Under the Dome: A Novel Read online

  Andrea’s smile was as wan as her cheeks and brow. “I know how I look,” she said. The words came out in a croak. “I better not invite you in. I’m on the mend, but I still might be catching.”

  “Have you seen Dr.—” But no, of course not. Dr. Haskell was dead. “Have you seen Rusty Everett?”

  “Indeed I have,” Andrea said. “All will soon be well, I’m told.”

  “You’re perspiring.”

  “Still a little touch of fever, but it’s almost gone. Can I help you with something, Bren?”

  She almost said no—she didn’t want to saddle a woman who was still clearly sick with a responsibility like the one in her carrier-bag—but then Andrea said something that changed her mind. Great events often turn on small wheels.

  “I’m so sorry about Howie. I loved that man.”

  “Thank you, Andrea.” Not just for the sympathy, but for calling him Howie instead of Duke.

  To Brenda he’d always been Howie, her dear Howie, and the VADER file was his last work. Probably his greatest work. Brenda suddenly decided to put it to work, and with no further delay. She dipped into the carrier-bag and brought out the manila envelope with Julia’s name printed on the front. “Will you hold this for me, dear? Just for a little while? I have an errand to run and I don’t want to take it with me.”

  Brenda would have answered any questions Andrea asked, but Andrea apparently had none. She only took the bulky envelope with a sort of distracted courtesy. And that was all right. It saved time. Also, it would keep Andrea out of the loop, and might spare her political blowback at some later date.

  “Happy to,” Andrea said. “And now … if you’ll excuse me … I think I’d better get off my feet. But I’m not going to sleep!” she added, as if Brenda had objected to this plan. “I’ll hear you when you come back.”

  “Thank you,” Brenda said. “Are you drinking juices?”

  “By the gallon. Take your time, hon—I’ll babysit your envelope.”

  Brenda was going to thank her again, but The Mill’s Third Selectman had already closed the door.

  19

  Toward the end of her conversation with Brenda, Andrea’s stomach began to flutter. She fought it, but this was a fight she was going to lose. She blathered something about drinking juice, told Brenda to take her time, then closed the door in the poor woman’s face and sprinted for her stinking bathroom, making gutteral urk-urk noises deep down in her throat.

  There was an end table beside the living room couch, and she tossed the manila envelope at it blindly as she rushed past. The envelope skittered across the polished surface and fell off the other side, into the dark space between the table and the couch.

  Andrea made it to the bathroom but not to the toilet … which was just as well; it was nearly filled with the stagnant, stinking brew that had been her body’s output during the endless night just past. She leaned over the basin instead, retching until it seemed to her that her very esophagus would come loose and land on the splattery porcelain, still warm and pulsing.

  That didn’t happen, but the world turned gray and teetered away from her on high heels, growing smaller and less tangible as she swayed and tried not to faint. When she felt a little better, she walked slowly down the hall on elastic legs, sliding one hand along the wood to keep her balance. She was shivering and she could hear the jittery clitter of her teeth, a horrible sound she seemed to pick up not with her ears but with the backs of her eyes.

  She didn’t even consider trying to reach her bedroom upstairs but went out onto the screened-in back porch instead. The porch should have been too cold to be comfortable this late in October, but today the air was sultry. She did not lie down on the old chaise longue so much as collapse into its musty but somehow comforting embrace.

  I’ll get up in a minute, she told herself. Get the last bottle of Poland Spring out of the fridge and wash that foul taste out of my mou …

  But here her thoughts slipped away. She fell into a deep and profound sleep from which not even the restless twitching of her feet and hands could wake her. She had many dreams. One was of a terrible fire people ran from, coughing and retching, looking for anyplace where they might find air that was still cool and clean. Another was of Brenda Perkins coming to her door and giving her an envelope. When Andrea opened it, a never-ending stream of pink OxyContin pills poured out. By the time she woke up it was evening, and the dreams were forgotten.

