Under the Dome: A Novel (87 page)

“Close to what? What’d they see?”

“A flashing purple light. You know where the old orchard is?”

“Hell, yeah. The McCoy place. I used to take girls parkin dere. You can see the whole town. I had dis ole Willys….” He looked momentarily wistful. “Well, never mind. Just a flashin light?”

“They also came across a lot of dead animals—some deer, a bear. Looked to the kids like they committed suicide.”

Rommie regarded him gravely. “I’m going wit you.”

“That’s fine … up to a point. One of us has got to go all the way, and that should be me. But I need a radiation suit.”

“What you got in mind, doc?”

Rusty told him. When he had finished, Rommie produced a package of Winstons and offered the pack across the table.

“My favorite OPs,” Rusty said, and took one. “So what do you think?”

“Oh, I can help you,” Rommie said, lighting them up. “I got ever-thin in dat store of mine, as everyone in dis town well know.” He pointed his cigarette at Rusty. “But you ain’t gonna want any pictures of yourself in the paper, because gonna look damn funny, you.”

“Not worried about dat, me,” Rusty said. “Newspaper burned down last night.”

“I heard,” Rommie said. “Dat guy Barbara again. His friens.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Oh, I’m a believin soul. When Bush said there was nukes an such in Iraq, I believed
dat.
I tell people, ‘He’s the guy who knows.’ Also b’lieve dat Oswal’ act alone, me.”

From the other room, Michela called: “Stop talking that fake French shit.”

Rommie gave Rusty a grin that said,
You see what I have to put up with.
“Yes, my dear,” he said, and with absolutely no trace of his Lucky Pierre accent. Then he faced Rusty again. “Leave your car here. We’ll take my van. More space. Drop me off at the store, then get those kids. I’ll put together your radiation suit. But as for gloves … I don’t know.”

“We’ve got lead-lined gloves in the X-ray room closet at the hospital. Go all the way up to the elbow. I can grab one of the aprons—”

“Good idea, hate to see you risk your sperm count—”

“Also there might be a pair or two of the lead-lined goggles the techs and radiologists used to wear back in the seventies. Although they could have been thrown out. What I’m hoping is that the radiation count doesn’t go much higher than the last reading the kids got, which was still in the green.”

“Except you said they didn’t get all dat close.”

Rusty sighed. “If the needle on that Geiger counter hits eight hundred or a thousand counts per second, my continued fertility is going to be the least of my worries.”

Before they left, Michela—now dressed in a short skirt and a spectacularly cozy sweater—swept back into the kitchen and berated her husband for a fool. He’d get them in trouble. He’d done it before and would do it again. Only this might be worse trouble than he knew.

Rommie took her in his arms and spoke to her in rapid French. She replied in the same language, spitting the words. He responded. She beat a fist twice against his shoulder, then cried and kissed him. Outside, Rommie turned to Rusty apologetically and shrugged.

“She can’t help it,” he said. “She’s got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.”

4

When Rusty and Romeo Burpee got to the department store, Toby Manning was already there, waiting to open up and serve the public, if that was Rommie’s pleasure. Petra Searles, who worked across the street in the drugstore, was sitting with him. They were in lawn chairs with tags reading END OF SUMMER BLOWOUT SALE hanging from the arms.

“Sure you don’t want to tell me about this radiation suit you’re going to build before”—Rusty looked at his watch—“ten o’clock?”

“Better not,” Rommie said. “You’d call me crazy. Go on, Doc. Get those gloves and goggles and the apron. Talk to the kids. Gimme some time.”

“We opening, boss?” Toby asked when Rommie got out.

“Dunno. Maybe this afternoon. Gonna be a l’il busy dis mornin, me.”

Rusty drove away. He was on Town Common Hill before he realized that both Toby and Petra had been wearing blue armbands.

5

He found gloves, aprons, and one pair of lead-lined goggles in the back of the X-ray closet, about two seconds before he was ready to give up. The goggles’ strap was busted, but he was sure Rommie could staple it back together. As a bonus, he didn’t have to explain to anyone what he was doing. The whole hospital seemed to be sleeping.

