandering nose, the wire-brush eyebroe lean deeper into the stink to exalitter like ht on a sodden riverbank All in all, they look un-settlingly gleeful, but not particularly human Not , if you can call that rictus a s?

dey are gowering in their bloody holes and govering their eyes, dey are whi in derror, my boor loss babbies No, no, dat won’t help, will it? Ah, zee de engynes, yezz, oh dose beeyoodiful beeyoodiful engynes, whad a zight, the beeyoodiful engynes againzt de vire, how they churrn, how dey churrn and burrn I zee a hole, yez yez dere id iz oho zo brighd around de etches zo folded back

Carl Bierstonein, but his babble is not of litter gaze in hopes that it ive us a hint as to what has so excited the old boy Aroused, too, as we observe from the shape beneath the sheet He and Chipper see at the ready, except that instead of the benefit of Rebecca Vilas’s expert attentions, Burny’s only stih his

The view hardly htly elevated upon a pillow, Charles Burnside looks raptly out over a brief expanse of lawn to a row ofof an extensive woods Farther back tower the great, leafy heads of oaks A few birch trunks shine candlelike in the inner darkness Froht of the oaks and the variety of the trees, we know that we are regarding a rereat climax forest that once blanketed this entire part of the country Like all of the ancient forest’s traces, the woods extending north and east from Maxton’s speak of profound mysteries in a voice nearly too deep to be heard Beneath its green canopy, time and serenity embrace bloodshed and death; violence roils on unseen, constantly, absorbed into every aspect of a hushed landscape that never pauses butfloor covers rows and thrives here thrives on rot Worlds within worlds churn, and great, syste abundance and catastrophe upon its unguessed-at neighbors

Does Burny contemplate these woods, is he enlivened by what he sees in them? Or, for that matter, is he in fact still asleep, and does Carl Bierstone caper behind Charles Burnside’s peculiar eyes?

Burny whispers, Fogzes down fogzhulls, radz in radhulls, hyenaz over eladzoe oho on bledding foodzies

Let’s blow this pop stand, okay?

Let’s sail away froh Let us seek the fresh air and fly north, over the woods Foxes down foxholes and rats in ratholes , true, that’s hoorks, but we are not about to find any starving hyenas in western Wisconsin Hyenas are always hungry anyhow No one feels sorry for the heart to pity a creature that does nothing but skulk around the periphery of other species until the , it can plunder their leftovers Out we go, right through the roof

East of Maxton’s, the woods carpet the ground for so like a hway 35 like a careless parting in a thick head of hair The woods continue for another hundred yards or so, then yield to a thirty-year-old housing develop of two streets Basketball hoops, backyard swing sets, tricycles, bicycles, and vehicles by Fisher-Price clutter the driveways of the modest houses on Schubert and Gale The children ill s, hohtful infinitudes; also asleep are their anxious parents, doo Wendell Green’s contribution to the front page of the day’s Herald

So catches our eye ¡ª that narrow dirt road curving into the woods frohtaway More a lane than an actual road, its air of privacy seems at odds with its apparent uselessness The lane loops off into the woods and, three-fourths of a mile later, comes to an end What is its point, what is it for? Froht above the earth, the track resembles a faint line sketched by a No 4 pencil ¡ª you practically need an eagle’s eye to see it at all ¡ª but soh the woods Trees had to be cut and cleared, sturound If one man did it, the ould have takenlabor The result of all that inhu itself, of evading the eye, so that it fades away if attention wanders, and ht think of dwarfs and secret dwarf old ¡ª a treasure so safeguarded that access to it has been caon treasures, and ic spells are too childish, but e drop down for a closer exan stands at the beginning of the lane, proof that souarded, even if it is ain at the end of the lane In the darkness under the trees down there, one area seeloouishes it fro trees Aha oho, we say to ourselves in an echo of Burny’s gibberish, what have we here, a wall of some kind? It seems that featureless When we reach the ular section of darkness all but obscured by the treetops abruptly defines itself as a peaked roof Not until we are nearly upon it does the entire structure move into definition as a three-story wooden house, oddly sha front porch This house has clearly stood e in its eccentricity, the first thing we notice is its inhospitability to new tenants A second NO TRESPASSING sign, leaning sideways at an iainst a newel post,itself

