Under the Dome

1

Other than town politics, Big Jim Rennie had only one vice, and that was high school girls’ basketball—Lady Wildcats basketball, to be exact. He’d had season tickets ever since 1998, and attended at least a dozen games a year. In 2004, the year the Lady Wildcats won the State Class D championship, he attended all of them. And although the autographs people noticed when they were invited into his home study were inevitably those of Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt, and Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the one of which he was proudest—the one he treasured—was Hanna Compton’s, the little sophomore point guard who had led the Lady Wildcats to that one and only gold ball.

When you’re a season ticket holder, you get to know the other season ticket holders around you, and their reasons for being fans of the game. Many are relatives of the girls who play (and often the spark-plugs of the Booster Club, putting on bake sales and raising money for the increasingly expensive “away” games). Others are basketball purists, who will tell you—with some justification—that the girls’ games are just better. Young female players are invested in a team ethic that the boys (who love to run and gun, dunk, and shoot from way downtown) rarely match. The pace is slower, allowing you to see inside the game and enjoy every pick-and-roll or give-and-go. Fans of the girls’ game relish the very low scores that boys’ basketball fans sneer at, claiming that the girls’ game puts a premium on defense and foul shooting, which are the very definition of old-school hoops.

There are also guys who just like to watch long-legged teenage girls run around in short pants.

Big Jim shared all these reasons for enjoying the sport, but his passion sprang from another source entirely, one he never vocalized when discussing the games with his fellow fans. It would not have been politic to do so.

The girls took the sport personally, and that made them better haters.

The boys wanted to win, yes, and sometimes a game could get hot if it was against a traditional rival (in the case of The Mills Wildcats sports teams, the despised Castle Rock Rockets), but mostly with the boys it was about individual accomplishments. Showing off, in other words. And when it was over, it was over.

The girls, on the other hand, loathed losing. They took loss back to the locker room and brooded over it. More importantly, they loathed and hated it as a team. Big Jim often saw that hate rear its head; during a loose ball-brawl deep in the second half with the score tied, he could pick up that No you don’t, you little bitch, that ball is MINE vibe. He picked it up and fed on it.

Before 2004, the Lady Wildcats made the state tournament only once in twenty years, that appearance a one-and-done affair against Buckfield. Then had come Hanna Compton. The greatest hater of all time, in Big Jim’s opinion.

As the daughter of Dale Compton, a scrawny pulp-cutter from Tarker’s Mills who was usually drunk and always argumentative, Hanna had come by her out-of-my-face ’tude naturally enough. As a freshman she had played JV for most of the season; Coach swung her up to varsity only for the last two games, where she’d outscored everyone and left her opposite number from the Richmond Bobcats writhing on the hardwood after a hard but clean defensive play.

When that game was over, Big Jim had collared Coach Wood-head. “If that girl doesn’t start next year, you’re crazy,” he said.

“I’m not crazy,” Coach Woodhead had replied.

Hanna had started hot and finished hotter, blazing a trail that Wildcats fans would still be talking about years later (season average: 27.6 points per game). She could spot up and drop a three-pointer any time she wanted, but what Big Jim liked best was to watch her split the defense and drive for the basket, her pug face set in a sneer of concentration, her bright black eyes daring anyone to get in her way, her short ponytail sticking out behind her like a raised middle finger. The Mill’s Second Selectman and premier used car dealer had fallen in love.

In the 2004 championship game, the Lady Wildcats had been leading the Rock Rockets by ten when Hanna fouled out. Luckily for the Cats, there was only a buck-sixteen left to play. They ended up winning by a single point. Of their eighty-six total points, Hanna Compton had scored a brain-freezing sixty-three. That spring, her argumentative dad had ended up behind the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac, sold to him at cost-minus-forty-percent by James Rennie, Sr. New cars weren’t Big Jim’s business, but when he wanted one “off the back of the carrier,” he could always get it.

Sitting in Peter Randolph’s office, with the last of the pink meteor shower still fading away outside (and his problem children waiting—anxiously, Big Jim hoped—to be summoned and told their fate), Big Jim recalled that fabulous, that outright mythic, basketball game; specifically the first eight minutes of the second half, which had begun with the Lady Wildcats down by nine.

Hanna had taken the game over with the single-minded brutality of Joseph Stalin taking over Russia, her black eyes glittering (and seemingly fixed upon some basketball Nirvana beyond the sight of normal mortals), her face locked in that eternal sneer that said, I’m better than you, I’m the best, get out of my way or I’ll run you the fuck down. Everything she threw up during that eight minutes had gone in, including one absurd half-court shot that she launched when her feet tangled together, getting rid of the rock just to keep from being called for traveling.

There were phrases for that sort of run, the most common being in the zone. But the one Big Jim liked was feeling it, as in “She’s really feeling it now.” As though the game had some divine texture beyond the reach of ordinary players (although sometimes even ordinary players felt it, and were transformed for a brief while into gods and goddesses, every bodily defect seeming to disappear during their transitory divinity), a texture that on special nights could be touched: some rich and marvelous drape such as must adorn the hardwood halls of Valhalla.

Hanna Compton had never played her junior year; the championship game had been her valedictory. That summer, while driving drunk, her father had killed himself, his wife, and all three daughters while driving back to Tarker’s Mills from Brownie’s, where they had gone for ice cream frappes. The bonus Cadillac had been their coffin.

The multiple-fatality crash had been front-page news in western Maine—Julia Shumway’s Democrat published an issue with a black border that week—but Big Jim had not been grief-stricken. Hanna never would have played college ball, he suspected; there the girls were bigger, and she might have been reduced to role-player status. She never would have stood for that. Her hate had to be fed by constant action on the floor. Big Jim understood completely. He sympathized completely. It was the main reason he had never even considered leaving The Mill. In the wider world he might have made more money, but wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne.

Running The Mill was good on ordinary days, but in times of crisis it was better than good. In times like that you could fly on the pure wings of intuition, knowing that you couldn’t screw up, absolutely couldn’t. You could read the defense even before the defense had coalesced, and you scored every time you got the ball. You were feeling it, and there was no better time for that to happen than in a championship game.

This was his championship game, and everything was breaking his way. He had the sense—the total belief—that nothing could go wrong during this magical passage; even things that seemed wrong would become opportunities rather than stumbling blocks, like Hanna’s desperation half-court shot that had brought the whole Derry Civic Center to its feet, the Mills fans cheering, the Castle Rockers raving in disbelief.

Feeling it. Which was why he wasn’t tired, even though he should have been exhausted. Which was why he wasn’t worried about Junior, in spite of Junior’s reticence and pale watchfulness. Which was why he wasn’t worried about Dale Barbara and Barbara’s troublesome coterie of friends, most notably the newspaper bitch. Which was why, when Peter Randolph and Andy Sanders looked at him, dumbfounded, Big Jim only smiled. He could afford to smile. He was feeling it.

“Close the supermarket?” Andy asked. “Won’t that get a lot of people upset, Big Jim?”

“The supermarket and the Gas and Grocery,” Big Jim corrected, still smiling. “Brownie’s we don’t have to worry about, it’s already closed. A good thing, too—it’s a dirty little place.” Selling dirty little magazines, he did not add.

“Jim, there’s still plenty of supplies at Food City,” Randolph said. “I spoke to Jack Cale about that just this afternoon. Meat’s thin, but everything else is holding up.”

“I know that,” Big Jim said. “I understand inventory, and Cale does, too. He should; he’s Jewish, after all.”

“Well… I’m just saying everything’s been orderly so far, because people keep their pantries well stocked.” He brightened. “Now, I could see ordering shorter hours at Food City. I think Jack could be talked into that. He’s probably already thinking ahead to it.”

Big Jim shook his head, still smiling. Here was another example of how things broke your way when you were feeling it. Duke Perkins would have said it was a mistake to put the town under any extra stress, especially after this night’s unsettling celestial event. Duke was dead, however, and that was more than convenient; it was divine.

“Closed up,” he repeated. “Both of them. Tight as ticks. And when they reopen, we’ll be the ones handing out supplies. Stuff will last longer, and the distribution will be fairer. I’ll announce a rationing plan at the Thursday meeting.” He paused. “If the Dome isn’t gone by then, of course.”

Andy said hesitantly, “I’m not sure we have the authority to close down businesses, Big Jim.”

“In a crisis like this, we not only have the authority, we have the responsibility.” He clapped Pete Randolph heartily on the back. The Mill’s new Chief wasn’t expecting it and gave out a startled squeak.

“What if it starts a panic?” Andy was frowning.

“Well, that’s a possibility,” Big Jim said. “When you kick a nest of mice, they’re all apt to come running out. We may have to increase the size of our police force quite a bit if this crisis doesn’t end soon. Yes, quite a bit.”

Randolph looked startled. “We’re going on twenty officers now. Including—” He cocked his head toward the door.

“Yep,” Big Jim said, “and speaking of those fellers, better bring em in, Chief, so we can finish this and send them home to bed. I think they’re going to have a busy day tomorrow.”

And if they get roughed up a little, so much the better. They deserve it for not being able to keep their jackhandles in their pants.

2

Frank, Carter, Mel, and Georgia shuffled in like suspects onto a police lineup stage. Their faces were set and defiant, but the defiance was thin; Hanna Compton would have laughed at it. Their eyes were down, studying their shoes. It was clear to Big Jim that they expected to be fired, or worse, and that was just fine with him. Fright was the easiest of emotions to work with.

“Well,” he said. “Here are the brave officers.”

Georgia Roux muttered something under her breath.

“Speak up, honeybunch.” Big Jim cupped a hand to his ear.

“Said we didn’t do nothing wrong,” she said. Still in that teacher’s-being-mean-to-me mumble.

“Then exactly what did you do?” And, when Georgia, Frank, and Carter all started to talk at once, he pointed at Frankie. “You.” And make it good, for gosh sake.

