WE ALL SUPPORT THE TEAM

Barbie walked back down Route 119 into the center of town, a distance of about three miles. By the time he got there, it was six o’clock. Main Street was almost deserted, but alive with the roar of generators; dozens of them, by the sound. The traffic light at the intersection of 119 and 117 was dark, but Sweetbriar Rose was lit and loaded. Looking through the big front window, Barbie saw that every table was taken. But when he walked in the door, he heard none of the usual big talk: politics, the Red Sox, the local economy, the Patriots, newly acquired cars and pickemups, the Celtics, the price of gas, the Bruins, newly acquired power tools, the Twin Mills Wildcats. None of the usual laughter, either.

There was a TV over the counter, and everyone was watching it. Barbie observed, with that sense of disbelief and dislocation everyone who actually finds him- or herself at the site of a major disaster must feel, that CNN’s Anderson Cooper was standing out on Route 119 with the still-smoldering hulk of the wrecked pulp-truck in the background.

Rose herself was waiting table, occasionally darting back to the counter to take an order. Wispy locks of hair were escaping her net and hanging around her face. She looked tired and harried. The counter was supposed to be Angie McCain’s territory from four until closing, but Barbie saw no sign of her tonight. Perhaps she’d been out of town when the barrier slammed down. If that were the case, she might not be back behind the counter for a good long while.

Anson Wheeler—whom Rosie usually just called “the kid,” although the guy had to be at least twenty-five —was cooking, and Barbie dreaded to think what Anse might do to anything more complicated than beans and franks, the traditional Saturday-night special at Sweetbriar Rose. Woe to the fellow or gal who ordered breakfast-for-dinner and had to face Anson’s nuclear fried eggs. Still, it was good he was here, because in addition to the missing Angie, there was also no sign of Dodee Sanders. Although that particular drip didn’t need a disaster to keep her away from work. She wasn’t lazy, exactly, but she was easily distracted. And when it came to brainpower … jeez, what could you say? Her father—Andy Sanders, The Mill’s First Selectman—would never be a Mensa candidate, but Dodee made him look like Albert Einstein.

On the TV, helicopters were landing behind Anderson Cooper, blowing his groovy white hair around and nearly drowning his voice. The copters looked like Pave Lows. Barbie had ridden in his share during his time in Iraq. Now an Army officer walked into the picture, covered Cooper’s mike with one gloved hand, and spoke in the reporter’s ear.

The assembled diners in Sweetbriar Rose murmured among themselves. Barbie understood their disquiet. He felt it himself. When a man in a uniform covered a famous TV reporter’s mike without so much as a by­your-leave, it was surely the End of Days.

The Army guy—a Colonel but not his Colonel, seeing Cox would have completed Barbie’s sense of mental dislocation—finished what he had to say. His glove made a windy whroop sound when he took it off the mike. He walked out of the shot, his face a stolid blank. Barbie recognized the look: Army pod-person.

Cooper was saying, “The press is being told we have to fall back half a mile, to a place called Raymond’s Roadside Store.” The patrons murmured again at this. They all knew Raymond’s Roadside in Motton, where the sign in the window said COLD BEER HOT SANDWICHES FRESH BAIT. “This area, less than a hundred yards from what we’re calling the barrier—for want of a better term—has been declared a national security site. We’ll resume our coverage as soon as we can, but right now I’m sending it back to you in Washington, Wolf.”

The headline on the red band beneath the location shot read BREAKING NEWS MAINE TOWN CUT OFF MYSTERY DEEPENS. And in the upper righthand corner, in red, the word SEVEREwas blinking like a neon tavern sign. Drink Severe Beer, Barbie thought, and nearly chuckled.

Wolf Blitzer took Anderson Cooper’s place. Rose had a crush on Blitzer and would not allow the TV to be tuned to anything but The Situation Room on weekday afternoons; she called him “my Wolfie.” This evening Wolfie was wearing a tie, but it was badly knotted and Barbie thought the rest of his clothes looked suspiciously like Saturday grubs.

“Recapping our story,” Rose’s Wolfie said, “this afternoon at roughly one o’clock—”

“Twas earlier than that, and by quite a patch,” someone said.

“Is it true about Myra Evans?” someone else asked. “Is she really dead?”

“Yes,” Fernald Bowie said. The town’s only undertaker, Stewart Bowie, was Fern’s older brother. Fern sometimes helped him out when he was sober, and he looked sober tonight. Shocked sober. “Now shutcha quack so I can hear this.”

Barbie wanted to hear it, too, because Wolfie was even now addressing the question Barbie cared most about, and saying what Barbie wanted to hear: that the airspace over Chester’s Mill had been declared a no-fly zone. In fact, all of western Maine and eastern New Hampshire, from Lewiston-Auburn to North Conway, was a no-fly zone. The President was being briefed. And for the first time in nine years, the color of the National Threat Advisory had exceeded orange.

