"This was a no-brakes chapter. This was clearly the question that wanted asking, but he wasnt sure it was a question either of them wanted asked.
That man would have asked. With a lot of water in the cellar and the mistress of the manor gone, he had heard them in the walls. Page two was a birth announcement: Paul Emery Wilkes, born in Bakersfield Receiving Hospital, May 12th, 1939. The phone — the working phone — would have gotten on her nerves long before he came.
His first cursory glance had taken in the shelves with their stacks of folded sheets and pillow-cases and washcloths and towels. Dragging something down cellar.
He dreamed of the piling, so real he felt he could almost reach out and slide his palm over its green-black fissured curve. But now he ate it hungrily, with all the trimmings, as if discovering the great principle of food for the first time in his life.