“We were out there,” Frank said, “but she invited us.”

“Right!” Georgia cried, folding her arms below her considerable bosom. “She—”

“Shut it.” Big Jim pointed a hammy finger at her. “One speaks for all. That’s how it works when you’re a team. Are you a team?”

Carter Thibodeau saw where this was going. “Yes, sir, Mr. Rennie.”

“Glad to hear it.” Big Jim nodded for Frank to go on.

“She said she had some beers,” Frank said. “That’s the only reason we went out. Can’t buy it in town, as you know. Anyway, we were sitting around, drinking beers—just a can each, and we were pretty much off-duty—”

“Completely off-duty,” the Chief put in. “Isn’t that what you meant?”

Frank nodded respectfully. “Yes, sir, that’s what I meant to say. We drank our beers and then said we’d better go, but she said she appreciated what we were doing, every one of us, and wanted to say thank you. Then she kind of spread her legs.”

“Showing her woofer, you know,” Mel clarified with a large and vacant smile.

Big Jim winced and gave silent thanks that Andrea Grinnell wasn’t here. Dope addict or not, she could have gone all politically correct in a situation like this.

“She took us in the bedroom one by one,” Frankie said. “I know it was a bad decision, and we’re all sorry, but it was purely voluntary on her part.”

“I’m sure it was,” Chief Randolph said. “That girl has quite a reputation. Her husband, too. You didn’t see any drugs out there, did you?”

“No sir.” A four-part chorus.

“And you didn’t hurt her?” Big Jim asked. “I understand she’s claiming she was punched around and whatnot.”

“Nobody hurt her,” Carter said. “Can I say what I think happened?”

Big Jim flapped an assenting hand. He was beginning to think that Mr. Thibodeau had possibilities.

“She probably fell down after we left. Maybe a couple of times. She was pretty drunk. Child Welfare should take that kid away from her before she kills it.”

No one picked up on that. In the town’s current situation, the Child Welfare office in Castle Rock might as well have been on the moon.

“So basically, you’re all clean,” Big Jim said.

“As a whistle,” Frank replied.

“Well, I think we’re satisfied.” Big Jim looked around. “Are we satisfied, gentlemen?”

Andy and Randolph nodded, looking relieved.

“Good,” Big Jim said. “Now, it’s been a long day—an eventful day—and we all need some sleep, I’m sure. You young officers especially need it, because you’ll report back for duty at seven AM tomorrow. The supermarket and the Gas and Grocery are both going to be closed for the duration of this crisis, and Chief Randolph thought that you’d be just the ones to guard Food City in case the people who show up there don’t take kindly to the new order of things. Think you’re up to that, Mr. Thibodeau? With your… your war wound?”

Carter flexed his arm. “I’m okay. Her dog didn’t rip the tendon none.”

“We can put Fred Denton with them, too,” Chief Randolph said, getting into the spirit of the thing. “Wettington and Morrison at the Gas and Grocery should be enough.”

“Jim,” Andy said, “maybe we should put the more experienced officers at Food City, and the less experienced ones at the smaller—”

“I don’t think so,” Big Jim said. Smiling. Feeling it. “These young folks are the ones we want at Food City. The very ones. And another thing. A little bird told me that some of you folks have been carrying weapons in your cars, and a couple have even been wearing them on foot patrol.”

Silence greeted this.

“You’re probationary officers,” Big Jim said. “If you’ve got personal handguns, that’s your right as Americans. But if I hear that any of you are strapped while standing out in front of Food City tomorrow and dealing with the good folks of this town, your police officer days are over.”

“Absolutely right,” Randolph said.

Big Jim surveyed Frank, Carter, Mel, and Georgia. “Any problems with that? Any of you?”

They didn’t look happy about it. Big Jim hadn’t expected that they would be, but they were getting off easy. Thibodeau kept flexing his shoulder and his fingers, testing them.

“What if they weren’t loaded?” Frank asked. “What if they were just there, you know, as a warning?”

Big Jim raised a teacherly finger. “I’m going to tell you what my father told me, Frank—there’s no such thing as an unloaded gun. We’ve got a good town here. They’ll behave, that’s what I’m banking on. If they change, we’ll change. Got it?”

“Yessir, Mr. Rennie.” Frank didn’t sound happy about it. That was fine with Big Jim.

He rose. Only instead of leading them out, Big Jim extended his hands. He saw their hesitation and nodded, still smiling. “Come on, now. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day, and we don’t want to let this one go without a word of prayer. So grab on.”

They grabbed on. Big Jim closed his eyes and bowed his head. “Dear Lord—”

It went on for some time.

3

Barbie mounted the outside steps to his apartment at a few minutes to midnight, his shoulders sagging with weariness, thinking that the only thing in the world he wanted was six hours of oblivion before answering the alarm and going up to Sweetbriar Rose to cook breakfast.

The weariness left him as soon as he snapped on the lights—which, courtesy of Andy Sanders’s generator, still worked.

Someone had been in here.

The sign was so subtle that at first he couldn’t isolate it. He closed his eyes, then opened them and let them swing casually about his combination living-room/kitchenette, trying to take in everything. The books he’d been planning to leave behind hadn’t been moved around on the shelves; the chairs were where they had been, one under the lamp and the other by the room’s only window, with its scenic view of the alley outside; the coffee cup and the toast plate were still in the dish drainer beside the tiny sink.

Then it clicked home, as such things usually did if you didn’t push too hard. It was the rug. What he thought of as his Not Lindsay rug.

About five feet long and two wide, Not Lindsay was a repeating diamond pattern in blue, red, white, and brown. He had bought it in Baghdad, but had been assured by an Iraqi policeman he trusted that it was of Kurdish manufacture. “Very old, very beautiful,” the policeman had said. His name was Latif abd al-Khaliq Hassan. A good troop. “Look Turkey, but no-no-no.” Big grin. White teeth. A week after that day in the marketplace, a sniper’s bullet had blown Latif abd al-Khaliq Hassan’s brains right out through the back of his head. “Not Turkey, Iraqi!”

The rug-merchant wore a yellow tee-shirt that had said DON’T SHOOT ME, I’M ONLY THE PIANO PLAYER. Latif listened to him, nodding. They laughed together. Then the merchant had made a startlingly American jackoff gesture and they laughed even harder.

“What was that about?” Barbie had asked.

“He says American senator bought five like these. Lindsay Graham. Five rug, five hundred dollar. Five hundred out front, for press. More on the down-low. But all senator rug fake. Yes-yes-yes. This one not fake, this one real. I, Latif Hassan, tell you this, Barbie. Not Lindsay Graham rug.”

Latif had raised his hand and Barbie slapped him five. That had been a good day. Hot, but good. He had bought the rug for two hundred dollars American and an all-territories Coby DVD player. Not Lindsay was his one souvenir of Iraq, and he never stepped on it. He always stepped around it. He had planned to leave it behind when he left The Mill—he supposed down deep his idea had been to leave Iraq behind when he left The Mill, but fat chance of that. Wherever you went, there you were. The great Zen truth of the age.

He hadn’t stepped on it, he was superstitious about that, he always detoured around it, as if to step on it would activate some computer in Washington and he would find himself back in Baghdad or fucking Fallujah. But somebody had, because Not Lindsay was mussed. Wrinkled. And a little crooked. It had been perfectly straight when he left this morning, a thousand years ago.

He went into the bedroom. The coverlet was as neat as always, but that sense that someone had been here was equally strong. Was it a lingering smell of sweat? Some psychic vibe? Barbie didn’t know and didn’t care. He went to his dresser, opened the top drawer, and saw that the pair of extra-faded jeans which had been on top of the pile was now on the bottom. And his khaki shorts, which he’d laid in with the zippers up, were now zippers-down.

He went immediately to the second drawer, and the socks. It took less than five seconds to verify that his dog tags were gone, and he wasn’t surprised. No, not surprised at all.

He grabbed the disposable cell he had also been planning to leave behind and went back into the main room. The combined Tarker’s-Chester’s telephone directory was sitting on a table by the door, a book so skinny it was almost a pamphlet. He looked for the number he wanted, not really expecting it to be there; Chiefs of Police did not make a practice of listing their home phone numbers.

Except, it seemed, in small towns, they did. At least this one had, although the listing was discreet: H and B Perkins 28 Morin Street. Even though it was now past midnight, Barbie punched in the number without hesitation. He couldn’t afford to wait. He had an idea that time might be extremely short.

4

Her phone was tweeting. Howie, no doubt, calling to tell her he was going to be late, to just lock up the house and go to bed—

Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead. She didn’t know who could be calling her at—she checked her watch—twenty past midnight, but it wasn’t Howie.

She winced as she sat up, rubbing her neck, cursing herself for falling asleep on the couch, also cursing whoever had wakened her at such an ungodly hour and refreshed her recollection of her strange new singularity.

Then it occurred to her that there could be only one reason for such a late call: the Dome was either gone or had been breached. She bumped her leg on the coffee table hard enough to make the papers there rattle, then limped to the phone beside Howie’s chair (how it hurt her to look at that empty chair) and snatched it up. “What? What?”

“It’s Dale Barbara.”

“Barbie! Has it broken? Has the Dome broken?”

“No. I wish that’s why I was calling, but it’s not.”

“Then why? It’s almost twelve-thirty in the morning!”

“You said your husband was investigating Jim Rennie.”

Brenda paused, getting the sense of this. She had put her palm against the side of her throat, the place where Howie had caressed her for the last time. “He was, but I told you, he had no absolute—”

“I remember what you said,” Barbie told her. “You need to listen to me, Brenda. Can you do that? Are you awake?”

“I am now.”

“Your husband had notes?”

“Yes. On his laptop. I printed them.” She was looking at the VADER file, spread out on the coffee table.

