The Summer Man

Chapter TWENTY





DREAM IMAGERY

The woman with the blood in her hair. Smiling. Thinking about…something burning? NOTE: Haven’t seen this one for three days at least (since 7/7?)

The boy in the hall of mirrors. Maybe 12, 13? It’s dark, he thinks he’s being followed, he’s scared. Feels sick.

The mother bathing her child. Her hair is tied back, she and the baby—2-3 mos?—are both crying. She (mother) weeps from exhaustion.

Big building fire at night. Person watching is a man. Young?

Woman hiding in bushes, sounds of screams and gunfire (can’t see anything but leaves). Early. She has to pee. Someone yelling “Get down!”


PRECOG/ONE TIMEONLY

Lisa Meyer (nothing about Billings murder/suicide, tho—also nothing about Le Poisson).

B. Glover/Dicks assault.

Devon, drowned.

Lawn King suicide.

Greg Taner, enlist?

Liz Shannon loses virginity/gets pregnant(?)

Amanda stared down at the notebook, trying to think. Should she add another category for thoughts and emotions? She kind of didn’t want to, considering how much of it there was…plus, Devon f*cking Mitch Jessup, that time she’d kind of gotten “in” to Eric, John having sex with Sarah, whoever she was. Thinking about having to discuss that stuff with grown men made her uncomfortable.

There were several things she didn’t want to put down…or didn’t know how to put down. Bob and his drinking, for one. She could write that on the way home from John’s office, right before Eric had gotten all freaky, she’d felt Bob’s deep, persistent desire to be pouring alcohol down his throat…but who would that help? Bob knew he drank, he knew he’d been drinking too much, and he was either helpless to stop it or he just didn’t care. And John’s confusion, his super brainiac chaos…he was entirely aware of what was going on; he didn’t need her to spell it out. He was way smart. Obviously, they were both experiencing mood shifts, changes of thought, difficulties with control…had she changed, too? If anything, she felt stronger lately. Like, cooler, emotionally. She thought that even six months ago, Grace kicking her out would have wrecked her—same with Peter’s attempted rape, or even Devon leaving. Now, though, she felt like she was coping really well, not letting it get through to her…changed, though?

Well, not counting the whole totally psychic aspect…

She almost smiled. Sudden access to ESP probably qualified as a change. Now that she thought of it, maybe there were other people in Port Isley who’d gotten, like, powers in the last month or so. Why not? There was all kinds of stuff she couldn’t explain—the last few days, wherever she’d been, she’d felt…it was like there were these free-floating pockets of anxiety that she kept blundering into, that didn’t seem to be connected to anyone in particular, random feelings of tension, strain, fear…and of secretiveness, of things hiding, of things held back. Like there was this incredible energy of restraint, of strong feelings that were being clamped down on, hard, and she didn’t think she could explain that to anyone, it was such a weird, unformed feeling. If Devon were here, he’d understand what she meant…

Devon. She looked around his room, where she’d been sleeping since Sid had come home; Devon’s uncle had pointed out that if she was going to be around for a while, she might as well have a door she could close. Thank God for Uncle Sid. It was a comfortable room, dark colors, good smells—faded cigarette smoke, hair product. Devon’s spendy unisex cologne, the one she always teased him about, telling him it smelled like lemon soap and anal lubricant. She’d talked to him exactly once since he’d been gone, for about two minutes. He’d been on his way out somewhere. He’d sounded…busy. Out of breath almost, to get off the phone, to get moving; his questions were rote, and he cut off her answers. She’d hung up feeling depressed and lonely. And he hadn’t even been gone a full week.

Not that she was alone. She had Eric.

She sighed, leaning back on Devon’s too-soft bed. Eric. The sex continued to be devastatingly satisfying, which made it hard to work through some of the other parts. They still hooked up at his house, at random hours…his dad and stepmom were perpetually out, cocktails or dinner or boating, though she had finally met them. Yikes. His father was a stereotype, a business-guy dad from an eighties comedy flick. He winked all the time. And his fake-boob wife was practically a teenager, which was just creepy. It was hard to believe that they were Eric’s family, that he had any connection to them at all.

