Chapter 11: Hopper's Dead Daughter and Holmes's Empty Chair

The call came at eleven forty-seven, which Holmes knew because he had been watching the clock on the hardware store wall — a Coca-Cola promotional piece, red and white, with a sweep second hand that he had spent twenty minutes establishing as accurate to within four seconds of the BBC World Service time signal available on Owens's transistor radio. He had been sitting with the notebook and the eleven-second pattern and the question of whether a dying fluorescent tube in a Hawkins stairwell could constitute evidence of anything, and the answer continued to be that he did not know, which continued to be intolerable, when the phone on the wall rang.

It was Hopper. His voice had the flattened quality of a man who had been driving for some time and had arrived somewhere that confirmed his worst suspicions about the evening.

"There's a body," Hopper said. "Except there isn't."