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sleep for over ten years, and lately he had been seeing them too, but the pain had never been as close as it was right now. He would get no more sleep tonight.
    “My brother comes to me in my dreams,” Angel said finally. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? That he gets up out of the ground and he’s not alive when he comes, he’s dead and he’s rotting and I can see it in his face, I can smell it.”
    “No,” he said honestly. “That’s not what I wanted to hear. That’s not what I wanted to hear at all.”
    After a moment, she rested her hand on his arm, and they sat there until the sun came up.
    Then they got back in the car and headed north.

CHAPTER THREE
    On the way home from Mrs. Friedman’s, though it was only four o’clock, Jeb Taylor thought about stopping at the local watering hole for a drink. After all, he told himself, he was almost nineteen years old, and if he wanted to stop and have a beer he ought to be able to do it. They would serve him without a fuss; his money was as good as anybody else’s, and nobody much cared about the drinking age around here. To be truthful he had been thirsting for a good drink since the night before, and the only thing that had stopped him all day was the watchful eye of Mrs. Friedman herself, who came out every five minutes to check on him and make sure he was “doing things right.” She would watch him work until he felt her eyes burning through the back of his neck, then finally she would sigh and go back inside, only to come back out again later to say some other meaningless thing. I wonder what it’s like to live with her , he had thought, as he dug through the rocks and old roots in the back garden and dumped fresh manure on the soil. Mr. Friedman was a big-shot lawyer in town, and worked long hours. Jeb always figured it was a way to avoid his wife more than anything else. Her husband probably thinks about killing himself every day of his life .
    The local watering hole was a one-room bar on Route 27called Johnny’s, located just beyond the town square and across from the grocery. The place used to be an old schoolhouse, and the red brick and small wooden windows had survived through several minor renovations. The owner thought the windows made the place look more distinguished, and in fact the building was listed on the historical landmark map or some such fool thing. There were four places of historical interest in White Falls; three were old houses on the square, built by founding members of the town, and the other was the schoolhouse, which had come to Johnny Berden in 1974 with a dirt-cheap price from the previous owner who eventually declared bankruptcy. The town council asked him to keep the place empty as a museum for tourists, but Johnny had laughed at them. The least he could do then, the council said, was preserve the “flavor” of the place. So Johnny put a horseshoe bar in the center of the room, a few cheap plastic booths around the edges, planted a jukebox in the corner, and hung a few pool lights from the ceiling, and Johnny’s was born, such as it was. A lot of people still called it the schoolhouse.
    Right now Jeb didn’t give a damn what the place was called. He hadn’t slept well last night, and today had been a long hard day digging in the dirt. It had been unusually hot for the middle of April, and so humid Jeb’s shirt stuck to his shoulders with sweat. That was no job for a grown man. Now that he was turning nineteen he ought to have something better. His back had begun to ache and his knees crack a little too loud when he bent down, and for seven-fifty an hour, he thought he could find better things to do. He had begun lately to think of ways he could get out of the job and still keep gas in his car.
    But now he wanted a shot of whiskey and a beer to wash it down, for starters. He couldn’t remember when he’d craved a drink so bad. He’d never much cared for whiskey before, but right now it seemed like the