“Good. Tomorrow morning, I want you to put the printout in an envelope and take it to Julia Shumway. Tell her to put it in a safe place. An actual safe, if she’s got one. A cash strongbox or a locked file cabinet, if she doesn’t. Tell her she’s only to open it if something happens to you or me or both of us.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“She is not to open it otherwise. If you tell her that, will she do it? My instincts say she will.”

“Of course she will, but why not let her look?”

“Because if the editor of the local paper sees what your husband had on Big Jim and Big Jim knows she’s seen it, most of the leverage we have will be gone. Do you follow that?”

“Ye-es…” She found herself wishing desperately that Howie were the one having this post-midnight conversation.

“I said I might be arrested today if the missile strike didn’t work. Do you remember me telling you that?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I wasn’t. That fat sonofabitch knows how to bide his time. But he won’t bide it much longer. I’m almost positive it’s going to happen tomorrow—later today, I mean. If, that is, you can’t put a stop to it by threatening to air whatever dirt your husband dug up.”

“What do you think they’re going to arrest you for?”

“No idea, but it won’t be shoplifting. And once I’m in jail, I think I might have an accident. I saw plenty of accidents like that in Iraq.”

“That’s crazy.” But it had the horrid plausibility she had sometimes experienced in nightmares.

“Think about it, Brenda. Rennie has something to cover up, he needs a scapegoat, and the new Police Chief is in his pocket. The stars are in alignment.”

“I was planning to go see him anyway,” Brenda said. “And I was going to take Julia with me, for safety’s sake.”

“Don’t take Julia,” he said, “but don’t go alone.”

“You don’t actually think he’d—”

“I don’t know what he’d do, how far he’d go. Who do you trust besides Julia?”

She flashed back to that afternoon, the fires almost out, standing beside Little Bitch Road, feeling good in spite of her grief because she was flush with endorphins. Romeo Burpee telling her she ought to at least stand for Fire Chief.

“Rommie Burpee,” she said.

“Okay, then he’s the one.”

“Do I tell him what Howie had on—”

“No,” Barbie said. “He’s just your insurance policy. And here’s another one: lock up your husband’s laptop.”

“Okay… but if I lock up the laptop and leave the printout with Julia, what am I going to show Jim? I guess I could print a second copy—”

“No. One of those floating around is enough. For now, at least. Putting the fear of God into him is one thing. Freaking him out would make him too unpredictable. Brenda, do you believe he’s dirty?”

She did not hesitate. “With all my heart.” Because Howie believed it—that’s good enough for me.

“And you remember what’s in the file?”

“Not the exact figures and the names of all the banks they used, but enough.”

“Then he’ll believe you,” Barbie said. “With or without a second copy of the paperwork, he’ll believe you.”

5

Brenda put the VADER file in a manila envelope. On the front she printed Julia’s name. She put the envelope on the kitchen table, then went into Howie’s study and locked his laptop in the safe. The safe was small and she had to turn the Mac on its side, but in the end it just fit. She finished by giving the combination dial not just one but two spins, as per her dead husband’s instructions. As she did, the lights went out. For a moment some primitive part of her was certain she had blown them just by giving the dial that extra spin.

Then she realized that the generator out back had died.

6

When Junior came in at five minutes past six on Tuesday morning, his pale cheeks stubbly, his hair standing up in haystacks, Big Jim was sitting at the kitchen table in a white bathrobe the approximate size of a clipper ship’s mainsail. He was drinking a Coke.

Junior nodded at it. “A good day starts with a good breakfast.”

Big Jim raised the can, took a swallow, and set it down. “There’s no coffee. Well, there is, but there’s no electricity. The generator’s out of LP. Grab yourself a pop, why don’t you? They’re still fairly cold, and you look like you could use it.”

Junior opened the fridge and peered into its dark interior. “Am I supposed to believe you couldn’t score some bottled gas anytime you wanted it?”

Big Jim started a little at that, then relaxed. It was a reasonable question, and didn’t mean Junior knew anything. The guilty man flees where none pursueth, Big Jim reminded himself.

“Let’s just say it might not be politic at this point in time.”

“Uh-huh.”

Junior closed the refrigerator door and sat down on the other side of the table. He looked at his old man with a certain hollow amusement (which Big Jim mistook for affection).

The family that slays together stays together, Junior thought. At least for the time being. As long as it’s…

“Politic,” he said.

Big Jim nodded and studied his son, who was supplementing his early-morning beverage with a Big Jerk beefstick.

He did not ask Where have you been? He did not ask What’s wrong with you?, although it was obvious, in the unforgiving first light that flooded the kitchen, that something was. But he did have a question.

“There are bodies. Plural. Is that right?”

“Yes.” Junior took a big bite of his beefstick and washed it down with Coke. The kitchen was weirdly silent without the hum of the fridge and the burble of the Mr. Coffee.

“And all these bodies can be laid at Mr. Barbara’s door?”

“Yes. All.” Another chomp. Another swallow. Junior looking at him steadily, rubbing his left temple as he did so.

“Can you plausibly discover those bodies around noon today?”

“No prob.”

“And the evidence against our Mr. Barbara, of course.”

“Yes.” Junior smiled. “It’s good evidence.”

“Don’t report to the police station this morning, son.”

“I better,” Junior said. “It might look funny if I don’t. Besides, I’m not tired. I slept with…” He shook his head. “I slept, leave it at that.”

Big Jim also did not ask Who did you sleep with? He had other concerns than whom his son might be diddling; he was just glad the boy hadn’t been among the fellows who’d done their business with that nasty piece of trailer trash out on Motton Road. Doing business with that sort of girl was a good way to catch something and get sick.

He’s already sick, a voice in Big Jim’s head whispered. It might have been the fading voice of his wife. Just look at him.

That voice was probably right, but this morning he had greater concerns than Junior Rennie’s eating disorder, or whatever it was.

“I didn’t say go to bed. I want you on motor patrol, and I want you to do a job for me. Just stay away from Food City while you’re doing it. There’s going to be trouble there, I think.”

Junior’s eyes livened up. “What kind of trouble?”

Big Jim didn’t answer directly. “Can you find Sam Verdreaux?”

“Sure. He’ll be in that little shack out on God Creek Road. Ordinarily he’d be sleeping it off, but today he’s more apt to be shaking himself awake with the DTs.” Junior snickered at this image, then winced and went back to rubbing his temple. “You really think I’m the person to talk to him? He’s not my biggest fan right now. He’s probably even deleted me from his Facebook page.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a joke, Dad. Forget it.”

“Do you think he’d warm up to you if you offered him three quarts of whiskey? And more later, if he does a good job?”

“That skanky old bastard would warm up to me if I offered him half a juice glass of Two-Buck Chuck.”

“You can get the whiskey from Brownie’s,” Big Jim said. In addition to cheapass groceries and beaver-books, Brownie’s was one of three agency liquor stores in The Mill, and the PD had keys to all three. Big Jim slid the key across the table. “Back door. Don’t let anyone see you going in.”

“What’s Sloppy Sam supposed to do for the booze?”

Big Jim explained. Junior listened impassively… except for his bloodshot eyes, which danced. He had only one more question: Would it work?

Big Jim nodded. “It will. I’m feeling it.”

Junior took another chomp on his beefstick and another swallow of his soda. “So’m I, Dad,” he said. “So’m I.”

7

When Junior was gone, Big Jim went into his study with his robe billowing grandly around him. He took his cell phone from the center drawer of his desk, where he kept it as much as possible. He thought they were Godless things that did nothing but encourage a lot of loose and useless talk—how many man-hours had been lost to useless gabble on these things? And what kind of nasty rays did they shoot into your head while you were gabbling?

Still, they could come in handy. He reckoned that Sam Verdreaux would do as Junior told him, but he also knew it would be foolish not to take out insurance.

He selected a number in the cell phone’s “hidden” directory, which could be accessed only via numeric code. The phone rang half a dozen times before it was picked up. “What?” the sire of the multitudinous Killian brood barked.

Big Jim winced and held the phone away from his ear for a second. When he put it back, he heard low clucking sounds in the background. “Are you in the chickenhouse, Rog?”

“Uh… yessir, Big Jim, I sure am. Chickens got to be fed, come hell or high water.” A 180-degree turn from irritation to respect. And Roger Killian ought to be respectful; Big Jim had made him a gosh-darn millionaire. If he was wasting what could have been a good life with no financial worries by still getting up at dawn to feed a bunch of chickens, that was God’s will. Roger was too dumb to stop. It was his heaven-sent nature, and would no doubt serve Big Jim well today.

And the town, he thought. It’s the town I’m doing this for. The good of the town.

“Roger, I’ve got a job for you and your three oldest sons.”

“Only got two t’home,” Roger said. In his thick Yankee accent, home came out hum. “Ricky and Randall are here, but Roland was in Oxford buying feed when the Christing Dome came down.” He paused and considered what he had just said. In the background, the chickens clucked. “Sorry about the profanity.”

“I’m sure God forgives you,” Big Jim said. “You and your two oldest, then. Can you get them to town by—” Big Jim calculated. It didn’t take long. When you were feeling it, few decisions did. “Say, nine o’clock, nine fifteen at the latest?”

“I’ll have to rouse em, but sure,” Roger said. “What are we doin? Bringin in some of the extra propa—”

“No,” Big Jim said, “and you hush about that, God love you. Just listen.”

Big Jim talked.

Roger Killian, God love him, listened.

In the background roughly eight hundred chickens clucked as they stuffed themselves with steroid-laced feed.

8

“What? What? Why? ”

Jack Cale was sitting at his desk in the cramped little Food City manager’s office. The desk was littered with inventory lists he and Ernie Calvert had finally completed at one in the morning, their hopes of finishing earlier dashed by the meteor shower. Now he swept them up—handwritten on long yellow legal-pad sheets—and shook them at Peter Randolph, who stood in the office doorway. The new Chief had dolled up in full uniform for this visit. “Look at these, Pete, before you do something foolish.”

