Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, “Chad. Let it go.” There was a cloud in the man’s mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning.
“Chad,” he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, “this town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a depressed region anymore. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you.” And then he said, “Marguerite needs you.”
Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man’s head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen’s practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half smiled when she was amused. “She’s waiting for you,” said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it.
“Margie?” said Chad Mulligan.
And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached into Chad Mulligan’s mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon out from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picks an eye from roadkill.
The creases in Chad’s forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily.
“Go see Margie,” said Shadow. “It’s been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself.”
“Sure,” yawned Chad Mulligan.
A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.
Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water.
Soon, Alison would float to the surface ...
As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann’s place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a Maze. He could hear a siren wail.
He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye.
?
Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.
She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with secondhand bookstores.
She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone.
A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of about Sam’s age., with pigtailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie.
“Hello,” said Natalie. She went up on tiptoes and kissed Sam, depositing the kiss snugly between Sam’s cheek and the corner of her mouth. You can say a lot of things with a kiss like that. “You done?”
“Nearly.”
“You want to see a movie?”
“Sure. Love to. I’ve got a good five minutes left here, though. Why don’t you sit and read the Onion?’
“I saw this week’s already.” She sat on a chair near the door, ruffled through the pile of newspapers put aside for recycling until she found something, and read it while Sam bagged up the last of the money in the till and put it in the safe.
They had been sleeping together for a week now. Sam wondered if this was it, the relationship she’d been waiting for all her life. She told herself that it was just brain chemicals and pheromones that made her happy when she saw Natalie, and perhaps that was what it was; still, all she knew for sure was that she smiled when she saw Natalie, and that when they were together she felt comfortable and comforted.
“This paper,” said Natalie, “has another one of those articles in it. ‘Is America Changing?’ “
“Well, is it?”
“They don’t say. They say that maybe it is, but they don’t know how and they don’t know why, and maybe it isn’t happening at all.”
Sam smiled broadly. “Well,” she said, “that covers every option, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.” Natalie’s brow creased and she went back to her newspaper.