Jackie pushed her glass aside. "Listen, Julia--you were with Barbara at the supermarket this morning, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"At a little past nine. That's when the riot started."
"Yes."
"Was he there first, or were you? Because I don't know."
Julia couldn't remember, but her impression was that she had been there first--that Barbie had arrived later, shortly after Rose Twitchell and Anson Wheeler.
"We cooled it out," she said, "but he was the one who showed us how. Probably saved even more people from being seriously hurt. I can't square that with what you found in that pantry. Do you have any idea what the order of the deaths were? Other than Brenda last?"
"Angie and Dodee first," Jackie said. "Decomp was less advanced with Coggins, so he came later."
"Who found them?"
"Junior Rennie. He was suspicious because he saw Angie's car in the garage. But that's not important. Barbara 's the important thing here. Are you sure he arrived after Rose and Anse? Because that doesn't look good."
"I am, because he wasn't in Rose's van. Just the two of them got out. So if we assume he wasn't busy killing people, then where would he ... ?" But that was obvious. "Piper, can I use your phone?"
"Of course."
Julia briefly consulted the pamphlet-sized local phone book, then used Piper's cell to call the restaurant. Rose's greeting was curt: "We're closed until further notice. Bunch of assholes arrested my cook."
"Rose? It's Julia Shumway."
"Oh. Julia." Rose sounded only a shade less truculent. "What do you want?"
"I'm trying to check out a possible alibi timeline for Barbie. Are you interested in helping?"
"You bet your ass. The idea that Barbie murdered those people is ridiculous. What do you want to know?"
"I want to know if he was at the restaurant when the riot started at Food City."
"Of course." Rose sounded perplexed. "Where else would he be right after breakfast? When Anson and I left, he was scrubbing the grills."
7
The sun was going down, and as the shadows grew lengthened, Claire McClatchey grew more and more nervous. Finally she went into the kitchen to do what she had been putting off: use her husband's cell phone (which he had forgotten to take on Saturday morning; he was always forgetting it) to call hers. She was terrified it would ring four times and then she'd hear her own voice, all bright and chirrupy, recorded before the town she lived in became a prison with invisible bars. Hi, you've reached Claire's voice mail. Please leave a message at the beep.
And what would she say? Joey, call back if you're not dead?
She reached for the buttons, then hesitated. Remember, if he doesn't answer the first time, it's because he's on his bike and can't get the phone out of his backpack before it goes to voice mail. He'll be ready when you call the second time, because he'll know it's you.
But if she got voice mail the second time? And the third? Why had she ever let him go in the first place? She must have been mad.
She closed her eyes and saw a picture of nightmare clarity: the telephone poles and storefronts of Main Street plastered with photos of Joe, Benny, and Norrie, looking like any kids you ever saw on a turnpike rest area bulletin board, where the captions always contained the words LAST SEEN ON.
She opened her eyes and dialed quickly, before she could lose her nerve. She was preparing her message--I'm calling back in ten seconds and this time you better answer, mister--and was stunned when her son answered, loud and clear, halfway through the first ring.
"Mom! Hey, Mom!" Alive and more than alive: bubbling over with excitement, from the sound.
Where are you? she tried to say, but at first she couldn't manage anything. Not a single word. Her legs felt rubbery and elastic; she leaned against the wall to keep from falling on the floor.
"Mom? You there?"
In the background she heard the swish of a car, and Benny, faint but clear, hailing someone: "Dr. Rusty! Yo, dude, whoa!"
She was finally able to throw her voice in gear. "Yes. I am. Where are you?"
"Top of Town Common Hill. I was gonna call you because it's gettin near dark--tell you not to worry--and it rang in my hand. Surprised the heck out of me."
Well that put a spoke in the old parental scolding-wheel, didn't it? Top of Town Common Hill. They'll be here in ten minutes. Benny probably wanting another three pounds of food. Thank You, God.
Norrie was talking to Joe. It sounded like Tell her, tell her. Then her son was in her ear again, so loudly jubilant that she had to hold the receiver away from her ear a little bit. "Mom, I think we found it! I'm almost positive! It's in the orchard on top of Black Ridge!"