“Sorry, Jack. Market’s closed. It’ll reopen on Thursday, as a food depot. Share and share alike. We’ll keep all the records, Food City Corp won’t lose a cent, I promise you—”

“That’s not the point, ” Jack nearly groaned. He was a baby-faced thirtysomething with a thatch of wiry red hair he was currently torturing with the hand not holding out the yellow sheets… which Peter Randolph showed no signs of taking.

“Here! Here! What in the name of jumped-up Jack Sprat Jesus are you talking about, Peter Randolph?”

Ernie Calvert came barreling up from the basement storage area. He was broad-bellied and red-faced, his gray hair mowed into the crewcut he’d worn all his life. He was wearing a green Food City duster.

“He wants to close the market!” Jack said.

“Why in God’s name would you want to do that, when there’s still plenty of food?” Ernie asked angrily. “Why would you want to go scaring people like that? They’ll be plenty scared in time, if this goes on. Whose dumb idea was this?”

“Selectmen voted,” Randolph said. “Any problems you have with the plan, take them up at the special town meeting on Thursday night. If this isn’t over by then, of course.”

“What plan?” Ernie shouted. “Are you telling me Andrea Grinnell was in favor of this? She knows better!”

“I understand she’s got the flu,” Randolph said. “Flat on her back. So Andy decided. Big Jim seconded the decision.” No one had told him to put it this way; no one had to. Randolph knew how Big Jim liked to do business.

“Rationing might make sense at some point,” Jack said, “but why now?” He shook the sheets again, his cheeks almost as red as his hair. “Why, when we’ve still got so much?”

“That’s the best time to start conserving,” Randolph said.

“That’s rich, coming from a man with a powerboat on Sebago Lake and a Winnebago Vectra in his dooryard,” Jack said.

“Don’t forget Big Jim’s Hummer,” Ernie put in.

“Enough,” Randolph said. “The Selectmen decided—”

“Well, two of them did,” Jack said.

“You mean one of them did,” Ernie said. “And we know which one.”

“—and I carried the message, so there’s an end to it. Put a sign in the window. MARKET CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

“Pete. Look. Be reasonable.” Ernie no longer seemed angry; now he seemed almost to be pleading. “That’ll scare the dickens out of people. If you’re set on this, how about I put CLOSED FOR INVENTORY, WILL REOPEN SOON? Maybe add SORRY FOR THE TEMPORARY INCONVENIENCE. Put TEMPORARY in red, or something.”

Peter Randolph shook his head slowly and weightily. “Can’t let you, Ern. Couldn’t let you even if you were still an official employee, like him.” He nodded to Jack Cale, who had put down the inventory sheets so he could torture his hair with both hands. “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. That’s what the Selectmen told me, and I carry out their orders. Besides, lies always come back to bite you on the ass.”

“Yeah, well, Duke Perkins would have told them to take this particular order and wipe their asses with it,” Ernie said. “You ought to be ashamed, Pete, carrying that fat shit’s water. He says jump, you ask how high.”

“You want to shut up right now, if you know what’s good for you,” Randolph said, pointing at him. The finger shook a little. “If you don’t want to spend the rest of the day in jail on a disrespect charge, you just want to close your mouth and follow orders. This is a crisis situation—”

Ernie looked at him unbelievingly. “ ‘Disrespect charge?’ No such animal!”

“There is now. If you don’t believe it, go on and try me.”

9

Later on—much too late to do any good—Julia Shumway would piece together most of how the Food City riot started, although she never got a chance to print it. Even if she had, she would have done so as a pure news story: the five Ws and the H. If asked to write about the emotional heart of the event, she would have been lost. How to explain that people she’d known all her life—people she respected, people she loved—had turned into a mob? She told herself I could’ve gotten a better handle on it if I’d been there from the very beginning and seen how it started, but that was pure rationalization, a refusal to face the orderless, reasonless beast that can arise when frightened people are provoked. She had seen such beasts on the TV news, usually in foreign countries. She never expected to see one in her own town.

And there was no need for it. This was what she kept coming back to. The town had been cut off for only seventy hours, and it was stuffed with provisions of almost every kind; only propane gas was in mysteriously short supply.

Later she would say, It was the moment when this town finally realized what was happening. There was probably truth in the idea, but it didn’t satisfy her. All she could say with complete certainty (and she said it only to herself) was that she watched her town lose its mind, and afterward she would never be the same person.

10

The first two people to see the sign are Gina Buffalino and her friend Harriet Bigelow. Both girls are dressed in white nurse’s uniforms (this was Ginny Tomlinson’s idea; she felt the whites inspired more confidence among the patients than candy-striper pinafores), and they look most seriously cute. They also look tired, in spite of their youthful resiliency. It has been a hard two days, and another is ahead of them, after a night of short sleep. They have come for candy bars—they will get enough for everyone but poor diabetic Jimmy Sirois, that’s the plan—and they are talking about the meteor shower. The conversation stops when they see the sign on the door.

“The market can’t be closed,” Gina says unbelievingly. “It’s Tuesday morning.” She puts her face to the glass with her hands cupped to the sides to cut the glare of the bright morning sun.

While she’s so occupied, Anson Wheeler drives up with Rose Twitchell riding shotgun. They have left Barbie back at Sweet-briar, finishing up the breakfast service. Rose is out of the little panel truck with her namesake painted on the side even before Anson has turned off the engine. She has a long list of staples, and wants to get as much as she can, as soon as she can. Then she sees CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE posted on the door.

“What the hell? I saw Jack Cale just last night, and he never said a word about this.”

She’s speaking to Anson, who’s chugging along in her wake, but it’s Gina Buffalino who answers. “It’s still full of stuff, too. All the shelves are stocked.”

Other people are pulling in. The market is due to open in five minutes, and Rose isn’t the only one who planned to get an early start on her marketing; folks from all over town woke up to find the Dome still in place and decided to stock up on supplies. Asked later to explain this sudden rush of custom, Rose would say: “The same thing happens every winter when the Weather Bureau upgrades a storm warning to a blizzard warning. Sanders and Rennie couldn’t have picked a worse day to pull this bullshit.”

Among the early arrivals are Units Two and Four of the Chester’s Mill PD. Close behind them comes Frank DeLesseps in his Nova (he’s ripped off the ASS, GAS, OR GRASS sticker, feeling it hardly becomes an officer of the law). Carter and Georgia are in Two; Mel Searles and Freddy Denton in Four. They have been parked down the street by LeClerc’s Maison des Fleurs, by order of Chief Randolph. “No need to get there too soon,” he has instructed them. “Wait until there are a dozen or so cars in the parking lot. Hey, maybe they’ll just read the sign and go home.”

This doesn’t happen, of course, just as Big Jim Rennie knew it wouldn’t. And the appearance of the officers—especially such young and callow ones, for the most part—acts as an incitement rather than a calmative. Rose is the first to begin haranguing them. She picks on Freddy, showing him her long list of supplies, then pointing through the window, where most of the stuff she wants is ranked neatly on the shelves.

Freddy is polite to begin with, aware that people (not quite a crowd, not yet) are watching, but it’s hard to keep his temper with this mouthy little pipsqueak in his face. Doesn’t she realize he’s only following orders?

“Who do you think is feeding this town, Fred?” Rose asks. Anson puts a hand on her shoulder. Rose shakes it off. She knows Freddy is seeing rage instead of the deep distress she feels, but she can’t help it. “Do you think a Sysco truck full of supplies is just going to parachute down from the sky?”

“Ma’am—”

“Oh, can it! Since when am I a ma’am to you? You’ve been eating blueberry pancakes and that nasty limp bacon you like at my place four and five days a week for twenty years, and calling me Rosie while you did it. But you won’t be eating pancakes tomorrow unless I get some flour and some shortening and some syrup and…” She breaks off. “Finally! Sense! Thank You, God!”

Jack Cale is opening one of the double doors. Mel and Frank have taken up station in front of it, and he has just room to squeeze between them. The prospective shoppers—there are nearly two dozen now, even though the market’s official opening time of nine AM is still a minute away—surge forward, only to stop when Jack selects a key from the bunch on his belt, and locks up again. There’s a collective groan.

“Why the hell’d you do that?” Bill Wicker calls out indignantly. “My wife sent me down for aigs!”

“Take it up with the Selectmen and Chief Randolph,” Jack responds. His hair is raring every whichway. He throws Frank DeLesseps a black look and fires an even blacker one at Mel Searles, who is trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin, perhaps even his famous nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. “I know I will. But for now, I’ve had enough of this shit. I’m done.” He strides off through the crowd with his head down and his cheeks burning even brighter than his hair. Lissa Jamieson, just arriving on her bicycle (everything on her list will fit into the milk box perched on the rear fender; her wants are small-going-on-minuscule), has to swerve to avoid him.

Carter, Georgia, and Freddy are ranged in front of the large plate-glass window, where Jack would have set out wheelbarrows and fertilizer on an ordinary day. Carter’s fingers are Band-Aided, and a thicker bandage bulks under his shirt. Freddy has his hand on his gun-butt as Rose Twitchell continues to chew on him, and Carter wishes he could backhand her one. His fingers are okay, but his shoulder aches a bitch. The small cluster of would-be shoppers has become a large cluster, and more cars are turning into the parking lot.

Before Officer Thibodeau can really study the crowd, however, Alden Dinsmore gets into his personal space. Alden looks haggard, and seems to have lost twenty pounds since the death of his son. He’s wearing a black mourning band on his left arm and seems dazed.

“Need to go in, son. My wife sent me to stock up on the canned.” Alden doesn’t say the canned what. Probably the canned everything. Or maybe he just got thinking about the empty bed upstairs, the one that will never be filled again, and the Foo Fighters poster that will never be looked at again, and the model airplane on the desk that will never be finished, and clean forgot.

