MISSILE STRIKE IMMINENT 13 page

“I’m so sorry about Howie. I loved that man.”

“Thank you, Andrea.” Not just for the sympathy, but for calling him Howie instead of Duke.

To Brenda he’d always been Howie, her dear Howie, and the VADER file was his last work. Probably his greatest work. Brenda suddenly decided to put it to work, and with no further delay. She dipped into the carrier-bag and brought out the manila envelope with Julia’s name printed on the front. “Will you hold this for me, dear? Just for a little while? I have an errand to run and I don’t want to take it with me.”

Brenda would have answered any questions Andrea asked, but Andrea apparently had none. She only took the bulky envelope with a sort of distracted courtesy. And that was all right. It saved time. Also, it would keep Andrea out of the loop, and might spare her political blowback at some later date.

“Happy to,” Andrea said. “And now … if you’ll excuse me … I think I’d better get off my feet. But I’m not going to sleep!” she added, as if Brenda had objected to this plan. “I’ll hear you when you come back.”

“Thank you,” Brenda said. “Are you drinking juices?”

“By the gallon. Take your time, hon—I’ll babysit your envelope.”

Brenda was going to thank her again, but The Mill’s Third Selectman had already closed the door.

Toward the end of her conversation with Brenda, Andrea’s stomach began to flutter. She fought it, but this was a fight she was going to lose. She blathered something about drinking juice, told Brenda to take her time, then closed the door in the poor woman’s face and sprinted for her stinking bathroom, making gutteral urk-urk noises deep down in her throat.

There was an end table beside the living room couch, and she tossed the manila envelope at it blindly as she rushed past. The envelope skittered across the polished surface and fell off the other side, into the dark space between the table and the couch.

Andrea made it to the bathroom but not to the toilet … which was just as well; it was nearly filled with the stagnant, stinking brew that had been her body’s output during the endless night just past. She leaned over the basin instead, retching until it seemed to her that her very esophagus would come loose and land on the splattery porcelain, still warm and pulsing.

That didn’t happen, but the world turned gray and teetered away from her on high heels, growing smaller and less tangible as she swayed and tried not to faint. When she felt a little better, she walked slowly down the hall on elastic legs, sliding one hand along the wood to keep her balance. She was shivering and she could hear the jittery clitter of her teeth, a horrible sound she seemed to pick up not with her ears but with the backs of her eyes.

She didn’t even consider trying to reach her bedroom upstairs but went out onto the screened-in back porch instead. The porch should have been too cold to be comfortable this late in October, but today the air was sultry. She did not lie down on the old chaise longue so much as collapse into its musty but somehow comforting embrace.

I’ll get up in a minute, she told herself. Get the last bottle of Poland Spring out of the fridge and wash that foul taste out of my mou …

But here her thoughts slipped away. She fell into a deep and profound sleep from which not even the restless twitching of her feet and hands could wake her. She had many dreams. One was of a terrible fire people ran from, coughing and retching, looking for anyplace where they might find air that was still cool and clean. Another was of Brenda Perkins coming to her door and giving her an envelope. When Andrea opened it, a never-ending stream of pink OxyContin pills poured out. By the time she woke up it was evening, and the dreams were forgotten.

So was Brenda Perkins’s visit.

“Come into my study,” Big Jim said cheerfully. “Or would you like something to drink, first? I have Cokes,

although I’m afraid they’re a little warm. My generator died last night. Out of propane.”

“But I imagine you know where you can get more,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“The methamphetamine you’re making,” she said patiently. “My understanding—based on Howie’s notes— is that you’ve been cooking it in large batches. ‘Amounts that boggle the mind’ is how he put it. That must take a lot of propane gas.”

Now that she was actually into this, she found her jitters had melted away. She even took a certain cold pleasure in watching the color mount in his cheeks and go dashing across his forehead.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I think your grief …” He sighed, spread his blunt-fingered hands. “Come inside. We’ll discuss this and I’ll set your mind at rest.”

She smiled. That she could smile was sort of a revelation, and it helped more to imagine Howie watching her—from somewhere. Also telling her to be careful. That was advice she planned to heed.

On the Rennie front lawn, two Adirondack chairs sat amid the fallen leaves. “It’s nice enough out here for me,” she said.

“I prefer to talk business inside.”

