The town has its secrets, and keeps them well. The people don’t know them all. They know old Albie Crane’s wife ran off with a traveling man from New York City—or they think they know it. But Albie cracked her skull open after the traveling man had left her cold and then he tied a block on her feet and tumbled her down the old well and twenty years later Albie died peacefully in his bed of a heart attack, just as his son Joe will die later in this story, and perhaps someday a kid will stumble on the old well where it is hidden by choked blackberry creepers and pull back the whitened, weather-smoothed boards and see that crumbling skeleton staring blankly up from the bottom of that rock-lined pit, the sweet traveling man’s necklace still dangling, green and mossy, over her rib cage.

They know that Hubie Marsten killed his wife, but they don’t know what he made her do first, or how it was with them in that sun-sticky kitchen in the moments before he blew her head in, with the smell of honeysuckle hanging in the hot air like the gagging sweetness of an uncovered charnel pit. They don’t know that she begged him to do it.

Some of the older women in town—Mabel Werts, Glynis Mayberry, Audrey Hersey—remember that Larry McLeod found some charred papers in the upstairs fireplace, but none of them know that the papers were the accumulation of twelve years’ correspondence between Hubert Marsten and an amusingly antique Austrian nobleman named Breichen, or that the correspondence of these two had commenced through the offices of a rather peculiar Boston book merchant who died an extremely nasty death in 1933, or that Hubie had burned each and every letter before hanging himself, feeding them to the fire one at a time, watching the flames blacken and char the thick, cream-colored paper and obliterate the elegant, spider-thin calligraphy. They don’t know he was smiling as he did it, the way Larry Crockett now smiles over the fabulous land-title papers that reside in the safe-deposit box of his Portland bank.

They know that Coretta Simons, old Jumpin’ Simons’s widow, is dying slowly and horribly of intestinal cancer, but they don’t know that there is better than thirty thousand dollars cash tucked away behind the dowdy sitting room wallpaper, the results of an insurance policy she collected but never invested and now, in her last extremity, has forgotten entirely.

They know that a fire burned up half of the town in that smoke-hazed September of 1951, but they don’t know that it was set, and they don’t know that the boy who set it graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953 and went on to make a hundred thousand dollars on Wall Street, and even if they hadknown, they would not have known the compulsion that drove him to it or the way it ate at his mind for the next twenty years of his life, until a brain embolism hustled him into his grave at the age of forty-six.

They don’t know that the Reverend John Groggins has sometimes awakened in the midnight hour with horrible dreams still vivid beneath his bald pate—dreams in which he preaches to the Little Misses’ Thursday Night Bible Class naked and slick, and they ready for him; or that Floyd Tibbits wandered around for all of that Friday in a sickly daze, feeling the sun lie hatefully against his strangely pallid skin, remembering going to Ann Norton only cloudily, not remembering his attack on Ben Mears at all, but remembering the cool gratitude with which he greeted the setting of the sun, the gratitude and the anticipation of something great and good; or that Hal Griffen has six hot books hidden in the back of his closet which he masturbates over at every opportunity; or that George Middler has a suitcase full of silk slips and bras and panties and stockings and that he sometimes pulls down the shades of his apartment over the hardware store and locks the door with both the bolt and the chain and then stands in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom until his breath comes in short stitches and then he falls to his knees and masturbates; or that Carl Foreman tried to scream and was unable when Mike Ryerson began to tremble coldly on the metal worktable in the room beneath the mortuary and the scream was as sightless and soundless as glass in his throat when Mike opened his eyes and sat up; or that ten-month-old Randy McDougall did not even struggle when Danny Glick slipped through his bedroom window and plucked the baby from his crib and sank his teeth into a neck still bruised from a mother’s blows.

These are the town’s secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face.

The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.

TWO

Sandy McDougall knew something was wrong when she woke up, but couldn’t tell what. The other side of the bed was empty; it was Roy’s day off, and he had gone fishing with some friends. Would be back around noon. Nothing was burning and she didn’t hurt anywhere. So what could be wrong?

The sun. The sun was wrong.

It was high up on the wallpaper, dancing through the shadows cast by the maple outside the window. But Randy always woke her before the sun got up high enough to throw the maple’s shadow on the wall—

Her startled eyes jumped to the clock on the dresser. It was ten minutes after nine.

Trepidation rose in her throat.

“Randy?” she called, her dressing gown billowing out behind her as she flew down the narrow hall of the trailer. “Randy, honey?”

The baby’s bedroom was bathed in submerged light from the one small window above the crib…open. But she had closed it when she went to bed. She always closed it.

The crib was empty.

“Randy?” she whispered.

And saw him.

The small body, still clad in wash-faded Dr Dentons, had been flung into the corner like a piece of garbage. One leg stuck up grotesquely, like an inverted exclamation point.

“Randy!”

She fell on her knees by the body, her face marked with the harsh lines of shock. She cradled the child. The body was cool to the touch.

“Randy, honey-baby, wake up, Randy, Randy, wake up—”

The bruises were gone. All gone. They had faded overnight, leaving the small face and form flawless. His color was good. For the only time since his coming she found him beautiful, and she screamed at the sight of the beauty—a horrible, desolate sound.

“Randy! Wake up!Randy? Randy? Randy?”

She got up with him and ran back down the hall, the dressing gown slipping off one shoulder. The high chair still stood in the kitchen, the tray encrusted with Randy’s supper of the night before. She slipped Randy into the chair, which stood in a patch of morning sunlight. Randy’s head lolled against his chest and he slid sideways with a slow and terrible finality until he was lodged in the angle between the tray and one of the chair’s high arms.

“Randy?” she said, smiling. Her eyes bulged from their sockets like flawed blue marbles. She patted his cheeks. “Wake up now, Randy. Breakfast, Randy. Is oo hungwy? Please—oh Jesus, please—”

She whirled away from him and pulled open one of the cabinets over the stove and pawed through it, spilling a box of Rice Chex, a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, a bottle of Wesson oil. The Wesson oil bottle shattered, spraying heavy liquid across the stove and floor. She found a small jar of Gerber’s chocolate custard and grabbed one of the plastic Dairy Queen spoons out of the dish drainer.

“Look, Randy. Your favorite. Wake up and see the nice custard. Chocka, Randy. Chocka, chocka.” Rage and terror swept her darkly. “Wake up!”she screamed at him, her spittle beading the translucent skin of his brow and cheeks. “ Wake up wake up for the love of God you little shit WAKE UP!”