“Sorry, Mr. Dimmesdale,” Carter says. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s Dinsmore,” Alden says in a dazed voice. He starts toward the doors. They are locked, no way he can get in, but Carter still gives the farmer a good hearty shove backward. For the first time, Carter has some sympathy for the teachers who used to send him to detention back in high school; it is irritating not to be minded.

Also it’s hot and his shoulder aches in spite of the two Percocet his mother gave him. Seventy-five at nine AM is rare in October, and the faded blue color of the sky says it will be hotter by noon, hotter still by three PM.

Alden stumbles backward into Gina Buffalino, and they both would fall if not for Petra Searles—no lightweight she—steadying them. Alden doesn’t look angry, only puzzled. “M’wife sent me for the canned,” he explains to Petra.

A mutter comes from the gathering people. It’s not an angry sound—not quite yet. They came for groceries and the groceries are there but the door is locked. Now a man has been shoved by a high-school dropout who was a car mechanic last week.

Gina is looking at Carter, Mel, and Frank DeLesseps with widening eyes. She points. “Those are the guys that raped her!” she tells her friend Harriet without lowering her voice. “Those are the guys that raped Sammy Bushey!”

The smile disappears from Mel’s face; the urge to nyuck-nyuck has left him. “Shut up,” he says.

At the back of the crowd, Ricky and Randall Killian have arrived in a Chevrolet Canyon pickemup. Sam Verdreaux is not far behind, walking, of course; Sam lost his license to drive for good in ’07.

Gina takes a step backward, staring at Mel with wide eyes. Beside her, Alden Dinsmore hulks like a farmer-robot with a dead battery. “You guys are supposed to be police? Hel-lo?”

“That rape stuff was nothing but a whore lie,” Frank says. “And you better quit yelling about it before you get arrested for disturbing the peace.”

“Fuckin right,” Georgia says. She has moved a little closer to Carter. He ignores her. He is surveying the crowd. And that’s what it is now. If fifty people make a crowd, then this is one. More coming, too. Carter wishes he had his gun. He doesn’t like the hostility he’s seeing.

Velma Winter, who runs Brownie’s (or did, before it closed), arrives with Tommy and Willow Anderson. Velma is a big, burly woman who combs her hair like Bobby Darin and looks like she could be the warrior queen of Dyke Nation, but she has buried two husbands and the story you can hear at the bullshit table in Sweet-briar is that she fucked them both to death and is looking for number three at Dipper’s on Wednesdays; that’s Country Karaoke Night, and draws an older crowd. Now she plants herself in front of Carter, hands on her meaty hips.

“Closed, huh?” she says in a businesslike voice. “Let’s see your paperwork.”

Carter is confused, and being confused makes him angry. “Back off, bitch. I don’t need no paperwork. The Chief sent us down here. The Selectmen ordered it. It’s gonna be a food depot.”

“Rationing? That what you mean?” She snorts. “Not in my town.” She shoves between Mel and Frank and starts hammering on the door. “Open up! Open up in there! ”

“Nobody home,” Frank says. “You might as well quit it.”

But Ernie Calvert hasn’t left. He comes down the pasta-flour-and-sugar aisle. Velma sees him and starts hammering louder. “Open up, Ernie! Open up!”

“Open up!” voices from the crowd agree.

Frank looks at Mel and nods. Together they grab Velma and muscle her two hundred pounds away from the door. Georgia Roux has turned and is waving Ernie back. Ernie doesn’t go. Numb fuck just stands there.

“Open up!” Velma bawls. “Open up! Open up!”

Tommy and Willow join her. So does Bill Wicker, the postman. So does Lissa, her face shining—all her life she has hoped to be part of a spontaneous demonstration, and here’s her chance. She raises a clenched fist and begins to shake it in time—two small shakes on open and a big one on up. Others imitate her. Open up becomes Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Now they are all shaking their fists in that two-plus-one rhythm—maybe seventy people, maybe eighty, and more arriving all the time. The thin blue line in front of the market looks thinner than ever. The four younger cops look toward Freddy Denton for ideas, but Freddy has no ideas.

He does, however, have a gun. You better fire it into the air pretty soon, Baldy, Carter thinks, or these people are gonna run us down.

Two more cops—Rupert Libby and Toby Whelan—drive down Main Street from the PD (where they’ve been drinking coffee and watching CNN), blowing past Julia Shumway, who is jogging along with a camera slung over her shoulder.

Jackie Wettington and Henry Morrison also start toward the supermarket, but then the walkie-talkie on Henry’s belt crackles. It’s Chief Randolph, saying that Henry and Jackie should hold their station at the Gas & Grocery.

“But we hear—” Henry begins.

“Those are your orders,” Randolph says, not adding that they are orders he is just passing on—from a higher power, as it were.

“Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP!” The crowd shaking fisted power-salutes in the warm air. Still scared, but excited, too. Getting into it. The Chef would have looked at them and seen a bunch of tyro tweekers, needing only a Grateful Dead tune on the soundtrack to make the picture complete.

The Killian boys and Sam Verdreaux are working their way through the crowd. They chant—not as protective coloration but because that crowd-molting-into-mob vibe is just too strong to resist—but don’t bother shaking their fists; they have work to do. No one pays them any particular mind. Later, only a few people will remember seeing them at all.

Nurse Ginny Tomlinson is also working her way through the crowd. She has come to tell the girls they are needed at Cathy Russell; there are new patients, one a serious case. That would be Wanda Crumley from Eastchester. The Crumleys live next to the Evanses, out near the Motton town line. When Wanda went over this morning to check on Jack, she found him dead not twenty feet from where the Dome cut off his wife’s hand. Jack was sprawled on his back with a bottle beside him and his brains drying on the grass. Wanda ran back to her house, crying her husband’s name, and she had no more than reached him when she was felled by a coronary. Wendell Crumley was lucky not to crash his little Subaru wagon on his way to the hospital—he did eighty most of the way. Rusty is with Wanda now, but Ginny doesn’t think Wanda—fifty, overweight, a heavy smoker—is going to make it.

“Girls,” she says. “We need you at the hospital.”

“Those are the ones, Mrs. Tomlinson!” Gina shouts. She has to shout to be heard over the chanting crowd. She’s pointing at the cops and beginning to cry—partly from fear and tiredness, mostly from outrage. “Those are the ones who raped her!”

This time Ginny looks beyond the uniforms, and realizes Gina’s right. Ginny Tomlinson isn’t afflicted with Piper Libby’s admittedly vile temper, but she has a temper, and there’s an aggravating factor at work here: unlike Piper, Ginny saw the Bushey girl with her pants off. Her vagina lacerated and swelled. Huge bruises on her thighs that couldn’t be seen until the blood was washed off. Such a lot of blood.

Ginny forgets about the girls being needed at the hospital. She forgets about getting them out of a dangerous and volatile situation. She even forgets about Wanda Crumley’s heart attack. She strides forward, elbowing someone out of her way (it happens to be Bruce Yardley, the cashier-cum -bagboy, who is shaking his fist like everyone else), and approaches Mel and Frank. They are both studying the ever more hostile crowd, and they don’t see her coming.

Ginny raises both hands, looking for a moment like the bad guy surrendering to the sheriff in a Western. Then she brings both hands around and slaps both young men at the same time. “You bastards!” she shouts. “How could you? How could you be so cowardly? So catdirt mean? You’ll go to jail for this, all of y—”

Mel doesn’t think, just reacts. He punches her in the center of her face, breaking her glasses and her nose. She goes stumbling backward, bleeding, crying out. Her old-fashioned RN cap, shocked free of the bobbypins holding it, tumbles from her head. Bruce Yardley, the young cashier, tries to grab her and misses. Ginny hits a line of shopping carts. They go rolling like a little train. She drops to her hands and knees, crying in pain and shock. Bright drops of blood from her nose—not just broken but shattered—begin falling on the big yellow RK of NO PARKING ZONE.

The crowd goes temporarily silent, shocked, as Gina and Harriet rush to where Ginny crouches.

Then Lissa Jamieson’s voice rises, a clear perfect soprano: “YOU PIG BASTARDS!”

That’s when the chunk of rock flies. The first rock-thrower is never identified. It may be the only crime Sloppy Sam Verdreaux ever got away with.

Junior dropped him off at the upper end of town, and Sam, with visions of whiskey dancing in his head, went prospecting on the east bank of Prestile Stream for just the right rock. Had to be big but not too big, or he wouldn’t be able to throw it with any accuracy, even though once—a century ago, it seems sometimes; at others it seems very close—he was the starting pitcher for the Mills Wildcats in the first game of the Maine state tourney. He had found it at last, not far from the Peace Bridge: a pound, pound and a half, and as smooth as a goose egg.

One more thing, Junior had said as he dropped Sloppy Sam off. It wasn’t Junior’s one more thing, but Junior did not tell Sam this any more than Chief Randolph had told Wettington and Morrison, who had ordered them to stay on station. Wouldn’t have been politic.

Aim for the chick. That was Junior’s final word to Sloppy Sam before leaving him. She deserves it, so don’t miss.

As Gina and Harriet in their white uniforms kneel beside the sobbing, bleeding RN on her hands and knees (and while everyone else’s attention is there too), Sam winds up just as he did on that long-ago day in 1970, lets fly, and throws his first strike in over forty years.

In more ways than one. The twenty-ounce chunk of quartz-shot granite strikes Georgia Roux dead in the mouth, shattering her jaw in five places and all but four of her teeth. She goes reeling back against the plate-glass window, her jaw sagging grotesquely almost to her chest, her yawning mouth pouring blood.

An instant later two more rocks fly, one from Ricky Killian, one from Randall. Ricky’s connects with the back of Bill Allnut’s head and knocks the janitor to the pavement, not far from Ginny Tomlinson. Shit! Ricky thinks. I was supposed to hit a fuckin cop! Not only were those his orders; it’s sort of what he has always wanted to do.

Randall’s aim is better. He nails Mel Searles square in the forehead. Mel goes down like a bag of mail.

