Doctor Sleep: A Novel

over carefully. At last she said, “I was looking out my window when it happened. All I can see from there is the street. And the mountains, of course, but there are lots of mountains in America, right?”
    “Right.” Could the woman in the hat match the mountains she’d seen through Abra’s eyes to a photo, if she did an exhaustive computer search? Like so much else in this business, there was just no way to be sure.
    “Why did they kill him, Dan? Why did they kill the baseball boy?”
    He thought he knew, and he would have hidden it from her if he could, but even this short meeting was enough to tell him he would never have that sort of relationship with Abra Rafaella Stone. Recovering alcoholics strove for “complete honesty in all our affairs,” but rarely achieved it; he and Abra could not avoid it.
    ( food )
    She stared at him, aghast. “They ate his shining ?”
    ( I think so )
    ( they’re VAMPIRES? )
    Then, aloud: “Like in Twilight ?”
    “Not like them,” Dan said. “And for God’s sake, Abra, I’m only guessing.” The library door opened. Dan looked around, afraid it might be the overly curious Yvonne Stroud, but it was a boy-girl couple that only had eyes for each other. He turned back to Abra. “We have to wrap this up.”
    “I know.” She raised a hand, rubbed at her lips, realized what she was doing, and put it back in her lap. “But I have so many questions. There’s so much I want to know. It would take hours .”
    “Which we don’t have. You’re sure it was a Sam’s?”
    “Huh?”
    “She was in a Sam’s Supermarket?”
    “Oh. Yes.”
    “I know the chain. I’ve even shopped in one or two, but not around here.”
    She grinned. “Course not, Uncle Dan, there aren’t any. They’re all out west. I went on Google for that, too.” The grin faded. “There are hundreds of them, all the way from Nebraska to California.”
    “I need to think about this some more, and so do you. You can stay in touch with me by email if it’s important, but it would be better if we just”—he tapped his forehead—“zip-zip. You know?”
    “Yes,” she said, and smiled. “The only good part of this is having a friend who knows how to zip-zip. And what it’s like.”
    “Can you use the blackboard?”
    “Sure. It’s pretty easy.”
    “You need to keep one thing in mind, one above all others. The hat woman probably doesn’t know how to find you, but she knows you’re out there someplace.”
    She had grown very still. He reached for her thoughts, but Abra was guarding them.
    “Can you set a burglar alarm in your mind? So that if she’s someplace near, either mentally or in person, you’ll know?”
    “You think she’s going to come for me, don’t you?”
    “She might try. Two reasons. First, just because you know she exists.”
    “And her friends,” Abra whispered. “She has lots of friends.”
    ( with flashlights )
    “What’s the other reason?” And before he could reply: “Because I’d be good to eat. Like the baseball boy was good to eat. Right?”
    There was no point denying it; to Abra his forehead was a window. “ Can you set an alarm? A proximity alarm? That’s—”
    “I know what proximity means. I don’t know, but I’ll try.”
    He knew what she was going to say next before she said it, and there was no mind-reading involved. She was only a child, after all. This time when she took his hand, he didn’t pull away. “Promise you won’t let her get me, Dan. Promise .”
    He did, because she was a kid and needed comforting. But of course there was only one way to keep such a promise, and that was to make the threat go away.
    He thought it again: Abra, the trouble you’re getting me into .
    And she said it again, but this time not out loud:
    ( sorry )
    “Not your fault, kid. You didn’t
    ( ask for this )
    “any more than I did. Go on in with your books. I have to get back to Frazier. I’m on shift tonight.”
    “Okay. But we’re friends, right?”
    “Totally friends.”
    “I’m glad.”
    “And I bet you’ll like The Fixer . I think you’ll get it. Because you’ve fixed a few things in your time, haven’t you?”
    Pretty dimples deepened the corners of her mouth. “You’d know.”
    “Oh, believe me,” Dan said.
    He watched her start up the steps, then pause and come back. “I don’t know who the woman in the hat is, but I know one of her friends. His name is Barry the Chunk, or something like that. I bet wherever she is, Barry the