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about some coffee?”
    “He’s the new guy,” said Ralph. I swayed, catching myself on the back of a booth. The girl had a mug in her hand, and she was coming to me, concerned. 
    HER, the lights had said. Her. 
    “I’m Lischen,” she said, and my guts slid sideways like a glass door. 
    “How is that?” I managed. 
    “How’s what?” she said. “Lischen March. I know, it’s a funny name, but it’s in my family.” 
    “You know you’re—”
    She smiled at me. 
    “Drink that coffee. This is my place,” she said. “Well, it’s my mom’s place, anyway, and before that my grandma’s. I know you. I work at the library. You went running out like dogs were after you. You’re Malcolm, who bought the Weyland place. You’re the talk of the town. Drink the coffee. We know what drunk looks like.” 
    That perfume was still on her, a sweet, familiar forest smell, and her face was sweet too, and tender, sunburnt cheeks and hair bent from the braid she’d taken out. She was still wearing the same dress, flowers twining up from the hem to wrap around her. Maybe in her late twenties, not the teenager I’d first taken her for. I felt the ghost of the ring I’d had on my finger, and I pushed past her. 
    “I need to use the phone,” I said. “It’s urgent.”
    The guy behind the counter pushed an old phone at me. Rotary. I listened to the dial tone. I was real. There were people outside this town. 
    I caught myself dialing my old number. No. I put the receiver down again, with effort. 
    “I need a phone book.”
    He had one. Once I had it in my hands, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. This phone book wasn’t for Salem. Salem was 200 miles away. I decided to try to trust them.
    “I need to call the prison. The Oregon State Penitentiary, I think?”
    They looked at me, all these innocent people in this innocent town. None of them knew anything about what was happening to me. I got off the stool, exhausted. This had been a mistake. Ten days allotted to me by a madman. It wasn’t real. 
    Ralph sighed, and put his cup down on the counter. 
    “So you’re looking for Ironhide,” he said.

9.
     

    I collapsed to the ground in a clattering heap of red-glitter vinyl and silver chrome diner stools. Shock, exhaustion, drunkenness, and there I was, crumbled on the floor, no legs left to stand on.
    “Come on, now, fella. Up you come.” Ralph picked up the stools, then tucked his hands under my arms and pulled me up as well. “Malcolm. Have a seat now, Malcolm.”
    He heaved me onto one of the stools, and Lischen set a slice of grasshopper pie in front of me. “It’s on the house—a welcome to town,” she said.
    My brain was a page full of crossed-out writing.
    “Ironhide,” Ralph said. “No need to call the prison to find out anything about him. Eat up now. Everyone around here knows the story. Not the kind of thing we’d forget, even if Lischen weren’t named for her great-aunt, God rest her soul.”
    “Why do you call him Ironhide?” I asked.
    “Well, you can hardly expect a person to spit out his mouthful of a name every time, now can you? And besides, he had that condition. Give me a slice of that pie, too, Lischen.”
    She smiled as she slid the plate over to him, and the bracelet she wore glinted in the light from the fluorescents overhead. Normal things. I could barely hold myself still in my seat. Better to be back on the floor, where the world might stop tilting. They were acting as if Dusha Chuchonnyhoof was nothing.
    “Exactly,” Ralph said.
    “What?”
    “That name you just said. Dusha whatever it was.” Ralph took a bite of his pie.
    I hadn’t realized I had spoken.
    “Condition?” I asked.
    “Something to do with too much iron in his blood. Made him rust from the inside. And he smelled like iron, stank of it, if you got too close to him. Some said that’s what turned him into the monster he was, but I believe he was a monster already, to do what he did.” Ralph