There is a pause, a moment of indrawn breath. Think of a car teetering on two wheels, deciding whether or not to go over. See Rose Twitchell looking around, bewildered and frightened, not sure what’s happening, let alone what to do about it. See Anson put his arm around her waist. Listen to Georgia Roux howl through her hanging mouth, her cries weirdly like the sound the wind makes slipping across the waxed string of a tin-can mooseblower. Blood pours over her lacerated tongue as she hollers. See the reinforcements. Toby Whelan and Rupert Libby (he’s Piper’s cousin, though she doesn’t brag on the connection) are first to arrive on the scene. They survey it… then hang back. Next comes Linda Everett. She’s on foot with another part-time cop, Marty Arsenault, puffing along in her wake. She starts to push through the crowd, but Marty—who didn’t even put on his uniform this morning, just rolled out of bed and slipped into an old pair of bluejeans—grabs her by the shoulder. Linda almost breaks away from him, then thinks of her daughters. Ashamed of her own cowardice, she allows Marty to lead her over to where Rupe and Toby are watching developments. Of these four, only Rupe is wearing a gun this morning, and would he shoot? Balls he would; he can see his own wife in that crowd, holding hands with her mother (the mother-in-law Rupe wouldn’t have minded shooting). See Julia arrive just behind Linda and Marty, gasping for breath but already grabbing her camera, dropping the lenscap in her hurry to start shooting. See Frank DeLesseps kneel down beside Mel just in time to avoid another rock, which whizzes over his head and shatters a hole in one of the supermarket doors.

Then…

Then someone yells. Who will never be known, not even the sex of the shouter will ever be agreed upon, although most think a woman, and Rose will tell Anson later she’s almost sure it was Lissa Jamieson.

“GET THEM!”

Someone else bellows “GROCERIES!” and the crowd surges forward.

Freddy Denton fires his pistol once, into the air. Then he lowers it, in his panic about to empty it into the crowd. Before he can, someone wrests it from his hand. He goes down, shouting in pain. Then the toe of a big old farmer’s boot—Alden Dinsmore’s—connects with his temple. The lights don’t go completely out for Officer Denton, but they dim considerably, and by the time they come back up to bright, the Great Supermarket Riot is over.

Blood seeps through the bandage on Carter Thibodeau’s shoulder and small rosettes are blooming on his blue shirt, but he is—for the time being, at least—unaware of the pain. He makes no attempt to run. He sets his feet and unloads on the first person to come into range. This happens to be Charles “Stubby” Norman, who runs the antique shop on the 117 edge of town. Stubby drops, clutching his spouting mouth.

“Get back, you fucks!” Carter snarls. “Back, you sons of bitches! No looting! Get back!”

Marta Edmunds, Rusty’s babysitter, tries to help Stubby, and gets a Frank DeLesseps fist to the cheekbone for her pains. She staggers, holding the side of her face and looking unbelievingly at the young man who has just hit her… and is then knocked flat, with Stubby beneath her, by a wave of charging would-be shoppers.

Carter and Frank start punching at them, but they land only three blows before they are distracted by a weird, ululating scream. It’s the town librarian, her hair hanging around her usually mild face. She’s pushing a line of shopping carts, and she might be screaming banzai. Frank leaps out of her way, but the carts take care of Carter, sending him flying. He waves his arms, trying to stay up, and might actually manage to do so, except for Georgia’s feet. He trips over them, lands on his back, and is trampled. He rolls over on his stomach, laces his hands over his head, and waits for it to be over.

Julia Shumway clicks and clicks and clicks. Perhaps the pictures will reveal the faces of people she knows, but she sees only strangers in the viewfinder. A mob.

Rupe Libby draws his sidearm and fires four shots into the air. The gunfire rolls off into the warm morning, flat and declamatory, a line of auditory exclamation points. Toby Whelan dives back into the car, bumping his head and knocking off his cap (CHESTER’S MILL DEPUTY on the front in yellow). He snatches the bullhorn off the back seat, puts it to his lips, and shouts: “STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING! BACK OFF! POLICE! STOP! THAT IS AN ORDER!”

Julia snaps him.

The crowd pays no attention to the gunshots or the bullhorn. They pay no attention to Ernie Calvert when he comes around the side of the building with his green duster churning about his pumping knees. “Come in the back!” he yells. “You don’t need to do that, I’ve opened up the back!”

The crowd is intent upon breaking and entering. They smash against the doors with their stickers reading IN and OUT and EVERYDAY LOW PRICES. The doors hold at first, then the lock snaps under the crowd’s combined weight. The first to arrive are crushed against the doors and suffer injuries: two people with broken ribs, one sprained neck, two broken arms.

Toby Whelan starts to raise the bullhorn again, then just sets it down, with exquisite care, on the hood of the car in which he and Rupe arrived. He picks up his DEPUTY cap, brushes it off, puts it back on. He and Rupe walk toward the store, then stop, helpless. Linda and Marty Arsenault join them. Linda sees Marta and leads her back to the little cluster of cops.

“What happened?” Marta asks, dazed. “Did someone hit me? The side of my face is all hot. Who’s watching Judy and Janelle?”

“Your sister took them this morning,” Linda says, and hugs her. “Don’t worry.”

“Cora?”

“Wendy.” Cora, Marta’s older sister, has been living in Seattle for years. Linda wonders if Marta has suffered a concussion. She thinks that Dr. Haskell should check her, and then remembers that Haskell is either in the hospital morgue or the Bowie Funeral Home. Rusty is on his own now, and today he is going to be very busy.

Carter is half-carrying Georgia toward unit Two. She is still howling those eerie mooseblower cries. Mel Searles has regained some soupy semblance of consciousness. Frankie leads him toward Linda, Marta, Toby, and the other cops. Mel tries to raise his head, then drops it back to his chest. His split forehead is pouring blood; his shirt is soaked.

People stream into the market. They race along the aisles, pushing shopping carts or grabbing baskets from a stack beside the charcoal briquets display (HAVE YOURSELF A FALL COOKOUT! the sign reads). Manuel Ortega, Alden Dinsmore’s hired man, and his good friend Dave Douglas go straight to the checkout cash registers and start punching NO SALE buttons, grabbing money and stuffing it into their pockets, laughing like fools as they do so.

The supermarket is full now; it is sale day. In frozen foods, two women are fighting over the last Pepperidge Farm Lemon Cake. In deli, one man baffs another man with a kielbasa, telling him to leave some of that goddam lunchmeat for other folks. The lunchmeat shopper turns and biffs the kielbasa wielder in the nose. Soon they are rolling on the floor, fists flying.

Other brawls are breaking out. Rance Conroy, proprietor and sole employee of Conroy’s Western Maine Electrical Service & Supplies (“Smiles Our Specialty”), punches Brendan Ellerbee, a retired University of Maine science teacher, when Ellerbee beats him to the last large sack of sugar. Ellerbee goes down, but he holds onto the ten-pound bag of Domino’s, and when Conroy bends to take it, Ellerbee snarls “Here, then!” and smacks him in the face with it. The sugarsack bursts wide open, enveloping Rance Conroy in a white cloud. The electrician falls against one of the shelves, his face as white as a mime’s, screaming that he can’t see, he’s blind. Carla Venziano, with her baby goggling over her shoulder from the carrier on her back, pushes Henrietta Clavard away from the display of Texmati Rice—Baby Steven loves rice, he also loves to play with the empty plastic containers, and Carla means to make sure she has plenty. Henrietta, who was eighty-four in January, goes sprawling on the hard knot of scrawn that used to be her butt. Lissa Jamieson shoves Will Freeman, who owns the local Toyota dealership, out of her way so she can get the last chicken in the coldcase. Before she can grab it, a teenage girl wearing a PUNK RAGE tee-shirt snatches it, sticks out her pierced tongue at Libby, and hies gaily away.

There’s a sound of shattering glass followed by a hearty cheer made up mostly (but not entirely) of men’s voices. The beer cooler has been breached. Many shoppers, perhaps planning on HAVING THEMSELVES A FALL COOKOUT, stream in that direction. Instead of Oh-pun UP, the chant is now “Beer! Beer! Beer!”

Other folks are streaming into the storerooms below and out back. Soon men and women are packing wine out by the jug and the case. Some carry cartons of vino on their heads like native bearers in an old jungle movie.

Julia, her shoes crunching on crumbles of glass, shoots shoots shoots.

Outside, the rest of the town cops are pulling up, including Jackie Wettington and Henry Morrison, who have abandoned their post at the Gas & Grocery by mutual consent. They join the other cops in a huddled worry-cluster off to one side and simply watch. Jackie sees Linda Everett’s stricken face and folds Linda into her arms. Ernie Calvert joins them, yelling “So unnecessary! So completely unnecessary!” with tears streaming down his chubby cheeks.

“What do we do now?” Linda asks, her cheek pressed against Jackie’s shoulder. Marta stands close beside her, gaping at the market and pressing a palm against the discolored, rapidly swelling bruise on the side of her face. Beyond them, Food City surges with yells, laughter, the occasional cry of pain. Objects are thrown; Linda sees a roll of toilet tissue unspooling like a party streamer as it arcs over the housewares aisle.

“Honey,” Jackie says, “I just don’t know.”

11

Anson snatched Rose’s shopping list and went running into the market with it before the lady herself could stop him. Rose hesitated beside the restaurant panel truck, clenching and unclenching her hands, wondering whether or not to go in after him. She had just decided to stay put when an arm slipped around her shoulders. She jumped, then turned her head and saw Barbie. The depth of her relief actually weakened her knees. She clutched his arm—partly for comfort, mostly so she wouldn’t faint.

Barbie was smiling, without much humor. “Some fun, huh, kid?”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Anson’s in there… everybody is… and the cops are just standing around. ”

“Probably don’t want to get beat up any worse than they already have been. And I don’t blame them. This was well planned and beautifully executed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind. Want to take a shot at stopping it before it gets any worse?”