Julia Shumway, owner and editor of the Democrat, shot Barbie a glance as he passed her table. Then the pinched and secretive little smile that was her specialty—almost her trademark—flickered on her face. “It seems that Chester’s Mill doesn’t want to let you go, Mr. Barbara.”

“So it seems,” Barbie agreed. That she knew he had been leaving—and why—didn’t surprise him. He’d spent enough time in The Mill to know Julia Shumway knew everything worth knowing.

Rose saw him as she was serving beans and franks (plus a smoking relic that might once have been a pork chop) to a party of six crammed around a table for four. She froze with a plate in each hand and two more on her arm, eyes wide. Then she smiled. It was one full of undisguised happiness and relief, and it lifted his heart.

This is what home feels like, he thought. Goddamned if it isn’t.

“Good gravy, I never expected to see you again, Dale Barbara!”

“You still got my apron?” Barbie asked. A little shyly. Rose had taken him in, after all—just a drifter with a few scribbled references in his backpack—and given him work. She’d told him she completely understood why he felt he had to blow town, Junior Rennie’s dad wasn’t a fellow you wanted for an enemy, but Barbie still felt as if he’d left her in the lurch.

Rose put down her load of plates anywhere there was room for them and hurried to Barbie. She was a plump little woman, and she had to stand on tiptoe to hug him, but she managed.

“I’m so goddam glad to see you!” she whispered. Barbie hugged her back and kissed the top of her head.

“Big Jim and Junior won’t be,” he said. But at least neither Rennie was here; there was that to be grateful for. Barbie was aware that, for the time being, at least, he had become even more interesting to the assembled Millites than their very own town on national TV.

“Big Jim Rennie can blow me!” she said. Barbie laughed, delighted by her fierceness but glad for her discretion—she was still whispering. “I thought you were gone!”

“I almost was, but I got a late start.”

“Did you see … it?”

“Yes. Tell you later.” He released her, held her at arm’s length, and thought: If you were ten years younger, Rose … or even five …

“So I can have my apron back?”

She wiped the corners of her eyes and nodded. “Please take it back. Get Anson out of there before he kills us all.”

Barbie gave her a salute, then hooked around the counter into the kitchen and sent Anson Wheeler to the counter, telling him to take care of orders and cleanup there before helping Rose in the main room. Anson stepped back from the grill with a sigh of relief. Before going to the counter, he shook Barbie’s right hand in both of his. “Thank God, man—I never seen such a rush. I was lost.”

“Don’t worry. We’re gonna feed the five thousand.”

Anson, no Biblical scholar, looked blank. “Huh?”

“Never mind.”

The bell sitting in the corner of the pass-through binged. “Order up!” Rose called.

Barbie grabbed a spatula before taking the slip—the grill was a mess, it always was when Anson was engaged in those cataclysmic heat-induced changes he called cooking—then slipped his apron over his head, tied it in back, and checked the cabinet over the sink. It was full of baseball caps, which served Sweetbriar Rose grill-monkeys as chef’s toques. He selected a Sea Dogs cap in honor of Paul Gendron (now in the bosom of his nearest and dearest, Barbie hoped), yanked it on backward, and cracked his knuckles.

Then he grabbed the first slip and went to work.

By nine fifteen, more than an hour after their usual Saturday night closing time, Rose ushered the final patrons out. Barbie locked the door and turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. He watched those last four

or five cross the street to the town common, where there were as many as fifty people gathered and talking among themselves. They were facing south, where a great white light formed a bubble over 119. Not TV lights, Barbie judged; that was the U.S. Army, creating and securing a perimeter. And how did you secure a perimeter at night? Why, by posting sentries and lighting the dead zone, of course.

Dead zone. He didn’t like the sound of that.

Main Street, on the other hand, was unnaturally dark. There were electric lights shining in some of the buildings—where there were gennies at work—and battery-powered emergency lights shining in Burpee’s Department Store, the Gas & Grocery, Mill New & Used Books, Food City at the foot of Main Street Hill, and half a dozen others, but the streetlights were dark and there were candles shining in the windows of most of Main Street’s second-floor windows, where there were apartments.

Rose sat at a table in the middle of the room, smoking a cigarette (illegal in public buildings, but Barbie would never tell). She pulled the net off her head and gave Barbie a wan smile as he sat down across from her. Behind them Anson was swabbing the counter, his own shoulder-length hair now liberated from its Red Sox cap.

“I thought Fourth of July was bad, but this was worse,” Rose said. “If you hadn’t turned up, I’d be curled in the corner, screaming for my mommy.”

