"Weird."
"Extraordinary," Harry said. She shrugged. It was true, of course.
"I'm sure we've both wished it could have been different. But I guess somewhere deep down we must have wanted it this way."
"I guess."
The exchange faltered there. Tesia looked up and saw that Harry was staring straight at her, his lips pinched together as though to keep from weeping.
"Enjoy the sights," she said. "I will," he replied.
"You take care."
She broke the look between them, went to pick up her jacket, and headed outside. As she reached the front door she almost turned round and went back to embrace him, but she resisted. to do so would only extend the agony. Better be gone, now, and off on the open road.
The parade-watching crowds had long since vacated Main Street, but there were still plenty of people out and about, shopping for souvenirs, or looking for somewhere to eat. The evening was balmy, the sky still cloudless; the party atmo sphere a little subdued by the fiasco of the afternoon but not vanquished altogether.
An earlier Tesla might have brought her Harley to a screeching halt in the middle of Main Street and yelled herself hoarse trying to get people to leave before the lad came. But she knew better than to waste her breath. They'd shrug, laugh, and turn their backs on her, and in truth she could scarcely blame them. She'd caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror just before she'd left Phoebe's house. The lean woman she'd admired a few days before-the woman marked by he' journey, the woman proud of her scars-was now a bag of bones and despair.
Besides, what use would such warnings be, even if they were attended to? If the lad was indeed all it had been promised to be, then there was no escape from it. Perhaps these people, celebrating in the shadow of death and snuffed out before they even knew what force had snuffed them, would he thought the lucky ones in time. Gone too quickly to fear or hope. Worst of all, hope.
Though it was a detour to return to the crossroads, she did so, just to see what clues, if any, remained to the mysteries of the afternoon. Though the streets had been given back to traffic, there were very few cars passing in either direction. There was foot traffic however, and plenty of it. People lingering outside the diner, and in front of the crossroads. A few even had their cameras out to immortalize the spot. Of the people Tesia had last seen on their knees here, praying to the visions they were witnessing, there was now no sign. They'd gone home, or been taken.
As she was putting her helmet back on, she heard a shout from the opposite side of the street, and turned to see her nemesis from Kitty's Diner, Bosley the Righteous, striding towards her.
"What did you do?" he yelled, his face blotchy with rage.
"About what?" she said.
"You had a hand in this abomination," he said. "I saw you, right in the middle of it." He halted a couple of yards from her, as though fearful she might infect him with her godlessness. "I know what you're up to."
"You want to explain it to me?" she snapped. "And don't give me some shit about the Devil's work, Bosley, because you don't believe that any more than I do. Not really."
He flinched. And she saw such fear in him, such a profundity of dread that the rage went out of her, drained away from her all at once. "You know what?" she said. "I think I met Jesus this afternoon." Bosley looked at her warily. "At least, he was walking on water, and he had a lot of scars, so... it could have been him, right?" Still Bosley said nothing. "I'm sorry, we didn't get round to talking about you, but if we had I'd have said He should drop by your place sometime. Have a piece of pie."
"You're crazy-" Bosley said.
"You and me both," Tesla said. "Take care of yourself, Bosley." And with that she put on her helmet and drove off.
Once she was outside the town limits she gunned the bike, certain that the chief of police and his awestruck deputies would not be watching out for speed freaks tonight. She was right. With an empty road and no law keepers to flag her down she roared on her way as though to meet with Grillo, though the embrace that awaited her at the end of this ride was colder and more permanent than human arms could ever offer.
For Larry Glodoski, it was not pills that were keeping the memories hazy, it was beer, and plenty of it. He had been propped up at Hamrick's Bar for two and a half hours now, and he was finally getting to feel a little better. It was not what he'd seen at the crossroads he was dulling with alcohol, it was the pain of their departure. The women on the stairs had given him a glimpse of bliss; he'd thought his heart would crack with loss when they faded and disappeared.
"You want another of those?" Will Hamrick asked him.
There would be other years, Dorothy Bullard thought as she sat in a mildly sedated haze beside her living room window. Other festivals, other parades, other chances for things to be perfect. She had a mercifully confused memory of what had happened at the crossroads, but she'd been assured by a number of kind folks that it had not been her fault; no, not at all. She'd been under a lot of pressure, and she'd done a fine job, a wonderful job, and next year, oh next year"It'll be perfect."
"What did you say, dear?" Maisie had just come in with some fluffy scrambled eggs and a little bran muffin. "Next year, everything'll be perfect, you'll see."
"Let's not even think about next year," Maisie said. "Let's just take things as they come, shall we?"
"Keep 'em coming.
"You want to talk about it?"
Larry shook his head. "None of it makes much sense," he said.
Will passed another bottle down the bar. "I had a guy in here day before yesterday, really spooked me," he said.
"Like how?"
"It was just after Morton Cobb died. He was saying how it was better that he'd been killed that way, 'cause it was a better story."
"A better story?"
"Yeah. An' I was a-what the fuck did he call me?-a disseminator, I think that was it, yeah, a disseminator, and people liked to hear really brutal stories... " He lost his way in the midst of his recollections, and threw up his hands. "I don't know, he just seemed like a sick sonofabitch. He had this voice-it was kinda like a hypnotist or something."
The notion rang a bell. "What did he look like?" Larry asked.
"'Bout sixty, maybe. Had a heard."
"Broad guy? Wearing black?"
"That's him," Will said. "You know him?"
"He was there this afternoon," Larry said, quickly. "I think he was the one who fucked everything up."
"Somebody should talk to Jed about him."
"Jed@' Larry growled, "he's no damn good to anyone." He chugged on his beer. "I'm going to talk to some of the band. they were really pissed with what happened this afternoon."
"Be careful, Larry," Will advised. "You don't want Jed on your back for taking the law into your own hands."
Larry leaned over the bar until he was almost nose to nose with Will. "I don't give a shit," he slurred. "Something's going' on in this city, Hamrick, and Jed's not got a handle on it."
"And you have?"
Larry dug in his pocket and tossed three tens over the counter. "I will have soon enough," he said, pushing off from the bar and heading for the door. "I'll give you a call, tell you when we're ready for action."
Elsewhere in town, a fair appearance of normality had been reestablished. In the town hall the first partners for the Waltz-a-thon were already wanning up. At the library annex, which had only been completed two months ago, Jerry Totland, a local author who'd made a nice reputation for himself penning mysteries set in Portland, was reading from his newest opus. In the little Italian restaurant on Blasemont Street there was a line of twenty customers waiting to taste the glories of Neapolitan cuisine.