“Would you prefer to see your picture on the front page of the Democrat ? Because I can arrange that.”

He winced as if she had struck him, and for just a moment she saw hate in those small, deepset, piggy eyes. “Duke never liked me, and I suppose it’s natural that his feelings should have been communicated to —”

“His name was Howie !”

Big Jim threw up his hands as if to say there was no reasoning with some women, and led her to the chairs overlooking Mill Street.

Brenda Perkins talked for almost half an hour, growing colder and angrier as she spoke. The meth lab, with Andy Sanders and—almost certainly—Lester Coggins as silent partners. The staggering size of the thing. Its probable location. The mid-level distributors who had been promised immunity in exchange for information. The money trail. How the operation had gotten so big the local pharmacist could no longer safely supply the necessary ingredients, necessitating import from overseas.

“The stuff came into town in trucks marked Gideon Bible Society,” Brenda said. “Howie’s comment on that was ‘too clever by half.’”

Big Jim sat looking out at the silent residential street. She could feel the anger and hate baking off him. It was like heat from a casserole dish.

“You can’t prove any of this,” he said at last.

“That won’t matter if Howie’s file turns up in theDemocrat. It’s not due process, but if anyone can understand bypassing a little thing like that, it would be you.”

He flapped a hand. “Oh, I’m sure you had a file, ” he said, “but my name is on nothing.”

“It’s on the Town Ventures paperwork,” she said, and Big Jim rocked in his chair as if she had lashed out with her fist and hit him in the temple. “Town Ventures, incorporated in Carson City. And from Nevada, the money trail leads to Chongqing City, the pharma capital of the People’s Republic of China.” She smiled. “You thought you were smart, didn’t you? So smart.”

“Where is this file?”

“I left a copy with Julia this morning.” Bringing Andrea into it was the last thing she wanted to do. And thinking it was in the newspaper editor’s hands would bring him to heel that much quicker. He might feel that he or Andy Sanders could jawbone Andrea.

“There are other copies?”

“What do you think?”

He considered a moment, then said: “I kept it out of the town.”

She said nothing.

“It was for the good of the town.”

“You’ve done a lot of good for the town, Jim. We’ve got the same sewer system we had in nineteen sixty, Chester Pond is filthy, the business district is moribund….” She was sitting straight now, gripping the arms of her chair. “You fucking self-righteous turdworm.”

“What do you want?” He was staring straight ahead at the empty street. A large vein beat in his temple.

“For you to announce your resignation. Barbie takes over as per the President’s—”

“I’ll never resign in favor of that cotton-picker.” He turned to look at her. He was smiling. It was an appalling smile. “You didn’t leave anything with Julia, because Julia’s at the market, watching the food fight. You might have Duke’s file locked away somewhere, but you didn’t leave a copy with anyone. You tried Rommie, then you tried Julia, then you came here. I saw you walking up Town Common Hill.”

“I did,” she said. “I did have it.” And if she told him where she had left it? Bad luck for Andrea. She started to get up. “You had your chance. Now I’m leaving.”

“Your other mistake was thinking you’d be safe outside on the street. An empty street.” His voice was almost kind, and when he touched her arm, she turned to look at him. He seized her face. And twisted.

Brenda Perkins heard a bitter crack, like the breaking of a branch overloaded with ice, and followed the sound into a great darkness, trying to call her husband’s name as she went.

Big Jim went inside and got a Jim Rennie’s Used Cars gimme cap from the front hall closet. Also some gloves. And a pumpkin from the pantry. Brenda was still in her Adirondack chair, with her chin on her chest. He looked around. No one. The world was his. He put the hat on her head (pulling the brim low), the gloves on her hands, and the pumpkin in her lap. It would serve perfectly well, he thought, until Junior came back and took her to where she could become part of Dale Barbara’s butcher’s bill. Until then, she was just another stuffed Halloween dummy.

He checked her carrier-bag. It contained her wallet, a comb, and a paperback novel. So that was all right. It would be fine down cellar, behind the dead furnace.

He left her with the hat slouched on her head and the pumpkin in her lap and went inside to stash her bag and wait for his son.

IN THE JUG

Selectman Rennie’s assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she was seen on her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he was a reflective man, in his own way) on murder’s similarity to Lay’s potato chips: it’s hard to stop with just one.