“There was a blonde in an F-150,” Barbie said, smiling at the memory. “She almost gave me a ride. If she had, I might’ve been out. On the other hand, what happened to Chuck Thompson and the woman in that airplane with him might have happened to me.” Thompson’s name had been part of CNN’s coverage; the woman hadn’t been identified.

But Rose knew. “It was Claudette Sanders. I’m almost sure it was. Dodee told me yesterday that her mom had a lesson today.”

There was a plate of french fries between them on the table. Barbie had been reaching for one. Now he stopped. All at once he didn’t want any more fries. Any more of anything. And the red puddle on the side of the plate looked more like blood than ketchup.

“So that’s why Dodee didn’t come in.”

Rose shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t say for sure. I haven’t heard from her. Didn’t really expect to, with the phones out.”

Barbie assumed she meant the landlines, but even from the kitchen he’d heard people complaining about trouble getting through on their cells. Most assumed it was because everyone was trying to use them at the same time, jamming the band. Some thought the influx of TV people—probably hundreds by this time, toting Nokias, Motorolas, iPhones, and BlackBerries—was causing the problem. Barbie had darker suspicions; this was a national security situation, after all, in a time when the whole country was paranoid about terrorism. Some calls were getting through, but fewer and fewer as the evening went on.

“Of course,” Rose said, “Dodes might also have taken it into that air head of hers to blow off work and go to the Auburn Mall.”

“Does Mr. Sanders know it was Claudette in the plane?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I’d be awfully surprised if he doesn’t by now.” And she sang, in a small but tuneful voice: “It’s a small town, you know what I mean?”

Barbie smiled a little and sang the next line back to her: “Just a small town, baby, and we all support the team.” It was from an old James McMurtry song that had the previous summer gained a new and mysterious two-month vogue on a couple of western Maine c&w stations. Not WCIK, of course; James McMurtry was not the sort of artist Jesus Radio supported.

Rose pointed to the french fries. “You going to eat any more of those?”

“Nope. Lost my appetite.”

Barbie had no great love for either the endlessly grinning Andy Sanders or for Dodee the Dim, who had almost certainly helped her good friend Angie spread the rumor that had caused Barbie’s trouble at Dipper’s, but the idea that those body parts (it was the green-clad leg his mind’s eye kept trying to look at) had belonged to Dodee’s mother … the First Selectman’s wife …

“Me too,” Rose said, and put her cigarette out in the ketchup. It made a pfisss sound, and for one awful moment Barbie thought he was going to throw up. He turned his head and gazed out the window onto Main Street, although there was nothing to see from in here. From in here it was all dark.

“President’s gonna speak at midnight,” Anson announced from the counter. From behind him came the low, constant groan of the dishwasher. It occurred to Barbie that the big old Hobart might be doing its last chore, at least for a while. He would have to convince Rosie of that. She’d be reluctant, but she’d see sense. She was a bright and practical woman.

Dodee Sanders’s mother. Jesus. What are the odds?

He realized that the odds were actually not that bad. If it hadn’t been Mrs. Sanders, it might well have been someone else he knew. It’s a small town, baby, and we all support the team.

“No President for me tonight,” Rose said. “He’ll have to God-bless-America on his own. Five o’clock comes early.” Sweetbriar Rose didn’t open until seven on Sunday mornings, but there was prep. Always prep. And on Sundays, that included cinnamon rolls. “You boys stay up and watch if you want to. Just make sure we’re locked up tight when you leave. Front and back.” She started to rise.

“Rose, we need to talk about tomorrow,” Barbie said.

“Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow’s another day. Let it go for now, Barbie. All in good time.” But she must have seen something on his face, because she sat back down. “All right, why the grim look?”

“When’s the last time you got propane?”

“Last week. We’re almost full. Is that all you’re worried about?”

It wasn’t, but it was where his worries started. Barbie calculated. Sweetbriar Rose had two tanks hooked together. Each tank had a capacity of either three hundred and twenty-five or three hundred and fifty gallons, he couldn’t remember which. He’d check in the morning, but if Rose was right, she had over six hundred gallons on hand. That was good. A bit of luck on a day that had been spectacularly unlucky for the town as a whole. But there was no way of knowing how much bad luck could still be ahead. And six hundred gallons of propane wouldn’t last forever.

“What’s the burn rate?” he asked her. “Any idea?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because right now your generator is running this place. Lights, stoves, fridges, pumps. The furnace, too, if it gets cold enough to kick on tonight. And the gennie is eating propane to do it.”

They were quiet for a moment, listening to the steady roar of the almost-new Honda behind the restaurant.

Anson Wheeler came over and sat down. “The gennie sucks two gallons of propane an hour at sixty percent utilization,” he said.

“How do you know that?” Barbie asked.

“Read it on the tag. Running everything, like we have since around noon, when the power went out, it probably ate three an hour. Maybe a little more.”

