RIOT AND MURDERS AS CRISIS DEEPENS 3 page

Well, he thought, whatever he gives me, I can check it out with Andy.

Yes, but that wasn’t the biggest thing troubling him. It was something else Pete had said: If this Dome thing doesn’t go away …

Big Jim wasn’t worried about that. Quite the opposite. If the Dome did go away—too soon, that was—he could be in a fair spot of trouble even if the meth lab wasn’t discovered. Certainly there would be cotton-pickers who would second-guess his decisions. One of the rules of political life that he’d grasped early was Those who can, do; those who can’t, question the decisions of those who can. They might not understand that everything he’d done or ordered done, even the rock-throwing at the market this morning, had been of a caretaking nature. Barbara’s friends on the outside would be especially prone to misunderstanding, because they would not want to understand. That Barbara had friends, powerful ones, on the outside was a thing Big Jim hadn’t questioned since seeing that letter from the President. But for the time being they could do nothing. Which was the way Big Jim wanted it to stay for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe even a month or two.

The truth was, he liked the Dome.

Not for the long term, of course, but until the propane out there at the radio station was redistributed? Until the lab was dismantled and the supply barn that had housed it had been burned to the ground (another crime to be laid at the door of Dale Barbara’s co-conspirators)? Until Barbara could be tried and executed by police firing squad? Until any blame for how things were done during the crisis could be spread around to as many people as possible, and the credit accrued to just one, namely himself?

Until then, the Dome was just fine.

Big Jim decided he’d get kneebound and pray on it before turning in.

Sammy limped down the hospital corridor, looking at the names on the doors and checking behind those with no names just to be sure. She was starting to worry that the bitch wasn’t here when she came to the last one and saw a get-well card thumbtacked there. It showed a cartoon dog saying “I heard you weren’t feeling so well.”

Sammy drew Jack Evans’s gun from the waistband of her jeans (that waistband a little looser now, she’d finally managed to lose some weight, better late than never) and used the automatic’s muzzle to open the card. On the inside, the cartoon dog was licking his balls and saying, “Need a hindlick maneuver?” It was signed Mel, Jim Jr., Carter, and Frank, and was exactly the sort of tasteful greeting Sammy would have expected of them.

She pushed the door open with the barrel of the gun. Georgia wasn’t alone. This did not disturb the deep calm that Sammy felt, the sense of peace nearly attained. It might have if the man sleeping in the corner had been an innocent—the bitch’s father or uncle, say—but it was Frankie the Tit Grabber. The one who’d raped her first, telling her she’d better learn to keep her mouth for when she was on her knees. That he was sleeping didn’t change anything. Because guys like him always woke up and recommenced their fuckery.

Georgia wasn’t asleep; she was in too much pain, and the longhair who’d come in to check her hadn’t offered her any more dope. She saw Sammy, and her eyes widened. “D’yew,” she said. “Ged outta here.”

Sammy smiled. “You sound like Homer Simpson,” she said.

Georgia saw the gun and her eyes widened. She opened her now mostly toothless mouth and screamed.

Sammy continued to smile. The smile widened, in fact. The scream was music to her ears and balm to her hurts.

“Do that bitch,” she said. “Right, Georgia? Isn’t that what you said, you heartless cunt?”

Frank woke up and stared around in wide-eyed befuddlement. His ass had migrated all the way to the edge of his chair, and when Georgia shrieked again, he jerked and fell onto the floor. He was wearing a sidearm now—they all were—and he grabbed for it, saying “Put it down, Sammy, just put it down, we’re all friends here, let’s be friends here.”

Sammy said, “You ought to keep your mouth closed except for when you’re on your knees gobbling your friend Junior’s cock.” Then she pulled the Springfield’s trigger. The blast from the automatic was deafening in the small room. The first shot went over Frankie’s head and shattered the window. Georgia screamed again. She was trying to get out of bed now, her IV line and monitor wires popping free. Sammy shoved her and she flopped askew on her back.

Frankie still didn’t have his gun out. In his fear and confusion, he was tugging at the holster instead of the weapon, and succeeding at nothing but yanking his belt up on the right side. Sammy took two steps toward him, grasped the pistol in both hands like she’d seen people do on TV, and fired again. The left side of Frankie’s head came off. A flap of scalp struck the wall and stuck there. He clapped his hand to the wound. Blood sprayed through his fingers. Then his fingers were gone, sinking into the oozing sponge where his skull had been.