“How?”

He lifted the bullhorn, plucked from the hood of the car where Toby Whelan left it. When he tried to hand it to her, Rose drew back, holding her hands to her chest. “You do it, Barbie.”

“No. You’re the one who’s been feeding them for years, you’re the one they know, you’re the one they’ll listen to.”

She took the bullhorn, although hesitantly. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of a single thing that will make them stop. Toby Whelan already tried. They didn’t pay any attention.”

“Toby tried to give orders,” Barbie said. “Giving orders to a mob is like giving orders to an anthill.”

“I still don’t know what to—”

“I’m going to tell you.” Barbie spoke calmly, and that calmed her. He paused long enough to beckon Linda Everett. She and Jackie came together, their arms around each other’s waists.

“Can you get in touch with your husband?” Barbie asked.

“If his cell phone’s on.”

“Tell him to get down here—with an ambulance, if possible. If he doesn’t answer his phone, grab a police car and drive on up to the hospital.”

“He’s got patients….”

“He’s got some patients right here. He just doesn’t know it.” Barbie pointed to Ginny Tomlinson, now sitting with her back against the cinderblock side of the market and her hands pressed to her bleeding face. Gina and Harriet Bigelow crouched on either side of her, but when Gina tried to stanch the bleeding from Ginny’s radically altered nose with a folded handkerchief, Ginny cried out in pain and turned her head away. “Starting with one of his two remaining trained nurses, if I’m not mistaken.”

“What are you going to do?” Linda asked, taking her cell phone from her belt.

“Rose and I are going to make them stop. Aren’t we, Rose?”

12

Rose stopped inside the door, mesmerized by the chaos before her. The eye-watering smell of vinegar was in the air, mingled with the aromas of brine and beer. Mustard and ketchup were splattered like gaudy puke on the linoleum of aisle 3. A cloud of mingled sugar and flour arose from aisle 5. People pushed their loaded shopping carts through it, many coughing and wiping their eyes. Some of the carts slued as they rolled through a drift of spilled dry beans.

“Stay there a sec,” Barbie said, although Rose showed no sign of moving; she was hypnotized with the bullhorn clasped between her breasts.

Barbie found Julia shooting pictures of the looted cash registers. “Quit that and come with me,” he said.

“No, I have to do this, there’s no one else. I don’t know where Pete Freeman is, and Tony—”

“You don’t have to shoot it, you have to stop it. Before something a lot worse than that happens.” He was pointing to Fern Bowie, who was strolling past with a loaded basket in one hand and a beer in the other. His eyebrow was split and blood was dripping down his face, but Fern seemed content enough withal.

“How?”

He led her back to Rose. “Ready, Rose? Showtime.”

“I… well…”

“Remember, serene. Don’t try to stop them; just try to lower the temperature.”

Rose took a deep breath, then raised the bullhorn to her mouth. “HI, EVERYBODY, THIS IS ROSE TWITCHELL, FROM SWEETBRIAR ROSE.”

To her everlasting credit, she did sound serene. People looked around when they heard her voice—not because it sounded urgent, Barbie knew, but because it didn’t. He had seen this in Takrit, Fallujah, Baghdad. Mostly after bombings in crowded public places, when the police and the troop carriers arrived. “PLEASE FINISH YOUR SHOPPING AS QUICKLY AND CALMLY AS POSSIBLE.”

A few people chuckled at this, then looked around at each other as if coming to. In aisle 7, Carla Venziano, shamefaced, helped Henrietta Clavard to her feet. There’s plenty of Texmati for both of us, Carla thought. What in God’s name was I thinking?

Barbie nodded at Rose to go on, mouthing Coffee. In the distance, he could hear the sweet warble of an approaching ambulance.

“WHEN YOU’RE DONE, COME TO SWEETBRIAR FOR COFFEE. IT’S FRESH AND IT’S ON THE HOUSE.”

A few people clapped. Some leatherlungs yelled, “Who wants coffee? We got BEER!” Laughter and whoops greeted this sally.

Julia twitched Barbie’s sleeve. Her forehead was creased in what Barbie thought was a very Republican frown. “They’re not shopping; they’re stealing.”

“Do you want to editorialize or get them out of here before someone gets killed over a bag of Blue Mountain Dry Roast?” he asked.

She thought it over and nodded, her frown giving way to that inward-turning smile he was coming to like a great deal. “You have a point, Colonel,” she said.

Barbie turned to Rose, made a cranking gesture, and she started in again. He began to walk the two women up and down the aisles, starting with the mostly denuded deli and dairy section, on the look-out out for anyone who might be cranked up enough to offer interference. There was no one. Rose was gaining confidence, and the market was quieting. People were leaving. Many were pushing carts laden with loot, but Barbie still took it as a good sign. The sooner they were out the better, no matter how much shit they took with them… and the key was for them to hear themselves referred to as shoppers rather than stealers. Give a man or woman back his self-respect, and in most cases—not all, but most—you also give back that person’s ability to think with at least some clarity.

Anson Wheeler joined them, pushing a shopping cart full of supplies. He looked slightly shamefaced, and his arm was bleeding. “Someone hit me with a jar of olives,” he explained. “Now I smell like an Italian sandwich.”

Rose handed the bullhorn to Julia, who began broadcasting the same message in the same pleasant voice: Finish up, shoppers, and leave in orderly fashion.

“We can’t take that stuff,” Rose said, pointing at Anson’s cart. “But we need it, Rosie,” he said. He sounded apologetic but firm. “We really do.”

“We’ll leave some money, then,” she said. “If no one’s stolen my purse out of the truck, that is.”

“Um… I don’t think that’ll work,” Anson said. “Some guys were stealing the money out of the registers.” He had seen which guys, but didn’t want to say. Not with the editor of the local paper walking next to him.

Rose was horrified. “What’s happening here? In the name of God, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Anson said.

Outside, the ambulance pulled up, the siren dying to a growl. A minute or two later, while Barbie, Rose, and Julia were still canvassing the aisles with the bullhorn (the crowd was thinning out now), someone behind them said, “That’s enough. Give me that.”

Barbie was not surprised to see acting chief Randolph, tricked out to the nines in his dress uniform. Here he was, a day late and a dollar short. Right on schedule.

Rose was working the bullhorn, extolling the virtues of free coffee at Sweetbriar. Randolph plucked it from her hand and immediately began giving orders and making threats.

“LEAVE NOW! THIS IS CHIEF PETER RANDOLPH, ORDERING YOU TO LEAVE NOW! DROP WHAT YOU ARE HOLDING AND LEAVE NOW! IF YOU DROP WHAT YOU’RE HOLDING AND LEAVE NOW, YOU MAY AVOID CHARGES!”

Rose looked at Barbie, dismayed. He shrugged. It didn’t matter. The spirit of the mob had departed. The cops who were still ambulatory—even Carter Thibodeau, staggering but on his feet—started hustling people out. When the “shoppers” wouldn’t drop their loaded baskets, the cops struck several to the ground, and Frank DeLesseps overturned a loaded shopping cart. His face was grim and pale and angry.

“Are you going to make those boys stop that?” Julia asked Randolph.

“No, Ms. Shumway, I am not,” Randolph said. “Those people are looters and they’re being treated as such.”

“Whose fault is that? Who closed the market?”

“Get out of my way,” Randolph said. “I’ve got work to do.”

“Shame you weren’t here when they broke in,” Barbie remarked.

Randolph looked at him. The glance was unfriendly yet satisfied. Barbie sighed. Somewhere a clock was ticking. He knew it, and Randolph did, too. Soon the alarm would ring. If not for the Dome, he could run. But, of course, if not for the Dome, none of this would be happening.

Down front, Mel Searles tried to take Al Timmons’s loaded shopping basket. When Al wouldn’t give it up, Mel tore it away… and then pushed the older man down. Al cried out in pain and shame and outrage. Chief Randolph laughed. It was a short, choppy, una-mused sound—Haw! Haw! Haw!—and in it Barbie thought he heard what Chester’s Mill might soon become, if the Dome didn’t lift.

“Come on, ladies,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

13

Rusty and Twitch were lining up the wounded—about a dozen in all—along the cinderblock side of the market when Barbie, Julia, and Rose came out. Anson was standing by the Sweetbriar panel truck with a paper towel pressed to his bleeding arm.

Rusty’s face was grim, but when he saw Barbie, he lightened up a little. “Hey, sport. You’re with me this morning. In fact, you’re my new RN.”

“You wildly overestimate my triage skills,” Barbie said, but he walked toward Rusty.

Linda Everett ran past Barbie and threw herself into Rusty’s arms. He gave her a brief hug. “Can I help, honey?” she asked. It was Ginny she was looking at, and with horror. Ginny saw the look and wearily closed her eyes.

“No,” Rusty said. “You do what you need to. I’ve got Gina and Harriet, and I’ve got Nurse Barbara.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Barbie said, and almost added: Until I’m arrested, that is.

“You’ll be fine,” Rusty said. In a lower voice he added, “Gina and Harriet are the most willing helpers in the world, but once they get past giving pills and slapping on Band-Aids, they’re pretty much lost.”

Linda bent to Ginny. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I’ll be fine,” Ginny said, but she did not open her eyes.

Linda gave her husband a kiss and a troubled look, then walked back toward where Jackie Wettington was standing with a pad in her hand, taking Ernie Calvert’s statement. Ernie wiped his eyes repeatedly as he talked.

Rusty and Barbie worked side by side for over an hour, while the cops strung yellow police tape in front of the market. At some point, Andy Sanders came down to survey the damage, clucking and shaking his head. Barbie heard him ask someone what the world was coming to, when hometown folks could get up to a thing like this. He also shook Chief Randolph’s hand and told him he was doing a hell of a job.

Hell of a job.