  So was Brenda Perkins’s visit.

  20

  “Come into my study,” Big Jim said cheerfully. “Or would you like something to drink, first? I have Cokes, although I’m afraid they’re a little warm. My generator died last night. Out of propane.”

  “But I imagine you know where you can get more,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “The methamphetamine you’re making,” she said patiently. “My understanding—based on Howie’s notes—is that you’ve been cooking it in large batches. ‘Amounts that boggle the mind’ is how he put it. That must take a lot of propane gas.”

  Now that she was actually into this, she found her jitters had melted away. She even took a certain cold pleasure in watching the color mount in his cheeks and go dashing across his forehead.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I think your grief …” He sighed, spread his blunt-fingered hands. “Come inside. We’ll discuss this and I’ll set your mind at rest.”

  She smiled. That she could smile was sort of a revelation, and it helped more to imagine Howie watching her—from somewhere. Also telling her to be careful. That was advice she planned to heed.

  On the Rennie front lawn, two Adirondack chairs sat amid the fallen leaves. “It’s nice enough out here for me,” she said.

  “I prefer to talk business inside.”

  “Would you prefer to see your picture on the front page of the Democrat ? Because I can arrange that.”

  He winced as if she had struck him, and for just a moment she saw hate in those small, deepset, piggy eyes. “Duke never liked me, and I suppose it’s natural that his feelings should have been communicated to—”

  “His name was Howie !”

  Big Jim threw up his hands as if to say there was no reasoning with some women, and led her to the chairs overlooking Mill Street.

  Brenda Perkins talked for almost half an hour, growing colder and angrier as she spoke. The meth lab, with Andy Sanders and—almost certainly—Lester Coggins as silent partners. The staggering size of the thing. Its probable location. The mid-level distributors who had been promised immunity in exchange for information. The money trail. How the operation had gotten so big the local pharmacist could no longer safely supply the necessary ingredients, necessitating import from overseas.

  “The stuff came into town in trucks marked Gideon Bible Society,” Brenda said. “Howie’s comment on that was ‘too clever by half.’”

  Big Jim sat looking out at the silent residential street. She could feel the anger and hate baking off him. It was like heat from a casserole dish.

  “You can’t prove any of this,” he said at last.

  “That won’t matter if Howie’s file turns up in the Democrat. It’s not due process, but if anyone can understand bypassing a little thing like that, it would be you.”

  He flapped a hand. “Oh, I’m sure you had a file, ” he said, “but my name is on nothing.”

  “It’s on the Town Ventures paperwork,” she said, and Big Jim rocked in his chair as if she had lashed out with her fist and hit him in the temple. “Town Ventures, incorporated in Carson City. And from Nevada, the money trail leads to Chongqing City, the pharma capital of the People’s Republic of China.” She smiled. “You thought you were smart, didn’t you? So smart.”

  “Where is this file?”

  “I left a copy with Julia this morning.” Bringing Andrea into it was the last thing she wanted to do. And thinking it was in the newspaper editor’s hands would bring him to heel that much quicker. H
e might feel that he or Andy Sanders could jawbone Andrea.

  “There are other copies?”

  “What do you think?”

  He considered a moment, then said: “I kept it out of the town.”

  She said nothing.

  “It was for the good of the town.”

  “You’ve done a lot of good for the town, Jim. We’ve got the same sewer system we had in nineteen sixty, Chester Pond is filthy, the business district is moribund….” She was sitting straight now, gripping the arms of her chair. “You fucking self-righteous turdworm.”

  “What do you want?” He was staring straight ahead at the empty street. A large vein beat in his temple.

  “For you to announce your resignation. Barbie takes over as per the President’s—”

  “I’ll never resign in favor of that cotton-picker.” He turned to look at her. He was smiling. It was an appalling smile. “You didn’t leave anything with Julia, because Julia’s at the market, watching the food fight. You might have Duke’s file locked away somewhere, but you didn’t leave a copy with anyone. You tried Rommie, then you tried Julia, then you came here. I saw you walking up Town Common Hill.”

