The next day he had grilled Jackson and Pruett on the problem, but they were reluctant to fully clear low-level radiation as a cause. “But you see no link,” Thornton pressed, and the scientists confessed they didn’t. In that case, Thornton told them, perhaps the time had come to clear the air just a little.
The man called the next day. Thornton told him that he would talk to him, but not over the phone, and they agreed to meet on a back road several miles outside Merridale. The man was there when Thornton arrived, his tan BMW parked with its rear to the trees so that Thornton could not see the license plate. He stood beside it, the impeccable tailoring of his topcoat giving his massive body an intimidating V shape that made Thornton doubly aware of his own predilection to flabbiness. The man, clean-shaven, hair close-cropped, grasped Thornton’s hand firmly. “Glad you came,” he said.
Everything went smoothly. Deals with the devil usually do, Thornton thought later. He agreed to do what he could to clear Thorn Hill in the eyes of the public, to inform his contact (who unimaginatively asked to be addressed as Mr. Smith) in advance of any detrimental findings, and to withhold any of those findings from the public for as long as reasonable. “We’re not asking you to endanger the public,” Smith assured him. “Merely to give us time to work out a viable response.” Thornton’s stomach tightened. “Viable response” was one of those corporate buzzwords that meant everything and nothing at the same time. Though he used it, he disliked it when others did.
“Now,” said Smith, pulling two thick packets from his pocket. “Two hundred and fifty twenty-dollar bills in each of these. That’s ten thousand all together. An advance honorarium as a symbol of our good faith. Do a good job for us and you’ll receive an additional five thousand per week. If this thing is resolved with no blame being put on the facility, you’ll receive fifty thousand dollars. As a bonus, we’ll say.”
“That’s not enough.” That Thornton protested surprised him even more than it did Smith.
“Not enough?” Smith asked, his jaw suddenly tense.
“A hundred thousand would seem more equitable. TriCounty Power can afford it.”
“Perhaps. But I represent Friends of TriCounty Power.”
“I can’t believe that TriCounty Power wouldn’t have wealthy friends.”
“Dr. Thornton, I’ll be frank. I’m authorized to offer only up to seventy thousand.”
“A hundred. Otherwise you’re just another potential public hazard.”
“I don’t think—”
“A hundred.” The man irritated Thornton. His good looks, his sturdy build, his unflappable air of self-assurance—all contributed to a scenario of a rich man buying a poor one. All right, then. If Thornton was to be bought, it would be for a damn healthy sum. “A hundred maximum is the price. That includes this ten and the weekly fives. If we’re here another two months and you’re clean when we leave, you owe me”—he paused to figure—”fifty. A hundred total. If you have to check with your boss first, you know my number.” It tore at him to hand the ten thousand back, but he did it and turned toward his car.
“All right, Dr. Thornton,” Smith called just as Thornton was about to close the door. “That should be acceptable.”
They agreed to meet every Saturday morning at the cleared spot they now occupied just off the infrequently used back road. Thornton would report whatever was necessary, and Smith would hand over the five thousand in twenties.
It had not been difficult to take the heat off the utility. Thornton did it subtly, carefully, so that there should be no suspicion of any connection, and Smith was well pleased. Only this Saturday morning something was different. When Smith handed Thornton the money, Thornton noticed that instead of the plain white envelopes he’d always received before, these bore the printed return address of TriCounty Power.
“Coming out of the closet?” Thornton asked.
Smith smiled coolly. “Things were in a rush this week. Let’s just say that TriCounty contributes stationery to us because of the fine volunteer work we do for them.”
Thornton put the money in an inside pocket snug against his wallet, and the men exchanged a few words, then drove away separately. As he felt the healthy heft of cash against his chest, Thornton smiled. That made twenty-five thousand so far. Not a fortune, but in only four weeks he had more than he’d made from take-home in a whole year of working for Uncle Sam. He turned left on Coleton Road and, whistling, headed toward Merridale.