After their visit to John Hanover’s office, after Bob had taken them back to Devon’s, Eric had kind of flipped out over what had happened. He’d gone off on her about privacy, about how it wasn’t cool that she hadn’t told him that she could read minds, how it wouldn’t be cool if she tried to read his mind, how he’d be offended, blah blah blah. It had been more like a tantrum than a real fight…and she’d felt it coming off him in waves, then—his very deep feelings for her, and his fear that she would leave him if she knew. She didn’t call him on it, obviously—considering what he was yelling about, the timing would have been f*ck awful—but she’d been a little freaked-out herself. Mostly because his deep feelings were so dark to her, so hard to understand. She got a sense of that profound need she’d felt before, lust and longing and something like terror at the thought of losing her, and she didn’t know what to do with that. She felt those things too, sometimes. Sort of. Other times, the realization that he was about a hundred times more invested in “them” than she was made her feel like running, as fast and as far away as she could get.

Not today, though. The novelty clock on Devon’s wall said she had about half an hour before they were going to meet up. Whatever her brain was up to, her body wanted as much Eric as it could stand…they were both seventeen and willing to try anything; it couldn’t possibly get better. And he was her boyfriend, and she wanted to be with him. It was cool, walking with him to get coffee, smoking together, listening to music in his basement…touching him, letting him touch her. The feeling of calm closeness that almost always came after the sex, too, the feeling that everything—f*cking everything—was going to work out, that was like a drug, that was bliss. Why would she run away from that?

She picked up the notebook again, reread, considered adding more detail—the man at the fire, for instance. She got the impression he was young, but that was more a guess than anything else. He was so close to the flames that his shirt was actually hot, and the front of his hair was frizzled away from the heat; she could feel these things, although she couldn’t see him, physically, only the fire. The man wasn’t really thinking anything, just feeling how beautiful and consuming the fire was, watching it devour, watching it birth smoke and sparks, watching the night light up…

Her power, her gift, as John had called it, was big and getting bigger. She could even trace the evolution, kind of: her first experiences had been more like movies, only as they’d progressed, she’d started to be there, first as part of the scenery—when Brian Glover raped that poor woman, at the fairgrounds—then as, like, a participant. Or, rather, the participant, inside the person experiencing the situation. Maybe she would have more waking visions like the one she’d had about Lisa Meyer, or Devon, maybe the circumstances had to be just right, she had to get high first or something, she didn’t know. When she wasn’t with Eric, she spent most of her time online—Devon hadn’t taken his computer, thank God; he’d said his cousin had a laptop he could use—continuing to look up aspects of psychic ability (new favorite word: clairsentience; new favorite concept: mirror neurons) and case histories. She’d even taken the Zener card test, the one where she had to guess the symbol, and scored totally average. Which had actually been a little disappointing. What she’d been seeing, in her dreams—when she tried to describe it, it sounded like mind-reading, but that was an oversimplification; it was mind-inhabiting. She’d have thought she’d ace a card test, for Christ’s sake. And maybe having that particular talent would let her see something technically useful for a change, names or addresses, dates, possible reasons for why this was happening, all these people feeling and acting so differently…why hadn’t she known about the cannibal fest at Le Poisson, or that Mr. Billings was going to go home and kill his wife before he killed himself? What other disasters wasn’t she seeing?

She looked at her list of dream imagery. The gunfight, the big fire…the mom and baby. Plenty of potential for death and disaster, if any of it was real. But for as specifically as she experienced each image—the woman crouching in the bushes, worrying that she was about to pee herself as weapons cracked impossibly loudly, people screamed, and she held her purse like they would take it from her when they pried it from her cold, dead fingers—their meanings were as vague and untraceable as…well, dreams. What lady? Where? When? The scared kid in the hall of mirrors, that had to be at the carnival that came each August; they had a fun house…but easily thousands of kids went through there. It was in Isley for a full week, a magnet attraction for a half dozen port towns. The lights were out; there seemed to be no one else around—maybe it was closed and the kid had sneaked in. Or maybe there was a power outage. He thought someone was following him, but maybe it was his kid brother or a buddy, sneaking up to scare him.

You don’t think so, though. No. The things she felt were strong and mostly unpleasant, and John had told her that she needed to start trusting her instincts, and she thought that the boy in the fun house was in trouble.

She’d talked to Bob last night; he’d said that John had gotten someone from the state to come in and take soil and water samples. Amanda felt fairly certain that they’d find nothing. She didn’t know why she thought that, she just did…and she was starting to think that what was happening was, like, a destiny thing, that there was nothing any of them could do about any of it, and she didn’t know why she thought that, either.

And it’s not true, she told herself. Devon was safe. Wasn’t he?

