AAH, an acronym that came out sounding like a sigh, was the Tri-Counties’ Adopt-A-Highway crew, mostly retirees with pickup trucks. They were also the closest thing the Tri-Counties had to a volunteer fire department, and often came in handy during brushfire season.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Are you going out there?” Linny sounded faintly disapproving, and Lila wasn’t too tired to catch the subtext: With all this other stuff going on?
“Linny, if I had a magic wake-up wand, believe me, I’d use it.”
“Okay, Sheriff.” Subtext: Don’t bite my head off.
“Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got to do what I can do. Presumably someone—a bunch of someones—is working on this sleeping sickness thing at the Disease Control Center in Atlanta. Here in Dooling, I’ve got a double murder, and I need to work on that.”
Why am I explaining all this to my dispatcher? Because I’m tired, that’s why. And because it’s a distraction from the way my husband was looking at me back at the prison. And because it’s a distraction from the possibility—fact, really, Lila, not a possibility, but a fact, and that fact’s name is Sheila—that the husband you’re so concerned about isn’t anybody you really knew anyway.
Aurora, they were calling it. If I fall asleep, Lila thought, will that be the end? Will I die? Could be, as Clint might say. Could fucking be.
The good-natured back-and-forth they had always had, the ease of their collaborations on projects and meals and parenting responsibilities, the comfortable pleasure they’d taken from each other’s bodies—these repeated experiences, the marrow of their daily life together, had turned crumbly.
She pictured her husband smiling and it made her stomach sick. It was the same smile that Jared had, and it was Sheila’s smile, too.
Lila remembered how Clint had quit his private practice without a word of discussion. All the work they’d done planning his office, the care that they had put into choosing not just the location but also the town, ultimately selecting Dooling because it was the biggest population center in the area that didn’t have a psychiatrist with a general practice. But Clint’s second patient had annoyed him, so he had decided, on the spot, that he needed to make a change. And Lila had just gone along. The wasted effort had bothered her, the resultant lowering of their financial prospects had meant a lot of recalculating, and all things being equal she would much rather have lived closer to a city than in the rural Tri-Counties, but she had wanted Clint to be happy. She had just gone along. Lila hadn’t wanted a pool. She had gone along. One day Clint had decided that they were switching to bottled water and filled up half of the refrigerator with the stuff. She had gone along. Here was a prescription for Provigil that he had decided she needed to take. She would probably go along. Maybe sleep was her natural state. Maybe that was why she could accept Aurora, because for her, it was not much of a change. Could be. Who the hell knew?
Had Evie been there last night? Was that possible? Watching the AAU game in the Coughlin High gym as the tall blond girl went in for lay-up after lay-up, cutting through Fayette’s defense like a sharp blade? That would explain the triple-double thing, wouldn’t it?
Kiss your man before you go to sleep.
Yes, this is probably how you started to lose your mind.
“Linny, I have to go.”
She ended the call without waiting for a reply and re-holstered her phone.
Then she remembered Jared, and pulled the phone back out. Only what to tell him, and why bother? He had the Internet on his phone; they all did. By now Jere probably knew more about what was going on than she herself. Her son—at least she had a son, not a daughter. That was something to be thankful for today. Mr. and Mrs. Pak must be going crazy. She texted Jere to come straight home from school, and that she loved him, and left it at that.
Lila turned her face up to the sky and took more deep breaths. After almost a decade and a half of cleaning up the results of bad behavior, much of it drug-related, Lila Norcross was confident enough in her status and position to know that, although she would do her job to the best of her ability, she had very little personal stake in obtaining justice for a couple of dead meth chefs who, one way or another, had probably been destined to electrocute themselves on the great Bug Light of Life. And she was politically savvy enough to know that nobody was going to be yelling for a quick solve, not with this panic-inducing Aurora thing going on. But the trailer out by Adams Lumberyard was where Evie Doe had made her Dooling County debut, and Lila did have a personal stake in Freaky Evie. She hadn’t dropped out of thin air. Had she left a car out there? Possibly one with an owner’s registration in the glove compartment? The trailer was less than five miles away; no reason not to have a look-see. Only something else needed doing first.
She went into the Olympia. The place was nearly deserted, both waitresses sitting at a corner booth, gossiping. One of them saw Lila and started to get up, but Lila waved her back. Gus Vereen, the owner, was planted on a stool by the cash register, reading a Dean Koontz paperback. Behind him was a small TV with the sound muted. Across the bottom of the screen ran a crawl reading AURORA CRISIS DEEPENS.
“I read that one,” Lila said, tapping his book. “The dog communicates using Scrabble tiles.”
“Now you gone and spalled it fur me,” Gus said. His accent was as thick as red-eye gravy.
“Sorry. You’ll like it, anyway. Good story. Now that we’ve got the literary criticism out of the way, coffee to go. Black. Make it an XL.”
He went to the Bunn and filled a large go-cup. It was black, all right: probably stronger than Charles Atlas and as bitter as Lila’s late Irish granny. Fine with her. Gus slipped a cardboard heat-sleeve to the halfway point, snapped on a plastic cap, and handed it to her. But when she reached for her wallet, he shook his head.
“No charge, Shurf.”
“Yes, charge.” It was an unbreakable rule, one summarized by the plaque on her desk reading NO FAT COPS STEALING APPLES. Because once you started taking stuff on the arm, it never stopped… and there was always a quid pro quo.
She laid a five on the counter. Gus pushed it back.
“It ain’t the badge, Shurf. Free coffee fur all the womenfolk today.” He glanced at his waitresses. “Ain’t that so?”
“Yes,” one of them said, and approached Lila. She reached into the pocket of her skirt. “And dump this in your coffee, Sheriff Norcross. It won’t help the taste any, but it’ll jump-start you.”
It was a packet of Goody’s Headache Powder. Although Lila had never used it, she knew Goody’s was a Tri-Counties staple, right up there with Rebel Yell and cheese-covered hash browns. When you tore open the envelope and poured out the contents, what you had looked pretty much like the Baggies of coke they’d found in the Griner brothers’ back shed, wrapped in plastic and stored in an old tractor tire—which was why they, and plenty of other dealers, used Goody’s to cut their product. It was cheaper than Pedia-Lax.
“Thirty-two milligrams of caffeine,” the other waitress said. “I had two already today. I ain’t going to sleep until the bright boys solve this Aurora shit. No way.”
One of the great benefits of being Dooling County’s one and only animal control officer—maybe the only benefit—was having no boss lording it over him. Technically, Frank Geary answered to the mayor and the town council, but they almost never came to his little corner around the rear side of the nondescript building that also housed the historical society, the recreation department, and the assessor’s office, which was fine with him.