The grass was going to be cleared today, as close to the fair’s arrival as possible. Prairie grass would shoot up in the presence of even a little rain, so it was important that the field not get cleared too soon.
Then Touhy had convinced the five members of the town council to agree to allow the fair to set up in the first place. Many of them were concerned that the fair would encourage crime, from public drunkenness to pickpocketing to prostitution.
Touhy had soothed them down with promises that the fair would bring folks from neighboring towns to spend their money, and that meant spending their money not just on midway rides and cotton candy but also on local businesses. Even if that didn’t happen, the town was going to make a profit from renting the field. Free money, he’d told them, for an otherwise fallow and useless stretch of land. It was incredible, the way the promise of cash made all those worries disappear.
“I think everything will be cleared up by the time the fair comes around,” Christie said.
“I hope so,” Touhy said, and the underlying message was It had better be.
He rang off with Christie, who promised to keep him updated, and scrubbed his face with both hands.
It was a problem that the dead girls came from out of town. It was a problem because it wasn’t supposed to happen. Girls from Smiths Hollow, yes, but not out-of-town girls. And certainly not anyone male. When Joe diMucci was found in the woods last winter, Touhy had worried.
He’d worried because it wasn’t Joe that was supposed to be under that tree. It was supposed to be his daughter, Lauren.
Touhy had spent a couple of anxious months after that, wondering if the card house that comprised the town’s foundation was going to collapse. He monitored the financial health of the chili factory—the primary employer of Smiths Hollow—like he was monitoring his own blood pressure. He kept a watchful eye on Main Street for Going Out of Business signs.
If Touhy was lucky, the thought of these two dead girls would pass out of the town’s collective memory, just like the memory of the other girls always did.
It was only Richard Touhy III, and his father before him, and his father before him, and so on down the family tree, who remembered. That was the burden of the mayor, the keeper of the Secret, the one who made certain it was enforced.
Well, there was one other person who seemed to know the Secret, but she never told anyone and she couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Ten years earlier Touhy had seen the film Jaws at the drive-in with Crystal. This was before she took up her afternoon escapades (but maybe they weren’t really escapades, maybe she was just doing her aerobics tape like she said she was) and seemed to still enjoy spending time with him. He’d certainly enjoyed the way she snuggled closer every time the maniac shark ate up another clueless swimmer.
But the thing that really struck him in that movie was the mayor. Everyone in town acted like the mayor was just heartless, letting people go swimming when there was a giant shark gobbling up anyone that strayed into its path. But Touhy understood that character. The mayor of Amity was just trying to make sure his people survived. He wasn’t heartless. He was thinking about the greater good, and the greater good meant a few swimmers might end up digesting in a monster’s belly for the sake of the rest of the town.
Touhy had taken the mayor’s job from his father just two years prior to that night at the drive-in, and the deaths of two girls since he took office had been weighing heavily on him.
Once he saw that film he realized that he should shed some of that burden. After all, it wasn’t as if he were the one killing those girls. And he’d certainly put a stop to it if he thought such a thing could be done.
If he didn’t perform his duty, everyone in town might be killed.
Touhy shuddered, imagining every man, woman, and child in Smiths Hollow massacred. He could almost see the scene—baffled FBI agents (because of course the FBI would be called in) entering house after house, only to find the occupants dead—no survivors of the most mysterious mass murder in American history.
That was not how Touhy wanted the general public to think of Smiths Hollow. He wanted his town to be a shining beacon of success and productivity in a region mostly known for failure. He wanted other municipalities to gaze at his town with jealousy and aspiration.
There had been the failure with the mall—Touhy could admit that; it had been shortsighted of him to let Silver Lake outbid him with better tax breaks. He’d been thinking of Main Street, about protecting the businesses there that would otherwise face competition from large national chains. He still thought he’d done right in that respect, but the construction of the mall had brought jobs and growth to Silver Lake that were unprecedented. If he’d been more forward-thinking he might have been able to save Main Street and get the mall.
And of course, the addition of the mall would have meant more residents. More residents meant more girls.
This was, Touhy knew, a very hard way to look at it, but it was still true. Once someone moved to Smiths Hollow, they never left. Or rather, they might try to leave—go away to college or the military, live for a few years in Chicago or some other city—but they always returned.
Which meant there was always blood to feed the beast.
If he thought about it, Touhy was really doing a public service.
Anyway, after a while people forgot about the girls—even their families. The memory of the mutilated body found under the tree would fade away, to be replaced by a conviction that their daughter had died in a car accident or some such thing. Or the memory of their child would fade away altogether, as if she had never existed.
Touhy wondered if this was how it had always been—if the memory of the girls’ deaths would fade and morph into something else—or if there had been a time when the people of the town had known, too. Maybe the knowledge had dwindled only to the line of Touhy as time passed.
