Although Candy Meshaum had made a sweet try at it, hadn’t she, Lila thought.
She walked around the box, which was filled with the natural light that came through the open bay door. There was a nicely made bed in the middle of the room, draped in a glossy red comforter that picked up the daylight. Hung on the windowless wall was a framed seascape: fair skies and a length of rocky coast. It had perhaps been scavenged from the original stored contents of the pod. In the corner was a rocking chair, and on the floor beside the chair was a basket of yarn punctured by two brass needles. Another basket nearby contained pairs of expertly knitted socks, examples of her work.
“What do you think?” Coates had lingered outside the box to smoke. (Cigarettes, wrapped in foil and cellophane, were another of the things that had lasted quite well.) The warden—former warden—had grown her hair out, allowing it to go white. The way it spread down to her narrow shoulders gave her a prophetic look—as if she had been wandering in the desert in search of her tribe. Lila thought it suited her.
“I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
“Thanks, but I was referring to the woman who ought to be here, but suddenly isn’t.”
Candy Meshaum was one of four women who had lately vanished, counting Essie. Lila had interviewed a number of other women who lived in the neighboring pods. Candy had been seen happily rocking in her chair, knitting, and ten minutes afterward, she was nowhere. The pod was on the second floor of the storage complex, close to the middle, and yet not a single person had seen her slip away, a good-sized woman with a bad limp. It wasn’t inconceivable that she’d managed such a disappearance, but it was improbable.
Her neighbors described Candy as cheerful and happy. One of them, who had known her before, in the old world, used the word reborn. She evinced great pride in her crafts, and in her pretty little decorated box of a home. More than one person mentioned that she referred to her home as “the apartment of her dreams” without a crumb of irony.
“I don’t see anything definitive. Nothing I’d want to take to court,” Lila said. She guessed, however, that what had happened was what had occurred with Essie: there one second, gone the next. Poof. Abracadabra.
“Same thing, isn’t it?” Janice, who had been looking right at Essie, reported seeing a tiny flash—no bigger than a lighter flame—and then nothing. The space that the woman had filled was empty. Janice’s eyes had failed to detect the transformation, or disintegration, or whatever phenomenon had occurred. It was too quick for the eye. It was, the warden said, as if Essie had been turned off like a light bulb, except not even a filament dimmed that quickly.
“Could be,” Lila said. God, she sounded like her lost husband.
“She’s dead,” Janice said. “In the other world. Don’t you think so?”
A moth perched on the wall above the rocking chair. Lila held out her hand. The moth fluttered to it, landing on the fingernail of her index finger. Lila smelled a faint odor of burn.
“Could be,” she repeated. For the moment, this Clint-ism was all she dared to say. “We ought to go back and see the ladies off.”
“Crazy idea,” Janice grumbled. “We’ve got enough to do without exploring.”
Lila smiled. “Does that mean you wish you were going?”
Mimicking Lila, ex–Warden Coates said, “Could be.”
On Main Street, a patrol was about to set off for a look at the world beyond Dooling. There were a half-dozen women in the group, and they’d packed a pair of the golf carts with supplies. Millie Olson, an officer from the prison, had volunteered to take the lead. To this point, no one had ventured much beyond the old town lines. No airplanes or helicopters had flown overhead, no fires had burned in the distance, and no voices had surfaced on the bands of the emergency radios they’d cranked up. It reinforced in Lila that sense of incompleteness she’d felt from the beginning. The world they inhabited now seemed like a reproduction. Almost like a scene inside a snow globe, only without the snow.
Lila and Janice arrived in time to watch the final preparations. A former prisoner named Nell Seeger crouched on the ground by one of the golf carts, humming to herself as she checked the air pressure on the tires. Millie was sifting through the packs loaded onto a trailer hitched to the back, making last minute double-checks of the supplies: sleeping bags, freeze-dried food, clean water, clothes, a couple of toy walkie-talkies that had been found sealed in plastic and actually functioned (somewhat), a couple of rifles that Lila herself had cleaned up, first aid kits. There was an atmosphere of excitement and good humor; there were laughter and high-fives. Someone asked Millie Olson what she’d do if they ran into a bear.
“Tame it,” she deadpanned, not glancing up from the pack she was digging through. This earned a round of laughs from the onlookers.
“Did you know her?” Lila asked Janice. “You know, before?” They were under a sidewalk awning, shoulder to shoulder in winter coats. Their breath steamed.
“Shit, I was her damn boss.”
“Not Millie, Candy Meshaum.”
“No. Did you?”
“Yes,” said Lila.
“And?”
“She was a domestic abuse victim. Her husband beat her. A lot. That’s why she limped. He was a total asshole, a mechanic who made his real money selling guns. Ran a bit with the Griners. Or so it was rumored—we never managed to clip him for anything. He used his tools on her. They lived out on West Lavin in a house that was falling down around their ears. I’m not surprised she didn’t want to try to fix the place up, wouldn’t have been any point. Neighbors called us out more than once, heard her screaming, but she wouldn’t give us a word. Afraid of reprisals.”
“Lucky he never killed her.”
“I think he probably did.”
The warden squinted at Lila. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”
“Walk with me.”
They strolled along the ruins of the sidewalk, stepping over weed-choked fissures, detouring around asphalt chunks. The little park that faced the broken remains of the Municipal Building had been salvaged, trimmed and swept. Here the only sign of time’s passage was the toppled statue of some long-deceased town dignitary. A massive elm branch—storm-tossed, surely—had knocked him off his perch. The branch had been dragged away and chipped, but the dignitary was so heavy no one had done anything about him yet. He had gone down at an acute angle from the plinth, his top hat dug into the ground and his boots to the sky; Lila had seen little girls run up him, using his backside like a ramp, laughing wildly.
Janice said, “You think her son-of-a-bitch husband torched her in her cocoon.”
Lila didn’t answer directly. “Has anyone mentioned feeling dizzy to you? Nauseated? Comes on very suddenly, and then after a couple of hours it goes?” Lila had felt this herself a couple of times. Rita Coombs had mentioned a similar experience; so had Mrs. Ransom, and Molly.
“Yes,” said Janice. “Just about everyone I know has mentioned it. Like being spun around without being spun. I don’t know if you know Nadine Hicks, wife of my colleague at the prison—”
“Met her at a couple of community potlucks,” said Lila, and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, she hardly ever missed. And wasn’t missed when she did, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she claims to have that vertigo thing just about all the time.”
“Okay, keep that in mind. Now think about the mass burnings. You know about those?”
“Not personally. I’m like you, I came relatively early. But I’ve heard the newer arrivals talk about seeing it on the news: men burning women in their cocoons.”