  “I did,” she said. “I did have it.” And if she told him where she had left it? Bad luck for Andrea. She started to get up. “You had your chance. Now I’m leaving.”

  “Your other mistake was thinking you’d be safe outside on the street. An empty street.” His voice was almost kind, and when he touched her arm, she turned to look at him. He seized her face. And twisted.

  Brenda Perkins heard a bitter crack, like the breaking of a branch overloaded with ice, and followed the sound into a great darkness, trying to call her husband’s name as she went.

  21

  Big Jim went inside and got a Jim Rennie’s Used Cars gimme cap from the front hall closet. Also some gloves. And a pumpkin from the pantry. Brenda was still in her Adirondack chair, with her chin on her chest. He looked around. No one. The world was his. He put the hat on her head (pulling the brim low), the gloves on her hands, and the pumpkin in her lap. It would serve perfectly well, he thought, until Junior came back and took her to where she could become part of Dale Barbara’s butcher’s bill. Until then, she was just another stuffed Halloween dummy.

  He checked her carrier-bag. It contained her wallet, a comb, and a paperback novel. So that was all right. It would be fine down cellar, behind the dead furnace.

  He left her with the hat slouched on her head and the pumpkin in her lap and went inside to stash her bag and wait for his son.

  IN THE JUG

  1

  Selectman Rennie’s assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she was seen on her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he was a reflective man, in his own way) on murder’s similarity to Lay’s potato chips: it’s hard to stop with just one.

  2

  Big Jim didn’t see the watchers when he came down to the corner of Mill and Main. Neither did Brenda as she walked up Town Common Hill. This was because they didn’t want to be seen. They were sheltering just inside the Peace Bridge, which happened to be a condemned structure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If Claire McClatchey had seen the cigarettes, she would have shit a brick. In fact, she might have shit two. And certainly she never would have let Joe chum with Norrie Calvert again, not even if the fate of the town hinged upon their association, because it was Norrie who supplied the smokes—badly bent and croggled Winstons, which she had found on a shelf in the garage. Her father had quit smoking the year before and the pack was covered with a fine scrim of dust, but the cigarettes inside had looked okay to Norrie. There were just three, but three was perfect: one each. Think of it as a good-luck rite, she instructed.

  “We’ll smoke like Indians praying to the gods for a successful hunt. Then we’ll go to work.”

  “Sounds good,” Joe said. He had always been curious about smoking. He couldn’t see the attraction, but there must be one, because a lot of people still did it.

  “Which gods?” Benny Drake asked.

  “The gods of your choice,” Norrie answered, looking at him as if he were the dumbest creature in the universe. “God god, if that’s the one you like.” Dressed in faded denim shorts and a pink sleeveless top, her hair for once down and framing her foxy little face instead of scrooped back in its usual sloppin-around-town ponytail, she looked good to both boys. Totally awesome, in fact. “I pray to Wonder Woman.”

  “Wonder Woman is not a goddess,” Joe said, taking one of the elderly Winstons and smoothing it straight. “Wonder Woman is a superhero.” He considered. “Maybe a superher-ette. ”

  “She’s a goddess to me,” Norrie replied with a grave-eyed sincerity that could not be gainsaid, let alone ridiculed. She was carefully straightening her own cigarette. Benny left his the way it was; he thought a bent cigarette had a certain coolness factor. “I had Wonder Woman Power Bracelets until I was nine, but then I lost them. I think that bitch Yvonne Nedeau stole them.”

  She lit a match and touched it first to Scarecrow Joe’s cigarette, then to Benny’s. When she tried to use it to light her own, Benny blew it out.

  “What did you do that for?” she asked.

  “Three on a match. Bad luck.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Not much,” Benny said, “but today we’re going to need all the luck we can get.” He glanced at the shopping bag in the basket of his bike, then took a pull on his cigarette. He inhaled a little and then coughed the smoke back out, his eyes watering. “This tastes like panther-shit!”