Feelings without reasons, random affirmations out of nowhere based on nothing, on air. Bob and John had been compiling stats, making lists, trying to work out a time line; John wanted to go to the police before the end of the week. Amanda already knew that the cops wouldn’t even entertain the notion. “Officer, sometime in June things started to change…and they’re still changing!” Uncanny, not so much. Even with a stack of bizarre incidents to back up their theory, there was no commonality, there was no reason they could point to, to explain the changes in Port Isley.

“He’s here,” Amanda said aloud, surprising herself a little. That night at Pam’s party, a million years ago…she’d thought, he’s here, and she’d started crying because she was already totally freaking on the Lisa Meyer thing, and she’d been confused…but what had her stoned brain been trying to tell her? Was there some significance? She hadn’t even thought about it since telling Devon, a day or so after…

She turned a page in the notebook, wrote the two words down at the top of the page, underlined them. He’s here…tapped her pen on the innocuous words…jotted beneath them, influence = man?

She tried to follow the thought but got nothing; she had no sense that she was having some brilliant insight; maybe, maybe not. She looked at the clock again, a ticking black cat with eyes and a tail that moved from side to side, and decided that she wanted to clean up a little before meeting Eric. A wipe-down, some deodorant, mouthwash. She closed the notebook and dropped the pen on top of it. She didn’t know if anything would come of the effort she was making to keep track of what she saw—but it felt good to be involved, to be actively participating in her life. Since that first time, that first terrible vision, she’d wished for nothing more than for things to go back to the way they were, before…and now…

Now I want to keep it, she thought, looking into the mirror over Devon’s toothpaste-spattered sink, looking into herself as she worked her fingers through her hair. How many people had the opportunity to really do something, to make a difference? She didn’t know what to expect anymore, everything was different because she was different, and that was as liberating as it was frightening as it was exciting.

She smiled at herself, liking the light in her eyes. She’d always hoped she might be special, that she would be, and now it was true.





A few days after Tommy got back, Jeff came over early, like nine in the morning, and asked if he wanted to go inner tubing down at the old piers with some of the other kids. Tommy immediately agreed. Mom was being weird, which he had pretty much expected—Aunt Karen getting hurt and all; Tommy felt a little weird himself. Dad had told him before he left that his aunt had been attacked and assaulted; his mother had said the same thing, used the same words. It sounded better than beat up and raped, he figured, but he understood what had happened. He felt bad for her.

What he hadn’t expected was to come home from his entirely boring visit with Dad and Vanessa to find his mother all excited and happy about John Hanover, the geeky doctor they’d met at the picnic who was over every night. They tried to hide it. The doctor showed up at midnight and was gone by like, seven, but Tommy wasn’t as clueless as they obviously thought.

He swallowed a sudden foul taste, thinking of the muffled sounds he’d heard just last night. Disgusting. The guests were all gone; Aunt Karen practically never came out of her room, and Mom was flitting around like a schoolgirl, all smiles and blushes…which was even extra weird, because since he’d come back, she’d been all over him asking him about his feelings, asking if he felt different about anything, when she was the one who was obviously different. She was too…happy wasn’t the right word; he liked to think that happy wouldn’t bother him…

Stupid, maybe, he thought, walking next to Jeff, listening to the slap of their sneakers going down the hill, cool rubber on warming asphalt. By trying to hide the affair, she was lying to him, and that made him feel…it made him feel like punishing her by not thinking nice things about her. Even the guilt that accompanied the thought was fleeting. She was acting stupid. She barely knew the guy.

The sun was still mild, but he could already feel it revving up to be another scorcher. In addition to not asking anyone’s permission to leave—his mother hadn’t been up; she’d been sleeping in a lot just lately, so he’d left a note on the kitchen table—he hadn’t put on any sunblock. He hadn’t forgotten, he just hadn’t done it, and feeling the warming sun on the back of his neck, he felt a kind of nervous satisfaction that he couldn’t explain.

I’ll tell her I forgot because I was so tired, he thought. I’ll tell her that I couldn’t sleep, because of all the f*cking NOISE.