Rose’s response was immediate. “Anse, kill all the lights but the ones in the kitchen. Right now. And turn the furnace thermostat down to fifty.” She considered. “No, turn it off.”

Barbie smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She got it. Not everyone in The Mill would. Not everyone in The Mill would want to.

“Okay.” But Anson looked doubtful. “You don’t think by tomorrow morning … tomorrow afternoon at the latest … ?”

“The President of the United States is going to make a TV speech,” Barbie said. “At midnight. What do you think, Anse?”

“I think I better turn off the lights,” he said.

“And the thermostat, don’t forget that,” Rose said. As he hurried away, she said to Barbie: “I’ll do the same in my place when I go up.” A widow for ten years or more, she lived over her restaurant.

Barbie nodded. He had turned over one of the paper placemats (“Have You Visited These 20 Maine Landmarks?”) and was figuring on the back. Twenty-seven to thirty gallons of propane burned since the barrier went up. That left five hundred and seventy. If Rose could cut her use back to twenty-five gallons a day, she could theoretically keep going for three weeks. Cut back to twenty gallons a day—which she could probably do by closing between breakfast and lunch and again between lunch and dinner—and she could press on for nearly a month.

Which is fine enough, he thought. Because if this town isn’t open again after a month, there won’t be anything here to cook, anyway.

“What are you thinking?” Rose asked. “And what’s up with those numbers? I have no idea what they mean.”

“Because you’re looking at them upside down,” Barbie said, and realized everyone in town was apt to do the same. These were figures no one would want to look at rightside up.

Rose turned Barbie’s makeshift scratchpad toward her. She ran the numbers for herself. Then she raised her head and looked at Barbie, shocked. At that moment Anson turned most of the lights out, and the two of them were staring at each other in a gloom that was—to Barbie, at least—horribly persuasive. They could be in real trouble here.

“Twenty-eight days?” she asked. “You think we need to plan for four weeks ?”

“I don’t know if we do or not, but when I was in Iraq, someone gave me a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. I carried it around in my pocket, read it cover to cover. Most of it makes more sense than our politicians do on their sanest days. One thing that stuck with me was this: Wish for sunshine, but build dykes. I think that’s what we—you, I mean—”

“We,” she said, and touched his hand. He turned his over and clasped it.

“Okay, we. I think that’s what we have to plan for. Which means closing between meals, cutting back on the ovens—no cinnamon rolls, even though I love em as much as anybody—and no dishwasher. It’s old and energy inefficient. I know Dodee and Anson won’t love the idea of washing dishes by hand …”

“I don’t think we can count on Dodee coming back soon, maybe not at all. Not with her mother dead.” Rose sighed. “I almost hope she did go to the Auburn Mall. Although I suppose it’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

“Maybe.” Barbie had no idea how much information was going to come out of or into Chester’s Mill if this situation didn’t resolve quickly, and with some rational explanation. Probably not much. He thought Maxwell Smart’s fabled Cone of Silence would descend soon, if it hadn’t already.

Anson came back to the table where Barbie and Rose were sitting. He had his jacket on. “Is it okay for me to go now, Rose?”

“Sure,” she said. “Six tomorrow?”

“Isn’t that a little late?” He grinned and added, “Not that I’m complaining.”

“We’re going to open late.” She hesitated. “And close between meals.”

“Really? Cool.” His gaze shifted to Barbie. “You got a place to stay tonight? Because you can stay with me. Sada went to Derry to visit her folks.” Sada was Anson’s wife.

Barbie in fact did have a place to go, almost directly across the street.

“Thanks, but I’ll go back to my apartment. I’m paid up until the end of the month, so why not? I dropped off the keys with Petra Searles in the drugstore before I left this morning, but I still have a dupe on my key ring.”

“Okay. See you in the morning, Rose. Will you be here, Barbie?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Anson’s grin widened. “Excellent.”

When he was gone, Rose rubbed her eyes, then looked at Barbie grimly. “How long is this going to go on? Best guess.”

“I don’t have a best guess, because I don’t know what happened. Or when it will stop happening.”

Very low, Rose said: “Barbie, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m scaring myself. We both need to go to bed. Things will look better in the morning.”

“After this discussion, I’ll probably need an Ambien to get to sleep,” she said, “tired as I am. But thank God you came back.”

Barbie remembered what he’d been thinking about supplies.

“One other thing. If Food City opens tomorrow—”

“It’s always open on Sundays. Ten to six.”

“If it opens tomorrow, you need to go shopping.”

“But Sysco delivers on—” She broke off and stared at him dismally. “On Tuesdays, but we can’t count on that, can we? Of course not.”

“No,” he said. “Even if what’s wrong suddenly becomes right, the Army’s apt to quarantine this burg, at least for a while.”

“What should I buy?”

