The morning after, the usual domestic babble is smoothed over the lingering domestic terror of the night. They ease out the door and into their cars and back out cautiously although the other motorists stop and cheerfully wave them into the wake of traffic and they coast downhill into the city from the vantages of Lowry, Diamond Lake, and Saint Louis Park. They roll around the lakes and along the straight shot of Lake Street or Franklin. The family disbands in different directions into the thrill of their daily lives: to jobs, grade schools, and hockey rinks. There are always errands to run after work, to the hardware store to price siding or to buy another rattling package of D-Con for the mice that winter in the walls, nesting in the newspaper left there as insulation by the first owners who didn’t have enough money to buy rock wool. It is of these things they think as they near the rutted apartments of South Minneapolis, not of the people who live in the faded glory of the Windsor, in the redbrick town houses on Portland, rat-holed, and broken-into cells where children sleep on the floor. If they do look up from the thin space between the steering wheel and the visor, they don’t notice much but once in a while the Pillsbury Mansion strikes them as strange, misplaced, out of step with the rest of the neighborhood, set there by a strong force of nature.

It is only this kind of thing the drivers notice; the building seems alien in its surroundings. They note this instead of the people whom they pass, folded tightly into their clothes during their brutal wait at the bus stop. The drivers pass these people and then turn onto Third Avenue or Eleventh Street, over I-94 into the wide tunnels of steel and downtown offices that sweep them up over the city. Their own houses wait empty to greet them and their failures at the end of the day. Ready to begin again the terror muffled by the lawn and the hedge, planted this time with ornamental cedar so winter cannot lower its skirt to show what is really going on, quietly, in these houses.

5

Lincoln tells himself stories. They aren’t wild, or especially good. He tells himself stories because he has to. It started with the Gale Mansion; if the small house Lincoln grew up in could have as many worries as it did, then the huge stone house was bound to have more. By the time Irma left, he had stories for most of the buildings on his route to Andersen Elementary School. In the Gale Mansion he has placed a starched white woman who is so old and so mean she could be part ghost. No one really knows. What is certain is that small children regularly disappear forever along that stretch of Stevens Avenue.