Big Jim didn’t see the watchers when he came down to the corner of Mill and Main. Neither did Brenda as she walked up Town Common Hill. This was because they didn’t want to be seen. They were sheltering just inside the Peace Bridge, which happened to be a condemned structure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If Claire McClatchey had seen the cigarettes, she would have shit a brick. In fact, she might have shit two. And certainly she never would have let Joe chum with Norrie Calvert again, not even if the fate of the town hinged upon their association, because it was Norrie who supplied the smokes—badly bent and croggled Winstons, which she had found on a shelf in the garage. Her father had quit smoking the year before and the pack was covered with a fine scrim of dust, but the cigarettes inside had looked okay to Norrie. There were just three, but three was perfect: one each. Think of it as a good-luck rite, she instructed.

“We’ll smoke like Indians praying to the gods for a successful hunt. Then we’ll go to work.”

“Sounds good,” Joe said. He had always been curious about smoking. He couldn’t see the attraction, but there must be one, because a lot of people still did it.

“Which gods?” Benny Drake asked.

“The gods of your choice,” Norrie answered, looking at him as if he were the dumbest creature in the universe. “God god, if that’s the one you like.” Dressed in faded denim shorts and a pink sleeveless top, her hair for once down and framing her foxy little face instead of scrooped back in its usual sloppin-around­town ponytail, she looked good to both boys. Totally awesome, in fact. “I pray to Wonder Woman.”

“Wonder Woman is not a goddess,” Joe said, taking one of the elderly Winstons and smoothing it straight. “Wonder Woman is a superhero.” He considered. “Maybe a superher-ette. ”

“She’s a goddess to me,” Norrie replied with a grave-eyed sincerity that could not be gainsaid, let alone ridiculed. She was carefully straightening her own cigarette. Benny left his the way it was; he thought a bent cigarette had a certain coolness factor. “I had Wonder Woman Power Bracelets until I was nine, but then I lost them. I think that bitch Yvonne Nedeau stole them.”

She lit a match and touched it first to Scarecrow Joe’s cigarette, then to Benny’s. When she tried to use it to light her own, Benny blew it out.

“What did you do that for?” she asked.

“Three on a match. Bad luck.”

“You believe that?”

“Not much,” Benny said, “but today we’re going to need all the luck we can get.” He glanced at the shopping bag in the basket of his bike, then took a pull on his cigarette. He inhaled a little andthen coughed the smoke back out, his eyes watering. “This tastes like panther-shit!”

“Smoked a lot of that, have you?” Joe asked. He dragged on his own cigarette. He didn’t want to look like a wuss, but he didn’t want to start coughing and maybe throw up, either. The smoke burned, but in sort of a good way. Maybe there was something to this, after all. Only he already felt a little woozy.

Go easy on the inhaling part, he thought. Passing out would be almost as uncool as puking. Unless, maybe, he passed out in Norrie Calvert’s lap. That might be very cool indeed.

Norrie reached into her shorts pocket and brought out the cap of a Verifine juice bottle. “We can use this for an ashtray. I want to do the Indian smoke ritual, but I don’t want to catch the Peace Bridge on fire.” She then closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. Her cigarette was between her fingers, growing an ash.

Benny looked at Joe, shrugged, then closed his own eyes. “Almighty GI Joe, please hear the prayer of your humble pfc Drake—”

Norrie kicked him without opening her eyes.

Joe got up (a little dizzy, but not too bad; he chanced another drag when he was on his feet) and walked past their parked bikes to the town common end of the covered walkway.

“Where you goin?” Norrie asked without opening her eyes.

“I pray better when I look at nature,” Joe said, but he actually just wanted a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t the burning tobacco; he sort of liked that. It was the other smells inside the bridge—decaying wood, old booze, and a sour chemical aroma that seemed to be rising up from the Prestile beneath them (that was a smell, The Chef might have told him, that you could come to love).

Even the outside air wasn’t that wonderful; it had a slightly used quality that made Joe think of the trip he’d made with his parents to New York the previous year. The subways had smelled a little like this, especially late in the day when they were crowded with people headed home.

He tapped ashes into his hand. As he scattered them, he spotted Brenda Perkins making her way up the hill.