Passing through the roadblocks with ease, he drove into and parked in the square, calling friendly hellos to the people he knew and nodding sagely at those he did not. The newsstand was his first stop. It was empty except for Marie Snyder, who looked up sharply from her magazine and smiled, her glasses dropping obediently, dangling from the chain around her neck.
“Good morning, Dr. Thornton, or should I say”—she glanced at the RC Cola clock—”good afternoon. My, isn’t this weather something though? Coldest Christmas we’ve had in years, I think. Guess you’re not so used to winters like this, being from Florida originally and all.”
Florida? Thornton thought. How did she know I’m from Florida? Then he relaxed, remembering that it was in the People article. She must have read it there. Still, she gave him the creeps, always seeming to know more than everyone else about everyone else in town. “How’s business, Mrs. Snyder?” he asked, stepping around the jury-rigged affair of canvas and poles that hid Marie Snyder’s late husband, Lloyd, from view of the customers.
“Oh, it could be better. Lots of customers who used to come in early in the morning don’t bother anymore. But I still open at five-thirty just the same. Have for thirty years, and I’m not changing now. Everything’s fallen off around town, you know. Tom Markley’s not doing well at all, and I’m afraid it’s getting to him. ’Course, Bob Craven’s been a wonder at keeping people’s spirits up. He’s even giving a guest sermon at St. Luke’s tomorrow before the one at his own church. Weren’t for him, most of the people’d be gone instead of just some. Frank Kaylor told me it was about thirty percent, isn’t that something though? I just thank God people still buy newspapers, and my magazine and paperback sales are all right. Escape reading mostly, and who can blame them? If this situation isn’t something to escape from, well I don’t know what is.”
Thornton put a stack of magazines on the counter and Marie Snyder flipped through them, adding the prices in her head. “Newsweek, TIME, U.S. News, TV Guide, Scientific American, Playboy …” She sniffed. “Don’t think much of this one myself,” she said, peering snakelike at Thornton, “but I sell it ’cause so many want it.”
“There’s an article,” Thornton explained, angry at himself for doing so, “about Merridale. They interviewed me for it.”
“Oh,” Marie said, as though that were barely enough of a reason to buy filth. “And Food and Wine. That’s fourteen-fifty. I didn’t know you cooked. Do you cook?” Her eyes were wide, as if ready to see an answer, to gather in one more unnecessary smidgen of information to jam into her already overrich trove.
“Not me. Dr. Pruett.” Thornton reached roughly into his coat for his wallet. “He likes to cook. And with that huge kitchen over at Bashore’s, well, he’s …”
The wallet came out, followed by one of the envelopes whose flap had hooked onto the card case that protruded slightly above the rest of the wallet. The envelope fell onto the counter with a dull slap, face up, so that Marie Snyder could easily see the TriCounty Power logo and name in the return address space. Her hand shot out and clutched the envelope, lifted it, and returned it to the suddenly pale Thornton, while her thin, blue-veined fingers pressed and prodded the unmistakable sponginess of stacked currency within.
“Yes?” Marie Snyder said.
Thornton had the envelope now and stuffed it awkwardly into his pocket. His lip quivered, and he knew he must look as guilty as he felt. “What?”
“The kitchen?” she replied, smiling more sweetly than before. “At Ted Bashore’s house?”
; “Yes,” Thornton said. “Dr. Pruett likes the kitchen.”
“I see.” Marie took the magazines and slid them with practiced fingers into a brown bag. “That was fourteen-fifty dollars?”
“Ah!” Thornton picked up his forgotten wallet that lay on a pile of Messengers and paid her.
“Thank you. I hope you enjoy them.”
He looked at her, uncertain whether or not to read complexity into her simple words, then walked quickly out the door.
Marie Snyder watched him go, thinking how open people were, how they wore their secrets on their sleeves for those wise enough and experienced enough to know where to look.