“No more!” he cried. His eyes were huge and swimming with tears. “No more, don’t! Don’t hurt me!” And then: “Mom! MOMMY!”

“Don’t bother, your mommy didn’t raise you right,” Sammy said, and shot him again, this time in the chest. He jumped against the wall. His hand left his wrecked head and thumped to the floor, splashing in the pool of blood that was already forming there. She shot him a third time, in the place that had hurt her. Then she turned to the one on the bed.

Georgia was huddled in a ball. The monitor above her was beeping like crazy, probably because she’d pulled out the wires connected to it. Her hair hung in her eyes. She screamed and screamed.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Sammy asked. “Do that bitch, right?”

“I horry!”

“What?”

Georgia tried again. “I horry! I horry, Hammy!” And then, the ultimate absurdity: “I take it ack!”

“You can’t. ” Sammy shot Georgia in the face and again in the neck. Georgia jumped the way Frankie had, then lay still.

Sammy heard running footsteps and shouts in the corridor. Sleepy cries of concern from some of the rooms as well. She was sorry about causing a fuss, but sometimes there was just no choice. Sometimes things had to be done. And when they were, there could be peace.

She put the gun to her temple.

“I love you, Little Walter. Mumma loves her boy.”

And pulled the trigger.

Rusty used West Street to get around the fire, then hooked back onto Lower Main at the 117 intersection. Bowie’s was dark except for small electric candles in the front windows. He drove around back to the smaller lot as his wife had instructed him, and parked beside the long gray Cadillac hearse. Somewhere close by, a generator was clattering.

He was reaching for the door handle when his phone twittered. He turned it off without looking to see who might be calling, and when he looked up again, a cop was standing beside his window. A cop with a drawn gun.

It was a woman. When she bent down, Rusty saw a cloudburst of frizzy blond hair, and at last had a face to go with the name his wife had mentioned. The police dispatcher and receptionist on the day shift. Rusty assumed she had been pressed into full-time service on or just after Dome Day. He also assumed that her current duty-assignment had been self-assigned.

She holstered the pistol. “Hey, Dr. Rusty. Stacey Moggin. You treated me for poison oak two years ago? You know, on my—” She patted her behind.

“I remember. Nice to see you with your pants up, Ms. Moggin.”

She laughed as she had spoken: softly. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“A little. I was silencing my cell phone, and then there you were.”

“Sorry. Come on inside. Linda’s waiting. We don’t have much time. I’m going to stand watch out front. I’ll give Lin a double-click on her walkie if someone comes. If it’s the Bowies, they’ll park in the side lot and we can drive out on East Street unnoticed.” She cocked her head a little and smiled. “Well … that’s a tad optimistic, but at least unidentified. If we’re lucky.”

Rusty followed her, navigating by the cloudy beacon of her hair. “Did you break in, Stacey?”

“Hell, no. There was a key at the cop-shop. Most of the businesses on Main Street give us keys.”

“And why are you in on this?”

“Because it’s all fear-driven bullshit. Duke Perkins would have put a stop to it long ago. Now come on. And make this fast.”

“I can’t promise that. In fact, I can’t promise anything. I’m not a pathologist.”

“Fast as you can, then.”

Rusty followed her inside. A moment later, Linda’s arms were around him.

Harriet Bigelow screamed twice, then fainted. Gina Buffalino only stared, glassy with shock. “Get Gina out of here,” Thurse snapped. He had gotten as far as the parking lot, heard the shots, and come running back. To find this. This slaughter.

Ginny put an arm around Gina’s shoulders and led her back into the hall, where the patients who were ambulatory—this included Bill Allnut and Tansy Freeman—were standing, big-eyed and frightened.

“Get this one out of the way,” Thurse told Twitch, pointing at Harriet. “And pull her skirt down, give the poor girl some modesty.”

Twitch did as he was told. When he and Ginny reentered the room, Thurse was kneeling by the body of Frank DeLesseps, who had died because he’d come in place of Georgia’s boyfriend and over-stayed visiting hours. Thurse had flapped the sheet over Georgia, and it was already blooming with blood-poppies.

“Is there anything we can do, Doctor?” Ginny asked. She knew he wasn’t a doctor, but in her shock it came automatically. She was looking down at Frank’s sprawled body, and her hand was over her mouth.

“Yes.” Thurse rose and his bony knees cracked like pistol shots. “Call the police. This is a crime scene.”

