Chapter 15 Section 13

Students tend to stick to campus.There was nothing for them to do in Blacksmith's Town, no natural places to linger or enchanting sights.They have their own food, movies, music, theatre, sports, conversation and sex.There are only dry cleaners and optical shops in this town.The shadowy photographs of Victorian homes adorning the windows of real estate companies hadn't been changed in years.The house has been sold, may have been torn down, and may still stand in other cities in other states.There are priced, front and yard sales all over the town, and outdated items line the driveway and are tended by the children.

Babette came to see me in my office in the Centennial Hall.She said Heinrich got off the embankment, and he was wearing a camouflage hat and holding an instant-imaging point-and-shoot camera, and watched them trawl the river; .They hid, alive but terrified, in an abandoned bakery kiosk in a sprawling interstate mall called the Nakamura Mall.Apparently, the two of them wandered the mall for two days, got lost, dazed and scared, and then hid in this messy little pavilion.They spent another two days in the kiosk when the emaciated, trembling older sister braved herself to come out to pick up discarded food from the revolving door-drawn trash can with cartoon characters.During the time they stayed in the mall, the weather happened to be warm, which is really lucky.No one yet knows why they didn't call for help.Perhaps the large and unfamiliar place, together with their advanced age, made them feel helpless, so they had to wander here and there at a loss among a large amount of bewildering and frightening things.The Treadwells rarely went out, and in fact no one knew how they got to the mall.Probably one of their grandnieces dropped them off here and then forgot to pick them up.Babbitt said the grandniece has not yet been able to find an explanation for this.

The day before this happy discovery, the police had hired a wizard to help them divine Treadwell's whereabouts and fate.At that time, the local newspapers were full of reports in this regard.The wizard was a woman who lived in a mobile home in the woods outside the city.She wants people to just know her name is Adele T.Sitting in the house with Sheriff Hollis Wright, she reportedly examined photographs of Treadwell and sniffed items from their cupboards.She then asked the sheriff to leave her alone for an hour.She performed a ritual, consuming some kind of rice and a purple flower called a dahlia before being possessed by a ghost.In this specially constructed state, the report added, she managed to target whatever distant physical system she was looking for—in this case, old Treadwyer and his sister.When Sheriff Wright entered the trailer again, Adele T told him to forget about the river and focus on the dry land with lunar views within a fifteen-mile radius of Treadwell's home.The police immediately went to a plaster processing site ten miles down the river, where they found an air bag containing a pistol and two kilograms of pure heroin.

Adele T has been consulted several times by the police.She helped them find two men bludgeoned to death, a Syrian man stuffed in a freezer and a marked $600,000 safe.Although the report added that in each case, police were looking for none of these things. The mystique of America grows ever more unfathomable.