But then there had been Joe diMucci. It was supposed to be Lauren—Touhy had drawn the name from the lottery as he did every year—and he had fully expected to hear the report of her death the next day. When he heard that Joe had been found under the tree, his heart removed from his chest, he’d panicked.
Would nobody be safe? And after that, would it also mean that the factory would close, that businesses would collapse, that the town would come to ruin?
None of those tragedies had occurred, and after a while Touhy decided they were safe. He still didn’t understand how Joe had ended up in the woods instead of Lauren, though.
He drew the name, and that seemed to be enough—usually. The next day the remains would be found and Touhy could pretend it wasn’t going to happen for another year, like the way people thought of their annual dental cleaning. Out of sight, out of mind—at least until that circled date appeared at the turn of the calendar.
But now there were these girls, these mystery girls. Their names hadn’t been drawn from a lot. They weren’t from Smiths Hollow. They weren’t supposed to die in the woods. Which meant that if complete ruin hadn’t arrived before this, it only meant that it was keeping its own time.
Not on my watch, Touhy thought. If he had to sacrifice every girl in town to maintain the status quo, he would do it.
There were always more girls.
Touhy glanced at this watch. Perhaps no one would notice if he slipped out for a little coffee break.
Maybe he would go home and have a sandwich with his loving wife. He had a sudden, powerful need to know just who Crystal was doing aerobics with every afternoon.
10
Karen watched Lauren scrubbing the glass dish that had held the baked chicken legs they’d eaten for dinner. She felt the criticism rise up in her throat—Lauren wasn’t cleaning the corners very well, and if you didn’t get that off, there was buildup—but she swallowed it down again. Lauren was barely speaking to her as it was, after Karen’s outburst that afternoon.
The thing was, Karen knew when she was being ridiculous. She knew that half of what she said to Lauren was just nitpicking, that Lauren was basically a good kid and that every time Karen gave her a hard time for no particular reason, she was driving her daughter further and further away.
But she would see Lauren doing something that was just a little bit off, or thoughtless—like leaving the water on the floor earlier—and rage would fly up, totally unconnected to the severity (or lack thereof) of the crime. And even as she was shouting she could see herself from outside her body, see how unreasonable she appeared and how helpless she was to do anything about it.
Karen resolutely turned away from the sink and pulled the tablecloth off the table, taking it outside to shake out the crumbs. She didn’t need to pick another fight with Lauren—and she could be honest enough with herself to admit that it was picking a fight. She’d been feeling uneasy ever since Sofia Lopez called and told her that she’d found Mrs. Schneider screaming her head off in her backyard because two girls had been mutilated and left there.
All day long Karen had been trying to forget that . . . well, she didn’t know what it was that had happened to David on the sidewalk. A trance? It had seemed, at the moment that it happened, like he was sleepwalking or having some kind of waking nightmare. And when it was over he had smiled up at her and said, “Ice cream?”
Karen hadn’t known what to do. If David didn’t remember what he’d said, there was no reason to remind him—why would she remind a four-year-old that he’d just been speaking in tongues about blood? So she bought him a strawberry ice cream cone and a vanilla one for herself but hadn’t tasted a bite of it.
Then Sofia called and told her what happened on the block earlier in the day and Karen froze in shock, unable to respond. Not because of the girls, though that was shocking enough. But because David had known, and David should not have known.
“Karen? Are you still there?” Sofia asked.
“Yeah,” Karen said. “I’m still here. I was just stunned.”
“If you saw it you would have been even more stunned. I don’t know how I didn’t lose my breakfast all over the Old Bigot’s grass. Karen, it was hideous.”
Karen didn’t ask for details. She didn’t really want to know any and besides, Sofia probably didn’t want the kids to hear the gory details.
I bet David would know if I asked him, Karen thought as she carried the tablecloth back inside. Not that she would ask him.
Lauren had finished washing the dishes and escaped the kitchen while Karen was outside woolgathering. She’d left everything to air-dry in the rack instead of toweling it off and putting it away, and Karen gritted her teeth before she shouted her daughter’s name.
She could hear the music blasting from Lauren’s room upstairs, anyway—Lauren was unlikely to hear her mother screaming while Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was turned all the way up. Karen had heard the song more times than she cared to count since Purple Rain was released, and she was ready for Lauren to move on to a new obsession.
Karen made a half pot of decaf coffee—she couldn’t handle caffeine at night anymore. She couldn’t even have a can of Tab after three p.m. or else she’d be staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle while everyone else slept.
And I might be up tonight anyway, because I think my child had some kind of psychic vision. Though that’s absurd.
How else, though, could David have known about the bodies and Mrs. Schneider? It had to be a psychic experience.
