Chapter 2: The Byers House and the Christmas Lights

Elm Street was three-quarters of a mile from the police department, and Holmes walked it in the rain with the missing-persons report folded in his breast pocket, having removed it from Hopper's bulletin board in the forty seconds the chief had spent with his back turned, retrieving his bourbon.

He was not proud of this. He was also not particularly troubled by it.

The address — 4 Randolph Lane, a deviation from Elm Street proper that he had located by reading the street grid tacked beneath the bulletin board map — led him through a neighborhood that settled around him like a film of quiet domesticity, curtained windows and porch lights and the blue-grey flicker of television sets resolving faces he could not name. The cars in the driveways were large and rounded and smelled of rubber and processed fuel. A child's bicycle lay on its side on a lawn, already turning wet. He catalogued these details with the automatic efficiency of a man who has never learned to look at anything without also reading it, and he filed them in the temporary index he had been constructing since his arrival — the index labeled, with some discomfort, Not Yet Classifiable.