It only took about ten minutes to walk down the hill, and unhappy thoughts about his mother kept him mostly distracted from Jeff’s random comments about the town, about the kids, school, and this and that. There were a lot of people out and about, more as they neared the bottom of the hill—summer people, Jeff informed him with a sneer—brightly dressed, carrying to-go coffee cups, wearing sandals and expensive shades. Tommy liked not being grouped in with the tourists, although technically, he supposed he was a summer person, since they’d leave at the end of the season. Back to that little apartment without a yard and seventh grade at a school where he would be the new kid, where his mom would be the new teacher. All of which would suck, but he guessed that would be the end of ol’ Doctor John; at least there was that. The idea of some stranger kissing and touching and, and f*cking his mother…gross. It made him want to throw up.

As the two boys got closer to the old pier, the crowd thinned dramatically. They headed east along Water and were quickly past the nicer eateries and shops, past the historical buildings and the town’s trio of small parking lots, all crammed with expensive cars. As picturesque as Port Isley’s main thoroughfare was, twenty minutes straight along the water down the exhaust-stinking road and the view became a gas station, a warehouse, and the run-down Seaside Motel with a gravel parking lot. There was a kid at the motel, standing in the shade of the front office, smoking a cigarette.

“Hey, that’s Trevor,” Jeff said, perking up as they got closer. “His uncle works there. Trevor!”

Trevor shot them a cool, disinterested look, exhaling smoke. He was tall and skinny and looked a little older, maybe fifteen. Tommy had seen him before, hanging around at Kehoe Park right after that girl had been killed, but they hadn’t spoken. Trevor had a mean smile, curved and smirking. He’d been the kid who’d come up with the idea to ride bikes over the place where they’d found the body. Tommy had met guys like him—not many, thank God, and he’d never had to hang out with any of them—and was pretty sure that Trevor probably laughed whenever someone got hurt and talked shit about people that weren’t around. It was written all over him.

“Is he coming?” Tommy asked quickly, his voice low. They were still approaching Trevor, who didn’t move to meet them. Jeff shrugged, his attention fixed on the older kid.

“Hey,” Jeff said again, and Trevor finally gave him a nod.

“We’re going tubing,” Jeff said. “You wanna come?”

Trevor deliberately looked them up and down, then took a drag. “Tubing on what?”

“Ah, Mike T. and Jeremy are meeting us down there; they’re bringing their stuff,” Jeff said. “You got a smoke?”

Trevor ignored him. “You the new kid?” he asked, looking at Tommy hard. Like he thought he was Clint Eastwood and Tommy was a street punk.

Tommy held his ground and his silence, only nodding. He instinctively knew that whatever he said, Trevor would find a way to use it to make him look dumb.

“Your aunt runs Big Blue, doesn’t she?” Trevor asked. From the way his eyes sparkled, he already knew the answer.

“Yeah,” Tommy said, waiting for the inevitable. Wondering if it was going to bother him.

“She got raped, right?” He shook his head in mock disparagement, stealing looks at Tommy’s face. “Got f*cked by practically the whole football team…cops arrested ’em and everything…that’s rough, man, that totally sucks.”

Tommy wasn’t as big as Trevor, but he was tall for his age, and sturdy. And his dad had taught him how to throw a punch last summer. In spite of his suddenly hammering heart, the fearful knowledge that he’d never been in an actual fight, not once, he decided immediately that he wasn’t going to put up with any shit.

That’s how bullies work, his father had said, after Scott Morgan had threatened to beat him up at his old school last year, when his parents were still together. They’ll try to intimidate you. But if you stand up to them right away, let ’em know you won’t put up with their bullshit, they’ll back off, look for an easier target. His father had been on his second beer after dinner or he wouldn’t have cursed like that in front of him, which made the advice all the more valued, all the more credible. Tommy had never had cause to apply the principle—Scott Morgan had been expelled for fighting some other kid, not a week later—but had always wondered if he would, when the appropriate occasion arose. If he’d have the balls.

“Yeah,” he said, through an actual flash of red brought on by speaking, and the abrupt rage spoke for him, the words spilling out of his mouth without his thinking them first. “She got hurt; that’s right. Did you feel a need to discuss it? Because I really don’t want to.”

His heart was still thumping overtime, but he welcomed the rush of adrenaline, the feeling that maybe it would be good to fight, to curl his fingers in and wrap his thumb around them and drive it into this mean kid’s narrow face…and maybe Trevor saw it, because he dropped his gaze first, dropping the subject of Aunt Karen along with it. He looked back at Jeff, like Tommy was now beneath his interest.

“Any girls coming?” he asked Jeff.

“Mike’s sister, probably,” Jeff said. “If she does, she’ll bring some of her friends.”