A moment later, a hand touched his shoulder. Too light and delicate to be Benny’s. “Who’s that?” Norrie asked.

“Know the face, not the name,” he said.

Benny joined them. “That’s Mrs. Perkins. The Sheriff’s widow.”

Norrie elbowed him. “Police Chief, dummy.”

Benny shrugged. “Whatever.”

They watched her, mostly because there was no one else to watch. The rest of the town was at the supermarket, apparently having the world’s biggest food fight. The three kids had investigated, but from afar; they did not need persuasion to stay away, given the valuable piece of equipment that had been entrusted to their care.

Brenda crossed Main to Prestile, paused outside the McCain house, then went on to Mrs. Grinnell’s.

“Let’s get going,” Benny said.

“We can’t get going until she’s gone,” Norrie said.

Benny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? If she sees us, we’re just some kids goofing around on the town common. And know what? She probably wouldn’t see us if she looked right at us. Adults never see kids.” He considered this. “Unless they’re on skateboards.”

“Or smoking,” Norrie added. They all glanced at their cigarettes.

Joe hooked a thumb at the shopping bag sitting in the carrier attached to the handlebars of Benny’s Schwinn High Plains. “They also have a tendency to see kids who are goofing around with expensive town property.”

Norrie tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. It made her look wonderfully tough, wonderfully pretty, and wonderfully adult.

The boys went back to watching. The Police Chief’s widow was now talking to Mrs. Grinnell. It wasn’t a long conversation. Mrs. Perkins had taken a big brown envelope from her carrier-bag as she came up the steps, and they watched her hand it to Mrs. Grinnell. A few seconds later, Mrs. Grinnell pretty much slammed the door in her visitor’s face.

“Whoa, that was rude,” Benny said. “Week’s detention.”

Joe and Norrie laughed.

Mrs. Perkins stood where she was for a moment, as if perplexed, then went back down the steps. She was now facing the common, and the three children instinctively stepped further into the shadows of the walkway. This caused them to lose sight of her, but Joe found a handy gap in the wooden siding and peered through that.

“Going back to Main,” he reported. “Okay, now she’s going up the hill … now she’s crossing over again….”

Benny held an imaginary microphone. “Video at eleven.”

Joe ignored this. “Now she’s going onto my street.” He turned to Benny and Norrie. “Do you think she’s going to see my mom?”

“Mill Street’s four blocks long, dude,” Benny said. “What are the chances?”

Joe felt relieved even though he could think of no reason why Mrs. Perkins’s going to see his mom would be a bad thing. Except his mother was all worried about Dad being out of town, and Joe would sure hate to see her more upset than she already was. She had almost forbidden him to go on this expedition. Thank God Miz Shumway had talked her out of that idea, mostly by telling her that Dale Barbara had mentioned Joe specifically for this job (which Joe—Benny and Norrie, too—preferred to think of as “the mission”).

“Mrs. McClatchey,” Julia had said, “if anyone can put this gadget to use, Barbie thinks it’s probably your son. It could be very important.”

That had made Joe feel good, but looking at his mother’s face—worried, drawn—made him feel bad. It hadn’t even been three days since the Dome had come down, but she’d lost weight. And the way she kept holding his dad’s picture, that made him feel bad, too. It was like she thought he’d died instead of just being holed up in a motel somewhere, probably drinking beer and watching HBO.

She had agreed with Miz Shumway, though. “He’s a smart boy about gadgets, all right. He always has been.” She looked him over from head to foot, and sighed. “When did you get so tall, Son?”

“I don’t know,” he had replied truthfully.

“If I let you do this, will you be careful?”

“And take your friends with you,” Julia said.

“Benny and Norrie? Sure.”

“Also,” Julia had added, “be a little discreet. Do you know what that means, Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”

It meant don’t get caught.

Brenda disappeared into the screening trees that lined Mill Street. “Okay,” Benny said. “Let’s go.” He carefully crushed his cigarette in the makeshift ashtray, then lifted the shopping bag out of the bike’s wire carrier. Inside the bag was the old-fashioned yellow Geiger counter, which had gone from Barbie to Rusty to Julia … and finally to Joe and his posse.

Joe took the juice lid and crushed out his own smoke, thinking he would like to try again when he had more time to concentrate on the experience. On the other hand, it might be better not to. He was addicted to computers, the graphic novels of Brian K. Vaughan, and skateboarding. Maybe that was enough monkeys for one back.

