Under the Dome: A Novel (14 page)

As the past perfect clanged in his mind, Andy groaned again.

Claudette and Big Jim had even collaborated on fixing up the town’s books that time when the state audited them. It was supposed to be a surprise audit, but Big Jim had gotten advance word. Not much; just enough for them to go to work with the computer program Claudette called MR. CLEAN. They called it that because it always produced clean numbers. They’d come out of that audit shiny side up instead of going to jail (which wouldn’t have been fair, since most of what they were doing—almost all, in fact—was for the town’s own good).

The truth about Claudette Sanders was this: she’d been a prettier Jim Rennie, a
kinder
Jim Rennie, one he could sleep with and tell his secrets to, and life without her was unthinkable.

Andy started to tear up again, and that was when Big Jim himself put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Andy hadn’t heard him come in, but he didn’t jump. He had almost expected the hand, because its owner always seemed to turn up when Andy needed him the most.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Big Jim said. “Andy—pal—I’m just so, so sorry.”

Andy lurched to his feet, groped his arms around Big Jim’s bulk, and began to sob against Big Jim’s jacket.
“I told her those lessons were dangerous! I told her Chuck Thompson was a jackass, just like his father!”

Big Jim rubbed his back with a soothing palm. “I know. But she’s in a better place now, Andy—she had dinner with Jesus Christ tonight—roast beef, fresh peas, mashed with gravy! How’s that for an awesome thought? You hang onto that. Think we should pray?”

“Yes!” Andy sobbed. “Yes, Big Jim! Pray with me!”

They got on their knees and Big Jim prayed long and hard for the
soul of Claudette Sanders. (Below them, in the workroom, Stewart Bowie heard, looked up at the ceiling, and observed: “That man shits from both ends.”)

After four or five minutes of
we see through a glass darkly
and
when I was a child I spake as a child
(Andy didn’t quite see the relevance of that one, but didn’t care; it was comforting just to be kneebound with Big Jim), Rennie finished up—“ForJesussakeamen”—and helped Andy to his feet.

Face-to-face and bosom to bosom, Big Jim grasped Andy by the upper arms and looked into his eyes. “So, partner,” he said. He always called Andy partner when the situation was serious. “Are you ready to go to work?”

Andy stared at him dumbly.

Big Jim nodded as if Andy had made a reasonable (under the circumstances) protest. “I know it’s hard. Not fair. Inappropriate time to ask you. And you’d be within your rights—God knows you would—if you were to bust me one right in the cotton-picking chops. But sometimes we have to put the welfare of others first—isn’t that true?”

“The good of the town,” Andy said. For the first time since getting the news about Claudie, he saw a sliver of light.

Big Jim nodded. His face was solemn, but his eyes were shining. Andy had a strange thought:
He looks ten years younger.
“Right you are. We’re custodians, partner. Custodians of the common good. Not always easy, but never unnecessary. I sent the Wettington woman to hunt up Andrea. Told her to bring Andrea to the conference room. In handcuffs, if that’s what it takes.” Big Jim laughed. “She’ll be there. And Pete Randolph’s making a list of all the available town cops. Aren’t enough. We’ve got to address that, partner. If this situation goes on, authority’s going to be key. So what do you say? Can you suit up for me?”

Andy nodded. He thought it might take his mind off this. Even if it didn’t, he needed to make like a bee and buzz. Looking at Gert Evans’s coffin was beginning to give him the willies. The silent tears of the Chief’s widow had given him the willies, too. And it
wouldn’t be hard. All he really needed to do was sit there at the conference table and raise his hand when Big Jim raised his. Andrea Grinnell, who never seemed entirely awake, would do the same. If emergency measures of some sort needed to be implemented, Big Jim would see that they were. Big Jim would take care of everything.

“Let’s go,” Andy replied.

Big Jim clapped him on the back, slung an arm over Andy’s thin shoulders, and led him out of the Remembrance Parlor. It was a heavy arm. Meaty. But it felt good.

He never even thought of his daughter. In his grief, Andy Sanders had forgotten her entirely.