Through the years little had escaped Marie’s birdlike eyes. Infidelities, dishonesties, lies, cheats—all had been obvious to her. But of all the thousands of secrets that their owners had unconsciously revealed, she channeled only a small number into the town’s network of rumor, and those with discretion. Oh, of course there were those stories that were too good to keep to oneself—stuffy old Grant Evans, the banker, bringing back a case of gonorrhea from one of his banking conventions, or Ed Kravitz finding Thelma in bed with his brother. These were filtered out to selected individuals who would tell only a small circle of people. Such items were never picked up for “Around the Square,” so where was the harm? Marie also had a way of getting intimate details of events that everyone knew about—the way Emeline Barnes cursed her daughter from her deathbed, not only what she called her but why—and the reason that Josh Foley’s daughter went to visit an aunt in Philadelphia for a few months.
There were some stories, though, she would not spread. Although she was fairly certain that Bob Rankin’s wife had had an abortion, she kept her suspicions to herself. The Rankin girl was nice, and though affairs and teenage pregnancies could be forgiven and forgotten over a number of years, murder was something different. So in this case, and in others, Marie Snyder remained silent out of good will. She had never, in her sixty-four years, thought about keeping a secret for any other reason. She had never thought of remaining quiet for money. Not until today, when that fat packet of bills landed like a windfall on her counter.
She had spotted Clyde Thornton’s guilt as easily as if he’d been wearing a wanted poster. And when she did, she was overwhelmed by an epiphany nearly stunning in its clarity. For years and years and years she had sat behind this counter collecting nickels and dimes and quarters, while the Clyde Thorntons of the world passed through, gracing her with their temporary beneficence, buying two-dollar magazines instead of quarter papers. She had always known that guile lay behind the facades, but now she was confronted with rank criminality, a seeping cancer that touched her, and took from her. The money that she paid (and it went up every month) to the electric company was in Clyde Thornton’s pocket, she was sure of it.
Bastard, she thought, hearing in her mind a word she never spoke. It was the Clyde Thorntons, she realized with sudden bitterness, who kept her here in this town of the dead collecting her dimes, counting profits in increments of pennies, the Clyde Thorntons who had caused the pressures that had finally killed her husband, Lloyd, who now lay mute under his shroud of green canvas, lay right where the stroke had killed him in 1964.
Well, maybe now was the time to get some of her own back. Just enough to go somewhere where no dead people glowed blue, somewhere where life wasn’t so damn dull that she had to pry into other people’s lives in order to make her own exciting enough to be livable. Maybe Atlantic City. Or Arizona. She had friends in Arizona.
She waited a half hour, and then called the number of Ted Bashore’s big, expensive house.
CHAPTER 15
Beth Callendar finished stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, then walked back into the dining room, where Jim sat gazing at the far wall.
“It is not easy for me to do this.
“If you had done something, anything, to show me that you care, that you’d just try to change. Not even try, but just want to try … if you’d only want to. But you don’t. You don’t at all, do you?”
Jim shook his head as though it weighed a hundred pounds. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s not a matter of wanting or trying. It’s a matter of being. ‘I am what I am.’ ”
“Goddamn it!” she flared. “Don’t quote the Bible to me! The Bible, the Koran, the fucking Upanishads, you name it—every moral system in the world would call you … sick! You are … are … sick! You’ve got an obsession, Jim. I tried. I have done everything I could. I babied you, I listened to you, I shared your guilt, and when that didn’t work, I bullied you, threatened you … but none of it’s worked. None of it.” She sat wearily in the chair across from him. “Don’t you love me?”
“I love you. Very much.”
“I’ve still got to go.”
“I know.”
“You can still come with me.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Jim”—she leaned toward him intently—”my car is packed. I’ve got everything I need out there. It’s today. I’m ready. And once I go, I’m gone.”
“You could come back. When this is over—”
“What? When what’s over? The bodies? The manifestations? They could disappear now and I’d still go. It’s not these ghosts that haunt you.”
He swallowed deeply. “Maybe someday … I’ll be over it. I can … can come to where you’ll be.”
“I don’t know if I’ll want you then.”