“People are gonna come by,” he said to Benny and Norrie. “Probably lots of people, once they get tired of playing in the supermarket. We’ll just have to hope they don’t pay any attention to us.”

In his mind he heard Miz Shumway telling his mom how important this could be to the town. She didn’t have to tell him ; he probably understood it better than they did.

“But if any cops come by …” Norrie said.

Joe nodded. “Back into the bag it goes. And out comes the Frisbee.”

“You really think there’s some kind of alien generator buried under the town common?” Benny asked.

“I said there might be,” Joe replied, more sharply than he had intended. “Anything’s possible.”

In truth, Joe thought it more than possible; he thought it likely. If the Dome wasn’t supernatural in origin, then it was a force field. A force field had to be generated. It looked like a QED situation to him, but he didn’t want to get their hopes up too high. Or his own, for that matter.

“Let’s start looking,” Norrie said. She ducked under the sagging yellow police tape. “I just hope you two prayed enough.”

Joe didn’t believe in praying for things he could do for himself, but he had sent up a brief one on a different subject: that if they found the generator, Norrie Calvert would give him another kiss. A nice long one.

Earlier that morning, during their pre-exploration meeting in the McClatchey living room, Scarecrow Joe had

taken off his right sneaker, then the white athletic sock beneath.

“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat,” Benny said cheerfully.

“Shut up, stupid,” Joe replied.

“Don’t call your friend stupid,” Claire McClatchey said, but she gave Benny a reproachful look.

Norrie added no repartee of her own, only watched with interest as Joe laid the sock on the living room rug and smoothed it out with the flat of his hand.

“This is Chester’s Mill,” Joe said. “Same shape, right?”

“You are correctamundo,” Benny agreed. “It’s our fate to live in a town that looks like one of Joe McClatchey’s athletic socks.”

“Or the old woman’s shoe,” Norrie put in.

“ ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,’ ” Mrs. McClatchey recited. She was sitting on the couch with the picture of her husband in her lap, just as she had been when Miz Shumway came by with the Geiger counter late yesterday afternoon. “‘She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.’”

“Good one, Mom,” Joe said, trying not to grin. The middle-school version had been revised to She had so many children her cunt fell off.

He looked down at the sock again. “So does a sock have a middle?”

Benny and Norrie thought it over. Joe let them. The fact that such a question could interest them was one of the things he dug about them.

“Not like a circle or square has a center,” Norrie said at last. “Those are geometric shapes.”

Benny said, “I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don’t know what you’d call it. A socktagon?”

Norrie laughed. Even Claire smiled a little.

“On the map, The Mill’s closer to a hexagon,” Joe said, “but never mind that. Just use common sense.”

Norrie pointed to the place on the sock where the foot-shaped bottom flowed into the tube top. “There. That’s the middle.”

Joe dotted it with the tip of his pen.

“I’m not sure that’ll come out, mister.” Claire sighed. “But you need new ones anyway, I suppose.” And, before he could ask the next question, she said: “On a map, that would be about where the town common is. Is that where you’re going to look?”

“It’s where we’re going to look first, ” Joe said, a little deflated at having his explicatory thunder stolen.

“Because if there’s a generator,” Mrs. McClatchey mused, “you think it should be in the middle of the township. Or as close to it as possible.”

Joe nodded.

“Cool, Mrs. McClatchey,” Benny said. He raised one hand. “Give me five, mother of my soul-brother.”

Smiling wanly, still holding the picture of her husband, Claire McClatchey slapped Benny five. Then she said, “At least the town common’s a safe place.” She paused to consider that, frowning slightly. “I hope so, anyway, but who really knows?”

“Don’t worry,” Norrie said. “I’ll watch out for them.”

“Just promise me that if you do find something, you’ll let the experts handle things,” Claire said.

Mom, Joe thought, I think maybe we’re the experts. But he didn’t say it. He knew it would bum her out even more.

“Word up,” Benny said, and held his hand up again. “Five more, o mother of my—”

This time she kept both hands on the picture. “I love you, Benny, but sometimes you tire me out.”

He smiled sadly. “My mom says the exact same thing.”