“Everything, but especially meat. Meat, meat, meat. If the store opens. I’m not sure it will. Jim Rennie may persuade whoever manages it now—”

“Jack Cale. He took over when Ernie Calvert retired last year.”

“Well, Rennie may persuade him to close until further notice. Or get Chief Perkins to order the place closed.”

“You don’t know?” Rose asked, and at his blank look: “You don’t. Duke Perkins is dead, Barbie. He died out there.” She gestured south.

Barbie stared at her, stunned. Anson had neglected to turn off the television, and behind them, Rose’s Wolfie was again telling the world that an unexplained force had cut off a small town in western Maine, the area had been isolated by the armed forces, the Joint Chiefs were meeting in Washington, the President would address the nation at midnight, but in the meantime he was asking the American people to unite their prayers for the people of Chester’s Mill with his own.

“Dad? Dad ?”

Junior Rennie stood at the top of the stairs, head cocked, listening. There was no response, and the TV was silent. His dad was always home from work and in front of the TV by now. On Saturday nights he forwent CNN and FOX News for either Animal Planet or The History Channel. Not tonight, though. Junior listened to his watch to make sure it was still ticking. It was, and what it said sort of made sense, because it was dark outside.

A terrible thought occurred to him: Big Jim might be with Chief Perkins. The two of them could at this minute be discussing how to arrest Junior with the least possible fuss. And why had they waited so long? So they could spirit him out of town under cover of darkness. Take him to the county jail over in Castle Rock. Then a trial. And then?

Then Shawshank. After a few years there, he’d probably just call it The Shank, like the rest of the murderers, robbers, and sodomites.

“That’s stupid,” he whispered, but was it? He’d awakened thinking that killing Angie had just been a dream, must have been, because he would never kill anyone. Beat them up, maybe, but kill ? Ridiculous. He was … was … well … a regular person !

Then he’d looked at the clothes under the bed, seen the blood on them, and it all came back. The towel falling off her hair. Her pussypatch, somehow goading him. The complicated crunching sound from behind her face when he’d gotten her with his knee. The rain of fridge magnets and the way she had thrashed.

But that wasn’t me. That was …

“It was the headache.” Yes. True. But who’d believe that? He’d have better luck if he said the butler did it.

“Dad?”

Nothing. Not here. And not at the police station, conspiring against him, either. Not his dad. He wouldn’t. His dad always said family came first.

But did family come first? Of course he said that—he was a Christian, after all, and half-owner of WCIK— but Junior had an idea that for his dad, Jim Rennie’s Used Cars might come before family, and that being the town’s First Selectman might come before the Holy Tabernacle of No Money Down.

Junior could be—it was possible—third in line.

He realized (for the first time in his life; it was a genuine flash of insight) that he was only guessing. That he might not really know his father at all.

He went back to his room and turned on the overhead. It cast an odd unsteady light, waxing bright and then dim. For a moment Junior thought something was wrong with his eyes. Then he realized he could hear their generator running out back. And not just theirs, either. The town’s power was out. He felt a surge of relief. A big power outage explained everything. It meant his father was likely in the Town Hall conference room, discussing matters with those other two idiots, Sanders and Grinnell. Maybe sticking pins in the big map of the town, making like George Patton. Yelling at Western Maine Power and calling them a bunch of lazy cotton-pickers.

Junior got his bloody clothes, raked the shit out of his jeans—wallet, change, keys, comb, an extra headache pill—and redistributed it in the pockets of his clean pants. He hurried downstairs, stuck the incriminating garments in the washer, set it for hot, then reconsidered, remembering something his mother had told him when he was no more than ten: cold water for bloodstains. As he moved the dial to COLD WASH/COLD RINSE, Junior wondered idly if his dad had started his hobby of secretary-fucking way back then, or if he was still keeping his cotton-picking penis at home.

He started the washer going and thought about what to do next. With the headache gone, he found that he could think.

He decided he should go back to Angie’s house after all. He didn’t want to—God almighty, it was the last thing he wanted to do—but he probably should scope out the scene. Walk past and see how many police cars were there. Also whether or not the Castle County forensics van was there. Forensics was key. He knew that from watching CSI. He’d seen the big blue-and-white van before, while visiting the county courthouse with his dad. And if it was at the McCains’ …

I’ll run.

Yes. As fast and far as he could. But before he did, he’d come back here and visit the safe in his dad’s study. His dad didn’t think Junior knew the combo to that safe, but Junior did. Just as he knew the password to his dad’s computer, and thus about his dad’s penchant for watching what Junior and Frank DeLesseps called Oreo sex: two black chicks, one white guy. There was plenty of money in that safe.

Thousands of dollars.

What if you see the van and come back and he’s here?

The money first, then. The money right now.