Trevor scowled and dropped his butt on the ground. He let it burn. “Isn’t his sister, like, ten?”

“Kylie’s eleven,” Jeff said. “And I think some of her friends are older. Hey, maybe Jenny Todd will show up with the Luther kids. Kylie’s friends with Valerie Luther, right?”

Why are you trying to impress this guy? Tommy thought, looking between the two older boys. Trevor was an a*shole. He didn’t want to spend the day hanging out with an a*shole.

“Huh,” Trevor said. “Nothing better to do in this loserf*ck town, I guess.”

They started walking again, Trevor promptly falling behind, trailing after as he lit another cigarette. Jeff seemed pleased that the older boy was coming with them. Tommy didn’t like it, but with the weird, powerful anger leaking out of him, the first hesitant feelings of pride welling up—it worked! I did it, and it worked!—he felt like he could handle himself.

Another five minutes walking, past an abandoned cannery, down a short, steep hill next to an ancient parking lot to a strip of dirty, gravelly sand. Jeff talked the whole way, trying to sound cool, cursing more than he had before Trevor had joined them. The beach was small and smelled kind of rotten. There was a much nicer beach down below the lighthouse, where the summer people went to tan and picnic; the sand there was fine and clean, meticulously maintained. Aunt Karen had taken them down there a few weeks ago; over lunch, she’d said that the beach was fortified by community tax dollars, the sand actually towed up from farther south down the coast each year to replace what winter always took. Tommy found the idea fascinating, that they’d been sitting on a beach that would mostly be gone come November. That night he’d had a bad dream that he was standing on a tiny shelf of rock at the base of a high cliff with the deep ocean lapping at his ankles and nowhere to go, and waves were starting to rise out in front of him, vast, towering waves…he remembered the dream because he’d woken in a burst of terror as the first freezing wave had been about to crash over him, and then he had lain there in the dark for a minute, feeling nightmare echoes. The waves had been scary, but the other fear was deeper, harder to name—it was just the water; the dark, cold, powerful blue had stretched out in front of him like eternity, so big that it could hide anything, anything at all…

Here, where the ferries had once docked—before the service had been moved to Port Angeles twenty years back, Jeff had told him on the way down the hill—the dark, glass-strewn rocks were littered with cans and bottles and assorted bits of trash. And there was the pier, massive and old, chipped concrete and gray wood extending out over the water, supported by rows of greased piles. The smell worsened and defined, became an oily, fishy kind of rotten, but Tommy didn’t really notice it after a minute or two. There were a bunch of other kids down by the piles on the rough sand, standing amid a collection of inner tubes and bright plastic beach toys, buckets, rafts, and a couple of beach balls. There were two guys around his age. As they got closer, Tommy could see that there were three girls there too, and one little kid, a boy, maybe five or so. There was also a much older girl, built like a woman from a sports magazine. She wore shades and a striped swimsuit top and a piece of gauzy light fabric wrapped around her hips.

Jenny Todd, I presume, Tommy thought, still happy with himself for standing up to Trevor. Still a little surprised, too, by how much he’d wanted to pound Trevor’s face in. Presumably someone would do it, eventually. His dad was fond of saying how people always got what was coming to them, and Tommy wanted very much to believe that; it just seemed fair.

The waves out in the bay were tipped with white, but the water at the base of the pier was mostly still, the lap rhythmic and slow. It was shallow, too. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Tommy could feel his exposed skin sucking up the heat. Another hour and he’d be a lobster. He’d make a point of sticking close to the pier. Under it, maybe.

They approached the group, Trevor still hanging back, acting indifferent. Toward the end of the pier, a man with fishing gear leaned against the rail, looking down at them. Looking at the teenage girl, Tommy figured as he got a closer look at her himself. She was tall and had long legs and round hips and big breasts; she had a heart-shaped face and a pretty smile; she had shining reddish-brown hair piled on top of her head, with long wisps of it curling down the back of her neck. She was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen in real life.

Jeff introduced him around, kind of, but Tommy missed some of the names, working to appear cool and clever and witty by the way he stood, trying to stare at Jenny without staring. He had half an erection from the very slight glance he’d dared at her breasts, and willed it to go away, told himself that she was at least seventeen, that the smile she gave him was friendly, nothing more. Much as he might wish otherwise. He’d known about masturbation for quite a while, and he wasn’t a fanatic or anything, but he’d been more into it just lately…like, a lot more. And he didn’t think it on purpose, but he did think it, that Jenny was going to have a starring role at some point in the very near future, like tonight.

