The towns people were all afraid.
Were he licensed to drive, he often thought, he would not be so unsympathetic to an old man. But Warren could not drive. He had a perfectly fine old Ford gathering dust in the barn—his father’s car, a 1945, scarcely driven—yet Warren could not use it. A danger to himself and to others. That’s what the doctors had said about his driving.
So the Ford stayed in the barn, over fifty years now, and it was as shiny as the day his father had parked it there. Time was kinder to chrome than it was to a man’s face. To a man’s heart. I am a danger to myself and to others.
His hands at last were starting to feel warm.
He pulled them from his pockets and swung his arms as he walked, heart pumping faster, sweat gathering under his cap. Even on the most frigid of days, if he walked fast enough, far enough, the cold would cease to matter.
By the time he reached town, he’d unbuttoned his coat and removed the cap. When he walked into Cobb and Morong’s General Store, he found it almost unbearably hot inside.
As soon as the door swung shut behind him, the store seemed to fall silent. The clerk looked up, then looked away. Two women standing by the vegetable bin ceased their chatter. Though no one was staring, he could feel their attention focused on him as he picked up a shopping basket and walked up the aisle, toward the canned goods. He filled his basket with the same items he bought every week. Cat food. Chili with beef. Tuna. Corn. He went down the next row for the dried beans and oatmeal, then to the vegetable bin for a sack of onions.
He carried the basket, now heavy, to the checkout counter.
The cashier avoided looking at him as she tallied up the items. He stood before the register, his blaze orange vest screaming out to the world, Look at me, look at me. Yet no one did. No one met his gaze.
In silence he paid the cashier, picked up the plastic grocery sacks, and turned to leave, steeling himself for the long walk home. At the door, he stopped.
On the newsstand was this week’s issue of the Tranquility Gazette. There was one copy left. He stared at the headline and suddenly the grocery sacks slipped out of his grasp and thudded to the floor. With shaking hands he reached for the newspaper.
HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING LEAVES TEACHER DEAD, TWO STUDENTS WOUNDED: 14-YEAR-OLD BOY ARRESTED.
“Hey! You gonna pay for that paper?” the clerk called out.
Warren didn’t answer. He just stood by the door, his eyes fixed in horror on a second headline, almost lost in the bottom right corner: YOUTH BEATS PUPPY TO DEATH: CITED FOR CRUELTY.
And he thought: It’s happening again.
Damaris Horne was stuck in purgatory, and all she could think about was how to get back to Boston. So this is how my editor punishes me, she thought. We get into a tiff, and he assigns me to the story no one else wants. Welcome to Hicksville-by-the-Lake, otherwise known as Tranquility, Maine. Good name. The place was so tranquil, they should issue it a death certificate. She drove up Main Street, thinking that this was the perfect model for how a town would look after a neutron bomb hit it: no people, no signs of life, just standing buildings and deserted sidewalks. Nine hundred ten residents supposedly lived in this town, so where were they all? In the woods, gnawing lichen off the trees?
She drove past Monaghan’s Diner, and through the front window she caught a glimpse of a plaid shirt. Yes! A sighting of the local natives in their ceremonial dress. (What was the mystical significance of plaid, anyway?) Further up the street, she had another sighting: a shabbily dressed old geezer came out of Cobb and Morong’s, clutching his grocery sacks. She stopped to let him cross the street, and he shuffled past, head bent in a look of permanent weariness. She watched him walk along the lakeshore, a slow-moving silhouette laboring across a bleak backdrop of bare trees and gray water.
She drove on, to the Lakeside Bed and Breakfast, her home for the indefinite future. It was the only local inn still open this late in the year, and although she sneeringly referred to it as the Bates Motel, she knew she was lucky to have found any room at all, what with the other regional reporters arriving in town.
She walked into the dining room and saw that most of her competition were still stuffing themselves at the breakfast buffet. Damaris always skipped breakfast, which put her ahead of the game this morning. It was eight A.M., and she’d already been up for two and a half hours. At six, she’d been at the hospital to observe the boy being transferred out to his new home, the Maine Youth Center. At seven-fifteen, she’d driven over to the high school. There she’d sat in her parked car and watched the kids in their baggy clothes gather in front of the building, waiting for first bell, looking like teenagers everywhere.
Damaris crossed to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Sipping it black, she glanced around the room at the other reporters until her gaze settled on the freelancer, Mitchell Groome. Though he couldn’t be much older than forty-five, Groome’s face was all sad droops, like a hound in mourning. Still, he seemed fit enough—perhaps even athletic. Best of all, he had noticed her gaze, and was looking back at her, albeit with puzzlement.
She set down her empty cup and strolled out of the dining room, knowing, without even a backward glance, that Groome was watching her.
Hicksville had just gotten a little more interesting.
Up in her room, she took a few minutes to review her notes from the interviews she’d conducted over the last few days. Now came the hard part—putting it all together in an article that would make her editor happy and catch the eyes of bored New England housewives cruising past the tabloid stands.
She sat at her desk and stared out the window, wondering how to turn this tragic but nonetheless commonplace tale into something a little more titillating. What made this case special? What new angle would entice a reader to reach for a copy of the Weekly Informer?