He went into the study and for a moment thought he saw his father sitting in the high-backed chair where he watched the news and nature programs. He’d fallen asleep, or … what if he’d had a heart attack? Big Jim had had heart problems off and on for the last three years; mostly arrhythmia. He usually went up to Cathy Russell and either Doc Haskell or Doc Rayburn buzzed him with something, got him back to normal. Haskell would have been content to keep on doing that forever, but Rayburn (whom his father called “an overeducated cotton-picker”) had finally insisted that Big Jim see a cardiologist at CMG in Lewiston. The cardiologist said he needed a procedure to knock out that irregular heartbeat once and for all. Big Jim (who was terrified of hospitals) said he needed to talk to God more, and you called that a prayer procedure. Meantime, he took his pills, and for the last few months he’d seemed fine, but now … maybe …

“Dad?”

No answer. Junior flipped the light switch. The overhead gave that same unsteady glow, but it dispelled the shadow Junior had taken for the back of his father’s head. He wouldn’t be exactly heartbroken if his dad vaporlocked, but on the whole he was glad it hadn’t happened tonight. There was such a thing as too many complications.

Still, he walked to the wall where the safe was with big soft steps of cartoon caution, watching for the splash of headlights across the window that would herald his father’s return. He set aside the picture that covered the safe (Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount), and ran the combination. He had to do it twice before the handle would turn, because his hands were shaking.

The safe was stuffed with cash and stacks of parchment-like sheets with the words BEARER BONDSstamped on them. Junior gave a low whistle. The last time he’d opened this—to filch fifty for last year’s Fryeburg Fair—there had been plenty of cash, but nowhere near this much. And no BEARER BONDS.He thought of the plaque on his father’s desk at the car store: WOULD JESUS APPROVE OF THIS DEAL? Even in his distress and fear, Junior found time to wonder if Jesus would approve of whatever deal his dad had going on the side these days.

“Never mind his business, I gotta run mine,” he said in a low voice. He took five hundred in fifties and twenties, started to close the safe, reconsidered, and took some of the hundreds as well. Given the obscene glut of cash in there, his dad might not even miss it. If he did, it was possible he’d understand why Junior had taken it. And might approve. As Big Jim always said, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

In that spirit, Junior helped himself to another four hundred. Then he closed the safe, spun the combo, and hung Jesus back on the wall. He grabbed a jacket from the front hall closet and went out while the generator roared and the Maytag sudsed Angie’s blood from his clothes.

There was no one at the McCains’ house.

Fucking no one.

Junior lurked on the other side of the street, in a moderate shower of maple leaves, wondering if he could trust what he was seeing: the house dark, Henry McCain’s 4Runner and LaDonna’s Prius still not in evidence. It seemed too good to be true, far too good.

Maybe they were on the town common. A lot of people were tonight. Possibly they were discussing the power failure, although Junior couldn’t remember any such gatherings before when the lights went out; people mostly went home and went to bed, sure that—unless there’d been a whopper of a storm—the lights would be back on when they got up for breakfast.

Maybe this power failure had been caused by some spectacular accident, the kind of thing the TV news broke into regular coverage to report. Junior had a vague memory of some geezer asking him what was going on not long after Angie had her own accident. In any case, Junior had taken care to speak to nobody on his way over here. He had walked along Main Street with his head down and his collar turned up (he had, in fact, almost bumped into Anson Wheeler as Anse left Sweetbriar Rose). The streetlights were out, and that helped preserve his anonymity. Another gift from the gods.

And now this. A third gift. A gigantic one. Was it really possible that Angie’s body hadn’t been discovered yet? Or was he looking at a trap?

Junior could picture the Castle County Sheriff or a state police detective saying, We only have to keep out of sight and wait, boys. The killer always revisits the scene of his crime. It’s a well-known fact.

TV bullshit. Still, as he crossed the street (drawn, it seemed, by a force outside himself), Junior kept expecting spotlights to go on, pinning him like a butterfly on a piece of cardboard; kept expecting someone to shout—probably through a bullhorn: “Stop where you are and get those hands in the air!”

Nothing happened.

When he reached the foot of the McCain driveway, heart skittering in his chest and blood thumping in his temples (still no headache, though, and that was good, a good sign), the house remained dark and silent. Not even a generator roaring, although there was one at the Grinnells’ next door.

Junior looked over his shoulder and saw a vast white bubble of light rising above the trees. Something at the south end of town, or perhaps over in Motton. The source of the accident that had killed the power? Probably.

He went to the back door. The front door would still be unlocked if no one had returned since Angie’s accident, but he didn’t want to go in the front. He would if he had to, but maybe he wouldn’t. He was, after all, on a roll.

The doorknob turned.