The peaked roof covers only the central section To the left, a two-story extension retreats back into the woods On the right, the building sprouts additions like outsized sheds, hts In both senses of the word, the building looks unbalanced: an off-kilter ht it into off-center being The intractable result deflects inquiry and resists interpretation An odd, monolithic invulnerability ee done by time and weather Obviously built in search of seclusion, if not isolation, the house seee point the house appears to have been painted a uniform black ¡ª not only the boards, but every inch of the exterior, the porch, the triutters, even the s Black, frouileless, good-hearted corner of the world, not even the most crazily misanthropic builder would turn his house into its own shadow We float down to just above ground level andthe narrow lane

When we coment, which is uncoo further than we had supposed The house is not black now, but it used to be What it has faded into ht have been too critical about the original color The house has becoray-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hulls of wrecked ships Black would be preferable to this utter lifelessness

We may be certain that very few of the adults who live in the nearby develop towns, have defied the admonition on 35 and ventured up the narrow lane Aln anymore; none of them know of the existence of the black house We can be just as certain, however, that a number of their children have explored the lane, and that soh to come upon the house They would have seen it in a way their parents could not, and what they saould have sent thehway

The black house seems as out of place in western Wisconsin as a skyscraper or a moated palace In fact, the black house would be an anomaly anywhere in our world, except perhaps as a "Haunted Mansion," a "Castle of Terrors," in an amusement park, where its capacity to repel ticket buyers would put it out of business within a week Yet in one specific way itthe ascent of Chase Street into respectability from the riverbank and Nailhouse Row The shabby Nelson Hotel, the obscure tavern, the shoe store, and the others, rease pencil, share the same eerie, dreamlike, half-unreal flavor that saturates the black house

At thisthat follows ¡ª ould do well to rehtly unnatural is characteristic of borderlands It can be detected in every seanificant or insignificant the border in question Borderlands places are different from other places; they are borderish

Say you happen to be driving for the first tih a semirural section of Oostler County in your home state, on your way to visit a recently divorced friend of the opposite sex who has abruptly and, you think, unwisely decamped to a ser seat beside you, atop a picnic basket containing two bottles of a superior white Bordeaux held tightly in place by various gouroodies in exquisite little containers, lies a map carefully folded to expose the relevant area You ht road and ood time

Gradually, the landscape alters The road veers around a nonexistent berh inexplicable curves; on either side, the trees slouch; beneath their twisted boughs, the intered dog squirht front tire A crone wearing a teensy straw hat and what appears to be a shroud glances up red-eyed froirl costulittery, star-headed wand over a heap of burning tires Then a rectangular placard bearing the legend WELCOME TO ORELOST COUNTY glides into view Soon the trees ihtens out Released froe the accelerator and hasten toward your needy friend

Borderlands taste of unruliness and distortion The grotesque, the unpredictable, and the lawless take root in thee And while we are in a setting of wondrous natural beauty, we have also been traveling over a natural borderland, delineated by a great river and defined by other, lesser rivers, wide glacial moraines, limestone cliffs, and valleys that reht corner and meet them face to face

Have you ever seen a furious old wreck in worn-out clothes who pushes an e cart down deserted streets and rants about a "fushing feef "? Solasses with one cracked lens

Have you ever htened into a doorway and watched a soldierly -bolt scar on one side of his face storled in death on the ground, a boy, his head ser and the pity blaze in that e

Another lies concealed below us on the outskirts of French Landing, and despite the terror and heartbreak that surround this sign, we have no choice but to stand in witness before it By our witness, we shall do it honor, to thewitnessed, by offering its testireater

We are back in led out ¡ª beneath us French County sprawls like a topographical reen rectangular fields and dazzles off the lightning rods rising froht shine froes of the fields Holsteins nudge pasture gates, ready for the confine’s date with themachine

At a safe distance froiven us an excellent exa straight ribbon of Eleventh Street and beginning a journey into a transitional area of scattered houses and sh actual farpole will not display Old Glory for another forty-five minutes In one of the houses set back fro, the wife of Thornberg Kinderling, a wicked and foolisha life sentence in a California prison, awakens, eyes the level of the vodka in the bottle on her bedside table, and decides to postpone breakfast for another hour Fifty yards along, glealass bubble of Ted Goltz’s farm-implement dealership, French County Farm Equipment, where a decent, troubled husband and father na, will soon report for work