2

Julia Shumway walked slowly down Commonwealth Street, home of the town’s wealthiest residents, toward Main Street. Happily divorced for ten years, she lived over the offices of the
Democrat
with Horace, her elderly Welsh Corgi. She had named him after the great Mr. Greeley, who was remembered for a single bon mot—“Go West, young man, go West”—but whose real claim to fame, in Julia’s mind, was his work as a newspaper editor. If Julia could do work half as good as Greeley’s on the New York
Trib,
she would consider herself a success.

Of course,
her
Horace always considered her a success, which made him the nicest dog on earth, in Julia’s book. She would walk him as soon as she got home, then enhance herself further in his eyes by scattering a few pieces of last night’s steak on top of his kibble. That would make them both feel good, and she wanted to feel good—about something, anything—because she was troubled.

This was not a new state for her. She had lived in The Mill for all of her forty-three years, and in the last ten she liked what she saw in her hometown less and less. She worried about the inexplicable decay of the town’s sewer system and waste treatment plant in spite of all the money that had been poured into them, she worried
about the impending closure of Cloud Top, the town’s ski resort, she worried that James Rennie was stealing even more from the town till than she suspected (and she suspected he had been stealing a great deal for decades). And of course she was worried about this new thing, which seemed to her almost too big to comprehend. Every time she tried to get a handle on it, her mind would fix on some part that was small but concrete: her increasing inability to place calls on her cell phone, for instance. And she hadn’t
received
a single one, which was very troubling. Never mind concerned friends and relatives outside of town trying to get in touch; she should have been jammed up with calls from other papers: the Lewiston
Sun,
the Portland
Press Herald,
perhaps even the
New York Times.

Was everyone else in The Mill having the same problems?

She should go out to the Motton town line and see for herself. If she couldn’t use her phone to buzz Pete Freeman, her best photographer, she could take some pix herself with what she called her Emergency Nikon. She had heard there was now some sort of quarantine zone in place on the Motton and Tarker’s Mills sides of the barrier—probably the other towns, as well—but surely she could get close on this side. They could warn her off, but if the barrier was as impermeable as she was hearing, warning would be the extent of it.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” she said. Absolutely true. If words
could
hurt her, Jim Rennie would have had her in ICU after the story she’d written about that joke audit the state had pulled three years ago. Certainly he’d blabbed aplenty-o about suing the paper, but blabbing was all it had been; she had even briefly considered an editorial on the subject, mostly because she had a terrific headline: SUPPOSED SUIT SLIPS FROM SIGHT.

So, yes, she had worries. They came with the job. What she wasn’t used to worrying about was her own behavior, and now, standing on the corner of Main and Comm, she was. Instead of turning left on Main, she looked back the way she had come. And spoke in the low murmur she usually reserved for Horace. “I shouldn’t have left that girl alone.”

Julia would not have done, if she’d come in her car. But she’d come on foot, and besides—Dodee had been so
insistent.
There had been a smell about her, too. Pot? Maybe. Not that Julia had any strong objections to that. She had smoked her own share over the years. And maybe it would calm the girl. Take the edge off her grief while it was sharpest and most likely to cut.

“Don’t worry about me,” Dodee had said, “I’ll find my dad. But first I have to dress.” And indicated the robe she was wearing.

“I’ll wait,” Julia had replied … although she didn’t
want
to wait. She had a long night ahead of her, beginning with her duty to her dog. Horace must be close to bursting by now, having missed his five o’clock walk, and he’d be hungry. When those things were taken care of, she really had to go out to what people were calling the barrier. See it for herself. Photograph whatever there was to be photographed.

Even that wouldn’t be the end. She’d have to see about putting out some sort of extra edition of the
Democrat.
It was important to her and she thought it might be important to the town. Of course, all this might be over tomorrow, but Julia had a feeling—partly in her head, partly in her heart—that it wouldn’t be.

And yet. Dodee Sanders should not have been left alone. She’d seemed to be holding herself together, but that might only have been shock and denial masquerading as calm. And the dope, of course. But she
had
been coherent.

“You don’t need to wait. I don’t want you to wait.”

“I don’t know if being alone right now is wise, dear.”