Joe and his friends walked downhill to the bandstand that stood in the center of the common. Behind them, the Prestile murmured. It was lower now, dammed up by the Dome where it crossed into Chester’s Mill from the northwest. If the Dome was still in place tomorrow, Joe thought it would be nothing but a mudslick.

“Okay,” Benny said. “Enough with the Freddy Fuckaround. Time for the board-bangers to rescue Chester’s Mill. Let’s fire that baby up.”

Carefully (and with real reverence), Joe lifted the Geiger counter out of the shopping bag. The battery that powered it had been a long-dead soldier and the terminals had been thick with gunk, but a little baking soda took care of the corrosion, and Norrie had found not just one but three six-volt dry cells in her father’s tool closet. “He’s kind of a freak when it comes to batteries,” she had confided, “and he’s gonna kill himself trying to learn boarding, but I love him.”

Joe put his thumb on the power switch, then looked at them grimly. “You know, this thing could read zilch everywhere we take it and there still might be a generator, just not one that emits alpha or beta wa—”

“Do it, for God’s sakes!” Benny said. “The suspense is killin me.”

“He’s right,” Norrie said. “Do it.”

But here was an interesting thing. They had tested the Geiger counter plenty around Joe’s house, and it worked fine—when they tried it on an old watch with a radium dial, the needle jerked appreciably. They’d each taken a turn. But now that they were out here—on-site, so to speak—Joe felt frozen. There was sweat on his forehead. He could feel it beading up and getting ready to trickle down.

He might have stood there quite awhile if Norrie hadn’t put her hand over his. Then Benny added his. The three of them ended up pushing the slide-switch together. The needle in the COUNTS PER SECOND window immediately jumped to +5, and Norrie clutched Joe’s shoulder. Then it settled back to +2, and she relaxed her hold. They had no experience with radiation counters, but they all guessed they were seeing no more than a background count.

Slowly, Joe walked around the bandstand with the Geiger-Müller tube held out on its coiled phone receiver–type cord. The power lamp glowed a bright amber, and the needle jiggled a little bit from time to time, but mostly it stayed close to the zero end of the dial. The little jumps they saw were probably being caused by their own movements. He wasn’t surprised—part of him knew it couldn’t be so easy—but at the same time, he was bitterly disappointed. It was amazing, really, how well disappointment and lack of surprise complimented each other; they were like the Olsen Twins of emotion.

“Let me,” Norrie said. “Maybe I’ll have better luck.”

He gave it over without protest. Over the next hour or so, they crisscrossed the town common, taking turns with the Geiger counter. They saw a car turn down Mill Street, but didn’t notice Junior Rennie—who was feeling better again—behind the wheel. Nor did he notice them. An ambulance sped down Town Common Hill in the direction of Food City with its lights flashing and its siren wailing. This they looked at briefly, but were again absorbed when Junior reappeared shortly after, this time behind the wheel of his father’s Hummer.

They never used the Frisbee they had brought as camouflage; they were too preoccupied. Nor did it matter. Few of the townspeople heading back to their homes bothered looking into the Common. A few were hurt. Most were carrying liberated foodstuffs, and some were wheeling loaded shopping carts. Almost all looked ashamed of themselves.

By noon, Joe and his friends were ready to give up. They were also hungry. “Let’s go to my house,” Joe said. “My mom’ll make us something to eat.”

“Great,” Benny said. “Hope it’s chop suey. Your ma’s chop suey is tight.”

“Can we go through the Peace Bridge and try the other side first?” Norrie asked.

Joe shrugged. “Okay, but there’s nothing over there but woods. Also, it’s moving away from the center.”

“Yes, but …” She trailed off.

“But what?”

“Nothing. Just an idea. It’s probably stupid.”

Joe looked at Benny. Benny shrugged and handed her the Geiger counter.

They went back to the Peace Bridge and ducked under the sagging police tape. The walkway was dim, but not too dim for Joe to look over Norrie’s shoulder and see the Geiger counter’s needle stir as they passed the halfway point, walking single file so as not to test the rotted boards under their feet too much. When they came out on the other side, a sign informed them YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE CHESTER’S MILL TOWN COMMON, EST. 1808. A well-worn path led up a slope of oak, ash, and beech. Their fall foliage hung limply, looking sullen rather than gay.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 509