“Things are better now,” Essie said once. “I have my very own house.” She looked fondly down at the dolls in her lap. “My girls like it. Their names are Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle.”
Lila had asked her on that occasion what her last name was.
“Once it was Wilcox,” Essie said, “but now it’s Estabrook. I have taken back my maidenhood name just like that Elaine woman. This place is better than the old place, and not just because I have my maidenhood name and my very own house. It smells sweeter.”
Today, Essie seemed to have slipped back inside herself a bit. When Lila tried to engage her in conversation, Essie shook her head, made violent shooing motions in Lila’s direction, and rummaged in her rusty shopping cart. From it she removed an ancient Philco table radio and started tossing it from hand to hand. Which was perfectly okay with Lila; let her play hot potato to her heart’s content if that was what eased her mind.
As she was getting ready to break for lunch, Janice Coates rode up on a bicycle. “Sheriff,” she said to Lila. “A word.”
“I’m not the sheriff anymore, Janice. Don’t you read the Dooling Doings? I’m just another local.”
Coates was undeterred. “Fine, but you need to know there’s people disappearing. Three of them now. Too many to be a coincidence. We need someone to look into this situation.”
Lila examined the pumpkin she had just torn from a vine. The top was bright orange, but the underside was black and rotten. She dropped it with a thud in the tilled earth. “Talk to the Redevelopment Committee, or bring it up at the next Meeting. I’m retired.”
“Come on, Lila.” Coates, perched on the seat of the bike, crossed her bony arms. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re not retired, you’re depressed.”
Feelings, Lila thought. Men almost never wanted to talk about them, women almost always did. It could get boring. That came as a surprise. It came to her that she might have to re-evaluate some of her resentments about Clint’s stoicism.
“I can’t, Janice.” Lila walked down the row of pumpkins. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m depressed, too,” said Janice. “I may never see my daughter again. I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Every damn day. And I miss calling my brothers. But I’m not about to let that—”
There was a dull thump and a soft cry from behind them. Lila glanced around. The radio lay on the grass next to Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle. The dolls stared up at the cloudless sky with their flat, beatific expressions. Essie was gone. There was a single brown moth where she had been. It fluttered aimlessly for a moment, then flew up and away, trailed, faintly, by the smell of fire.
CHAPTER 3
“Holy fucking shit!” Eric Blass cried. He was sitting on the ground, and staring up. “Did you see that?”
“I’m still seeing it,” Don replied, looking at the flock of moths winging above the tennis courts and toward the high school. “And smelling it.”
He had given Eric his lighter, since it was Eric’s idea (also so he could semi-plausibly put it all on the kid, if anyone found out). Eric had squatted, flicked the Zippo alight, and applied it to the edge of the cocoon in the littered den filled with junk. The cocoon had gone up in a crackling flash, as if it had contained gunpowder instead of a crazy homeless lady. The stench was immediate and sulphuric. It was like God himself had cut the cheese. Old Essie had sat upright—not that you could see anything more than the outline of her—and seemed to twist toward them. For an instant, her features had clarified, black and silver like a photo negative, and Don had seen her lips rolling back into a snarl. In another beat there was nothing left of her.
The fireball rose to a height of four feet, seeming to revolve as it did so. Then the fireball had turned into moths—hundreds of them. Of the cocoon or a skeleton there was no sign, and the grass where Old Essie had been lying wasn’t so much as charred.
It wasn’t that kind of fire, Don thought. If it had’ve been, we would be baked.
Eric got to his feet. His face was very white, and his eyes were frantic. “What was that? What just happened?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Don said.
“Those Blowtorch Brigades, or whatever they call themselves… have there been any reports from them of burning cocoons that turned into flying bugs?”
“Not that I know of. But maybe they’re not reporting it.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Eric licked his lips. “Yeah, there’s no reason why she’d be different.”
No, there wasn’t any reason why Old Essie would be different from every other sleeping woman in the world. But Don could think of one reason why things in Dooling might be different. Things might be different here because there was a special woman here, one who slept without growing a cocoon around her. And who woke up again.
“Come on,” Don said. “We’ve got work to do on Ellendale Street. Bitch-bags to count. Names to write down. This here… this never happened. Right, partner?”
“Right. Absolutely.”
“You’re not going to talk about it, are you?”
“Jesus, no!”
“Good.”
But I might talk about it, Don thought. Not to Terry Coombs, though. It had only taken Don a couple of days to come to the conclusion that the man was next door to useless. A what-did-you-call-it, a figurehead. And he seemed to have a drinking problem, which was truly pathetic. People who couldn’t control their urges repulsed Don. That guy Frank Geary, though, the one Terry had appointed his chief deputy… that one was a thinking cat, and he was keenly interested in the Evie Black woman. He’d have her sprung soon, if not already. He was the one to talk to about this, if talking had to be done.
But he needed to think about it first.
Very carefully.
“Don?”
They were back in the truck. “Yeah, kid?”
“Did she see us? It seemed like she saw us.”
“No,” said Don. “She didn’t see nothing, just exploded. Don’t be a pussy, Junior.”
Terry said he wanted to go home and think about their next move. Frank, who was pretty sure the acting sheriff’s next move would be lying down to sleep it off, said that was a good idea. He saw Terry to his front door, then drove directly to the sheriff’s station. There he found Linny Mars pacing circles with a laptop in her hands. There was a crust of white powder around her nostrils. Her cheeks were colored a hectic red. Her eyes were bleary and sunken. From the laptop came the all-too-familiar sounds of chaos.
“Hi, Pete.”
She had been calling him Pete since yesterday. Frank didn’t bother correcting her. If he did, she’d remember he was Frank for a few minutes, then revert to Pete. Short-term memory loss was common among the women who were still awake. Their frontal lobes were melting like butter in a hot pan. “What are you watching?”
“YouTube vids,” she said, not slowing her circuit of the office. “I could watch at my desk, I know, Gertrude’s screen is much bigger, but every time I sit down I start to float away. Walking is better.”
“Gotcha. What’s on?” Not that he really needed an update. Frank knew what was going on: bad things.
“Clips from Al Jazeera. All the news networks are going crazy, but Al Jazeera’s absolutely shitting themselves. The whole Mideast is on fire. Oil, you know. Oil wells. At least no nukes yet, but somebody over there will pop one eventually, don’t you think?”