Doctor Sleep

it many times.
    It also helped that Dave Stone kept up a constant stream of family stories, many of which Abra had never heard before. And still, Dan wasn’t convinced any of this would have worked if the one in charge of finding her hadn’t been sick.
    “Can’t the others do this location thing?” he had asked her.
    “Thelady in the hat could, even from halfway across the country,but she’s staying out of it.” That unsettling smile had once more curved Abra’s lips and exposed the tips of her teeth. It made her look far older than her years. “Rose is scared of me.”
    Abra’s presence in Dan’s head wasn’t constant. Every now and then he would feel her leave as she went the other way, reaching out—oh so carefully—tothe one who had been foolish enough to slip Bradley Trevor’s baseball glove on his hand. She said they had stopped in a town called Starbridge (Dan was pretty sure she meant Sturbridge) and left the turnpike there, moving along the secondary roads toward the bright blip of her consciousness. Later on they had stopped at a roadside café for lunch, not hurrying, making the final leg of the trip last.They knew where she was going now, and were perfectly willing to let her get there, because Cloud Gap was isolated. They thought she was making their job easier, and that was fine, but this was delicate work, a kind of telepathic laser surgery.
    There had been one unsettling moment when a pornographic image filled Dan’s mind—some kind of group sex by a pool—but it had been gone almost at once.He supposed he had gotten a peek into her undermind, where—if you believed Dr. Freud—all sorts of primal images lurked. This was an assumption he would come to regret, although never to blame himself for; he had taught himself not to snoop into people’s most private things.
    Dan held the Riv ’s steering-yoke with one hand. The other was on the mangy stuffed bunny in his lap. Deep woods, now startingto flame with serious color, flowed by on both sides. In the right-hand seat—the so-called conductor’s seat—Dave rambled on, telling his daughter family stories and dancing at least one family skeleton out of the closet.
    “When your mom called yesterday morning, she told me there’s a trunk stored in the basement of Momo’s building. It’s marked Alessandra . You know who that is, don’t you?”
    “GrammaSandy,” Dan said. Christ, even his voice sounded higher. Younger.
    “Right you are. Now here’s something you might not know, and if that’s the case, you didn’t hear it from me. Right?”
    “No, Daddy.” Dan felt his lips curve up as, some miles away, Abra smiled down at her current collection of Scrabble tiles: S P O N D L A.
    “Your Gramma Sandy graduated from SUNY Albany—the State University of NewYork—and was doing her student teaching at a prep school, okay? Vermont, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, I forget which. Halfway through her eight weeks, she up and quit. But she hung around for awhile, maybe picking up some part-time work, waitressing or something, for sure going to a lot of concerts and parties. She was . . .”
    5
    ( a good-time girl )
    That made Abra think of the three sex maniacsby the pool, smooching and gobbling to oldtime disco music. Uck. Some people had very strange ideas of what was a good time.
    “Abra?” That was Mrs. Deane. “It’s your turn, honey.”
    If she had to keep this up for long, she’d have a nervous breakdown. It would have been so much easier at home, by herself. She had even floated the idea to her father, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Not even with Mr.Freeman watching over her.
    She used a U on the board to make POUND.
    “Thanks, Abba-Doofus, I was going there,” Emma said. She turned the board and began to study it with beady-eyed final-exam concentration that would go on for another five minutes, at least. Maybe even ten. Then she would make something totally lame, like RAP or PAD.
    Abra returned to the Riv . What her father was saying was sortof interesting, although she knew more about it than he thought she did.
    ( Abby? Are you )
    6
    “Abby? Are you listening?”
    “Sure,” Dan said. I just had to take a little time-out to play a word . “This is interesting.”
    “Anyway, Momo was living in Manhattan at that time, and when Alessandra came to see her that June, she was pregnant.”
    “Pregnant with Mom?”
    “That’s right, Abba-Doo.”
    “So Mom wasborn out of wedlock ?”
    Total surprise, and