“All the ones on duty will be fighting that fire downstreet,” Twitch said. “Those who aren’t will either be on their way or sleeping with their phones turned off.”

“Well call somebody, for the love of Jesus, and find out if we’re supposed to do anything before we clean up the mess. Take photographs, or I don’t know what. Not that there’s much doubt about what happened. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute. I’m going to vomit.”

Ginny stood aside so Thurston could go into the tiny WC attached to the room. He closed the door, but the sound of his retching was still loud, the sound of a revving engine with dirt caught in it somewhere.

Ginny felt a wave of faintness rush through her head, seeming to lift her and make her light. She fought it off. When she looked back at Twitch, he was just closing his cell phone. “No answer from Rusty,” he said. “I left a voice mail. Anyone else? What about Rennie?”

“No!” She almost shuddered. “Not him.”

“My sister? Andi, I mean?”

Ginny only looked at him.

Twitch looked back for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “Maybe not,” he mumbled.

Ginny touched him above the wrist. His skin was cold with shock. She supposed her own was, too. “If it’s any comfort,” she said, “I think she’s trying to get clean. She came to see Rusty, and I’m pretty sure that was what it was about.”

Twitch ran his hands down the sides of his face, turning it for a moment into an opéra bouffe mask of sorrow. “This is a nightmare.”

“Yes,” Ginny said simply. Then she took out her cell phone again.

“Who you gonna call?” Twitch managed a little smile. “Ghost-busters?”

“No. If Andi and Big Jim are out, who does that leave?”

“Sanders, but he’s dogshit-useless and you know it. Why don’t we just clean up the mess? Thurston’s right, what happened here is obvious.”

Thurston came out of the bathroom. He was wiping his mouth with a paper towel. “Because there are rules, young man. And under the circumstances, it’s more important than ever that we follow them. Or at least give it the good old college try.”

Twitch looked up and saw Sammy Bushey’s brains drying high on one wall. What she had used to think with now looked like a clot of oatmeal. He burst into tears.

Andy Sanders was sitting in Dale Barbara’s apartment, on the side of Dale Barbara’s bed. The window was filled with orange fireglare from the burning Democrat building next door. From above him he heard footsteps and muffled voices—men on the roof, he assumed.

He had brought a brown bag with him when he climbed the inside staircase from the pharmacy below. Now he took out the contents: a glass, a bottle of Dasani water, and a bottle of pills. The pills were OxyContin tablets. The label read HOLD FOR A. GRINNELL. They were pink, the twenties. He shook some out, counted, then shook out more. Twenty. Four hundred milligrams. It might not be enough to kill Andrea, who’d had time to build up a tolerance, but he was sure it would do quite well for him.

The heat from the fire next door came baking through the wall. His skin was wet with sweat. It had to be at least a hundred in here, maybe more. He wiped his face with the coverlet.

Won’t feel it much longer. There’ll be cool breezes in heaven, and we’ll all sit down to dinner together at the Lord’s table.

He used the bottom of the glass to grind the pink pills into powder, making sure the dope would hit him all at once. Like a hammer on a steer’s head. Just lie down on the bed, close his eyes, and then good night, sweet pharmacist, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Me … and Claudie … and Dodee. Together for eternity.

Don’t think so, brother.

That was Coggins’s voice, Coggins at his most dour and declamatory. Andy paused in the act of crushing the pills.

Suicides don’t eat supper with their loved ones, my friend; they go to hell and dine on hot coals that burn forever in the belly. Can you give me hallelujah on that? Can you say amen?

“Bullspit,” Andy whispered, and went back to grinding the pills. “You were snout-first in the trough with the rest of us. Why should I believe you?”

Because I speak the truth. Your wife and daughter are looking down on you right now, pleading with you not to do it. Can’t you hear them?

“Nope,” Andy said. “And that’s not you, either. It’s just the part of my mind that’s cowardly. It’s run me my whole life. It’s how Big Jim got hold of me. It’s how I got into this meth mess. I didn’t need the money, I don’t even understand that much money, I just didn’t know how to say no. But I can say it this time. Nosir. I’ve got nothing left to live for, and I’m leaving. Got anything to say to that?”

It seemed that Lester Coggins did not. Andy finished reducing the pills to powder, then filled the glass with water. He brushed the pink dust into the glass using the side of his hand, then stirred with his finger. The only sounds were the fire and the dim shouts of the men fighting it and from above, the thump-thud­thump of other men walking around on his roof.