"Found what, Joey?"
"I don't know for sure, don't want to jump to conclusions, but probably the thing generating the Dome. Almost gotta be. We saw a blinker, like the ones they put on radio towers to warn planes, only on the ground and purple instead of red. We didn't go close enough to see anything else. We passed out, all of us. When we woke up we were okay, but it was starting to get la--"
"Passed out ?" Claire almost screamed this. "What do you mean, you passed out ? Get home! Get home right now so I can look at you!"
"It's okay, Mom," Joe said soothingly. "I think it's like ... you know how when people first touch the Dome they get a little shock, then they don't? I think it's like that. I think you pass out the first time and then you're like, immunized. Good to go. That's what Norrie thinks, too."
"I don't care what she thinks or what you think, mister! You get home right now so I can see you're all right or I'm going to immunize your ass!"
"Okay, but we have to get in touch with that guy Barbara. He's the one who thought of the Geiger counter in the first place, and boy, he was right on the money. We should get Dr. Rusty, too. He just drove by us. Benny tried to wave him down, but he didn't stop. We'll get him and Mr. Barbara to come to the house, okay? We hafta figure out our next move."
"Joe ... Mr. Barbara is ..."
Claire stopped. Was she going to tell her son that Mr. Barbara--whom some people had begun referring to as Colonel Barbara--had been arrested on multiple murder charges?
"What?" Joe asked. "What about him?" The happy triumph in his voice had been replaced by anxiety. She supposed he could read her moods as well as she could read his. And he had clearly pinned a lot of hope on Barbara--Benny and Norrie had too, probably. This wasn't news she could keep from them (much as she would have liked to), but she didn't have to give it to them on the phone.
"Come home," she said. "We'll talk about it here. And Joe--I'm awfully proud of you."
8
Jimmy Sirois died late that afternoon, as Scarecrow Joe and his friends were tearing back toward town on their bikes.
Rusty sat in the hallway with his arm around Gina Buffalino and let her cry against his chest. There was a time when he would have felt exceedingly uncomfortable about sitting this way with a girl who was barely seventeen, but times had changed. You only had to look at this hallway--lit now with hissing Coleman lanterns instead of by fluorescents shining calmly down from the paneled ceiling--to know that times had changed. His hospital had become an arcade of shadows.
"Not your fault," he said. "Not your fault, not mine, not even his. He didn't ask to have diabetes."
Although, God knew, there were people who coexisted with it for years. People who took care of themselves. Jimmy, a semi-hermit who had lived by himself out on the God Creek Road, had not been one of those. When he had finally driven himself in to the Health Center--last Thursday, this had been--he hadn't even been able to get out of his car, just kept honking until Ginny came out to see who it was and what was wrong. When Rusty got the old fellow's pants off, he had observed a flabby right leg that had turned a cold, dead blue. Even if everything had gone right with Jimmy, the nerve damage probably would have been irreversible.
"Don't hurt at all, Doc," Jimmy had assured Ron Haskell just before slipping into a coma. He
had been in and out of consciousness ever since, the leg getting worse, Rusty putting off the amputation even though he knew it had to come if Jimmy were to have any chance at all.
When the power went out, the IVs feeding antibiotics to Jimmy and two other patients continued to drip, but the flowmeters stopped, making it impossible to fine-tune the amounts. Worse, Jimmy's cardiac monitor and respirator failed. Rusty disconnected the respirator, put a valve mask over the old man's face, and gave Gina a refresher course on how to use the Ambu bag. She was good with it, and very faithful, but around six o'clock, Jimmy had died anyway.
Now she was inconsolable.
She lifted her tear-streaked face from his chest and said, "Did I give him too much? Too little? Did I choke him and kill him?"
"No. Jimmy was probably going to die anyway, and this way he's spared a very nasty amputation."
"I don't think I can do this anymore," she said, beginning to weep again. "It's too scary. It's awful now."
Rusty didn't know how to respond to this, but he didn't have to. "You'll be okay," a raspy, plugged-up voice said. "You have to be, hon, because we need you."
It was Ginny Tomlinson, walking slowly up the hallway toward them.