“Hey, Jenny,” Trevor said, nodding at the beautiful girl, and she smiled pleasantly enough at him, too, but there was zero interest in the look. She might have been smiling at a mailman or a waiter or something. Tommy felt a weird kind of satisfaction that she wasn’t interested in the older boy, either. She pulled out a lime-green cell phone about a second later and started tapping keys.

“Sissy, will you keep an eye on Jay?” she said, and one of the girls nodded eagerly. Jay’s sissy, Valerie, was maybe nine, had frizzy hair and a rounded, unformed body and a missing tooth. Another girl volunteered to assist, and they promptly surrounded the little boy, who was rubbing handfuls of dirty sand on his stomach for no apparent reason. Her babysitting duties delegated, Jenny walked away from the group, still punching keys. There was a blanket and a couple of bags of stuff in a relatively clean patch of sun, next to the rocky wall separating the beach from the parking lot above. Jenny knelt on the blanket, nearly knocking over a tall can of energy drink, arranging her long legs just so…

Tommy wasn’t the only one looking. He glanced away long enough to see that Jeff, his friend Mike, and Trevor were all watching her, various dazed expressions on their faces. Jeremy, a glasses-wearing, quiet kid who seemed younger, was more interested in claiming the best raft. He and one of the little girls were already exclaiming over the chill of the water.

Tommy caught a small movement from the pier. The fisherman was still looking down, but he was watching the kids—them, not Jenny. He had thinning, sandy hair. His bland, middle-aged face was red, sunburnt maybe, and the look he wore…

“Who’s that guy?” Tommy asked. The look he wore was creepy. He looked hungry. But as soon as he realized that they were all turning to look at him, he backed away from the rail, suddenly deeply interested in his fishing rod. He jammed a shapeless sun hat on his head and looked out over the bay.

“Some perv, probably,” Jeff said. “Come on.”

They set out the rafts and inflatable tubes, the girls giggling and shrieking as they positioned themselves on the plastic toys. Tommy got a clear, purple-tinted ring with a patch on the side and rubber handles. The water was uncomfortably cold, but the handles allowed him to pull his butt mostly out, and his feet quickly went numb. After a few moments in the reflected sun, the cold felt good.

They floated around the end of the pier, the waves keeping them from drifting too far out. They paddled out to the drop-off, Tommy getting chills even looking out to where the water turned black. Thinking about that dream he’d had, about the depthless ocean. Thankfully, the water was too cold and choppy there for them to linger.

The sun had grown hot, and everything seemed hazed out in shades of brightness, and Tommy realized he was having a good time, that he liked being out on the water. Jay, the little kid, got splashed and started screaming that he wanted to make sand castles instead, so he and his sister and the other girls paddled their rafts back to the beach. Trevor tried to smoke, sitting on a big blue foam board, and immediately dropped his lighter in the water. Jeff and Tommy and Mike all cracked up. After several choice curses, Trevor wondered aloud if Jenny had a light, and kicked himself back under the pier, muttering about “f*cking little kids” as he went.

“Trevor’s kind of a dick,” Tommy ventured, when he was sure Trevor was out of earshot. Jeff didn’t say anything, but Mike nodded vigorously.

“I heard he got busted for stealing a couple of weeks ago,” Jeremy said, floating on a flat foam mat shaped liked a frog. He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his pudgy, peeling nose. “He took some stuff from the hardware store. His mom had to go down to the police station and get him.”

“Aw, Trevor’s all right,” Jeff said.

“No, he’s totally a dick,” Mike said. “He pushes people around all the time, and that’s the second time he’s gotten caught. My dad says he’s a bad egg.”

“A bad egg?” Jeff smirked. “That’s stupid. Who says bad egg?”

Tommy was about to volunteer that he’d used the term himself, a perfectly acceptable descriptive when you didn’t want to say a*shole in front of your parents, when from the beach came a high, squealing scream. Tommy looked over and saw that Jay had stripped out of his SpongeBob shorts and food-stained tee and was running bare-ass naked across the sand, laughing while his sister shouted after him to stop. Jenny’s blanket was empty, she was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t look like an emergency or anything; he was just being a little kid, and now the other girls were chasing after him, calling his name. Jay shrieked and ran faster, his pudgy little legs kicking up sand, his babyish arms pumping, his round butt shiny white, practically glowing in the sun. He should be falling down; he was wearing sandals that appeared to be on the wrong feet, but he was losing them, fast. It was kind of funny.

