He had been thinking a lot about the dead girl. He didn’t regret what he’d done. If she’d escaped, that would have been the end for all of them, but he had a lingering sense of transgression. The girl hadn’t been his to kill. She had been sourced for a particular reason. She was the town’s girl. She belonged to Prosperous, and her life was the town’s to take. By killing her, he had deprived it of its due. That had never happened before, not in the long history of the community. Ben feared that, if another girl wasn’t found soon, there could be repercussions. He would bury the rife in the woods. It would represent his own small sacrifice, an act of recompense.

For the first, and last, time, Ben stumbled in his workshop, a place that he had known for decades. As he fell, his finger slipped inside the trigger guard. The rife should not have been loaded. As far as Ben was concerned, the rife could not have been loaded. He was obsessively careful about such matters, and never left a round chambered.

The bullet tore through his chest, nicking his heart.

And he held his beloved rife in his arms as he died.

29

I had been anticipating the call from Euclid Dane ever since the first reports began to link the deaths of the soldiers in Afghanistan to the town of Prosperous. A traffic fatality and an apparently accidental shooting in the same town in the space of twenty-four hours would have been unlikely to attract quite the same degree of media interest, but the addition of the military casualties, and the manner in which the soldiers had died, brought attention to Prosperous, and not just from the local and state outlets. The nationals turned their gaze on the town, and it was featured on the websites of the New York Times and USA Today. The task of dealing with the media fell to Hayley Conyer, the head of the board of selectmen. (One unfortunate local TV reporter inadvertently referred to it as the board of ‘selectpersons’ within earshot of Conyer, and was lucky to escape with his life.) She handled her role well. She was polite, dignified, and distant. She gave the reporters just enough to keep them from prying further, but in repeating the same soundbites over and over, along with ongoing pleas for privacy, she managed to dull their curiosity. Prosperous weathered the storm of attention for a few days, and then subsided into a traumatized calm.

Euclid called me on the third day, when Prosperous was already starting to slide from prominence in the bulletins.

‘Looks like Prosperous has emptied its barrel of good fortune,’ he said. He didn’t sound triumphant, but concerned.

‘It happens,’ I said.

‘Not to Prosperous.’

‘I guess they’ll just have to deal with it.’

‘That’s what worries me. I received a call early this morning. There was no caller ID. The voice was male, but I didn’t recognize it. He told me that my bullshit wasn’t going to be tolerated any longer, and if I didn’t keep my mouth shut I’d be put in a hole in the ground, and my bitch sister too. His words, not mine. I like my sister, apart from her cooking. I was also warned not to go shooting my mouth off to strangers in Benny’s.’

‘Somebody ratted you out.’

‘Money’s scarce in Dearden, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was being paid a little on the side to keep an eye on me, but I thought you should know about the call. With all that’s happened over the last day or two, Prosperous is going to be in pain, and wounded animals lash out.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind. Thank you, Mr Danes.’

Euclid Danes said goodbye and hung up.

I waited until the remains of the soldiers were repatriated, and the bodies laid in the ground, before I returned to Prosperous.

It was Pastor Warraner’s daughter who alerted him to the presence of a man in the cemetery.

Warraner had almost finished the final detailing on the last of the kitchen cabinets. It was an out-of-town order from a banker and his wife in Rockland, and they hadn’t even blinked at his estimate, even though he’d added a premium of twenty percent to what was already an expensive quote. The recent tragedies, and their implications for the town, would not force him to miss his deadline. He was already a week ahead when the deaths occurred, for which he was grateful: he could not work well with fear in his heart, and his pace had slowed during the Prosperous’s recent troubles.

The board was scheduled to meet the following evening, now that the media circus had collapsed its tents and departed to seek out new miseries and misfortunes. Warraner had pressed for an earlier conclave but Hayley Conyer had resisted. The presence of the newspapers and TV cameras, and the unwelcome attention they brought on Prosperous, had disturbed her, adding to her shock and grief at the four deaths. She and Ben Pearson had been close, even though their personalities had differed vastly. There was an element of the Brahmin to Hayley, while Ben had been an earthy Mainer through and through. Unlike so many others in Prosperous, Ben Pearson had no fear of Hayley Conyer, and she had admired his independence of thought. It made her respect his opinion more than those of the other board members, and she usually tended to listen when he disagreed with her, and adapt her views and actions accordingly.

Now there was another vacancy on the board. Under ordinary circumstances, the remaining members would have come up with the names of suitable candidates and presented them to the townsfolk for rubber-stamping, but Prosperous was in crisis and this was not the time for an election. The board would continue with only five members, and Morland and Warraner would remain as observers who could offer advice and arguments, but were still not entitled to vote.

The soldiers, along with Valerie Gillson and Ben Pearson, were all buried in the new cemetery to the south. Nobody had been interred in the grounds of the old church since the end of the last century, not even deceased members of the senior families whose surnames already adorned so many stones in the churchyard. It was Warraner’s father who had decreed that the cemetery was now closed to interments, and nobody had questioned his decision. The only reason he had given was this:

Why risk disturbing what is at rest?

In recent days his son had issued an even more restrictive edict. The cemetery and church were out of bounds to all. Nobody was to trespass there, and while the media was in town Morland and his deputies, aided by the most trustworthy of the younger citizens, had maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil to ensure that visitors and reporters were kept away. Had Warraner been asked for a reason, he would have given this one:

Why risk disturbing further what is no longer at rest?

Now here was his youngest daughter telling him that a man was walking among the stones, and taking photographs of the church with his phone. Warraner was so incensed that he did not even go to the house to get a coat but ran in his shirtsleeves through the woods, ignoring the cold, ignoring too the branches that pulled at him even as he recalled the final photograph on Valerie Gillson’s cell phone, the image of a deer with its legs bound by briars, a deer that had been crippled and laid out as bait …

He burst from the woods and saw the intruder.

‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘That’s private property and sacred ground. You’ve no right to be in there.’

The stranger turned, and at the sight of him Pastor Warraner immediately understood that the town’s troubles had just increased considerably.

I watched Warraner as he came to a halt at the iron railing that surrounded the cemetery. He was breathing heavily, and a scratch to his neck was bleeding into his shirt collar.