It wasn’t Holly saying his name either. Holly had fled into the kitchen, where she was now lying facedown, arms stretched out over her head, like a child pretending to be flying. He had gotten her in the heart, which was where she had gotten him, too.
The voice he heard was coming from the TV. A stern, dark-haired news anchor was saying that a lead slug had been found hidden in a toilet and that the discovery threw Randall Kellaway’s story into serious doubt. The newsman said the candle-lighting ceremony had been canceled abruptly with no explanation. He said the disturbing new evidence had been confirmed by a reporter with the Digest. The news anchor said the reporter’s name—and Kellaway said it too, very quietly.
Why had George been afraid of him? Because Aisha Lanternglass told him to be. She’d been telling the world for days that Kellaway was a scary person. Maybe not explicitly. But it was hinted at in every line she wrote, in every gleeful insinuation. When he met her in the parking lot and she flashed her teeth at him, her bright gaze had said, I’m going to fix you, cracker. I’m going to fix you good. The thought gave her joy; he could see it all over her face.
He kissed George good-bye, on what was left of his brow, before he left.
11:26 A.M.
Lanternglass drove at a crawl the whole last quarter of a mile to the office, on the western outskirts of town. Smoke billowed across the road in smothering yellow heaps that the headlights could barely penetrate. The wind snatched at her elderly Passat, jolting it this way and that. Once she drove through a whirl of sparks that spattered and died against the hood and the windshield.
“Mom, Mom, look!” Dorothy called from the backseat, pointing, and Lanternglass saw a sixty-foot-tall pine tree, engulfed in a red shroud of flame, over on the right side of the road. Nothing else around it was visibly burning, just that one tree.
“Where are the fire trucks?” Dorothy asked.
“Fighting the fire,” Lanternglass said.
“We just passed the fire! Didn’t you see the tree?”
“The fire is even worse farther down the road. That’s where they’re trying to hold it. They want to keep it from jumping the highway.” She didn’t add, And pouring down the hills into St. Possenti.
Just before they reached the office, the smoke lifted a little. The Digest was in a squat, unremarkable two-story redbrick building, which they shared with a yoga studio and a branch of Merrill Lynch. The parking lot was about half full, and Lanternglass saw people she knew, other employees, carrying boxes to their cars.
She got out and started to walk toward the fire door, and the wind came up behind her and shoved. She saw more sparks, floating in the high thermals. Her eyes watered. The late morning stank of char. Lanternglass took her daughter’s hand. They half ran and were half carried by the gusts to the stairwell.
They went up the cement stairs, three at a time, almost at a run, as she had so often done before. She wasn’t going to be able to pack her weights, still tucked in under the stairwell. If the building burned, they’d be melted back to ingots of raw iron.
The fire door to the newsroom was propped open with a cinder block. It was a modest office space containing six desks of the cheapest quality, low particleboard dividers arranged between them. At the far side of the room was a floor-to-ceiling glass partition, looking into the only private office at the Digest, Tim Chen’s. Tim stood in his office door, clutching a cardboard file box with some framed photographs and several coffee cups balanced on top.
Shane Wolff was there, too, sitting at a desk by the fire door, dismantling a PC and neatly setting the components into a cardboard box. Several other computers had already been removed. An intern, a wispy, nervous, nineteen-year-old girl named Julia, was pulling steel drawers from the file cabinet that occupied most of one wall and stacking them on a dolly. A short, solidly built sportswriter named Don Quigley used bungee cable to strap them in place. The atmosphere was one of quiet, industrious urgency.
“Lanternglass,” Tim said, and nodded toward her desk, which was the one closest to his office.
“I’m on it. I can pack everything I’ve got in ten minutes.”
“Don’t pack. Write.”
Lanternglass said, “You aren’t serious.”
“I think we both know I’m famously humor-deficient. I put an alert on the Web site about the bullet. The TV news is already running with it. I want the full story uploaded to the server by noon. Then you can pack,” he said as he hurried past her, carrying his box.
“My car is unlocked,” Lanternglass said. “Bring up my laptop? It’s in the backseat.”
He jerked his head in a gesture that seemed to indicate assent and hauled his file box out and down the stairs.
She slowed near Shane Wolff. “I’m going to miss this place if it burns down. Some of the most mediocre hours of my life were spent in this very room. You think you’ll miss anything about coming here?”
“Watching you run up and down the stairs,” he said. “Nothing mediocre about that.”
“Ew,” Dorothy said. “Mama, he’s hitting on you.”
“Who says?” Shane asked her. “Maybe I’m a fitness nut. Maybe I just admire someone who shows real dedication to staying in shape.”
Dorothy narrowed one eye to a squint and said, “You hitting on her.”
“Pfff,” Shane said. “Don’t go ragging on me now. I’m not the one walking around with my head stuck up a chicken’s butt.”
Dorothy touched her chicken hat and giggled, and Lanternglass tugged her hand and led her on to her desk.
A stack of flattened cardboard boxes leaned against the full-wall window looking into Tim Chen’s office. Lanternglass assembled one, and she and Dorothy began to empty out her desk. The box was half full when Tim returned with her laptop bag.
She fired up her aging MacBook and opened a new document while Dorothy continued to pack the box. Lanternglass began to write, starting with her headline: CRIME-SCENE DISCOVERY RAISES QUESTIONS. Shit, that was terrible. Too general, too vague. She deleted it, tried another. NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET: CRIME-SCENE DISCOV— Fuck, no, that was even worse.
It was hard to think. She had a sense of the world coming apart around her, buckling and splitting at the seams. In his office Tim Chen was throwing piles of folders into a box. Shane Wolff was on the other side of the room with part of the carpet torn back. He yanked a long Ethernet cable out from under it, gathering it in loops. A file cabinet with all its drawers hanging open overbalanced and fell with a crash. The wispy intern screamed. The sportswriter laughed.
At Lanternglass’s back she heard the wind whap against the windows, and suddenly Dorothy jumped to her feet, staring outside with enormous eyes.