Junior stuck his head into the kitchen and smelled the blood at once—an odor a little like spray starch, only gone stale. He said, “Hi? Hello? Anybody home?” Almost positive there wasn’t, but if someone was, if by some crazy chance Henry or LaDonna had parked over by the common and returned on foot (somehow missing their daughter lying dead on the kitchen floor), he would scream. Yes! Scream and “discover the body.” That wouldn’t do anything about the dreaded forensics van, but it would buy him a little time.

“Hello? Mr. McCain? Mrs. McCain?” And then, in a flash of inspiration: “Angie? Are you home?”

Would he call her like that if he’d killed her? Of course not! But then a terrible thought lanced through him: What if she answered? Answered from where she was lying on the floor? Answered through a throatful of blood?

“Get a grip,” he muttered. Yes, he had to, but it was hard. Especially in the dark. Besides, in the Bible stuff like that happened all the time. In the Bible, people sometimes returned to life like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

“Anybody home?”

Zip. Nada.

His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but not enough. He needed a light. He should’ve brought a flashlight from the house, but it was easy to forget stuff like that when you were used to just flipping a switch. Junior crossed the kitchen, stepping over Angie’s body, and opened the first of two doors on the far side. It was a pantry. He could just make out the shelves of bottled and canned goods. He tried the other door and had better luck. It was the laundry. And unless he was mistaken about the shape of the thing standing on the shelf just to his right, he was still on a roll.

He wasn’t mistaken. It was a flashlight, a nice bright one. He’d have to be careful about shining it around the kitchen—easing down the shades would be an excellent idea—but in the laundry room he could shine it around to his heart’s content. In here he was fine.

Soap powder. Bleach. Fabric softener. A bucket and a Swiffer. Good. With no generator there’d only be cold water, but there would probably be enough to fill one bucket from the taps, and then, of course, there were the various toilet tanks. And cold was what he wanted. Cold for blood.

He would clean like the demon housekeeper his mother had once been, mindful of her husband’s exhortation: “Clean house, clean hands, clean heart.” He would clean up the blood. Then he’d wipe everything he could remember touching and everything he might have touched without remembering. But first …

The body. He had to do something with the body.

Junior decided the pantry would do for the time being. He dragged her in by the arms, then let them go: flump. After that he set to work. He sang under his breath as he first replaced the fridge magnets, then drew the shades. He had filled the bucket almost to the top before the faucet started spitting. Another bonus.

He was still scrubbing, the work well begun but nowhere near done, when the knock came at the front door.

Junior looked up, eyes wide, lips drawn back in a humorless grin of horror.

“Angie?” It was a girl, and she was sobbing. “Angie, are you there?” More knocking, and then the door opened. His roll, it seemed, was over. “Angie, please be here. I saw your car in the garage …”

Shit. The garage! He never checked the fucking garage!

“Angie?” Sobbing again. Someone he knew. Oh God, was it that idiot Dodee Sanders? It was. “Angie, she said my mom’s dead! Mrs. Shumway said that she died !”

Junior hoped she’d go upstairs first, check Angie’s room. But she came down the hall toward the kitchen instead, moving slowly and tentatively in the dark.

“Angie? Are you in the kitchen? I thought I saw a light.”

Junior’s head was starting to ache again, and it was this interfering dope-smoking cunt’s fault. Whatever happened next … that would be her fault, too.

Dodee Sanders was still a little stoned and a little drunk; she was hungover; her mother was dead; she was fumbling up the hall of her best friend’s house in the dark; she stepped on something that slid away under her foot and almost went ass over teapot. She grabbed at the stair railing, bent two of her fingers painfully back, and cried out. She sort of understood all this was happening to her, but at the same time it was impossible to believe. She felt as if she’d wandered into some parallel dimension, like in a science fiction movie.

She bent to see what had nearly spilled her. It looked like a towel. Some fool had left a towel on the front hall floor. Then she thought she heard someone moving in the darkness up ahead. In the kitchen.

“Angie? Is that you?”

Nothing. She still felt someone was there, but maybe not.

“Angie?” She shuffled forward again, holding her throbbing right hand—her fingers were going to swell, she thought they were swelling already—against her side. She held her left hand out before her, feeling the dark air. “Angie, please be there! My mother’s dead, it’s not a joke, Mrs. Shumway told me and she doesn’t joke, I need you!”

The day had started so well. She’d been up early (well … ten; early for her) and she’d had no intention of blowing off work. Then Samantha Bushey had called to say she’d gotten some new Bratz on eBay and to ask if Dodee wanted to come over and help torture them. Bratz-torture was something they’d gotten into in high school—buy them at yard sales, then hang them, pound nails into their stupid little heads, douse them with lighter fluid and set them on fire—and Dodee knew they should have grown out of it, they were adults now, or almost. It was kid-stuff. Also a little creepy, when you really thought about it. But the thing was, Sammy had her own place out on the Motton Road—just a trailer, but all hers since her husband had taken off in the spring—and Little Walter slept practically all day. Plus Sammy usually had bitchin weed. Dodee guessed she got it from the guys she partied with. Her trailer was a popular place on the weekends. But the thing was, Dodee had sworn off weed. Never again, not since all that trouble with the cook. Never again had lasted over a week on the day Sammy called.

