Going Where It's Dark Read Online Free Page A

inside that little place.”
    The sun shone through the trees and made leaf shadows on the pavement. Buck and his uncle kept to the side of the road and shifted over even farther when a car went by.
    “How’d you meet him?” Buck asked.
    “Remember that big windstorm we had last September? I was coming back from the gas station and I see the screen door on this house flopping back and forth. And here’s this crippled man holding a hammer in one hand, the other on the screen, trying to set it straight. So I stopped.”
    Uncle Mel reached up to push some branches out of their way. “Can’t say he was glad to see me. In fact, I wasn’t sure he saw me at all, ’cause when I asked if I could help, he didn’t even look my way. But a hinge had lost its pin, so I found it, wrestled the screen in place, then let him hammer the pin back in….”
    “D…did he thank you?”
    “Nope. I’d been studying the way his legs shook, and the spotty way he’d shaved that morning. I put out my hand and said, ‘I’m Mel Turner. Live with the Andersons down the road there.’ And all he did was give me a nod and hobble back into the house.”
    Buck waited until a pickup without a muffler roared by. Then he said, “I wouldn’t have ever g…g…gone back.”
    “I sort of felt the same way. But when I walked out to the road again, I saw how the flap on his mailbox had been blown open too, and the box was full. Stuff had been there a week, maybe. So I pulled out all the mail, walked it back to the house, and set it between the screen and the door. One envelope read
Jacob Wall,
so at least I had his name.”
    The small square house was coming into view now. Like many of the other houses along the road, it was dwarfed by the land on which it sat. Folks along here were said to be land-rich and house-poor, Buck had heard.
    When he and his uncle turned up the gravel drive, an old Volvo crookedly parked at the head of it, Mel said, “So…I just started dropping by couple times a week, walking the mail up to the house. And one day I knocked and said, ‘Jacob, it’s Mel. You got a pliers and screwdriver handy, I could fix the flap on your mailbox.’ And after that—maybe because I was asking
his
help, wanting to borrow his tools—he thawed a little.”
    “Like you were friends?”
    “Naw. Never that. But when I’d ask if he needed anything, he’d let me pick up something from the store, mail a letter, fix a leak. The Bealls say he comes into town ’bout once a month, but driving’s a chore for him. I never learned much more about him than I’m telling you now. But every Friday he hands me a five-dollar bill. Told me I couldn’t come back if I didn’t take it, and he doesn’t want any thank-yous. Strange, though. The inside of the house doesn’t fit with the outside, and he doesn’t quite fit with either one.”
    Buck wondered if Jacob heard the gravel crunching underfoot as they approached the house—if he’d been watching from a window, maybe. It seemed a long time before the door opened, though. Then he found himself staring up into two fading blue eyes, half hidden by bushy white eyebrows that matched the thick thatch of hair reaching down under his collar. Jacob’s face had so many wrinkles it looked like a shriveled apple.
    “Afternoon, Jacob. Brought the lightbulbs you needed. This is my nephew, Buck. He’s going to give me a hand. Buck, this is Mr. Wall.”
    “Hi,” said Buck, and waited.
    In response the man stared at him two seconds longer, then shakily turned himself around and wordlessly set off for the kitchen.
    Buck looked up at his uncle, but Mel only shrugged and followed Jacob through the house.
    •••
    It was more like an antique store than a house. So much furniture that in places Buck had to turn sideways to get through. Two large leather couches, when the living room was only suited for one. Two leather armchairs, three end tables, and bookcases that not only lined the walls but covered one