Under the Dome

“Also,” she said as they rounded the rear corner of the house and entered a commodious backyard, “it will stay light out here longer. I have a generator, but it died this morning. Out of fuel, I believe. There’s a spare tank, but I don’t know how to change it. I used to nag Howie about the generator. He wanted to teach me how to maintain it. I refused to learn. Mostly out of spite.” A tear overspilled one eye and trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away absently. “I’d apologize to him now if I could. Admit he was right. But I can’t do that, can I?”

Barbie knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. “If it’s just the canister,” he said, “I can change it out.”

“Thank you,” she said, leading him to a patio table with an Igloo cooler sitting beside it. “I was going to ask Henry Morrison to do it, and I was going to get more canisters at Burpee’s, too, but by the time I got down to the high street this afternoon, Burpee’s was closed and Henry was out at Dinsmore’s field, along with everyone else. Do you think I’ll be able to get extra canisters tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Barbie said. In truth, he doubted it.

“I heard about the little boy,” she said. “Gina Buffalino from next door came over and told me. I’m terribly sorry. Will he live?”

“I don’t know.” And, because intuition told him honesty would be the most direct route to this woman’s trust (provisional though that might be), he added, “I don’t think so.”

“No.” She sighed and wiped at her eyes again. “No, it sounded very bad.” She opened the Igloo. “I have water and Diet Coke. That was the only soft drink I allowed Howie to have. Which do you prefer?”

“Water, ma’am.”

She opened two bottles of Poland Spring and they drank. She looked at him with her sadly curious eyes. “Julia told me you want a key to the Town Hall. I understand why you want it. I also understand why you don’t want Jim Rennie to know—”

“He may have to. The situation’s changed. You see—”

She held up her hand and shook her head. Barbie ceased.

“Before you tell me that, I want you to tell me about the trouble you had with Junior and his friends.”

“Ma’am, didn’t your husband—?”

“Howie rarely talked about his cases, but this one he did talk about. It troubled him, I think. I want to see if your story matches his. If it does, we can talk about other matters. If it doesn’t, I’ll invite you to leave, although you may take your bottle of water with you.”

Barbie pointed to the little red shed by the left corner of the house. “That your gennie?”

“Yes.”

“If I change out the canister while we talk, will you be able to hear me?”

“Yes.”

“And you want the whole deal, right?”

“Yes indeed. And if you call me ma’am again, I may have to brain you.”

The door of the little generator shed was held shut with a hook-and-eye of shiny brass. The man who had lived here until yesterday had taken care of his things… although it was a shame about that lone canister. Barbie decided that, no matter how this conversation went, he would take it upon himself to try and get her a few more tomorrow.

In the meantime, he told himself, tell her everything she wants to know about that night. But it would be easier to tell with his back turned; he didn’t like saying the trouble had happened because Angie McCain had seen him as a slightly overage boy-toy.

Sunshine Rule, he reminded himself, and told his tale.

10

What he remembered most clearly about last summer was the James McMurtry song that seemed to be playing everywhere—“Talkin’ at the Texaco,” it was called. And the line he remembered most clearly was the one about how in a small town “we all must know our place.” When Angie started standing too close to him while he was cooking, or pressing a breast against his arm while she reached for something he could have gotten for her, the line recurred. He knew who her boyfriend was, and he knew that Frankie DeLesseps was part of the town’s power structure, if only by virtue of his friendship with Big Jim Rennie’s son. Dale Barbara, on the other hand, was little more than a drifter. In the Chester’s Mill scheme of things, he had no place.

One evening she had reached around his hip and given his crotch a light squeeze. He reacted, and he saw by her mischievous grin that she’d felt him react.

“You can have one back, if you want,” she said. They’d been in the kitchen, and she’d twitched the hem of her skirt, a short one, up a little, giving him a quick glimpse of frilly pink underwear. “Fair’s fair.”

“I’ll pass,” he said, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

He’d seen similar hijinks in half a dozen restaurant kitchens, had even played along from time to time. It might have amounted to no more than a young girl’s passing letch for an older and moderately good-looking co-worker. But then Angie and Frankie broke up, and one night when Barbie was dumping the swill in the Dumpster out back after closing, she’d put a serious move on him.