“Down the hatch,” he said … but didn’t drink. His hand was on the glass, but that cowardly part of him— that part that didn’t want to die even though any meaningful life was over—held it where it was.

“No, you don’t win this time,” he said, but he let go of the glass so he could wipe his streaming face with the coverlet again. “Not every time and not this time.”

He raised the glass to his lips. Sweet pink oblivion swam inside. But again he put it down on the bed table.

The cowardly part, still ruling him. God damn that cowardly part.

“Lord, send me a sign,” he whispered. “Send me a sign that it’s all right to drink this. If for no other reason than because it’s the only way I can get out of this town.”

Next door, the roof of the Democrat went down in a stew of sparks. Above him, someone—it sounded like Romeo Burpee—shouted: “Be ready, boys, be on the goddam ready!”

Be ready. That was the sign, surely. Andy Sanders lifted the glassful of death again, and this time the cowardly part didn’t hold his arm down. The cowardly part seemed to have given up.

In his pocket, his cell phone played the opening phrases of “You’re Beautiful,” a sentimental piece of crap that had been Claudie’s choice. For a moment he almost drank, anyway, but then a voice whispered that this could be a sign, too. He couldn’t tell if that was the voice of the cowardly part, or of Coggins, or of his own true heart. And because he couldn’t, he answered the phone.

“Mr. Sanders?” A woman’s voice, tired and unhappy and frightened. Andy could relate. “This is Virginia Tomlinson, up at the hospital?”

“Ginny, sure!” Sounding like his old cheery, helpful self. It was bizarre.

“We have a situation here, I’m afraid. Can you come?”

Light pierced the confused darkness in Andy’s head. It filled him with amazement and gratitude. To have someone say Can you come. Had he forgotten how fine that felt? He supposed he had, although it was why he’d stood for Selectman in the first place. Not to wield power; that was Big Jim’s thing. Only to lend a helping hand. That was how he’d started out; maybe it was how he could finish up.

“Mr. Sanders? Are you there?”

“Yes. You hang in, Ginny. I’ll be right there.” He paused. “And none of that Mr. Sanders stuff. It’s Andy. We’re all in this together, you know.”

He hung up, took the glass into the bathroom, and poured its pink contents into the commode. His good feeling—that feeling of light and amazement—lasted until he pushed the flush-lever. Then depression settled over him again like a smelly old coat. Needed? That was pretty funny. He was just stupid old Andy Sanders, the dummy who sat on Big Jim’s lap. The mouthpiece. The gabbler. The man who read Big Jim’s motions and proposals as if they were his own. The man who came in handy every two years or so, electioneering and laying on the cornpone charm. Things of which Big Jim was either incapable or unwilling.

There were more pills in the bottle. There was more Dasani in the cooler downstairs. But Andy didn’t seriously consider these things; he had made Ginny Tomlinson a promise, and he was a man who kept his word. But suicide hadn’t been rejected, only put on the back burner. Tabled, as they said in the smalltown political biz. And it would be good to get out of this bedroom, which had almost been his death chamber.

It was filling up with smoke.

The Bowies’ mortuary workroom was belowground, and Linda felt safe enough turning on the lights. Rusty needed them for his examination.

“Look at this mess,” he said, waving an arm at the dirty, foot-tracked tile floor, the beer and soft drink cans on the counters, an open trashcan in one corner with a few flies buzzing over it. “If the State Board of Funeral Service saw this—or the Department of Health—it’d be shut down in a New York minute.”

“We’re not in New York,” Linda reminded him. She was looking at the stainless steel table in the center of the room. The surface was cloudy with substances probably best left unnamed, and there was a balled-up Snickers wrapper in one of the runoff gutters. “We’re not even in Maine anymore, I don’t think. Hurry up, Eric, this place stinks.”

“In more ways than one,” Rusty said. The mess offended him—hell,outraged him. He could have punched Stewart Bowie in the mouth just for the candy wrapper, discarded on the table where the town’s dead had the blood drained from their bodies.

On the far side of the room were six stainless steel body-lockers. From somewhere behind them, Rusty could hear the steady rumble of refrigeration equipment. “No shortage of propane here,” he muttered. “The Bowie brothers are livin large in the hood.”

There were no names in the card slots on the fronts of the lock-ers—another sign of sloppiness—so Rusty pulled the whole sixpack. The first two were empty, which didn’t surprise him. Most of those who had so far died under the Dome, including Ron Haskell and the Evanses, had been buried quickly. Jimmy Sirois, with no close relatives, was still in the small morgue at Cathy Russell.

