would hire someone like Balazar to carry their messages."
"You have a point," Eddie said. "Tower was mucho scared."
"Anyway," Jake said, "it makes at least a few things clearer. The sign I saw in the vacant lot, for instance.
This Sombra Company also got the right to 'advertise forthcoming projects' there for their hundred thousand.
Did you see that part, Eddie?"
"I think so. Right after the part about Tower not permitting any liens or encumbrances on his property,
because of Sombra's 'stated interest,' wasn't it? "
"Right," Jake said. "The sign I saw in the lot said…" He paused, thinking, then raised his hands and looked
between them, as if reading a sign only he could see: "Mills construction AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE
ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN. And then, COMING
SOON, TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS."
"So that's what they want it for," Eddie said. "Condos. But—"
"What are condominiums?" Susannah asked, frowning. "It sounds like some newfangled kind of spice rack."
"It's a kind of co-op apartment deal," Eddie said. "They probably had em in your when, but by a different
name."
"Yeah," Susannah said with some asperity. "We called em coops. Or sometimes we went way downtown and
called em apartment buildings."
"It doesn't matter because it was never about condos," Jake said. "Never about the building the sign said they
were going to put there, for that matter. All that's only, you know… shoot, what's the word?"
"Camouflage?" Roland suggested.
Jake grinned. "Camuflage, yeah. It's about the rose, not the building! And they can't get at it until they own
the ground it grows on. I'm sure of it."
"You may be right about the building's not meaning anything," Susannah said, "but that Turtle Bay name has
a certain resonance, wouldn't you say?" She looked at the gunslinger. "That part of Manhattan is called Turtle
Bay, Roland."
He nodded, unsurprised. The Turtle was one of the twelve Guardians, and almost certainly stood at the far
end of the Beam upon which they now traveled.
"The people from Mills Construction might not know about the rose," Jake said, "but I bet the ones from
Sombra Corporation do." His hand stole into Oy's fur, which was thick enough at the billy-bumbler's neck to
make his fingers disappear entirely. "I think that somewhere in New York City—in some business building,
probably in Turtle Bay on the East Side— there's a door marked sombra corporation. And someplace behind
that door there's another door. The kind that takes you here."
For a minute they sat thinking about it—about worlds spinning on a single axle in dying harmony—and no
one said anything.
FOUR
"Here's what I think is happening," Eddie said. "Suze, Jake, feel free to step in if you think I'm getting it
wrong. This guy Cal Tower's some sort of custodian for the rose. He may not know it on a conscious level,
but he must be. Him and maybe his whole family before him. It explains the name."
"Only he's the last," Jake said.
"You can't be sure of that, hon," Susannah said.
"No wedding ring," Jake responded, and Susannah nodded, giving him that one, at least provisionally.
"Maybe at one time there were lots of Torens owning lots of New York property," Eddie said, "but those days
are gone. Now the only thing standing between the Sombra Corporation and the rose is one nearly broke fat
guy who changed his name. He's a… what do you call someone who loves books?"
"A bibliophile," Susannah said.
"Yeah, one of those. And George Biondi may not be Einstein, but he said at least one smart thing while we
were eavesdropping. He said Tower's place wasn't a real shop but just a hole you poured money into. What's
going on with him is a pretty old story where we come from, Roland. When my Ma used to see some rich
guy on TV—Donald Trump, for instance—"
"Who?" Susannah asked.
"You don't know him, he would've been just a kid back in '64. And it doesn't matter. 'Shirtsleeves to
shirtsleeves in three generations,' my mother would tell us. 'It's the American way, boys.'
"So here's Tower, and he's sort of like Roland—the last of his line. He sells off a piece of property here and a
piece there, making his taxes, making his house payments, keeping up with the credit cards and the doctor
bills, paying for his stock. And yeah, I'm making this up… except somehow it doesn't feel that way."
"No," Jake said. He spoke in a low, fascinated voice. "It doesn't."
"Perhaps you shared his khef," Roland said. "More likely, you touched him. As my old friend Alain used to.
Go on, Eddie."
"And every year he tells himself the bookstore'll turn around. Catch on, maybe, the way things in New York
sometimes do. Get out of the red and into the black and then he'll be okay. And finally there's only one thing
left to sell: lot two-ninety-eight on Block Nineteen in Turtle Bay."
"Two-nine-eight adds up to nineteen," Susannah said. "I wish I could decide if that means something or if it's
just Blue Car Syndrome."
"What's Blue Car Syndrome?" Jake asked.
"When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere."
"Not here, you don't," Jake said.
"Not here," Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes whole weeks would go by, and Oy would
do nothing but give out the occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might almost
have been the product of original thought. But you didn't know. Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure.
The way we don't know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head.
Oy responded with a companionable wink.
"He holds onto that lot until the bitter end," Eddie said. "I mean hey, he doesn't even own the crappy building
his bookstore's in, he only leases it."
