“No one in, no one out.”
She hefts her lone case and walks away, figuring she’ll have to identify whoever’s in charge later. She’ll be okay, she thinks, she’s got an open face. In the meantime, if nothing else, she wants that photo of her father back—let me at least have that as a souvenir of all this, she thinks. She decides to walk past Wayne’s house, one last time, just to see if the photo she left is still half-sticking out from under the door, so she can snatch it back. Which she’s sure it will be. She’s starting to wonder if William Wayne even exists. Or if maybe he died years ago, and there’s no one to notice, or care. Maybe he’s just a bogeyman, a legend languishing behind a locked door. As she trudges down his block and approaches his house, suitcase held in one hand, she must look like a traveling salesman, she thinks, with her bag of cheap inducements—and then she sees the photo. It’s not under the door anymore. It’s taped up inside the window, facing out to the street.
Her father’s face.
Left like a message. From William Wayne. To her.
She walks up to the door and knocks.
24.
MARILYN ROOSEVELT LOOKS UP from her desk when she hears the bell ring over the door to the library. “May I help—” she starts, but something in Fran’s face halts her usual chipper greeting.
“This week’s papers,” Fran says, tugging Isaac behind here. “Do you still have them?”
“Sure, they’re all out on the rack.”
“What about the last few months? Do you keep those, too?”
“I’m supposed to recycle them, so I bundle them up every week. But no one ever comes to pick them up. If you want, you can find them all in the back room. Is there something specific you’re looking for?”
“I just want to have a look through.” Fran steers Isaac off toward the YA section to flip through paperbacks.
“But I’ve read all those—” Isaac starts to whine, but Fran gives him a look that cuts him short. He sulks over to the shelves and starts idly flipping. Fran gathers the stacks of inky papers on their long, stiff wooden spines from the rack and lays them with a clack out on a large table. They’re mostly local papers from the castaway towns within a few hundred miles, filled with coupons and news items about fires. The national news sections are thin collections of wire-service copy. Fran’s not even sure what she’s looking for. But something about those pages, in the journal with the quote, the way they came alive under her eyes, convinced her to keep looking; that maybe these papers would have more words that would trigger something in her.
She sits, begins at page one, and starts flipping. She scans through each rippled newsprint page for a spark. Ink blackens her fingertips as she traces the headlines, hoping for—she doesn’t know, exactly. She avoids the local news, the sports, the entertainment—she scans only the national news. It’s like looking for a memorable quote in a book you once read. She’ll know it when she sees it, or she hopes she will.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
Who sent her that message, and why?
Who left those numbers on her wrist before she even got here?
More gray boxes. Small type, and all gibberish. Studies, protests, polls: the usual cacophony of inconsequence. She glances at the dates of the papers—they’re all out of order, and seem to be from random days. She calls to Marilyn: “These papers are old, and weeks apart.”
“I just put out what comes on the truck,” says Marilyn.
Fran turns back to her papers and keeps flipping. What’s common to all these papers? She looks for recurring articles, echoed headlines. Her fingers are so ink-stained now that she’s leaving her own fingerprints in the margins.
She sniffs an inky finger, idly. It smells like gunpowder.
No. Like ink. Right?
Like gunpowder.
She remembers smelling gunpowder. The acrid stink of it in the air. On her fingers. The acrid stink and a jarring, numbing shudder sent back up her right arm.
A recoil.
Her shoulder aches at the recollection of it.
She’s remembering.
She flips.
More pages. More columns. More headlines.
Wait.
MIRACLE MOGUL MAKES SENATE RUN OFFICIAL
A smiling photo. The same man she saw making speeches on the TV in the Laundromat.
She grabs another paper’s national section and flips through it—there he is again. She rummages through the other editions she has piled on the table. Each one contains an article about him, charting his progress as he prepares to run for the Senate seat in California. Detailing his past as a billionaire tech titan, his political ambitions, and his long recovery from a gunshot wound to the head.
She turns back to the first article. About the miracle mogul.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
She reads.
If Fran looked up, she would see through the library’s front window the figure of Cooper, heading back to the police trailer, alone, right down the middle of the main street. As he walks, head down, the restless assemblage of a dozen or so townspeople that has been hovering at the edges of the thoroughfare, conspiring and speculating, converges around him. Buster Ford is the first to speak: “Calvin—”
“It’s under control, Buster,” says Cooper tersely, not breaking stride. “These agents are from the Institute. They’re just here to wrap things up.”
“How long are they staying?” shouts Lyndon Lancaster from the edge of the crowd. Cooper turns; he can tell Lancaster’s out of sorts, because he’s unshaven and looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and his usually impeccable, Brylcreemed hair flops in long strands over his face.
“I can’t imagine it will be longer than a day or two,” Cooper says, though he’s starting to imagine it might be much longer than that.
“So do they—do they know?” says Spiro Mitchum.
“Know what, Spiro?”
Mitchum clutches at his apron anxiously. He says quietly: “Who we are?” Cooper can’t tell from his voice if he’s fearful that they might know or hopeful that they do.
“Of course not,” says Cooper. “No one has access to those files, not me, not them, not anyone. You know that.” He turns to walk away.
“I have a question—” comes a reedy voice from the crowd, and Cooper knows it right away: fucking Dietrich. He turns and spots Dietrich lingering near the back of the group.
“What is it, Dick?”
“When whatever comes that’s coming, how do you plan to deal with it?”
Cooper stares him down. “Dietrich, what are you asking me?”
Dietrich repeats himself, as though presenting a delightful riddle he expects everyone will find enchanting. “When whatever comes that’s coming, how do you plan to deal with it, Sheriff?”
“The same way I deal with everything in this town,” says Cooper. “Quickly, resolutely, and definitively.” Cooper’s about to walk away, to let it drop—he should, he knows—but instead he says: “What’s your game, Dietrich?”
“I’m just biding my time, Sheriff. Just waiting.”
“For what?”