“One of them. Last year.”

“Mr Barlow or Mr Straker?”

“Straker.”

“Seem like a nice enough sort, did he?”

“Hard to tell,” Larry said, and found he wanted to lick his lips. He didn’t. “We only talked business. He seemed okay.”

“Good. That’s good. Come on. I’ll walk up to the Excellent with you.”

When they crossed the street, Lawrence Crockett was thinking about deals with the devil.

TWELVE

1:00 PM

Susan Norton stepped into Babs’ Beauty Boutique, smiled at Babs Griffen (Hal and Jack’s eldest sister), and said, “Thank goodness you could take me on such short notice.”

“No problem in the middle of the week,” Babs said, turning on the fan. “My, ain’t it close? It’ll thunderstorm this afternoon.”

Susan looked at the sky, which was an unblemished blue. “Do you think so?”

“Yeah. How do you want it, hon?”

“Natural,” Susan said, thinking of Ben Mears. “Like I hadn’t even been near this place.”

“Hon,” Babs said, closing in on her with a sigh, “that’s what they all say.”

The sigh wafted the odor of Juicy Fruit gum, and Babs asked Susan if she had seen that some folks were opening up a new furniture store in the old Village Washtub. Expensive stuff by the look of it, but wouldn’t it be nice if they had a nice little hurricane lamp to match the one she had in her apartment and getting away from home and living in town was the smartest move she’d ever made and hadn’t it been a nice summer? It seemed a shame it ever had to end.

THIRTEEN

3:00 PM

Bonnie Sawyer was lying on the big double bed in her house on the Deep Cut Road. It was a regular house, no shanty trailer, and it had a foundation and a cellar. Her husband, Reg, made good money as a car mechanic at Jim Smith’s Pontiac in Buxton.

She was naked except for a pair of filmy blue panties, and she looked impatiently over at the clock on the nightstand: 3:02—where was he?

Almost as if the thought had summoned him, the bedroom door opened the tiniest bit, and Corey Bryant peered through.

“Is it okay?” he whispered. Corey was only twenty-two, had been working for the phone company two years, and this affair with a married woman—especially a knockout like Bonnie Sawyer, who had been Miss Cumberland County of 1973—left him feeling weak and nervous and horny.

Bonnie smiled at him with her lovely capped teeth. “If it wasn’t, honey,” she said, “you’d have a hole in you big enough to watch TV through.”

He came tiptoeing in, his utility lineman’s belt jingling ridiculously around his waist.

Bonnie giggled and opened her arms. “I really like you, Corey. You’re cute.”

Corey’s eyes happened on the dark shadow beneath the taut blue nylon, and he began to feel more horny than nervous. He forgot about tiptoeing and came to her, and as they joined, a cicada began to buzz somewhere in the woods.

FOURTEEN

4:00 PM

Ben Mears pushed away from his desk, the afternoon’s writing done. He had forgone his walk in the park so he could go to dinner at the Nortons’ that night with a clear conscience, and had written for most of the day without a break.

He stood up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. His torso was wet with sweat. He went to the cupboard at the head of the bed, pulled out a fresh towel, and went down to the bathroom to shower before everyone else got home from work and clogged the place.

He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door, and then went to the window, where something had caught his eye. Nothing in town; it was drowsing away the late afternoon under a sky that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on fine late summer days.

He could look across the two-story buildings on Jointner Avenue, could see their flat, asphalted roofs, and across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared behind the shoulder of that first wooded hill. His eyes traveled naturally up to the break in the woods where the Burns Road and the Brooks Road intersected in a T—and on up to where the Marsten House sat overlooking the town.

From here it was a perfect miniature, diminished to the size of a child’s dollhouse. And he liked it that way. From here the Marsten House was a size that could be coped with. You could hold up your hand and blot it out with your palm.

There was a car in the driveway.

He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of terror in his belly that he did not try to analyze. Two of the fallen shutters had been replaced, too, giving the house a secretive, blind look that it had not possessed before.

His lips moved silently, as if forming words no one—even himself—could understand.

FIFTEEN

5:00 PM

Matthew Burke left the high school carrying his briefcase in his left hand and crossed the empty parking lot to where his old Chevy Biscayne sat, still on last year’s snow tires.

He was sixty-three, two years from mandatory retirement, and still carrying a full load of English classes and extracurricular activities. Fall’s activity was the school play, and he had just finished readings for a three-act farce called Charley’s Problem. He had gotten the usual glut of utter impossibles, perhaps a dozen usable warm bodies who would at least memorize their lines (and then deliver them in a deathly, trembling monotone), and three kids who showed flair. He would cast them on Friday and begin blocking next week. They would pull together between then and October 30, which was the play date. It was Matt’s theory that a high school play should be like a bowl of Campbell’s Alphabet Soup: tasteless but not actively offensive. The relatives would come and love it. The theater critic from the Cumberland Ledgerwould come and go into polysyllabic ecstasies, as he was paid to do over any local play. The female lead (Ruthie Crockett this year, probably) would fall in love with some other cast member and quite possibly lose her virginity after the cast party. And then he would pick up the threads of the Debate Club.

At sixty-three, Matt Burke still enjoyed teaching. He was a lousy disciplinarian, thus forfeiting any chance he might once have had to step up to administration (he was a little too dreamy-eyed to ever serve effectively as an assistant principal), but his lack of discipline had never held him back. He had read the sonnets of Shakespeare in cold, pipe-clanking classrooms full of flying airplanes and spitballs, had sat down upon tacks and thrown them away absently as he told the class to turn to page 467 in their grammars, had opened drawers to get composition paper only to discover crickets, frogs, and once a seven-foot black snake.

He had ranged across the length and breadth of the English language like a solitary and oddly complacent Ancient Mariner: Steinbeck period one, Chaucer period two, the topic sentence period three, and the function of the gerund just before lunch. His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

Children did not revere or love him; he was not a Mr Chips languishing away in a rustic corner of America and waiting for Ross Hunter to discover him, but many of his students did come to respect him, and a few learned from him that dedication, however eccentric or humble, can be a noteworthy thing. He liked his work.

Now he got into his car, pumped the accelerator too much and flooded it, waited, and started it again. He tuned the radio to a Portland rock ’n’ roll station and jacked the volume almost to the speaker’s distortion point. He thought rock ’n’ roll was fine music. He backed out of his parking slot, stalled, and started the car up again.