Beyond the showy glass bubble and the asphalt sea of Goltz’s parking lot, a half enerates into bare earth and spindly weeds At the end of a long, overgrown turn-in, what see luas pulide toward the earth The heap of lu, dilapidated structure on the verge of collapse An old tin Coca-Cola sign pocked with bullet holes tilts against the front of the building Beer cans and the round Froreatair and depart The black house was pretty bad; in fact, it was terrible, but thisthis is going to be worse

One secondary definition of slippage is: the feeling that things in general have just gotten, or very shortly will get, worse

The ruined boxcar-shaped shack before us used to house a comically ill-run and unsanitary establishs Fro 350-pound reasy, overdone haers, baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwiches orna ice-crea clientele,deceased, Ed was one of the nu’s chief of police, Dale Gilbertson, and a good-hearted slob and direat local renown His cook’s apron was of an indescribable filthiness; the state of his hands and fingernails would have brought any visiting health inspector to the verge of nausea; his utensils ht as well have been cleaned by cats I ice creariddle Overhead, li invisible within the fur of a thousand fly corpses The unlovely truth is that for decades Ed’s Eats pererriddle ¡ª not hesitating to colonize Ed himself! ¡ª to spatula, fork, and the unwashed ice-cream scoop, thence into the horrible food, finally into the uts of the kids who ate that stuff, plus those of the occasionalat Ed’s, and after a long-overdue heart attack felled its proprietor one day when heup a dozen new strips of flypaper, nobody had the heart to raze his little shack and clear away the rubble For twenty-five years, under the shelter of darkness its rotting shell has welcos of boys and girls in need of a secluded place to investigate for the first time in recorded history, or so it see of the flies tells us that whatever we ht be about to witness within this ruin will be neither a pair of spent young lovers nor a few silly, passed-out kids That soft, greedy uproar, inaudible fros We could say that it represents a kind of portal

We enter Mild sunlight filtering in through gaps in the eastern wall and the battered roof paints luritty floor Feathers, dust, eddy and stir over anione shoes Threadbare arainst the wall to our left; a few feet away, discarded beer cans and flattened cigarette ends surround a kerosene-burning hurricane laht lays war in a wide curve around the re counter and into the vacancy fore shelves There, in what once was Ed’s sacred domain, the footprints vanish Sorit, and soh ish it were, lies disarrayed against the rear wall, half in, half out of a dark, irregular pool of tacky liquid Delirious flies hover and settle upon the dark pool In the far corner, a rust-colored ets its teeth into the knuckle offrom the white object held between its front paws The white object is a running shoe, a sneaker A New Balance sneaker, to be exact To be more exact, a child’s New Balance sneaker, size 5

We want to invoke our capacity for flight and get the hell out of here We want to float through the unresisting roof, to regain the har is chewing on a child’s severed foot whileevery effort to extract the foot frorel’s scrawny back arches down and extends, the quilled shoulders and narrow head drop, the bony front legs rigidly cla, but the sneaker’s laces are tied ¡ª too bad for thethat is not an old army-surplus blanket, beyond a swirl of dusty tracks and furrows, at the floor’s far edge, its pale form lies flattened and face-up on the floor, its top half extending out of the dark pool One arht against the wall The fingers of both hands curl palmward Blunt, strawberry-blond hair flops back fronizable expression, it is that of mild surprise This is an accident of structure; it uration of this child’s face caused her to look faintly surprised even while she was asleep Bruises like ink stains and eraser ses lie upon her cheekbones, her teo of the Milwaukee Brewers and smeared with dirt and dried blood covers her torso from neck to navel The lower half of her body, pale as sthens into the dark pool, where the ecstatic flies hover and settle Her bare, slender left leg incorporates a scabby knee and concludes with the uptick of a bloodstained New Balance sneaker, size 5, laces double-knotted, toe pointed to the ceiling Where the partner to this leg should be is a vacancy, for her right hip ends, abruptly, at a ragged stump