“I’ll go to Angie’s,” Dodee said, and seemed to brighten a little at the thought even as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. “She’ll go with me to find Daddy.” She nodded. “Angie’s the one I want.”

In Julia’s opinion, the McCain girl had only marginally more sense than this one, who had inherited her mother’s looks but—unfortunately—her father’s brains. Angie was a friend, though, and if ever there was a friend in need who needed a friend indeed, it was Dodee Sanders tonight.

“I could go with you….” Not wanting to. Knowing that, even in her current state of fresh bereavement, the girl could probably see that.

“No. It’s only a few blocks.”

“Well …”

“Ms. Shumway … are you
sure
? Are you sure my mother—?”

Very reluctantly, Julia had nodded. She’d gotten confirmation of the airplane’s tail number from Ernie Calvert. She’d gotten something else from him as well, a thing that should more properly have gone to the police. Julia might have insisted that Ernie take it to them, but for the dismaying news that Duke Perkins was dead and that incompetent weasel Randolph was in charge.

What Ernie gave her was Claudette’s bloodstained driver’s license. It had been in Julia’s pocket as she stood on the Sanders stoop, and in her pocket it had stayed. She’d give it either to Andy or to this pale, mussy-haired girl when the right time came … but this was not the time.

“Thank you,” Dodee had said in a sadly formal tone of voice. “Now please go away. I don’t mean to be crappy about it, but—” She never finished the thought, only closed the door on it.

And what had Julia Shumway done? Obeyed the command of a grief-stricken twenty-year-old girl who might be too stoned to be fully responsible for herself. But there were other responsibilities tonight, hard as that was. Horace, for one. And the newspaper. People might make fun of Pete Freeman’s grainy black-and-white photos and the
Democrat
’s exhaustive coverage of such local fetes as Mill Middle School’s Enchanted Night dance; they might claim its only practical use was as a cat-box liner—but they needed it, especially when something bad happened. Julia meant to see that they had it tomorrow, even if she had to stay up all night. Which, with both of her regular reporters out of town for the weekend, she probably would.

Julia found herself actually looking forward to this challenge, and Dodee Sanders’s woeful face began to slip from her mind.

3

Horace looked at her reproachfully when she came in, but there were no damp patches on the carpet and no little brown package under the chair in the hall—a magic spot he seemed to believe invisible to human eyes. She snapped his leash on, took him out, and waited patiently while he pissed by his favorite sewer, tottering as he did it; Horace was fifteen, old for a Corgi. While he went, she stared at the white bubble of light on the southern horizon. It looked to her like an image out of a Steven Spielberg science fiction movie. It was bigger than ever, and she could hear the
whupapa-whuppa-whuppa
of helicopters, faint but constant. She even saw one in silhouette, speeding across that tall arc of brilliance. How many Christing spotlights had they set up out there, anyway? It was as if North Motton had become an LZ in Iraq.

Horace was now walking in lazy circles, sniffing out the perfect place to finish tonight’s ritual of elimination, doing that ever-popular doggie dance, the Poop Walk. Julia took the opportunity to try her cell phone again. As had been the case all too often tonight, she got the normal series of peeping tones … and then nothing but silence.

I’ll have to Xerox the paper. Which means seven hundred and fifty copies, max.

The
Democrat
hadn’t printed its own paper for twenty years. Until 2002, Julia had taken each week’s dummy over to View Printing in Castle Rock, and now she didn’t even have to do that. She e-mailed the pages on Tuesday nights, and the finished papers, neatly bound in plastic, were delivered by View Printing before seven o’clock the next morning. To Julia, who’d grown up dealing with penciled corrections and typewritten copy that was “nailed” when it was finished, this seemed like magic. And, like all magic, slightly untrustworthy.

Tonight, the mistrust was justified. She might still be able to e-mail
comps to View Printing, but no one would be able to deliver the finished papers in the morning. She guessed that by the morning, nobody would be able to get within five miles of The Mill’s borders.
Any
of its borders. Luckily for her, there was a nice big generator in the former print room, her photocopying machine was a monster, and she had over five hundred reams of paper stacked out back. If she could get Pete Freeman to help her … or Tony Guay, who covered sports …