"You shouldn't be on your feet," Rusty said.
"Probably not," Ginny agreed, and sat down on Gina's other side with a sigh of relief. Her taped nose and the adhesive strips running beneath her eyes made her look like a hockey goalie after a difficult game. "But I'm back on duty, just the same."
"Maybe tomorrow--" Rusty began.
"No, now." She took Gina's hand. "And so are you, hon. Back in nursing school, this tough old RN had a saying: 'You can quit when the blood dries and the rodeo's over.'"
"What if I make a mistake?" Gina whispered.
"Everybody does. The trick is to make as few as possible. And I'll help you. You and Harriet both. So what do you say?"
Gina gazed doubtfully at Ginny's swollen face, the damage accented by an old pair of spectacles Ginny had found somewhere. "Are you sure you're up to it, Ms. Tomlinson?"
"You help me, I help you. Ginny and Gina, the Fighting Females." She raised her fist. Managing a little smile, Gina tapped Ginny's knuckles with her own.
"That's all very hot shit and rah-rah," Rusty said, "but if you start to feel faint, find a bed and lie down for a while. Orders from Dr. Rusty."
Ginny winced as the smile her lips were trying on pulled at the wings of her nose. "Never mind a bed, I'll just hosey Ron Haskell's old couch in the lounge."
Rusty's cell phone rang. He waved the women away. They talked as they went, Gina with an arm around Ginny's waist.
"Hello, this is Eric," he said.
"This is Eric's wife," a subdued voice said. "She called to apologize to Eric."
Rusty walked into a vacant examining room and closed the door. "No apology necessary," he said ... although he wasn't sure that was true. "Heat of the moment. Have they let him go?" This seemed to him a perfectly reasonable question, given the Barbie he was coming to know.
"I'd rather not discuss it on the phone. Can you come to the house, honey? Please? We need to talk."
Rusty supposed he could, actually. He'd had one critical patient, who had simplified his professional life considerably by dying. And while he was relieved to be on speaking terms again with the woman he loved, he didn't like the new caution he heard in her voice.
"I can," he said, "but not for long. Ginny's back on her feet, but if I don't monitor her, she'll overdo. Dinner?"
"Yes." She sounded relieved. Rusty was glad. "I'll thaw some of the chicken soup. We better eat as much as the frozen stuff as we can while we've still got the power to keep it good."
"One thing. Do you still think Barbie's guilty? Never mind what the rest of them think, do you?"
A long pause. Then she said, "We'll talk when you get here." And with that, she was gone.
Rusty was leaning with his butt propped against the examination table. He held the phone in his hand for a moment, then pressed the END button. There were many things he wasn't sure of just now--he felt like a man swimming in a sea of perplexity--but he felt sure of one thing: his wife thought somebody might be listening. But who? The Army? Homeland Security?
Big Jim Rennie?
"Ridiculous," Rusty said to the empty room. Then he went to find Twitch and tell him he was leaving the hospital for a little while.
9
Twitch agreed to keep an eye on Ginny and make sure she didn't overdo, but there was a quid pro quo: Rusty had to examine Henrietta Clavard, who had been injured during the supermarket melee, before leaving.
"What's wrong with her?" Rusty asked, fearing the worst. Henrietta was strong and fit for an old lady, but eighty-four was eighty-four.
"She says, and I quote, 'One of those worthless Mercier sisters broke my goddam ass.' She thinks Carla Mercier. Who's Venziano now."
"Right," Rusty said, then murmured, apropos nothing: "It's a small town, and we all support the team. So is it?"
"Is it what, sensei?"
"Broken."
"I don't know. She won't show it to me. She says, and I also quote, 'I will only expose my smithyriddles to a professional eye.'"
They burst out laughing, trying to stifle the sounds.
From beyond the closed door, an old lady's cracked and dolorous voice said: "It's my ass that's broke, not my ears. I hear that."
Rusty and Twitch laughed harder. Twitch had gone an alarming shade of red.
From behind the door, Henrietta said: "If it was your ass, my buddies, you'd be laughing on the other side of your faces."