Tommy shaded his eyes, looking up at the pier, where the fisherman had been hanging out all morning—and saw that the fisherman was watching Jay, and that he had his hand in his pants and was moving it rhythmically, his glassy-eyed stare fixed on the little boy. They were close enough to the pier, it was maybe fifteen feet up and not far from where they were floating, that Tommy could clearly see what he was doing—but he couldn’t believe it; he couldn’t believe that someone would do that, right in the open like that.

A little kid, Tommy thought, and felt sick.

“Hey,” Tommy said, then suddenly he was screaming it. “HEY!”

The fisherman turned and looked at him, still jerking it, and he was staring right at Tommy as he shuddered, his mouth falling open, his tongue sticking out just a little…and then he had his hand out of his pants and was scooping up his gear, turning, running away.

“Was he jacking off?” Jeff asked. “He was, wasn’t he?”

Everyone was staring at Tommy. Even Jay had stopped running. Jenny and Trevor appeared from under the pier a beat later, blinking in the sudden brightness, both of them holding cigarettes.

“I didn’t see,” Jeremy said. “Was he?”

“That’s f*cked-up,” Mike said, and it was Tommy’s turn to nod, and then they were all paddling toward shore, Tommy dropping into the icy water as they got closer, his good feelings about the day turning confused and falling away as they dragged their floats onto the sand, and everyone was talking at once. Then Jenny was telling everyone to shut up, she was trying to call the cops, and Sissy was holding her little brother wrapped in a sandy towel, her eyes filled with tears. Jay started crying that he wanted to go home. Tommy could relate; he just wasn’t sure where home was, exactly; not today.





Friday morning, John and Bob went to meet Amanda at the closed deli half a block from the police station. John was tired; Bob had picked him up at his house a few hours after he’d gotten home from Sarah’s, which meant he’d slept, including last night’s nap, five hours? Not so bad, except he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a full eight. Research, caseload, his long, lovely nights with Sarah…six, seven days? As they walked toward the deli, Bob was telling him about what he’d heard only that morning, rumors of orgies out at the artist’s retreat, but John was trying to focus on the meeting ahead, on presentation, on objectives. What had seemed so clear only a week before had become clouded—and at the same time, the deep connection he’d made with Sarah had actually clarified some things for him, had made him reconsider the nature of the influence. They’d talked a lot about the possibility—the probability—that the intimacy they were experiencing had been boosted chemically by whatever was happening to Port Isley and its inhabitants…but Sarah had pointed out, and rightfully so, that if that were true, the things occurring could not easily be categorized as wholly bad or destructive. Considering how fulfilled he felt spending time with her, how mutual the attraction was, it was hard to argue. He found it hard to argue with her about much of anything, he was so consumed by their sudden, incredible affair.

I’m fine, he told himself, gripping the thin file he carried more tightly. At least well enough to take action. Hadn’t they found evidence? They had enough, he was sure they had enough.

There had been four suicides in Port Isley since about the first week of June, including Ed Billings and Dick Calvin. Last year, there had been one. All year. There had been four murders in the same six-week period—Lisa Meyer; Ed Billings’s wife, Darva; Sadie Truman; and Annie Thomas. Last year, and for two years before, none. Zero. Even accidental deaths were up within the city limits, two in the last week—a local had fallen down his stairs during a small house fire, and another had perished in a single-car crash; both men had had blood alcohol levels over .15. Bob had learned that the car crash victim had been in AA, had claimed to be sober for better than six years, and had attended his meetings religiously…up until sometime in June. There had been Karen’s rape and a handful of other probable sexual assaults—things that hadn’t made it to police report stage, that likely never would. Like what had happened—almost happened—to Amanda with her mother’s boyfriend. They’d kept the research focused on what they could prove, but Bob had dug up a lot more, through conversations with the families of hospital workers, chats with friends and neighbors. Sexual abuse and domestic violence were up, and there were undoubtedly a half dozen ugly scenes playing out unwitnessed and unreported for every one that Bob had heard about.

But how many stories are there out there like ours? Sarah had asked, her voice soft in the darkness, the feel of her naked skin like cream, like velvet, clichés that didn’t even touch the epiphany of her body against his. How many others like us? Letting go of sadness, anger, old defense mechanisms? Embracing the good people we find?

