*
The sun has already gone down. Maya is standing in the forest shaking, but the trees hide her. The dark still leaves her panic-stricken but she’s determined to make it her friend. Her ally. She stood here watching Kevin move about inside the illuminated house; he couldn’t see her but she could see him, and that gave her a sudden sense of power. It’s intoxicating.
When he came out onto the jogging track, she timed him. One circuit took three minutes and twenty-four seconds. Another circuit: three minutes and twenty-two seconds. Another circuit. Another circuit. Again, again, again.
*
She writes down the times. Raises her arms as if they were holding an invisible rifle. Wonders where she ought to stand.
*
One of them is going to die. She still hasn’t decided who.
43
Fighting isn’t hard. It’s the starting and stopping that are hard. Once you’re actually fighting, it happens more or less instinctively. The complicated thing about fighting is daring to throw the first punch, and then, once you’ve won, refraining from throwing that very last one.
*
Peter’s car is still parked in front of the rink. No one has set fire to it, even if he suspects that one or two people have thought about it. He scrapes the windows and gets in, without switching on the engine.
He’s always envied good hockey coaches more than anyone; the ones with that ability to stand in front of a group and carry everyone with them. He doesn’t have that sort of charisma. He was a team captain once upon a time, but he led through his play, not by his words. He can’t explain hockey to anyone, he just happened to be good at it. In music it’s called “perfect pitch,” and in sports, it’s sometimes called “physical intelligence.” You see someone do something, and your body instantly understands how to do the same thing. Skating, shooting a puck, playing a violin. Some people train all their lives without learning, while others have just got it.
He was good enough that he didn’t have to learn how to fight. That was his salvation. He doesn’t have a philosophical position; he hasn’t reasoned his way to not believing in violence. He just doesn’t have it in him. He lacks the instinct.
When Leo started to play hockey, Peter got into a discussion with a coach who kept shouting and yelling the whole time. The coach said: “You have to frighten the little buggers to get them to listen!”
Peter said nothing. But in the car on the way home he turned to Leo and explained: “When I was little, my dad used to hit me if I spilled my milk, Leo. That didn’t teach me not to spill things. It just made me scared of milk. Remember that.”
The parking lot around him gradually fills with cars. People are arriving from all directions. Some of them see Peter but pretend they haven’t. He waits until they’ve gone inside. Until the meeting has started. He considers simply starting the car and driving home, packing up his family and belongings and driving as far away from here as he can. But instead he gets out of the car, walks across the parking lot, opens the heavy door of the rink, and walks inside.
*
Fighting isn’t hard. It’s just hard to know when to throw the first punch.
*
Ann-Katrin is sitting close to Hog in one of the last rows of chairs. It feels like the whole town is gathered in the cafeteria of the rink. All the chairs are taken but people are still pouring in, lining up along the walls. Up at the front, on a little platform, sit the board members. In the first row of seats the sponsors and parents of the juniors. In the middle: Kevin’s parents. Ann-Katrin watches as people she’s known all her life go up to Kevin’s mom as if this were a funeral, as if they were offering their condolences for the terrible tragedy she’s suffered.
Hog holds Ann-Katrin’s hand tightly when he sees what she’s looking at.
“We can’t get involved, Anki. Half the people in here are customers of ours.”
“This isn’t a vote, it’s a lynch mob,” Anki whispers.
“We need to wait until we know what happened. We don’t know everything, Anki. We don’t know everything,” her husband replies.
She knows he’s right. So she waits. They wait. Everyone waits.
*
Tails is standing in the middle of the parking lot on purpose, not hidden in the shadows or behind a tree. The last thing he wants, obviously, is to appear threatening.
When the little car with the logo of the local newspaper on the door pulls into the parking lot, he gives a cheery wave. A journalist and a photographer are sitting inside it, and he gestures to them to roll the window down.
“Hello, hello! I don’t think we’ve met? I’m Tails—I own the supermarket!”
The journalist shakes his hand through the window.
“Hello, we’re just heading to the meet . . .”
Tails leans forward, scratching his stubble hard.
“Yes, the meeting, eh? I just wanted to have a few words with you about that. Sort of . . . off the record, if you get my meaning.”
The journalist tilts her head.
“No.”
Tails clears his throat.
“Oh, you know how it is. People sometimes get a bit nervous when a reporter shows up. What’s happened has been pretty traumatic for the whole town, as you obviously appreciate. So we’d just like to know that your article . . . well . . . that you haven’t come here looking for problems where there aren’t any.”
The journalist has no idea how she’s supposed to respond to that, but the way the huge man is leaning over her door as he says it makes her feel uncomfortable. Tails, of course, just smiles, wishes her a nice day, and walks off.
The journalist and photographer wait a couple of minutes before following him. When they open the door to the rink and start to walk down the hallway, two men step out from the darkness. In their late twenties, black jackets, hands in pockets.
“This meeting is for members only,” one of them says.
“We’re journalists . . . ,” the journalist begins to say.
The men block their path. They’re a head taller than the photographer, two heads taller than the journalist. They say no more; one just takes half a step forward and stops, a subtle indication of his potential for violence. The rink is poorly lit, and the part they are in is silent and deserted.
The photographer takes hold of the sleeve of the journalist’s jacket. She sees how white his face is. The journalist isn’t from around here, she’s only got a temporary contract with the paper, but the photographer lives in Beartown. He has his family here. He pulls her away and walks back to the car. They drive off.