The next four contained the bodies he had come to see. The smell of decomposition bloomed as soon as he pulled out the rolling racks. It overwhelmed the unpleasant but less aggressive smells of preservatives and funeral ointments. Linda retreated farther, gagging.

“Don’t you vomit, Linny,” Rusty said, and went across to the cabinets on the far side of the room. The first drawer he opened contained nothing but stacked back issues of Field & Stream, and he cursed. The one under it, however, had what he needed. He reached beneath a trocar that looked as if it had never been washed and pulled out a pair of green plastic face masks still in their wrappers. He handed one mask to Linda, donned the other himself. He looked into the next drawer and appropriated a pair of rubber gloves. They were bright yellow, hellishly jaunty.

“If you think you’re going to throw up in spite of the mask, go upstairs with Stacey.”

“I’ll be all right. I should witness.”

“I’m not sure how much your testimony would count for; you’re my wife, after all.”

She repeated, “I should witness. Just be as quick as you can.”

The body-racks were filthy. This didn’t surprise him after seeing the rest of the prep area, but it still disgusted him. Linda had thought to bring an old cassette recorder she’d found in the garage. Rusty pushed RECORD, tested the sound, and was mildly surprised to find it was not too bad. He placed the little Panasonic on one of the empty racks. Then he pulled on the gloves. It took longer than it should have; his hands were sweating. There was probably talcum or Johnson’s Baby Powder here somewhere, but he had no intention of wasting time looking for it. He already felt like a burglar. Hell, he was a burglar.

“Okay, here we go. It’s ten forty-five PM, October twenty-fourth. This examination is taking place in the prep room of the Bowie Funeral Home. Which is filthy, by the way. Shameful. I see four bodies, three women and a man. Two of the women are young, late teens or early twenties. Those are Angela McCain and Dodee Sanders.”

“Dorothy,” Linda said from the far side of the prep table. “Her name is … was … Dorothy.”

“I stand corrected. Dorothy Sanders. The third woman is in late middle age. That’s Brenda Perkins. The man is about forty. He’s the Reverend Lester Coggins. For the record, I can identify all these people.”

He beckoned his wife and pointed at the bodies. She looked, and her eyes welled with tears. She raised the mask long enough to say, “I’m Linda Everett, of the Chester’s Mill Police Department. My badge number is seven-seven-five. I also recognize these four bodies.” She put her mask back in place. Above it, her eyes pleaded.

Rusty motioned her back. It was all a charade, anyway. He knew it, and guessed Linda did, too. Yet he didn’t feel depressed. He had wanted a medical career ever since boyhood, would certainly have been a doctor if he hadn’t had to leave school to take care of his parents, and what had driven him as a high school sophomore dissecting frogs and cows’ eyes in biology class was what drove him now: simple curiosity. The need to know. And he would know. Maybe not everything, but at least some things.

This is where the dead help the living. Did Linda say that?

Didn’t matter. He was sure they would help if they could. “There has been no cosmeticizing of the bodies that I can see, but all four have been embalmed. I don’t know if the process has been completed, but I suspect not, because the femoral artery taps are still in place.

“Angela and Dodee—excuse me, Dorothy—have been badly beaten and are well into decomposition. Coggins has also been beaten—savagely, from the look—and is also into decomp, although not as far; the musculature on his face and arms has just begun to sag. Brenda—Brenda Perkins, I mean …” He trailed off and bent over her.

“Rusty?” Linda asked nervously. “Honey?”

He reached out a gloved hand, thought better of it, removed the glove, and cupped her throat. Then he lifted Brenda’s head and felt the grotesquely large knot just below the nape. He eased her head down, then rotated her body onto one hip so he could look at her back and buttocks.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Rusty? What?”

For one thing, she’s still caked with shit, he thought … but that wouldn’t go on the record. Not even if Randolph or Rennie only listened to the first sixty seconds before crushing the tape under a shoe heel and burning whatever remained. He would not add that detail of her defilement.

But he would remember.

“What?”

He wet his lips and said, “Brenda Perkins shows livor mortis on the buttocks and thighs, indicating she’s been dead at least twelve hours, probably more like fourteen. There’s significant bruising on both cheeks. They’re handprints. There’s no doubt in my mind of that. Someone took hold of her face and snapped her head hard to the left, fracturing the atlas and axis cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. Probably severed her spine as well.”