John let out an involuntary sigh, remembering what had followed. On a purely intellectual level, he knew that what was happening between them couldn’t be love. This was neurochemistry in action, hardwired instinct plus a projection of hope, beliefs about intimacy…but he also felt an excited flutter in the pit of his stomach every time he thought of her, and he couldn’t make himself not feel that.

She did have a point. If there were others like them, connecting, then the changes weren’t all bad. But people discovering themselves wasn’t something they could quantify, nor was it the kind of stuff even Bob could get, asking around.

The reporter had proved to be extremely adept at hearing things; he had a wide network of people who liked to gossip and was friendly with any number of summer residents besides. John supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised—Robert Sayers had been a regular byline in a major city newspaper when John himself had been in diapers—but the casual finesse with which Bob drew people out and got them talking was remarkable. John had thought that he’d have the edge, considering his career choice—

and how much Bob drinks

—but his own questions had turned up little. The Catholic priest he’d spoken to had wanted to tell him more, he was sure of it, but in the end, the good father had clammed up, saying that the only thing happening in Port Isley was God’s will. And the social worker had been a brick wall, start to finish. He’d learned that church attendance was up all over—so much so that the local Baptist minister was thinking about applying for a permit to hold Sunday services at the fairgrounds—but that wasn’t particularly helpful. John had turned the interviewing over to Bob and spent his very few spare hours compiling the notes Bob gave him and figuring out how to run a probability-statistics program on his aging computer. If he’d run it right—and he was pretty sure he had—they had more than enough to convince Stan Vincent, and then the chief would…he would do something. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but John couldn’t seem to imagine much further than their meeting with Vincent. They would lay out the facts, the facts, and Vincent would nod slowly, understanding filling his eyes, and then…

He’ll know what to do. John was sure.

They turned the corner on Main, and there was Amanda, alone. She sat cross-legged on the curb in front of the deserted deli, smoking, reading a book, wearing all black except for her half-laced, screaming-orange high-tops. She looked up and saw the two of them approaching, dog-eared her paperback, and slipped it into a flowered bag.

She stood up, dropping her cigarette to the pavement. “This is a bad idea,” she said. She ground the butt into the cement with her toe. “He’s not going to listen.”

John held up the file. “Two-hundred-percent increase in violent attacks in a three-month period, better than eighty percent of those in the last six weeks. Five weeks, really. Massive increases in medications prescribed and purchased, hospital ER reports, complaints filed…ah, church attendance, counseling sessions scheduled…vandalism…”

He looked to Bob for help, his brain too tired to remember any more, but Bob was looking at Amanda.

“You get a feeling for this?” he asked. “About Chief Vincent?”

She did a head shrug, tipping to one side and back. “Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s just what I think.”

Bob nodded. “When I saw him at the hospital, he seemed…hostile, I guess. Not like himself.”

John had to smile at that. “We can welcome him to the club, then.”

Bob snorted, and Amanda grinned.

“I suppose you have a point,” Bob said. “Still. We could go to the county sheriff’s, bypass the problem entirely.”

“The evidence is important; it’s how we’ll get people from the state or the feds to listen,” John said. “But I’m counting on the fact that the chief lives here, that he’s well aware of the increase in violent crime…and that he may be experiencing symptoms himself. When he sees the numbers, realizes how bad things are, and that there’s a possible reason for how he’s probably been feeling…”

They looked mollified, if not convinced. Sarah had agreed with his logic when he’d discussed it with her. She’d stopped worrying about the effects of the agent on herself or her son—her belief was that whatever was happening, the people who were inherently stable would remain so—but she was concerned about having Tommy in an unsafe environment. John wasn’t sure how she’d come to her conclusions, but she seemed committed to them.

Maybe she just doesn’t want to leave, he thought. Karen had made it clear that she wanted Sarah to stay for as long as she could.

And maybe she doesn’t want to leave me. The thought was intoxicating. If they could convince Stan Vincent to take them seriously and then to take over, to deal with what was happening, he could shift his focus back to work, where it belonged…and to Sarah and what was building between them. She was going to talk to Tommy, soon—they’d both agreed that until they were sure they wanted to continue their relationship, it was better that he not know the depth of their involvement—but John had never felt more certain of anything.

“Let’s do this,” he said firmly, and Bob nodded once, and Amanda sighed, and they started for the station.