His lip quivered and a large, wet tear rolled down to rest on his cheek like a tiny glass globe. It was not too difficult for her to keep from circling the table and holding him. She’d been ready for his tears, and to her surprise and relief found herself barely moved by them.
It had been less than six weeks before that she’d begun looking for another job. Even if Jim had been as normal as anyone could be in Merridale, she still would have wanted to leave. The night haunts that Jim nurtured were grim complements to the voiceless, incorporeal terrors that stalked many of the children who still attended Hatch Road. Although most had come to a wary acceptance of the still and harmless figures, there was a dull fear in many of the young eyes, a lack of interest in classes until midmorning, when the bus rides to school were finally forgotten, a nervous foreboding that began to creep over them around 2:00, when they realized that soon they must go outside again to be driven past and through the grisly residue of fled lives.
The sentiments were contagious, and she soon found that the intense curiosity that had followed her own first feelings of awed terror had been in time replaced by a violent loathing of the revenants. She was at the point now where she could not bear to look at one.
Yet in a deeper sense it was not the phantoms themselves but the lack of meaning for their existence that bothered her. She found the phenomenon irrational, and irrationality was one of the few things with which Elizabeth Callendar could not cope. It shook her prescribed ideas about life, made her edgy and irritable. If there had been an explanation, she might have been able to accept it, but no one was offering any.
She hated too what the phenomenon had done to Jim. He had, she thought, been getting better, had not seemed as withdrawn and private as before, even though she could see that he was still partially and perhaps eternally haunted by the memory of the accident. But the visitations had changed everything. She had suspected from the start that he would go out to the crash scene, and when he had returned, she’d asked him about it. He’d admitted it freely enough, but did not say what he’d seen. As for herself, she had no desire to see the embankment, especially after seeing how pale and shaken Jim looked after his visit.
“When are you going to go?” he asked in a choked voice. Beth looked up. “Now, I think.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I’ve done what you wanted for too long. Now I’ve got to do what’s right for me.”
The opening had been a godsend. A pregnant teacher quitting right after Christmas, her former replacement deciding not to take the position at the last
minute, and Beth’s résumé right on the principal’s desk top when the news came. An interview had followed, and Beth was in, starting January 3. Leaving now gave her a week to find an apartment, get settled, and prepare her head for being in the classroom once again. Jim had refused pointblank to go. If he would have argued or gotten angry, it would have been easier for her. But he only sat stoically, as he did now, looking and speaking for all the world like a suffering pseudo-Christ who would tearfully accept whatever blows were thrown at him.
It sickened her, and it was with relief that she left the driveway, left the town, drove past the final blue form, and passed through the roadblock. And all the way to Pittsburgh she did not once weep or feel any sorrow at leaving Merridale.
CHAPTER 16
His fingers were so fine, so beautiful. They were long and thin, like those of a violinist. It was strange, she thought, that those lovely fingers of the right hand should have remained untouched. Such fragile things, always dangling freely at arm’s end, unprotected by thick pads of muscle, layers of fat. Only pencil-thin bones, small strands of ligament holding them to the palm. She examined the back of the hand again and saw how the veins stood out against the skin, blue on blue like blade channels on a frozen lake in moonlight. She remembered again how warm and soft that hand was, holding her own, resting lightly on her shoulder, and moving down her back, under her blouse with the clumsy craft of youth, then up to cup her breast through the thick cotton sponginess of her brassiere, and reaching behind her to undo the glowering lock of hook and eye, freeing her to the grateful touch of that warm hand, a touch that gave her grace, bestowed on her something beyond girlhood.
And here was that hand still, unsullied, pure as that first night, nails lovingly pared, scrubbed immaculately clean so as not to offend death when he came to the bedside and took it in his own.
It seemed like only moments before. So much time had passed, yet it was as though all of it had been compressed in Alice Meadows’s consciousness, like that time she had smoked that bit of opium at a party. Tim’s life, Tim’s death, her return to him, were all stuffed into a tiny pill, a true time capsule she had swallowed effortlessly.
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