She suddenly realized she was staring straight at it.
Across the street was a rundown old building, the windows boarded up. The faded sign said Kimball’s Furniture.
The address was 666.
The sign of the Beast.
As her laptop computer powered up, she quickly shuffled through her notes, searching for the quote she remembered from yesterday. Something a woman had said in the local grocery store.
She found it. “I know the explanation for what happened at the school,” the woman had said. “Everyone knows it, but no one wants to admit it. They don’t want to sound superstitious or uneducated. But I’ll tell you what it is: it’s this new Godlessness. People have pushed the Lord out of their lives. They’ve replaced Him with something else. Something no one dares speak of.”
Yes! thought Damaris, and she was grinning as she began to type.
“Last week, Satan arrived in the bucolic town of Tranquility, Maine …”
Sitting in her wheelchair before the living room window, Faye Braxton watched her thirteen-year-old son step off the school bus and begin to hike up the long dirt driveway to the house. It was a daily event she usually looked forward to, seeing Scotty’s slight figure at last emerge through the bus doors, his shoulders weighed down by the heavy backpack, his head craned forward with the effort to lug his burden of books up the weedy and sloping front yard.
He was still so small. It pained her to see how little he had grown in the last year. While many of his classmates had shot past him in both height and bulk, there was her Scotty, left behind in pale adolescence, and so anxious to grow up he had nicked his chin last week while trying to shave his nonexistent beard. He was her firstborn, her best friend. She wouldn’t have minded at all if time suddenly stood still, and she could keep him as he’d always been, a sweet and loving child. But she knew the child would soon be gone.
The transformation had already begun.
She’d seen the first hint of it a few days ago, when he had stepped off the bus as usual. She’d been at the window, watching him walk toward the house, when she saw something happen that was both inexplicable and frightening. In the front yard, he had
suddenly halted and gazed up at a tree in which three gray squirrels perched. She’d thought he was merely curious. That like his younger sister Kitty, he would try to coax them down to be petted. So she was startled when he bent down, picked up a rock, and flung it at the tree.
The squirrels scampered to higher branches.
As she’d watched in dismay, Scotty had hurled another rock, and another, his thin body winding up like a tautly coiled spring of fury, the stones flying into the branches. When at last he stopped, he was breathing hard and exhausted. Then he’d turned to the house.
The look on his face had made her jerk back from the window. For one horrifying moment she’d thought: That is not my son.
Now, as she watched him approach the house, she wondered which boy would step through the door. Her son, her real son, sweet and smiling, or the ugly stranger who looked like Scotty? In the past, she would have dealt firmly with him for throwing rocks at animals.
In the past, she was never afraid of her own child.
Faye heard Scotty’s footsteps on the porch. Heart pounding, she swiveled her wheelchair around to face him as he came in the door.
7
Anyone could see that fourteen-year-old Barry Knowlton was his mother’s child. The resemblance was startling enough to take in with a single glance. Barry and Louise were like a pair of cheerful dumplings, both of them red-haired and apple-cheeked, both with pliant pink mouths. Their smiles of greeting promised to dispel even Claire’s gloom.
Since the classroom shooting nearly a week ago, Claire had awakened each morning to the awful realization that her move to Tranquility had been a mistake. Only eight months ago, she had arrived here full of confidence, had used most of her savings to buy a medical practice she was certain would succeed. And why wouldn’t it? She’d had a thriving practice in Baltimore. But one very public lawsuit would destroy everything.
Every day at work, when she saw the mailman stride up the front walk, she braced herself for the delivery of a letter she dreaded receiving. Paul Darnell had said she’d be hearing from his attorney, and she had no doubt he’d follow up on his threat.
Is it too late to leave? That was the question she asked herself every day now. Is it too late to move back to Baltimore?
She forced herself to smile as she stepped into the exam room to see Barry and his mother. Here, at least, was a bright spot in her day.
They both looked genuinely pleased to see her. Barry had already pulled off his boots and was standing on the scale, watching expectantly as the counterweight arm bobbed up and down.
“Hey, I think I lost another pound!” he announced.
Claire checked the chart, then glanced at the reading. “Down to two hundred forty-seven pounds. That’s two pounds you’ve lost. Good for you!”
Barry stepped off the scale, which sent the counterweight tilting up with a loud clap. “I think my belt feels looser already!”
“Let me listen to your heart,” said Claire.
Barry waddled over to the exam table, carefully climbed up onto the footstool, and plopped onto the table. He peeled off his shirt, baring folds of pale and sagging flesh. As Claire listened to his heart and lungs and took his blood pressure, she felt his gaze, curious and engaged, following her every move. The first time they’d met, Barry had told her he wanted to be a doctor, and he seemed to relish these bimonthly visits as field trips into his future profession. The occasional blood test, an ordeal for most patients, was a fascinating procedure for Barry, an opportunity to ask in sometimes endless detail about needle gauges and syringe volumes and the purpose of each different colored blood tube.
If only Barry would pay as much attention to what he put in his mouth.