14

When you’re feeling it, lousy breaks disappear. Strife becomes your friend. Bad luck turns hit-the-Megabucks good. You do not accept these things with gratitude (an emotion reserved for wimps and losers, in Big Jim Rennie’s opinion) but as your due. Feeling it is like riding in a magic swing, and one should (once more in Big Jim’s opinion) glide imperiously.

If he had emerged from the big old Rennie manse on Mill Street a little later or a little earlier, he would not have seen what he did, and he might have dealt with Brenda Perkins in an entirely different way. But he came out at exactly the right time. That was how it went when you were feeling it ; the defense collapsed and you rushed through the magical hole thus created, making the easy layup.

It was the chanted cries of Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! that got him out of his study, where he had been making notes for what he planned to call the Disaster Administration… of which cheerful, grinning Andy Sanders would be the titular head and Big Jim would be the power behind the throne. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was Rule One in Big Jim’s political operating manual, and having Andy out front always worked like a charm. Most of Chester’s Mill knew he was an idiot, but it didn’t matter. You could run the same game on people over and over, because ninety-eight percent of them were even bigger idiots. And although Big Jim had never planned a political campaign on such a grand scale—it amounted to a municipal dictatorship—he had no doubt it would work.

He hadn’t included Brenda Perkins in his list of possible complicating factors, but no matter. When you were feeling it, complicating factors had a way of disappearing. This you also accepted as your due.

He walked down the sidewalk to the corner of Mill and Main, a distance of no more than a hundred paces, with his belly swinging placidly before him. The Town Common was directly across the way. A little farther down the hill on the other side of the street were the Town Hall and the PD, with War Memorial Plaza in between.

He couldn’t see Food City from the corner, but he could see all of the Main Street business section. And he saw Julia Shumway. She came hurrying out of the Democrat ’s office, a camera in one hand. She jogged down the street toward the sound of the chanting, trying to sling the camera over her shoulder while on the move. Big Jim watched her. It was funny, really—how anxious she was to get to the latest disaster.

It got funnier. She stopped, turned, jogged back, tried the newspaper office’s door, found it open, and locked it. Then she hurried off once more, anxious to watch her friends and neighbors behaving badly.

She is realizing for the first time that once the beast is out of its cage, it could bite anyone, anywhere, Big Jim thought. But don’t worry, Julia—I’ll take care of you, just as I always have. You may have to tone down that tiresome rag of yours, but isn’t that a small price to pay for safety?

Of course it was. And if she persisted…

“Sometimes stuff happens,” Big Jim said. He was standing on the corner with his hands in his pockets, smiling. And when he heard the first screams… the sound of breaking glass… the gunshots… his smile widened. Stuff happens wasn’t exactly how Junior put it, but Big Jim reckoned it was close enough for government w—

His smile folded into a frown as he spotted Brenda Perkins. Most of the people on Main Street were heading toward Food City to see what all the ruckus was about, but Brenda was walking up Main Street instead of down. Maybe even up to the Rennie house… which would mean up to no good.

What could she want with me this morning? What could be so important it trumps a food riot at the local supermarket?

It was entirely possible he was the last thing on Brenda’s mind, but his radar was pinging and he watched her closely.

She and Julia passed on opposite sides of the street. Neither noticed the other. Julia was trying to run while managing her camera. Brenda was staring at the red ramshackle bulk of Burpee’s Department Store. She had a canvas carrier-bag that swung at her knee.

When she reached Burpee’s, Brenda tried the door with no success. Then she stood back and glanced around the way people do when they’ve hit an unexpected obstacle to their plans and are trying to decide what to do next. She might still have seen Shumway if she’d looked behind her, but she didn’t. Brenda looked left, right, then across Main Street, at the offices of the Democrat.

After another look at Burpee’s, she crossed to the Democrat and tried that door. Also locked, of course; Big Jim had watched Julia do it. Brenda tried it again, rattling the knob for good measure. She knocked. Peered in. Then she stood back, hands on hips, carrier-bag dangling. When she once more started up Main Street—trudging, no longer looking around—Big Jim retreated to his house at a brisk pace. He didn’t know why he wanted to make sure Brenda didn’t see him watching… but he didn’t have to know. You only had to act on your instincts when you were feeling it. That was the beauty of the thing.

What he did know was that if Brenda knocked on his door, he would be ready for her. No matter what she wanted.

15

Tomorrow morning I want you to take the printout to Julia Shumway, Barbie had told her. But the Democrat ’s office was locked and dark. Julia was almost certainly at whatever mess was going on at the market. Pete Freeman and Tony Guay probably were, too.

So what was she supposed to do with Howie’s VADER file? If there had been a mail slot, she might have slipped the manila envelope in her carrier-bag through it. Only there was no mail slot.

Brenda supposed she should either go find Julia at the market or return home to wait until things quieted down and Julia came back to her office. Not being in a particularly logical mood, neither choice appealed. As to the former, it sounded like a full-scale riot was going on at Food City, and Brenda did not want to get sucked in. As to the latter…

That was clearly the better choice. The sensible choice. Hadn’t All things come to him who waits been one of Howie’s favorite sayings?

But waiting had never been Brenda’s forte, and her mother had also had a saying: Do it and have done with it. That was what she wanted to do now. Face him, wait out his ranting, his denials, his justifications, and then give him his choice: resign in favor of Dale Barbara or read all about his dirty deeds in the Democrat. Confrontation was bitter medicine to her, and the thing to do with bitter medicine was swallow it as fast as you could, then rinse your mouth. She planned to rinse hers with a double bourbon, and she wouldn’t wait until noon to do it, either.

Only…

Don’t go alone. Barbie had said that, too. And when he’d asked who else she trusted, she’d said Romeo Burpee. But Burpee’s was closed too. What did that leave?

The question was whether or not Big Jim would actually hurt her, and Brenda thought the answer was no. She believed she was physically safe from Big Jim, no matter what worries Barbie might have—worries that were, no doubt, partly the result of his wartime experiences. This was a dreadful miscalculation on her part, but understandable; she wasn’t the only one who clung to the notion that the world was as it had been before the Dome came down.

16

Which still left the problem of the VADER file.

Brenda might be more afraid of Big Jim’s tongue than of bodily harm, but she knew it would be mad to show up on his doorstep with the file still in her possession. He might take it from her even if she said it wasn’t the only copy. That she would not put past him.

Halfway up Town Common Hill, she came to Prestile Street, cutting along the upper edge of the common. The first house belonged to the McCains. The one beyond was Andrea Grinnell’s. And although Andrea was almost always overshadowed by her male counterparts on the Board of Selectmen, Brenda knew she was honest and had no love for Big Jim. Oddly enough, it was Andy Sanders to whom Andrea was more apt to kowtow, although why anyone would take him seriously was beyond Brenda’s understanding.

Maybe he’s got some sort of hold on her, Howie’s voice spoke up in her head.

Brenda almost laughed. That was ridiculous. The important thing about Andrea was that she had been a Twitchell before Tommy Grinnell married her, and Twitchells were tough, even the shy ones. Brenda thought she could leave the envelope containing the VADER file with Andrea… assuming her place wasn’t also locked and empty. She didn’t think it would be. Hadn’t she heard from someone that Andrea was down with the flu?

Brenda crossed Main, rehearsing what she’d say: Would you hold this for me? I’ll be back for it in about half an hour. If I don’t come back for it, give it to Julia at the newspaper. Also, make sure Dale Barbara knows.

And if she was asked what all the mystery was about? Brenda decided she’d be frank. The news that she intended to force Jim Rennie’s resignation would probably do Andrea more good than a double dose of Theraflu.

In spite of her desire to get her distasteful errand done, Brenda paused for a moment in front of the McCain house. It looked deserted, but there was nothing strange about that—plenty of families had been out of town when the Dome came down. It was something else. A faint smell, for one thing, as if food were spoiling in there. All at once the day felt hotter, the air closer, and the sounds of whatever was going on at Food City seemed far away. Brenda realized what it came down to: she felt watched. She stood thinking about how much those shaded windows looked like closed eyes. But not completely closed, no. Peeking eyes.

Shake it off, woman. You’ve got things to do.

She walked on to Andrea’s house, pausing once to look back over her shoulder. She saw nothing but a house with drawn shades, sitting gloomily in the mild stink of its decaying supplies. Only meat smelled so bad so soon. Henry and LaDonna must have had a lot put by in their freezer, she thought.

17

It was Junior who watched Brenda, Junior on his knees, Junior dressed only in his underpants, his head whamming and slamming. He watched from the living room, peering around the edge of a drawn shade. When she was gone, he went back into the pantry. He would have to give his girlfriends up soon, he knew, but for now he wanted them. And he wanted the dark. He even wanted the stink rising from their blackening skin.

Anything, anything, that would soothe his fiercely aching head.

18

After three twists of the old-fashioned crank doorbell, Brenda resigned herself to going home after all. She was turning away when she heard slow, shuffling steps approaching the door. She arranged a little Hello, neighbor smile on her face. It froze there when she saw Andrea—cheeks pale, dark circles under her eyes, hair in disarray, cinching the belt of a bathrobe around her middle, pajamas underneath. And this house smelled, too—not of decaying meat but of vomit.

Andrea’s smile was as wan as her cheeks and brow. “I know how I look,” she said. The words came out in a croak. “I better not invite you in. I’m on the mend, but I still might be catching.”

“Have you seen Dr.—” But no, of course not. Dr. Haskell was dead. “Have you seen Rusty Everett?”

“Indeed I have,” Andrea said. “All will soon be well, I’m told.”

“You’re perspiring.”

“Still a little touch of fever, but it’s almost gone. Can I help you with something, Bren?”

She almost said no—she didn’t want to saddle a woman who was still clearly sick with a responsibility like the one in her carrier-bag—but then Andrea said something that changed her mind. Great events often turn on small wheels.

“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.

19

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.

20

“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 the Democrat. 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.

21

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.