The Killing Moon: A Novel

THEY SAY RIVERS USUALLY divide towns, but not Black Falls. The town had grown up around an east-west crook in the south-flowing Cold River, forming a natural crease between the low farmlands to the south and the foothills rising in the north. The town got its name from a pair of waterfalls just up the river, the site of a massacre—so bloody the water was said to run black—of Pequoigs in 1676, at the height of the Indian Wars. The town was not officially incorporated until 1755, the criteria being a population financially capable of building its own Congregational church and supporting its own Congregational minister. A state law in 1831 separating church from state prompted the construction of a new town meeting site, a white clapboard building renovated in the mid-1960s, now resembling a side-by-side two-family house, the town offices on one side and the police station on the other.

That building, symmetrical beneath a round attic window like an always open, always staring eye, stood at the head of the T-shaped intersection of Main and Mill. Main Street represented the top bar of the T, accompanying Cold River in either direction. Number 8 Road, the fragment of an old Hartford-to-Montpelier mail route, shot northward from the western bar, narrowing as it snaked into the hills above town.

Mill Road ran south, being the trunk of the T, first as a low iron bridge spanning the summer-swift Cold River, then as a paved road hooking around the old Falls Paper Incorporated pulp mill, rotting on its river stilts.

About half of Black Falls' 1,758 residents were clustered in the town center, in the old mill houses crowded along Main and Mill, crumbling brick tenements and company-built three-deckers with sagging roofs and slumping porches. The shuttering of the paper mill almost twenty years ago was largely to blame for the town's current state of affairs. Black Falls had evolved from a trading post town in the eighteenth century to a farming town in the nineteenth century to a mill town in the twentieth. But even its proudest citizen had to admit that the twenty-first held little promise. The town wasn't dying so much as it was disappearing. No supermarket. No traffic lights. No ATM. Mobile telephone reception was one bar at best, broadcast television reception almost nil, and the wait for cable television was currently twenty-five years and counting. As "globalization" evidently required paying customers, the modern world appeared willing to leave the town behind.

The town was hurting, financially, geographically, every which way. The community as a whole was depressed beyond simple economics. It was in the grip of a spiritual malaise from which there seemed no relief. The Mitchum County Chamber of Commerce guide referred to Black Falls as "once historic," and Pinty didn't even know what that meant, though the wording somehow seemed right.

Stavros Pintopolumanos leaned forward on his cane, the silver English grip familiar and smooth to his hand. With the bridge and the Cold River at his back, he looked across at what he considered to be the current source of the town's ills. To Pinty, everything started and finished with the police department, the institution which had employed him most of his life and which he had helmed at the time of his retirement almost ten years before. He looked at the big flag atop the pole in front, its colors vibrant even when furrowed on a windless day. As a source of inspiration and a symbol of hope, it buoyed him. He had lived in the same small town all his life, with the notable exception of three years of service in the Korean War, and whenever he laid eyes on the flag hung properly and high, he felt a breeze lift his heart.

This was parade day, after all. Two hundred and fifty years of incorporation, and that wasn't a birthday to let slip by unacknowledged. His hope that such an event might invigorate the town had already been dashed: the parade had started, and the center of town still didn't seem ready for it. So many bare patches along the sidewalks that families should have been filling. But then the Cub Scouts came marching, with their troop flag and their den mothers, and all Pinty could do was smile.

The other two selectmen followed: Parker Harris, the elementary school principal, pulling a boom box in a red Radio Flyer wagon, playing a Sousa march; and Bobby Loom, known as Big Bobby, proprietor of the Gas-Gulp-'N-Go, the minimart filling station a half mile west on Main. Big Bobby was scattering wrapped bubble gum and Dum Dums to the children. Pinty would have been out there with them as the third town selectman, were it not for his hips. He tap-tapped his cane nub on the sidewalk as they marched past.

Pinty saw Donny Maddox coming toward him along the sidewalk and felt a lift similar to the one he'd experienced looking up at the flag. Hope, mainly. But Pinty had learned in life not to hope too hard.

Donny stopped next to him, facing the parade. "Not up to it today?"