We are in the presence of the Fisherman’s third victim, ten-year-old Irma Freneau The shock waves aroused by her disappearance yesterday afternoon from the sidewalk outside the video store will increase in force and number after Dale Gilbertson comes upon her body, a little over a day froathered her up on Chase Street and transported her ¡ª we cannot say how ¡ª up the length of Chase Street and Lyall Road, past the 7-Eleven and the VFW hall, past the house where Wanda Kinderling seethes and drinks, past the shiny glass spaceship of Goltz’s, and across the border between town and farh the doorway next to the pockled, she ht her to the rear wall and silenced her with blows to the face Very likely, he strangled her He lowered her body to the floor and arranged her limbs Except for the white New Balance sneakers, he re from her waist down, underwear, jeans, shorts, whatever Ir when he abducted her After that, the Fisher, heavy-bladed knife, and without the assistance of cleaver or saw, he parted flesh and bone until he hadfrom the rest of the body Then, perhaps with no more than two or three doard chops to the ankle, he severed the foot He tossed it, still contained within the white sneaker, aside Irma’s foot was not important to the Fisher

Here, e

Irma Freneau’s small, inert body see floorboards The drunken flies sing on The dog keeps trying to yank the whole of its juicy prize out of the sneaker Were we to bring simpleminded Ed Gilbertson back to life and stand him beside us, he would sink to his knees and weep We, on the other hand

We are not here to weep Not like Ed, anyhow, in horrified shame and disbelief A tremendous mystery has inhabited this hovel, and its effects and traces hover everywhere about us We have coister, and record the ies, left in the comet trail of the ers in its oake, therefore it surrounds us A deep, deep gravity flows outward froravity humbles us Humility is our best, most accurate first response Without it, ould reat norant as pigs Let us not go on like pigs Weworrying the severed foot, the poor, pale body of Irnitude of what befell Ir our littleness In comparison, we are no h the emptyframe in the side wall six feet from Irma’s body and makes a slow, exploratory circuit around the rear of the shack Suspended beneath its blurred wings, the bee looks nearly too heavy for flight, but it proceeds with easy, unhurried deliberation,well above the bloody floor in a wide curve The flies, the h, the bee, which continues to drift contentedly about the rear of the horror chamber, has ceased to be a welco mystery It is a detail within the scene, and it, too, co rus see sound waves, higher in pitch, produced by the greedy flies: Like a singer at a microphone in front of a chorus, the bee controls the aural background The sound gathers and comes to a serious point When the bee ah the eastern wall, its stripes glow black and gold, the wings coalesce into a fan, and the insect becoirl flattens into the bloody floorboards Our huravity deeply erant us the sense of forces and powers beyond our understanding, of a kind of grandeur always present and at work but perceptible only during moments like this

We have been honored, but the honor is unbearable The speaking bee circles back to theand passes into another world, and, following his lead, we move on, out the , into the sun, and into the upper air

Sile, slick feel of slippage at the off-kilter house north of Highway 35; the sound of the flies and the sight of the blood at the for! Yuck! Is there no place here in French Landing, wenice under the skin? Where e see is e get, so to speak?

The short answer: no French Landing should be ress: WARNING! SLIPPAGE IN PROGRESS! PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

The ic It has rendered "nice" at least teo someplace nice-er, and if we can we probably should, because we need a break We e, but we can at least visit where no one shits the bed or bleeds on the floor (at least not yet)

So the bee goes its way and we go ours; ours takes us southwest, over en ¡ª there is no air like this air, at least not in this world ¡ª and then back to the works of ain

This section of town is called Libertyville, so na Town Council in 1976 You won’t believe this, but big-bellied Ed Gilbertson, the Hot Dog King himself, was a member of that bicentennial band of town fathers; those were strange days, pretty e as these, however; in French Landing, these are the Fisherdays, the slippery slippage days

The streets of Libertyville have names that adults find colorful and children find painful Sogotyville Let us descend non through the sweetup already; this will be a Strawberry Fest kind of day for sure) We cruise silently over Camelot Street, past the intersection of Camelot and Avalon, and travel on down Avalon to Maid Marian Way Froress to ¡ª is it any surprise? ¡ª Robin Hood Lane

Here, at No 16, a sweet little Cape Cod honey of a ho Family On Its Way Up, we find a kitchenopen There is the smell of coffee and toast, a wonderful coe (if only we did not know better; if only we had not seen the dog at work, eating a foot out of a sneaker as a child ht out of its bun), and we follow the aroma in It’s nice to be invisible, isn’t it? To watch in our godlike silence If only what our godlike eyes saas just a little less godda! But that is by the way We’re in it now, for better or for worse, and we had better get on about our business Daylight’s a-wasting, as they say in this part of the world

Here in the kitchen of No 16 is Fred Marshall, whose picture currently graces the Salesman of the Month easel in the showroom of French County Farm Equipment Fred has also been named Employee of the Year three years out of the last four (two years ago Ted Goltz gave the award to Otto Eisman, just to break the monotony), and when he is on the job no one radiates more charm, personality, or all around niceness You wanted nice? Ladies and gentle Fred Marshall!