Rusty went in, still smiling. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Clavard."
She was standing rather than sitting, and to his immense relief, she smiled herself. "Nah," she said. "Something in this balls-up has got to be funny. It might as well be me." She considered. "Besides, I was in there stealing with the rest of them. I probably deserved it."
10
Henrietta's ass turned out to be badly bruised but not broken. A good thing, because a smashed coccyx was really nothing to laugh about. Rusty gave her a pain-deadening cream, confirmed that she had Advil at home, and sent her away, limping but satisfied. As satisfied, anyway, as a lady of her age and temperament was ever likely to get.
On his second escape attempt, about fifteen minutes after Linda's call, Harriet Bigelow stopped him just short of the door to the parking lot. "Ginny says you should know Sammy Bushey's gone."
"Gone where?" Rusty asked. This under the old grade-school assumption that the only stupid question was the one you didn't ask.
"No one knows. She's just gone."
"Maybe she went down to Sweetbriar to see if they're serving dinner. I hope that's it, because if she tries to walk all the way back to her place, she's apt to bust her stitches."
Harriet looked alarmed. "Could she, like, bleed to death? Bleeding to death from your woo-woo ... that would be bad. "
Rusty had heard many terms for the vagina, but this one was new to him. "Probably not, but she could end up back here for an extended stay. What about her baby?"
Harriet looked stricken. She was an earnest little thing who had a way of blinking distractedly behind the thick lenses of her glasses when she was nervous; the kind of girl, Rusty thought, who might treat herself to a mental breakdown about fifteen years after graduating summa cum laude from Smith or Vassar.
"The baby! Omigod, Little Walter!" She dashed down the hall before Rusty could stop her and came back looking relieved. "Still here. He's not very lively, but that seems to be his nature."
"Then she'll probably be back. Whatever other problems she might have, she loves the kid. In an absentminded sort of way."
"Huh?" More furious blinking.
"Never mind. I'll be back as soon as I can, Hari. Keep em flying."
"Keep what flying?" Her eyelids now appeared on the verge of catching fire.
Rusty almost said, I mean keep your pecker up, but that wasn't right, either. In H
arriet's terminology, a pecker was probably a wah-wah.
"Keep busy," he said.
Harriet was relieved. "I can do that, Dr. Rusty, no prob."
Rusty turned to go, but now a man was standing there--thin, not bad-looking once you got past the hooked nose, a lot of graying hair tied back in a ponytail. He looked a bit like the late Timothy Leary. Rusty was starting to wonder if he was going to get out of here, after all.
"Can I help you, sir?"
"Actually, I was thinking that perhaps I could help you." He stuck out a bony hand. "Thurston Marshall. My partner and I were weekending at Chester Pond, and got caught in this whatever-it-is."
"Sorry to hear that," Rusty said.
"The thing is, I have a bit of medical experience. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam mess. Thought about going to Canada, but I had plans ... well, never mind. I registered as a CO and did two years as an orderly at a veterans' hospital in Massachusetts."
That was interesting. "Edith Nourse Rogers?"
"The very one. My skills are probably a bit out-of-date, but--"
"Mr. Marshall, do I have a job for you."
11
As Rusty headed down 119, a horn blew. He checked his mirror and saw one of the town's Public Works trucks preparing to turn in at Catherine Russell Drive. It was hard to tell in the red light of the lowering sun, but he thought Stewart Bowie was behind the wheel. What he saw on second glance gladdened Rusty's heart: there appeared to be a couple of LP tanks in the bed of the truck. He'd worry about where they came from later, maybe even ask some questions, but for now he was just relieved to know that soon the lights would be back on, the respirators and monitors online. Maybe not for the long haul, but he was in full one-day-at-a-time mode.
At the top of Town Common Hill he saw his old skateboarding patient, Benny Drake, and a couple of his friends. One was the McClatchey boy who'd set up the live video feed of the missile strike. Benny waved and shouted, obviously wanting Rusty to stop and shoot the shit. Rusty waved back, but didn't slow. He was anxious to see Linda. Also to hear what she had to say, of course, but mostly to see her, put his arms around her, and finish making up with her.