“Oh, Rusty,” Linda moaned.

Rusty thumbed up first one of Brenda’s eyelids, then the other. He saw what he had feared.

“Bruising to the cheeks and scleral petechiae—bloodspots in the whites of this woman’s eyes—suggest death wasn’t instantaneous. She was unable to draw breath and asphyxiated. She may or may not have been conscious. We’ll hope not. That’s all I can tell, unfortunately. The girls—Angela and Dorothy—have been dead the longest. The state of decomposition suggests they were stored in a warm place.”

He snapped off the recorder.

“In other words, I see nothing that absolutely exonerates Barbie and nothing we didn’t goddam know already.”

“What if his hands don’t match the bruises on Brenda’s face?”

“The marks are too diffuse to be sure. Lin, I feel like the stupidest man on earth.”

He rolled the two girls—who should have been cruising the Auburn Mall, pricing earrings, buying clothes at Deb, comparing boyfriends—back into darkness. Then he turned to Brenda.

“Give me a cloth. I saw some stacked beside the sink. They even looked clean, which is sort of a miracle in this pigsty.”

“What are you—”

“Just give me a cloth. Better make it two. Wet them.”

“Do we have time to—”

“We’re going to make time.”

Linda watched silently as her husband carefully washed Brenda Perkins’s buttocks and the backs of her thighs. When he was done, he flung the dirty rags into the corner, thinking that if the Bowie brothers had been here, he would have stuffed one into Stewart’s mouth and the other into fucking Fernald’s.

He kissed Brenda on her cool brow and rolled her back into the refrigerated locker. He started to do the same with Coggins, then stopped. The Reverend’s face had been given only the most cursory of cleanings; there was still blood in his ears, his nostrils, and grimed into his brow.

“Linda, wet another cloth.”

“Honey, it’s been almost ten minutes. I love you for showing respect to the dead, but we’ve got the living to—”

“We may have something here. This wasn’t the same kind of beating. I can see that even without … wet a cloth.”

She made no further argument, only wet another cloth, wrung it out, and handed it to him. Then she watched as he cleansed the remaining blood from the dead man’s face, working gently but without the love he’d shown Brenda.

She had been no fan of Lester Coggins (who had once claimed on his weekly radio broadcast that kids who went to see Miley Cyrus were risking hell), but what Rusty was uncovering still hurt her heart. “My God, he looks like a scarecrow after a bunch of kids used rocks on it for target practice.”

“I told you. Not the same kind of beating. This wasn’t done with fists, or even feet.”

Linda pointed. “What’s that on his temple?”

Rusty didn’t answer. Above his mask, his eyes were bright with amazement. Something else, too: understanding, just starting to dawn.

“What is it, Eric? It looks like … I don’t know … stitches. ”

“You bet.” His mask bobbed as the mouth beneath it broke into a smile. Not happiness; satisfaction. And of the grimmest kind. “On his forehead, too. See? And his jaw. That one broke his jaw.”

“What sort of weapon leaves marks like that?”

“A baseball,” Rusty said, rolling the drawer shut. “Not an ordinary one, but one that was gold-plated? Yes. If swung with enough force, I think it could. I think it did. ”

He lowered his forehead to hers. Their masks bumped. He looked into her eyes.

“Jim Rennie has one. I saw it on his desk when I went to talk to him about the missing propane. I don’t know about the others, but I think we know where Lester Coggins died. And who killed him.”

After the roof collapsed, Julia couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Come home with me,” Rose said. “The

guest room is yours as long as you want it.” “Thanks, but no. I need to be by myself now, Rosie. Well, you know … with Horace. I need to think.” “Where will you stay? Will you be all right?” “Yes.” Not knowing if she would be or not. Her mind seemed okay, thinking processes all in order, but she felt as if someone had given her emotions a big shot of Novocaine. “Maybe I’ll come by later.”

When Rosie was gone, walking up the other side of the street (and turning to give Julia a final troubled wave), Julia went back to the Prius, ushered Horace into the front seat, then got behind the wheel. She looked for Pete Freeman and Tony Guay and didn’t see them anywhere. Maybe Tony had taken Pete up to the hospital to get some salve for his arm. It was a miracle neither of them had been hurt worse. And if she hadn’t taken Horace with her when she drove out to see Cox, her dog would have been incinerated along with everything else.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 602