2
There were still moments, like this one, when Wayward Pines felt like a real place.
Sunlight pouring down into the valley.
The morning still pleasantly cool.
Pansies gemmed a planter under an open window that let the smell of a cooking breakfast waft outside.
People out for morning walks.
Watering lawns.
Collecting the local paper.
Beads of dew steaming off the top of a black mailbox.
Ethan Burke found it tempting to linger in the moment, to pretend that everything was just as it appeared. That he lived with his wife and son in a perfect little town, where he was a well-liked sheriff. Where they had friends. A comfortable home. All needs provided for. And it was in the pretending that he’d come to fully understand how well the illusion worked. How people could let themselves succumb, let themselves disappear into the pretty lie that surrounded them.
Bells jingled over the door as Ethan entered the Steaming Bean. He stepped up to the counter and smiled at the barista, a hippie chick with blond dreads and soulful eyes.
“Morning, Miranda.”
“Hi, Ethan. Usual?”
“Please.”
While she started the espresso shots for his cappuccino, Ethan surveyed the shop. The regulars were all here, including two old-timers—Phillip and Clay—hunched over a chessboard. Ethan walked over, studied the game. By the looks of it, they’d been at it for a while now, each man down to a king, queen, and several pawns.
“Looks like you’re heading toward a stalemate,” Ethan said.
“Not so fast,” Phillip said. “I still got something up my sleeve.”
His opponent, a gray grizzly of a man, grinned through his wild beard across the chessboard and said, “By something, Phil means he’s going to take so damn long to move that I die and he wins by forfeit.”
“Oh, shut up, Clay.”
Ethan moved on past a ratty sofa to a bookshelf. He ran his finger across the spines. Classics. Faulkner. Dickens. Tolkien. Hugo. Joyce. Bradbury. Melville. Hawthorne. Poe. Austen. Fitzgerald. Shakespeare. At a glance, it was just a ragtag assembly of cheap paperbacks. He pulled a slim volume off the shelf. The Sun Also Rises. The cover was an impressionistic bullfighting scene. Ethan swallowed against the lump that formed in his throat. The brittle-paged, mass-market edition of Hemingway’s first novel was probably the sole remaining copy in existence. It gave him goose bumps—awesome and tragic to hold it in his hands.
“Ethan, you’re all set!”
He grabbed one more book for his son and went to the counter to collect his cappuccino.
“Thanks, Miranda. I’m going to borrow these books, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “Keep ’em straight out there, Sheriff.”
“Do my best.”
Ethan tipped the brim of his hat and headed for the door.
Ten minutes later, he pushed through the glass double doors under a sign that read:
OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF OF WAYWARD PINES
Reception stood empty. Nothing new there.
His secretary sat at her desk looking as bored as ever. She was playing Solitaire, laying cards down at a steady, mechanical pace.
“Morning, Belinda.”
“Morning, Sheriff.”
She didn’t look up.
“Any calls?”
“No, sir.”
“Anyone been by?”
“No, sir.”
“How was your evening?”
She glanced up, caught off guard, an ace of spades clutched in her right hand.
“What?”
It was the first time since becoming sheriff that Ethan had pushed his interaction with Belinda beyond perfunctory greetings, goodbyes, and administrative chitchat. She’d been a pediatric nurse in her past life. He wondered if she knew that he knew that.
“I was just asking how your evening was. Last night.”
“Oh.” She pulled her fingers through a long, silver ponytail. “Fine.”
“Do anything fun?”
“No. Not really.”
He thought she might return the question, inquire after his evening, but five seconds of uncomfortable silence and eye contact elapsed and still she didn’t speak.
Ethan finally rapped his knuckles on her desk. “I’ll be in my office.”