* * *
Outside the pub, he took off his shoes and started down the sidewalk in bare feet, the concrete cold, but at least he could walk without pain.
Instead of going back to the hotel, he followed one of the streets that intersected Main and headed into a neighborhood.
Thinking about Kate.
Victorian houses lined both sides of the block, set off by the glow of their porch lights.
The silence was staggering.
You never got nights like this in Seattle.
There was always the distant moan of some ambulance or car alarm or the patter of rainfall on the streets.
Here, the complete, dead quiet was broken only by the soft slap of his feet against the pavement—
Wait.
No, there was another sound—a solitary cricket chirping in a bush up ahead.
It took him back to his childhood in Tennessee and those mid-October evenings sitting on the screened porch while his father smoked his pipe, staring across the soybean fields when the chorus of crickets had dwindled down to a lonely one.
Hadn’t the poet Carl Sandburg written about this very thing? Ethan couldn’t recall the verse verbatim, knew only that it had something to do with the voice of the last cricket across the frost.
A splinter of singing.
There it was—that was the phrase he’d loved.
A splinter of singing.
He stopped beside the bush, half-expecting the chirping to abruptly stop, but it kept on at a rhythm so steady it almost seemed mechanical. Crickets rubbed their wings together to make that sound—he’d read that somewhere.
Ethan glanced at the bush.
Some species of juniper.
Strong, fragrant smell.
A nearby streetlight threw a decent splash of illumination down onto the branches, and he leaned in to see if he could catch a glimpse of the cricket.
The chirping went on, unabated.
“Where are you, little guy?”
He cocked his head.
Now he was squinting at something barely poking up between the branches. But it wasn’t the cricket. Some sort of box instead, about the size of his iPhone.
He reached through the branches and touched the face of it.
The chirping grew softer.
He took his hand away.
Louder.
What the hell was the point of this?
The chirp of the cricket was emanating from a speaker.