She finished her exam, then stood back and regarded him for a moment. “You’re doing a good job, Barry. How is the diet coming?”
He gave a shrug. “Okay, I guess. I’m trying real hard.”
“Oh, he loves to eat! That’s the problem,” said Louise. “I try my best cooking low-fat meals. But then his daddy comes home with a box of doughnuts and, well … it’s so hard to resist. It just about breaks my heart to see the way Barry looks at us, with those big hungry eyes of his.”
“Could you discourage your husband from bringing home doughnuts?”
“Oh, no. Mel, he’s got this …” She leaned forward and said, confidentially: “Overeating problem.”
“Is that so?”
“I gave up on Mel long ago. But Barry, he’s still so young. It’s not good for a boy his age to carry around all that weight. And the other kids, they can be so mean about it.”
Claire looked sympathetically at Barry. “You’re having problems at school?”
A light seemed to dim in the boy’s eyes. He looked down, all cheerfulness gone. “I don’t much like school anymore.”
“The other kids tease you?”
“They don’t ever stop with the fat boy jokes.”
Claire glanced at Louise, who shook her head sadly. “He has an IQ of a hundred thirty-five, and he doesn’t want to go to school. I don’t know what to do about it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Barry,” said Claire. “We’re going to show everyone how determined you are. You’re too intelligent to let those other kids defeat you.”
“Well, they aren’t all that bright,” he agreed hopefully.
“You have to outsmart your own body as well. That’s the part that takes effort. And Mom and Dad have to work with you, not against you.” She looked at Louise. “Mrs. Knowlton, you have a smart and wonderful boy here, but he can’t do this alone. This takes the whole family.”
Louise sighed, already preparing for the daunting task ahead. “I know,” she said. “I’ll talk to Mel. No more doughnuts.”
After the Knowltons left, Claire walked into Vera’s office. “Don’t we have a patient at three o’clock?”
“We did,” said Vera, looking puzzled as she hung up the phone. “That was Mrs. Monaghan. It’s the second cancellation we’ve had today.”
Claire glimpsed movement in the waiting room. Through the sliding business window, she saw a man sitting on the couch. Large, homely, his sad-clown face emphasized by an unflattering crewcut, he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else than in a doctor’s office. “Well, who’s that?”
“Oh, he’s just some magazine reporter who wants to talk to you. His name’s Mitchell Groome.”
“I hope you told him I’m not available.”
“I gave him your standard ‘no comment’ line. But this guy insists on waiting around for you.”
“Well, he can wait all he wants. I’m not talking to any more reporters. Is there anyone left on the schedule?”
“Elwyn Clyde. Wound check on his foot.”
Elwyn. Claire pressed her hand to her head, already anticipating a headache. “Do we have air freshener on hand?”
Vera laughed and clapped a can of Glade on the desk. “We’re all ready for Elwyn. After him, you’re free for the day. Which works out well, because you have a meeting with Dr. Sarnicki this afternoon. He just called a little while ago.”
Dr. Sarnicki was chief of staff at the hospital. This was the first Claire had heard about any meeting.
“Did he say what it’s about?”
“Something about a letter he just received. He said it was urgent.” Vera’s gaze suddenly shot to the front window and she jumped to her feet. “Damn it, there they are again!” she said, and dashed out the side door.
Claire looked out the window to see Vera, all flashing bangles and earrings, shaking her fist at two boys with skateboards. One of the boys was yelling back at her now, his voice cracking in adolescent outrage.
“We didn’t do anything to your stupid car!”
“Then who left that giant scratch on the door, huh? Who?” demanded Vera.
“Why’re you always blaming us? Like kids are always the ones who get dumped on!”
“I see you here again, I’m calling the police!”
“T
his is a public sidewalk! We gotta right to skate here!”
A tapping on glass drew Claire’s attention. Mitchell Groome’s hangdog face was gazing at her through the receptionist’s window.
She slid the window open. “Mr. Groome, I’m not talking to any reporters.”
“I just wanted to tell you something.”
“If it’s about Taylor Darnell, you can talk to Dr. Adam DelRay. He’s the boy’s physician now.”
“No, it’s about your receptionist’s car. The one that got scratched. Those boys out there didn’t do it.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it happen yesterday. Some old woman scraped past it with her car. I assumed she was going to leave a note on the windshield. Obviously she didn’t, and I think your receptionist has already reached her own conclusions.” He glanced out the window, at the argument raging outside, and he shook his head. “Why do we always treat kids like the enemy?”
“Because they so often behave like an alien species?”
He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Spoken like someone who has an alien living in the house.”
“Fourteen years old. You can probably tell by all the gray hairs on my head.” They regarded each other for a moment through the window.
“Are you sure you won’t talk to me?” he asked. “It would just be for a few minutes.”
“I can’t discuss my patients. It’s a confidentiality issue.”
“No, I’m not going to ask about Taylor Darnell specifically. I’m after more general information, about the other kids in town. You’re the only doctor in Tranquility, and I assume you have a good idea of what’s going on around here.”
“I’ve only been in town eight months.”
“But you’d be aware of drug abuse among the local kids, wouldn’t you? It could explain the boy’s behavior.”