She shook her head. Just thinking the words “psychic experience” made her feel like an idiot. Psychic kids were something from a Stephen King book, like that one that got made into a movie with Drew Barrymore last year. Karen tried to remember what it was called—something about fire? The little girl could start fire with her mind? But David wasn’t like that. That was the kind of thing that only happened in fiction.
For half a second she wished that Joe were there, so she could talk to somebody about it. Somebody who wouldn’t tell everyone in the neighborhood.
Then she remembered that Joe had been useless at talking, would have dismissed her fears.
She also remembered that the reason why Joe wasn’t there was that he’d gone out to meet his lover and gotten killed instead.
He’d thought Karen didn’t know about the other woman, but she had. She was about twenty times smarter than him to begin with, and he hadn’t tried very hard to hide what he was doing. He stopped coming home for lunch, asking Karen to pack something for him or saying he’d eat out instead. There were sudden work emergencies that kept him late at night—people who just had to have their car fixed by the next day. And whenever she asked him about these emergencies his eyes would slide away and he’d say she didn’t know the person who brought the car into the shop.
She didn’t mind, in a certain sense. Once Joe started getting sex elsewhere he stopped badgering her for it. It had been a long time since she’d wanted to have sex with him. Most of the time she just went along with it so he would leave her alone and she could go to sleep.
Every time she looked at him she’d think of all the little things that he did—leaving his shit around for her to clean up, ignoring her when she was talking, or worse, talking over her and dismissing whatever she was concerned about. It was hard to feel romantically interested in someone who thought it was stupid when she got annoyed that he left a dirty glass in the sink.
And okay, she could admit to some degree that it was stupid. It was just a little thing. But little things added up. They could just have easily added up in the other direction, but Joe wasn’t interested in changing. Maybe if she felt less like he was just another child she had to pick up after, they might have worked things out. They’d never had a chance to find out.
If Joe had lived she might have become a divorcée instead of a widow.
This, of course, was the real reason why Lauren and Karen were always fighting. It wasn’t because Lauren was a teenage girl and her hormones were peaking and making her nuts—at least, that was only part of it.
The other part of it was that Karen was relieved Joe was dead, and Lauren could never forgive her for that. It wasn’t anything Karen had said or done specifically. Lauren had managed to ferret it out on her own, even though Karen denied the accusation.
The only thing Karen could do was deny it, because you don’t tell your daughter that you are glad her father is dead.
David was in the living room playing with Silly Putty. He liked to take the color comics page of the Sunday paper, spread Silly Putty all over his favorite panels, and then press it into the paper until the panel was transferred. Then he would show her the picture he’d impressed into the clay before rolling it up again and starting over with a different picture.
He was sprawled on the floor with the paper spread out before him so he could view all his choices at a glance. The plastic egg that the Silly Putty was stored in was on the coffee table, both halves neatly clipped together. David was the opposite of Lauren—he never left his things lying around for someone else to trip on or clean up.
Karen would have liked to take credit for this, but she knew it was just in his nature—just like it was in Lauren’s nature to leave her dirty socks on the floor wherever she happened to take them off. Like Joe.
Karen sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and watched her second child, and wondered.
“Look at this, Mommy!” David said, holding up a piece of putty with a panel from Prince Valiant pressed into it.
“Very good, sweetheart,” Karen said, but she didn’t really see it. All she saw was David, standing on the sidewalk, his eyes blank and far away and then coming back to look straight at Karen.
“It’s Mrs. Schneider. She won’t stop screaming. There’s so much blood.”
11
Miranda toyed with the French fries Tad had left on the table and
swallowed the tears that she felt building in her throat. She was not going to cry in a public place, especially not with those bitches looking over at her every few minutes.
She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Tad ditched Billy at the pizza place, just like Miranda hoped, and when they got in the Camaro he’d kissed her and even did a quick grope of her breasts before grinning and starting the engine.
When they arrived at the mall they’d discovered that the next showing of Rambo wasn’t for an hour, so they decided to walk around for a while. Tad had put his hand in the back pocket of Miranda’s jeans while they did so and she did not object, letting him squeeze her ass whenever the impulse occurred to him. She could see his boner pushing at the front of his jeans and figured he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her during the movie.
Then Tad had decided he was hungry again, so they went to the food court. He wanted French fries so he went to McDonald’s, and Miranda decided that she needed something in her stomach before she passed out. The smells coming from the food court were making her insides twist up. She still didn’t want to eat like a piggy in front of him, though, so she went to Orange Julius and got a drink and hoped the fruit would help her feel full.
Tad was already sitting at the table eating one of two Big Macs when she joined him. There was a large pile of fries and ketchup dumped onto the paper liner of the tray.
“Have a fry,” he said.
“I’m good,” she said, holding up her drink.
“Girls never eat, huh?” Tad said, shoving three fries in his mouth at once. “Guess that’s how you keep your figure.”
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