  “Smoked a lot of that, have you?” Joe asked. He dragged on his own cigarette. He didn’t want to look like a wuss, but he didn’t want to start coughing and maybe throw up, either. The smoke burned, but in sort of a good way. Maybe there was something to this, after all. Only he already felt a little woozy.

  Go easy on the inhaling part, he thought. Passing out would be almost as uncool as puking. Unless, maybe, he passed out in Norrie Calvert’s lap. That might be very cool indeed.

  Norrie reached into her shorts pocket and brought out the cap of a Verifine juice bottle. “We can use this for an ashtray. I want to do the Indian smoke ritual, but I don’t want to catch the Peace Bridge on fire.” She then closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. Her cigarette was between her fingers, growing an ash.

  Benny looked at Joe, shrugged, then closed his own eyes. “Almighty GI Joe, please hear the prayer of your humble pfc Drake—”

  Norrie kicked him without opening her eyes.

  Joe got up (a little dizzy, but not too bad; he chanced another drag when he was on his feet) and walked past their parked bikes to the town common end of the covered walkway.

  “Where you goin?” Norrie asked without opening her eyes.

  “I pray better when I look at nature,” Joe said, but he actually just wanted a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t the burning tobacco; he sort of liked that. It was the other smells inside the bridge—decaying wood, old booze, and a sour chemical aroma that seemed to be rising up from the Prestile beneath them (that was a smell, The Chef might have told him, that you could come to love).

  Even the outside air wasn’t that wonderful; it had a slightly used quality that made Joe think of the trip he’d made with his parents to New York the previous year. The subways had smelled a little like this, especially late in the day when they were crowded with people headed home.

  He tapped ashes into his hand. As he scattered them, he spotted Brenda Perkins making her way up the hill.

  A moment later, a hand touched his shoulder. Too light and delicate to be Benny’s. “Who’s that?” Norrie asked.

  “Know the face, not the name,” he said.

  Benny joined them. “That’s
Mrs. Perkins. The Sheriff’s widow.”

  Norrie elbowed him. “Police Chief, dummy.”

  Benny shrugged. “Whatever.”

  They watched her, mostly because there was no one else to watch. The rest of the town was at the supermarket, apparently having the world’s biggest food fight. The three kids had investigated, but from afar; they did not need persuasion to stay away, given the valuable piece of equipment that had been entrusted to their care.

  Brenda crossed Main to Prestile, paused outside the McCain house, then went on to Mrs. Grinnell’s.

  “Let’s get going,” Benny said.

  “We can’t get going until she’s gone,” Norrie said.

  Benny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? If she sees us, we’re just some kids goofing around on the town common. And know what? She probably wouldn’t see us if she looked right at us. Adults never see kids.” He considered this. “Unless they’re on skateboards.”

  “Or smoking,” Norrie added. They all glanced at their cigarettes.

  Joe hooked a thumb at the shopping bag sitting in the carrier attached to the handlebars of Benny’s Schwinn High Plains. “They also have a tendency to see kids who are goofing around with expensive town property.”

  Norrie tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. It made her look wonderfully tough, wonderfully pretty, and wonderfully adult.

  The boys went back to watching. The Police Chief’s widow was now talking to Mrs. Grinnell. It wasn’t a long conversation. Mrs. Perkins had taken a big brown envelope from her carrier-bag as she came up the steps, and they watched her hand it to Mrs. Grinnell. A few seconds later, Mrs. Grinnell pretty much slammed the door in her visitor’s face.

  “Whoa, that was rude,” Benny said. “Week’s detention.”

  Joe and Norrie laughed.

  Mrs. Perkins stood where she was for a moment, as if perplexed, then went back down the steps. She was now facing the common, and the three children instinctively stepped further into the shadows of the walkway. This caused them to lose sight of her, but Joe found a handy gap in the wooden siding and peered through that.