Jake took over. "Tom and Jerry's Artistic Deli goes out of business, and Tower has it torn down. Because part
of him wants to sell the lot. That part of him says he'd be crazy not to." Jake fell silent for a moment, thinking
about how some thoughts came in the middle of the night. Crazy thoughts, crazy ideas, and voices that
wouldn't shut up. "But there's another part of him, another voice—"
"The voice of the Turtle," Susannah put in quietly.
"Yes, the Turtle or the Beam," Jake agreed. "They're probably the same thing. And this voice tells him he has
to hold onto it at all costs." He looked at Eddie. "Do you think he knows about the rose? Do you think he
goes down there sometimes and looks at it?"
"Does a rabbit shit in the woods?" Eddie responded. "Sure he goes. And sure he knows. On some level he
must know. Because a corner lot in Manhattan… how much would a thing like that be worth, Susannah?"
"In my time, probably a million bucks," she said. "By 1977, God knows. Three? Five?" She shrugged.
"Enough to let sai Tower go on selling books at a loss for the rest of his life, provided he was reasonably
careful about how he invested the principal."
Eddie said, "Everything about this shows how reluctant he is to sell. I mean Suze already pointed out how
little Sombra got for their hundred grand."
"But they did get something," Roland said. "Something very important."
"A foot in the door," Eddie said.
"You say true. And now, as the term of their agreement winds down, they send your world's version of the
Big Coffin Hunters. Hard-caliber boys. If greed or necessity doesn't compel Tower to sell them the land with
the rose on it, they'll terrify him into it."
"Yeah," Jake said. And who would stand on Tower's side? Maybe Aaron Deepneau. Maybe no one. "So what
do we do?"
"Buy it ourselves," Susannah said promptly. "Of course."
FIVE
There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Eddie nodded thoughtfully. "Sure, why not? The
Sombra Corporation doesn't have a topping privilege in their little agreement—they probably tried, but
Tower wouldn't go for it. So sure, we'll buy it. How many deerskins do you think he'll want? Forty? Fifty? If
he's a real hard bargainer, maybe we can throw in some relics from the Old People. You know, cups and
plates and arrowheads. They'd be conversation pieces at cocktail parties."
Susannah was looking at him reproachfully.
"Okay, maybe not so funny," Eddie said. "But we have to face the facts, hon. We're nothing but a bunch of
dirty-ass pilgrims currently camped out in some other reality—I mean, this isn't even Mid-World anymore."
"Also," Jake said apologetically, "we weren't even really there, at least not the way you are when you go
through one of the doors. They sensed us, but basically we were invisible."
"Let's take one thing at a time," Susannah said. "As far as money goes, I have plenty. If we could get at it,
that is."
"How much?" Jake asked. "I know that's sort of impolite— my mother'd faint if she heard me ask someone
that, but—"
"We've come a little bit too far to worry about being polite," Susannah said. "Truth is, honey, I don't exacdy
know. My dad invented a couple of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made the
most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and handled the financial side mostly by
himself until 1959."
"The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train," Eddie said.
She nodded. "That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father had a heart attack—the first of
many. Some of it was probably stress over what happened to me, but I won't own all of it. He was a hard
driver, pure and simple."
"You don't have to own any of it," Eddie said. "I mean, it's not as if you jumped in front of that subway car,
Suze."
"I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn't always have a lot to do with objective truth. With
Mama gone, it was my job to take care of him and I couldn't handle it—I could never completely get the idea
that it was my fault out of my head."
"Gone days," Roland said, and without much sympathy.
"Thanks, sug," Susannah said dryly. "You have such a way of puttin things in perspective. In any case, my
Dad turned over the financial side of the company to his accountant after that first heart attack—an old friend
named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop Mose took care of things for me. I'd guess that when Roland
yanked me out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have been worth eight or ten
million dollars. Would that be enough to buy Mr. Tower's lot, always assuming he'd sell it to us?"
"He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie's right about the Beam," Roland said. "I believe a deep part
of Mr. Tower's mind and spirit—the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the first place—has
been waiting for us."
"Waiting for the cavalry," Eddie said with a trace of a grin. "Like Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John
Wayne movie."
Roland looked at him, unsmiling. "He's been waiting for the White."
Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them. "Then I guess he isn't waiting for
me," she said.
"Yes," Roland said, "he is." And wondered, briefly, what color that other one was. Mia.
"We need a door," Jake said.
"We need at least two," Eddie said. "One to deal with Tower, sure. But before we can do that, we need one to
go back to Susannah's when. And I mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It'd be a
bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared
legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo."
"Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone," Jake said. 'Tunneled everything into his own
accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol."
Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under
other circumstances. "Pop Mose'd never do such a thing! Why, he's my godfather!"
Jake looked embarrassed. "Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain—
and stuff like that happens in them all the time."
"Besides," Eddie said, "big money can do weird things to people."
She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew
something Eddie and Jake didn't, thought it a frog-squeezing look. "How would you know?" she asked. And
then, almost at once, "Oh, sugar, I'm sorry. That was uncalled-for."
"It's okay," Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. "Heat of the moment." He
reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie's face grew a little, started to
look as if it belonged there.
"It's just that I know Moses Carver. He's as honest as the day is long."
Eddie raised his hand—not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.
