Body Surfing

is.”
    He looked at Jasper and Michaela one more time.
    Jasper nodded. Q. nodded back.
    “You’d better come here,” he said into the phone.
    There was a long silence. Jasper could practically hear the demon inside Dr. Thomas consider his options. Finally:
    “I’m on my way.”

9
    E lizabeth Hogarth, better know to her friends as Cakes, drove fifteen miles an hour slower than the speed limit. It was two-thirty in the morning, the roads were unlighted, and God knows there’d been enough accidents in the last week. In fact, Cakes didn’t even like to be on the road after dark, but it was a little hard to avoid when you worked as a cocktail waitress. Wasn’t any money in the day shift. Fortunately, it was a Thursday and traffic was light at this hour. No jerk tailgating her or flashing his high beams in her rearview mirror. She was on her way to her boyfriend John’s house. He hadn’t picked up her calls all day, and, what with recent events, she figured he could use a little checking in on. Poor man kept his feelings so bottled up. Out in his daylily field the very morning after Jasper was buried in the suit Cakes had picked out for his high school graduation. “Plants won’t water themselves,” he told her when she said he should take a day off. That was New England for you. Keep on keepin’ on, or however they put it. Which was why she was concerned about him not picking up his phone. He didn’t have a cell, of course, or an answering machine, but she’d called every hour from six on. It wasn’t like John Van Arsdale socialized or anything.
    John’s pickup was parked on the gravel beneath one of the beech trees in his front yard. The house was dark upstairs and down. Thefront door was unlocked, which it always was when he was home. Cakes turned on the hallway light, peeked in the living room and kitchen first. Right off she sensed something wrong. Wasn’t a single glass or bottle in either room. John Van Arsdale had poured himself a drink every day after he finished work for the past fifteen years. She made a cursory check upstairs but knew she wouldn’t find him there, unless he was hanging from the rafters—which was unlikely, since the rafters were only six and a half feet off the floor.
    “John Van Arsdale, if you did something stupid. I’ll kill you myself.”
    She went downstairs, took herself to the back door. It was a dark night, clouds just thick enough to hide the stars. The only thing she could see was the quarter-moon and its dim reflection in the river all the way down at the bottom of the hill. She was just about to go back inside when she heard footsteps. Heavy, running. Cakes had grown up in the country, knew the difference between human and animal steps. She thought maybe it was a deer or a coyote at first, but then a big black shape hurtled out of the darkness and nearly knocked her over.
    “Gunther! Goddamn it, dog, get off me!”
    The dog barked in her face, nervous, needy. He was a good dog, Gunther. A big, overgrown puppy who didn’t get the attention he needed.
    “Who let you out, huh, boy?”
    Cakes grabbed the flashlight, headed into the backyard. Figured she’d feed Gunther, put him up, then make a few calls, see if anyone had seen John. But the dog set off down the yard at a run, and for some reason Cakes knew he wasn’t chasing a possum or deer that she couldn’t see. In a moment he’d escaped the flashlight’s thin glow and melted into the night.
    “Gunther! Get back here.” But her voice was weak. “John,” she said under her breath. “Tell me you didn’t do nothing stupid.”
    The grass was wet and slippery so she took the stairs. She didn’t like the steps herself. Each one was a slightly different width and height, so you couldn’t really get your rhythm, especially goingdown, especially in the dark, and there was that one loose one. She never could remember where—ah! There it was.
    “Gunther! Where are you?”
    She flashed her light around, but the night was so big and dark it didn’t do much. The things in the light were almost more unrecognizable than the things she couldn’t see at all.
    She heard a faint scraping to her right, swung her light around. The beam reflected off something on the south side of the property. She held it as steady as she could, but couldn’t really tell what it was. Somewhat reluctantly, she left the stairs and began walking that way. The ground this far down the hill was gravelly and she skidded in her