Chapter 9: In Her Sleep

On Wednesday morning I told Donal I was going to Weymouth, and he said he'd send the driver first.

"Why first?" I said.

"Because I want to know what's there before you do."

"It's a pit."

"It's a pit a frightened woman called about at two in the morning," he said. "Let him look."

Ambrose came into the kitchen while the driver was gone, and poured himself a coffee.

I had made up my mind to say nothing to him, and I said it anyway.

"Do you know the Pond Street pit?"

He stopped with the cup halfway to his mouth.

"The old fill pit? Closed up when the landfill company went bust. Nothing in it but gulls and bad tires." He shrugged. "Everybody knows that."

"Somebody's husband guards it," I said.

"Nobody guards that place, kid."

"A woman called last night."

"A woman called." The dimple came out, amused.

"Dahl, you're going to get fifty calls a night. Half of them will have a husband who saw something."

I didn't answer, and he drank his coffee and left.

The driver came back at noon.

He stood in the doorway of the study with his cap in his hands.

The gate on Pond Street was padlocked, he said, and the shed was empty with the door open.

A neighbor had told him the watchman left for his sister's in Maine on Saturday.

He went the day after the posters went up, with two suitcases and his wife.

"He ran," Donal said.

"Yes, sir," the driver said.

"Because of a poster."

"Yes, sir."

Donal turned to look out the window at the bay for a long minute.

"Then he's frightened," he said. "And frightened men want to talk to someone who isn't me."

That was all he said about it.

He was quiet at supper, and he was quiet afterward.

At eleven I went looking for him.

He was standing at the end of the upstairs hall, outside the study, with his hand flat on the wall.

"Donal."

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