Close your eyes and click your heels three times, Julia thought. Because there's no place like Dome.
She introduced Rose to Cox and Cox to Rose. During their brief getting-to-know-you exchange, Julia looked around, not liking what she saw. The lights were still in place, shining at the sky as if signaling a glitzy Hollwood premiere, and there was a purring generator to run them, but the trucks were gone and so was the big green HQ tent that had been erected forty or fifty yards down the road. A patch of flattened grass marked the place where it had been. There were two soldiers with Cox, but they had the not-ready-for-prime-time look she associated with aides or attaches. The sentries probably weren't gone, but they had been moved back, establishing a perimeter beyond hailing distance of any poor slobs who might wander up on The Mill side to ask what was going on.
Ask now, plead later, Julia thought.
'Fill me in, Ms Shumway,' Cox said.
'First answer a question.'
He rolled his eyes (she thought she would have slapped him for that, if she'd been able to get at him; her nerves were still jangled from the near miss on the ride out here). But he told her to ask away.
'Have we been abandoned?'
'Absolutely not.' He replied promptly, but didn't quite meet her eye. She thought that was a worse sign than the queerly empty look she now saw on his side of the Dome - as if there had been a circus, but it had moved on.
'Read this,' she said, and plastered the front page of tomorrow's paper against the Dome's unseen surface, like a woman mounting a sale notice in a department store window. There was a faint, fugitive thrum in her fingers, like the kind of static shock you could get from touching metal on a cold winter morning, when the air was dry. After that, nothing.
He read the entire paper, telling her when to turn the pages. It took him ten minutes. When he finished, she said: 'As you probably noticed, ad space is way down, but I flatter myself the quality of the writing has gone up. Fuckery seems to bring out the best in me.'
'Ms Shumway - '
'Oh, why not call me Julia. We're practically old pals.'
'Fine. You're Julia and I'm JC
'I'll try not to confuse you with the one who walked on water.'
'You believe this fellow Rennie's setting himself up as a dictator? A kind of Downeast Manuel Noriega?'
'It's the progression to Pol Pot I'm worried about.'
'Do you think that's possible?'
'Two days ago I would have laughed at the idea - he's a used-car salesman when he isn't running selectmen's meetings. But two days ago we hadn't had a food riot. Nor did we know about these murders.'
'Not Barbie,' Rose said, shaking her head with stubborn weariness. 'Never.'
Cox took no notice of this - not because he was ignoring Rose, Julia felt, but because he thought the idea was too ridiculous to warrant any attention. It warmed her toward him, at least a little. 'Do you think Rennie committed the murders, Julia?'
'I've been thinking about that. Everything he's done since the Dome appeared - from shutting down alcohol sales to appointing a complete dope as Police Chief- has been political, aimed at increasing his own clout.'
'Are you saying murder isn't in his repertoire?'
'Not necessarily. When his wife passed, there were rumors that he might have helped her along. I don't say they were true, but for rumors like that to start in the first place says something about how people see the man in question.'
Cox grunted agreement.
'But for the life of me I can't see how murdering and sexually abusing two teenage girls could be political.'
'Barbie would never,' Rose said again.
'The same with Coggins, although that ministry of his - especially the radio station part - is suspiciously well endowed. Brenda Perkins, now? That could have been political.'
'And you can't send in the Marines to stop him, can you?' Rose asked. 'All you guys can do is watch. Like kids looking into an aquarium where the biggest fish takes all the food, then starts earing the little ones.'
'I can kill the cellular service,' Cox mused. 'Also Internet. I can do that much.'
'The police have walkie-talkies,' Julia said.'He'll switch to those. And at the meeting on Thursday night, when people complain about losing their links to the outside world, he'll blame you.'
'We were planning a press conference on Friday. I could pull the plug on that.'
Julia grew cold at the thought.'Don't you dare.Then he wouldn't have to explain himself to the outside world.'
'Plus,' Rose said, 'if you kill the phones and the Internet, no one can tell you or anyone else what he's doing.'
Cox stood quiet for a moment, looking at the ground. Then he raised his head. 'What about this hypothetical generator that's maintaining the Dome? Any luck?'
Julia wasn't sure she wanted to tell Cox that they had put a middle-school kid in charge of hunting for it. As it turned out, she didn't have to, because that was when the town fire whistle went off.