With power scavenged from a handful of solar panels that had survived the years of neglect, they were able to create a limited electrical grid for at least a few of the high-ground houses.
Regular cars were useless; it was impossible to determine how long this version of their world had spun unattended, but the state of the parked cars was a clue that it had been enough time for water and moisture to have its way with engines. A car stored in a still-standing garage might have been salvageable, except there wasn’t a drop of gasoline anywhere that hadn’t destabilized or evaporated. What the women did find was a small fleet of well-preserved solar-powered golf carts in the equipment shed at the country club. Once they were recharged, they started right up. Women drove them up and down streets that had been cleared of trees and foliage.
Like the Shopwell, the Olympia Diner had stood up to the passage of time remarkably well, and Rita Coombs, once the wife of Terry, reopened it on a barter basis, cooking with an old portable woodstove that a gang of women had helped haul up from the Coombses’ basement.
“I always wanted to try my hand at running a restaurant,” she explained to Lila, “but Terry never wanted me to work. He said it would make him worry. Terry could never understand how damn boring it was, to be a piece of china in a hutch.”
She said this in a light way, but kept her gaze averted in an expression of what Lila read as shame—a shame that came from being happy to have something of her own. Lila hoped Rita would get over it, and thought she would—eventually. There were a lot of them that felt changed, but in a way that might also contain that tincture of shame, as if they were playing hooky. Women like Magda and Rita, who suddenly found themselves in demand and flourishing in the light of a new world. As those unmarked weeks peeled away, they discussed not just what they missed, but also some of what they did not miss.
The leaves changed as they did in the old world, but to Lila their colors seemed more vibrant and longer-lasting.
She was in Mrs. Ransom’s garden one day in what felt like late October, picking pumpkins for the schoolgirls to carve. Old Essie, seated on a bench in the shade, watched her. Next to the bench was a rusty shopping cart full of things Essie had picked up, as if trying to restock her new life from memories of the old one: a radio, a cell phone, a heap of clothes, a dog collar, a calendar from 2007, a bottle of something that had no label but might have been maple syrup once upon a time, and a trio of dolls. She liked to follow Lila when she saw Lila in her big straw hat rolling the wheelbarrow piled high with gardening implements.
The old lady was silent at first, and shied away if anyone came near her, but as the weeks passed, she began to relax, at least around Lila. Sometimes she would even talk, although Lila guessed she’d never been a great conversationalist, even in her prime.
“Things are better now,” Essie said once. “I have my very own house.” She looked fondly down at the dolls in her lap. “My girls like it. Their names are Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle.”
Lila had asked her on that occasion what her last name was.
“Once it was Wilcox,” Essie said, “but now it’s Estabrook. I have taken back my maidenhood name just like that Elaine woman. This place is better than the old place, and not just because I have my maidenhood name and my very own house. It smells sweeter.”
Today, Essie seemed to have slipped back inside herself a bit. When Lila tried to engage her in conversation, Essie shook her head, made violent shooing motions in Lila’s direction, and rummaged in her rusty shopping cart. From it she removed an ancient Philco table radio and started tossing it from hand to hand. Which was perfectly okay with Lila; let her play hot potato to her heart’s content if that was what eased her mind.
As she was getting ready to break for lunch, Janice Coates rode up on a bicycle. “Sheriff,” she said to Lila. “A word.”
“I’m not the sheriff anymore, Janice. Don’t you read the Dooling Doings? I’m just another local.”
Coates was undeterred. “Fine, but you need to know there’s people disappearing. Three of them now. Too many to be a coincidence. We need someone to look into this situation.”
Lila examined the pumpkin she had just torn from a vine. The top was bright orange, but the underside was black and rotten. She dropped it with a thud in the tilled earth. “Talk to the Redevelopment Committee, or bring it up at the next Meeting. I’m retired.”
“Come on, Lila.” Coates, perched on the seat of the bike, crossed her bony arms. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re not retired, you’re depressed.”
Feelings, Lila thought. Men almost never wanted to talk about them, women almost always did. It could get boring. That came as a surprise. It came to her that she might have to re-evaluate some of her resentments about Clint’s stoicism.
“I can’t, Janice.” Lila walked down the row of pumpkins. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m depressed, too,” said Janice. “I may never see my daughter again. I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Every damn day. And I miss calling my brothers. But I’m not about to let that—”
There was a dull thump and a soft cry from behind them. Lila glanced around. The radio lay on the grass next to Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle. The dolls stared up at the cloudless sky with their flat, beatific expressions. Essie was gone. There was a single brown moth where she had been. It fluttered aimlessly for a moment, then flew up and away, trailed, faintly, by the smell of fire.
CHAPTER 3
1
“Holy fucking shit!” Eric Blass cried. He was sitting on the ground, and staring up. “Did you see that?”
“I’m still seeing it,” Don replied, looking at the flock of moths winging above the tennis courts and toward the high school. “And smelling it.”
He had given Eric his lighter, since it was Eric’s idea (also so he could semi-plausibly put it all on the kid, if anyone found out). Eric had squatted, flicked the Zippo alight, and applied it to the edge of the cocoon in the littered den filled with junk. The cocoon had gone up in a crackling flash, as if it had contained gunpowder instead of a crazy homeless lady. The stench was immediate and sulphuric. It was like God himself had cut the cheese. Old Essie had sat upright—not that you could see anything more than the outline of her—and seemed to twist toward them. For an instant, her features had clarified, black and silver like a photo negative, and Don had seen her lips rolling back into a snarl. In another beat there was nothing left of her.
The fireball rose to a height of four feet, seeming to revolve as it did so. Then the fireball had turned into moths—hundreds of them. Of the cocoon or a skeleton there was no sign, and the grass where Old Essie had been lying wasn’t so much as charred.
It wasn’t that kind of fire, Don thought. If it had’ve been, we would be baked.
Eric got to his feet. His face was very white, and his eyes were frantic. “What was that? What just happened?”