But she doesn’t. So they stay.
She thinks about all the people who’ve arrived since she first came. She was in the first batch, the original eight, but there’s been two or three new people who’ve come every few months ever since. She heard that four people arrived just today, the bus rumbling in after dark. Two women and two men. Of course, she can’t help but speculate on what they did and how they wound up here. That’s the kind of gossip people here tend to traffic in. Especially her next-door neighbor Doris Agnew, who always seems to know what’s going on, gossip-wise. When she told Fran that she’d heard Sheriff Cooper was thinking of organizing a field trip outside the facility, just for Isaac, to a movie, in a real-live movie theater, Fran hadn’t believed it, didn’t dare to, but that rumor turned out to be true. The sheriff assured Fran it would be safe, but knowing what had happened to that poor boy years ago, and his mother, when they both left, Fran couldn’t help but panic. Watching Cooper’s truck leave with Isaac inside, his face pressed against the passenger-side glass, waving back at her, looking both lost and excited, was the worst and best she’s felt since the day she arrived here.
Just come back, she said to no one, as the truck trundled off in a shimmer of dust, and the entry gates closed behind it.
He came back. He’s growing up. And now he’s seen the outside world. It was all she ever wanted for him, until it actually happened.
She stands up and wipes her hands on her jeans. Two drags. That’s all she allows herself. The second drag is always a disappointment anyway, just an unsatisfying echo of the first. But she always takes that second drag, just to be sure.
She lingers a moment longer on the steps, savoring the silence, then starts to head inside, to shower off the smoky smell, and that’s when she hears the shot.
A single gunshot. Far away but loud enough to startle her.
In the movies, people always mistake other things, like firecrackers or a car backfiring, for gunshots. But in real life, in her experience, no one ever mistakes a gunshot for anything other than what it is.
That’s one thing she remembers from her previous life.
That a gunshot sounds like nothing else.
And even at this early hour, up and down the rows of houses, lights go on.
MONDAY
1.
HUBERT HUMPHREY GABLE, real name unknown, lies slumped on the bar at Blinders, his head resting in a curdling puddle of splashed beer and spilled brain matter, both of which used to be his. Gable’s face is no longer useful for purposes of identification but the other three people assembled in the bar all know him well enough. Greta Fillmore, the bar’s owner, stands newly awakened and angry, with the unkempt, hastily swept-up gray hair of a wizened frontier widow. She lives in the bungalow adjacent to the trailer that houses the bar and she dashed over at the sound of the shot. She’s dressed, presumably hastily, in a colorful African-print dashiki. She looks pissed.
Calvin Cooper stands next to her, in his wrinkled brown sheriff’s uniform, a concession to the propriety of his office that he considers important, even at this early hour. He wears his sheriff’s star, too, and his gun belt, the full getup, though his revolver is not currently loaded, and hasn’t been for the past eight years. Technically, he’s not even officially a sheriff. He’s a privately employed security guard with previous training as a corrections officer. The star he wears was a gag gift on his first day of work. But given that he’s tasked professionally with keeping order in this town, the title of sheriff has proven to be a useful shorthand. Most often, what he deals with in Caesura are drunken fights or noise complaints, and the occasional teary breakdowns by residents who’ve spent too much time staring into the bottom of an emptied bottle. Now he stands at a remove from the body in question, studying the scene with the weary air of a man who’s just returned from a particularly tedious errand to find that his car’s been keyed.
Behind him, Sidney Dawes, his deputy, takes notes. She’s always taking notes.
“‘Execution-style’ seems like the correct descriptor,” Dawes says, scribbling her thoughts.
Cooper winces, or deepens his existing wince. “All that tells me is that, before you got here, you spent too much time watching TV, Dawes.”
Cooper would be the first to admit that, as a sheriff, he’s not much of a sheriff, but then this town’s not much of a town, and this bar is not much of a bar. It’s just a few stools set in a crooked row in front of a long sheet of stained plywood slung across two stacks of tapped-out beer kegs. There’s a scatter of bottles on display on the shelves behind the bar, with enough variety on offer to allow patrons the illusion that what they’re drinking matters to them. Blinders doesn’t have to worry about customer loyalty, given it’s the only bar in town, as well as the only source of liquor for about a hundred miles in any direction. During normal hours, it’s reliably hopping. Right now, though, Hubert Gable is, or was, the only customer. It’s nearly two thirty in the A.M. and well past closing time.
Cooper regards the body. To say Gable was a hefty man would be to extend a euphemistic posthumous kindness, given that Gable’s impressive backside threatens to swallow the stool he’s sitting on. Cooper recalls that when Gable arrived in this town, seven years ago or so, he’d been simply burly, a big guy, like a bouncer or a night watchman, someone you might even have called muscular. But time and booze and food and boredom conspired to engorge him. None of which matters to Gable anymore, of course, only to the other three people in the bar, all of whom are considering, to varying degrees, how he got in this current state and how exactly they’re going to move him.
Cooper says to Greta, “Naturally, you didn’t see anyone else in here after closing.”
“Nope,” she says. “I often let Hubert close the place down. I left him here around midnight and headed off to bed. Beauty sleep, you know.” Greta’s eyes have a youthful vigor, but her hands are veined and gnarled in a way that suggests her true age; like several of the longtime residents in the Blinds, she’s on the far side of sixty and looks like she lived every day twice. On her fingers, she wears colorful rings with costume stones, each larger and more ornate than the last. As she talks, she twists and fidgets with the rings. “Hubert would usually lock up, then drop the keys in my mailbox,” she says. “And he was always good about marking in the ledger exactly how much he drank.”