Only now his confident smile is not in evidence, and his hair, always carefully combed on the job, hasn’t yet seen the brush He’s wearing Nike shorts and a tee with cutoff sleeves instead of his usual pressed khakis and sport shirt On the counter is the Marshall copy of the La Riviere Herald, open to an inside page

Fred has his share of problems just lately ¡ª or, rather, his wife, Judy, has problems, and what’s hers is his, so said the minister when he joined the isn’thim feel any better Far froe, and of course the author is everyone’s favorite muckraker, Wendell "FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE" Green

The sidebar is your basic recap of the first two murders (Gruesome and Gruesomer is how Fred thinks of the up behind hihrun What could berun? What could be nicer? What could possibly spoil such a lovely start to such a beautiful Wisconsin day?

Well, how about this:

Johnny Irkenharief-stricken father [Grief-stricken father, Fred thinks, stretching and i his son asleep upstairs Dear God, save , of course, how soon he must assue Irkenha his exhausted face "When he wasn’t putting out fires for the French Landing FD or fighting criue of Ahtine [But I’ his toe raises] Earlier this week, his dismembered body was discovered by Spencer Hovdahl of Centralia Hovdahl, a First Far an abandoned French Landing far county, with an eye to initiating repossession proceedings "I didn’t want to be there in the first place," Hovdahl told this reporter "If there’s anything I hate, it’s the repo stuff [Knowing Spence Hovdahl as he does, Fred very much doubts if "stuff " was the word he used] I wanted to be there even less after I went into the henhouse It’s all rickety and falling down, and I would have stayed out except for the sound of the bees I thought there ht be a hive in there Bees are an interest of mine, and I was curious God help ain"

What he found in the henhouse was the body of seven-year-old John Wesley Irkenha froh Police Chief Dale Gilbertson would neither confirm nor deny it, reliable police sources in La Riviere say that the thighs, torso, and buttocks had been bitten ¡ª

Okay, that’s enough for Fred, everybody out of the pool He sweeps the newspaper closed and shoves it all the way down the counter to the Mr Coffee By God, they never put stuff like that in the paper when he was a kid And why the Fisher every uy like whoever did this into the Celebrity Sicko of the Month?

Of course, nothing like this had ever happened when he was Tyler’s age, but the principlethe goddamned principle of thehimself to have a talk with Tyler It will be harder than their little talk about why his thing soets hard, but it absolutely ot to stick with your buddies now, Ty Noaround on your own for a while, okay?

Yet the idea of Ty actually being murdered seems remote to Fred; it is the stuff of TV docudramas or maybe a Wes Craven movie Call it Scream 4:The Fisheruy in a fisherers with a hook? Maybe, but not little kids, not babies like Amy St Pierre and Johnny Irkenhaht in front of hi henhouse, that is the part which haunts hiht here and now in Too It’s ti, Fred thinks, picking it up fro it until it looks like a thick paperback book (but part of the headline accuses him even so: FISHERMAN STILL AT L) Maybe the paper just kind of, I don’t know, e can beside the house

Yes, good idea Because Judy has been strange lately, and Wendell Green’s pulsating stories about the Fisherhs and torso bitten, Fred thinks as he glides through the early--quiet house toward the door, and while you’re at it, waiter, have them cut me a nice rare chunk of butt) She reads the press accounts obsessively,no comment, but Fred doesn’t like the way her eyes jump around, or some of the other tics she’s picked up: the obsessive touching of her tongue to her upper lip, for instanceand sometiue reach all the way up and pet at her philtruht i the local news She goes to bed earlier and earlier, and soe, slurry words that don’t sound like English Sometimes when Fred speaks to her, she doesn’t respond, sihtly, hands kneading together (cuts and scratches have begun to show up on the backs of theh she keeps her nails cropped sensibly short)

Ty has noticed hisoddities, too On Saturday, while father and son were having lunch together ¡ª Judy was upstairs taking one of her long naps, another nerinkle ¡ª the boy suddenly asked, right out of a blue clear sky, "What’s wrong with Mo with ¡ª "