“Capital Z – e – r – o.”
Zero wrote the letters as Stanley said them. “Zero,” he said, looking at his piece of paper. His smile was too big for his face.
Stanley watched him write it over and over again.
Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero …
In a way, it made him sad. He couldn’t help but think that a hundred times zero was still nothing.
“You know, that’s not my real name,” Zero said as they headed to the Wreck Room for dinner.
“Well, yeah,” Stanley said, “I guess I knew that.” He had never really been sure.
“Everyone’s always called me Zero, even before I came here.”
“Oh. Okay.”
; “My real name is Hector.”
“Hector,” Stanley repeated.
“Hector Zeroni.”
28
After twenty years, Kate Barlow returned to Green Lake. It was a place where nobody would ever find her—a ghost town on a ghost lake.
The peach trees had all died, but there were a couple of small oak trees still growing by an old abandoned cabin. The cabin used to be on the eastern shore of the lake. Now the edge of the lake was over five miles away, and it was little more than a small pond full of dirty water.
She lived in the cabin. Sometimes she could hear Sam’s voice echoing across the emptiness. “Onions! Sweet fresh onions.”
She knew she was crazy. She knew she’d been crazy for the last twenty years.
“Oh, Sam,” she would say, speaking into the vast emptiness. “I know it is hot, but I feel so very cold. My hands are cold. My feet are cold. My face is cold. My heart is cold.”
And sometimes she would hear him say, “I can fix that,” and she’d feel his warm arm across her shoulders.
She’d been living in the cabin about three months when she was awakened one morning by someone kicking open the cabin door. She opened her eyes to see the blurry end of a rifle, two inches from her nose.
She could smell Trout Walker’s dirty feet.
“You’ve got exactly ten seconds to tell me where you’ve hidden your loot,” said Trout. “Or else I’ll blow your head off.”
She yawned.
A redheaded woman was there with Trout. Kate could see her rummaging through the cabin, dumping drawers and knocking things from the shelves of cabinets.
The woman came to her. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Linda Miller?” asked Kate. “Is that you?”
Linda Miller had been in the fourth grade when Kate Barlow was still a teacher. She had been a cute freckle-faced girl with beautiful red hair. Now her face was blotchy, and her hair was dirty and scraggly.
“It’s Linda Walker now,” said Trout.
“Oh, Linda, I’m so sorry,” said Kate.