“You can have Jade and Yasmin,” Sammy coaxed. “Also, I’ve got some great you-know.” She always said that, as if someone listening in wouldn’t know what she was talking about. “Also, we can you-know.”

Dodee knew what that you-know was, too, and she felt a little tingle Down There (in her you-know), even though that was also kid-stuff, and they should have left it behind long ago.

“I don’t think so, Sam. I have to be at work at two, and—”

“Yasmin awaits,” Sammy said. “And you know you hate dat bitch.”

Well, that was true. Yasmin was the bitchiest of the Bratz, in Dodee’s opinion. And it was almost four hours until two o’clock. Further and, if she was a little late, so what? Was Rose going to fire her? Who else would work that shit job?

“Okay. But just for a little while. And only because I hate Yasmin.”

Sammy giggled.

“But I don’t you-know anymore. Either you-know.”

“Not a problem,” Sammy said. “Come quick.”

So Dodee had driven out, and of course she discovered Bratz-torture was no fun if you weren’t a little high, so she got a little high and so did Sammy. They collaborated on giving Yasmin some drain-cleaner plastic surgery, which was pretty hilarious. Then Sammy wanted to show her this sweet new camisole she’d gotten at Deb, and although Sam was getting a little bit of a potbelly, she still looked good to Dodee, perhaps because they were a little bit stoned—wrecked, in fact—and since Little Walter was still asleep (his father had insisted on naming the kid after some old bluesman, and all that sleeping, yow, Dodee had an idea Little Walter was retarded, which would be no surprise given the amount of rope Sam had smoked while carrying him), they ended up getting into Sammy’s bed and doing a little of the old you-know. Afterward they’d fallen asleep, and when Dodee woke up Little Walter was blatting—holy shit, call NewsCenter 6—and it was past five. Really too late to go in to work, and besides, Sam had produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and they had one-shot two-shot three-shot-four, and Sammy decided she wanted to see what happened to a Baby Bratz in the microwave, only the power was out.

Dodee had crept back to town at roughly sixteen miles an hour, still high and paranoid as hell, constantly checking the rearview mirror for cops, knowing if she did get stopped it would be by that redhaired bitch Jackie Wettington. Or her father would be taking a break from the store and he’d smell the booze on her breath. Or her mother would be home, so tired out from her stupid flying lesson that she had decided to stay home from the Eastern Star Bingo.

Please, God, she prayed. Please get me through this and I’ll never you-know again. Either you-know. Never in this life.

God heard her prayer. Nobody was home. The power was out here too, but in her altered state, Dodee hardly noticed. She crept upstairs to her room, shucked out of her pants and shirt, and laid down on her bed. Just for a few minutes, she told herself. Then she’d put her clothes, which smelled of ganja, in the washer, and put herself in the shower. She smelled of Sammy’s perfume, which she must buy a gallon at a time down at Burpee’s.

Only she couldn’t set the alarm with the power out and when the knocking at the door woke her up it was dark. She grabbed her robe and went downstairs, suddenly sure that it would be the redheaded cop with the big boobs, ready to put her under arrest for driving under the influence. Maybe for crack-snacking, too. Dodee didn’t think that particular you-know was against the law, but she wasn’t entirely sure.

It wasn’t Jackie Wettington. It was Julia Shumway, the editor-publisher of theDemocrat. She had a flashlight in one hand. She shined it in Dodee’s face—which was probably puffed with sleep, her eyes surely still red and her hair a haystack—and then lowered it again. Enough light kicked up to show Julia’s own face, and Dodee saw a sympathy there that made her feel confused and afraid.

“Poor kid,” Julia said. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Don’t know what?” Dodee had asked. It was around then that the parallel universe feeling had started. “Don’t know what ?”

And Julia Shumway had told her.

“Angie? Angie, please !”

Fumbling her way up the hall. Hand throbbing. Head throbbing. She could have looked for her father— Mrs. Shumway had offered to take her, starting at Bowie Funeral Home—but her blood ran cold at the thought of that place. Besides, it was Angie that she wanted. Angie who would hug her tight with no interest in the you-know. Angie who was her best friend.

A shadow came out of the kitchen and moved swiftly toward her.

“There you are, thank God!” She began to sob harder, and hurried toward the figure with her arms outstretched. “Oh, it’s awful! I’m being punished for being a bad girl, I know I am!”

The dark figure stretched out its own arms, but they did not enfold Dodee in a hug. Instead, the hands at the end of those arms closed around her throat.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 807