He went back out, sniffed at the air—flat, with an unpleasant smoky undertang—and looked west, at the hanging black smear
where the missiles had struck. It looked like a skin tumor. He knew he was concentrating on Barbie and Big Jim and the murders because they were the human element, things he sort of understood. But ignoring the Dome would be a mistake—a potentially catastrophic one. It had to go away, and soon, or his patients with asthma and COPD were going to start having problems. And they were really just the canaries in the coal mine.

That nicotine-stained sky.

“Not good,” he muttered, and threw his salvage into the back of the van. “Not good at all.”

6

All three children were at the McClatchey house when he got there, and oddly subdued for kids who might be acclaimed national heroes by the end of this Wednesday in October, if fortune favored them.

“You guys ready?” Rusty asked, more heartily than he felt. “Before we go out there we have to stop at Burpee’s, but that shouldn’t take l—”

“They’ve got something to tell you first,” Claire said. “I wish to God they didn’t. This just keeps getting worse and worse. Would you like a glass of orange juice? We’re trying to drink it up before it goes spunky.”

Rusty held his thumb and forefinger close together to indicate just a little. He’d never been much of an OJ man, but he wanted her out of the room and sensed she wanted to go. She looked pale and sounded scared. He didn’t think this was about what the kids had found out on Black Ridge; this was something else.

Just what I need,
he thought.

When she was gone he said, “Spill it.”

Benny and Norrie turned to Joe. He sighed, brushed his hair off his forehead, sighed again. There was little resemblance between this serious young adolescent and the sign-waving, hell-raising kid in Alden Dinsmore’s field three days ago. His face was as pale as his
mother’s, and a few pimples—maybe his first—had appeared on his forehead. Rusty had seen such sudden outbreaks before. They were stress-pimples.

“What is it, Joe?”

“People say I’m smart,” Joe said, and Rusty was alarmed to see the kid was on the verge of tears. “I guess I am, but sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

“Don’t worry,” Benny said, “you’re stupid in lots of important ways.”

“Shut up, Benny,” Norrie said kindly.

Joe took no notice. “I could beat my dad at chess when I was six, and my mom by the time I was eight. Get A’s in school. Always won the Science Fair. Been writing my own computer programs for two years. I’m not bragging. I know I’m a geek.”

Norrie smiled and put her hand on his. He held it.

“But I just make connections, see? That’s all it is. If A, then B. If
not
A, then B is out to lunch. And probably the whole alphabet.”

“What exactly are we talking about, Joe?”

“I don’t think the cook did those murders. That is,
we
don’t.”

He seemed relieved when Norrie and Benny both nodded. But that was nothing to the look of gladness (mixed with incredulity) that came over his face when Rusty said, “Neither do I.”

“Told you he had major chops,” Benny said. “Gives awesome stitches, too.”

Claire came back with juice in a tiny glass. Rusty sipped. Warm but drinkable. With no gennie, by tomorrow it wouldn’t be.

“Why don’t
you
think he did it?” Norrie asked.

“You guys first.” The generator on Black Ridge had momentarily slipped to the back of Rusty’s mind.

“We saw Mrs. Perkins yesterday morning,” Joe said. “We were on the Common, just starting to prospect with the Geiger counter. She was going up Town Common Hill.”

Rusty put his glass on the table next to his chair and sat forward with his hands clasped between his knees. “What time was this?”

“My watch stopped out at the Dome on Sunday, so I can’t say
exactly, but the big fight at the supermarket was going on when we saw her. So it had to be, like, quarter past nine. No later than that.”

“And no earlier. Because the riot was going on. You heard it.”

“Yeah,” Norrie said. “It was really loud.”

“And you’re positive it was Brenda Perkins? It couldn’t have been some other woman?” Rusty’s heart was thumping. If she had been seen alive during the riot, then Barbie was indeed in the clear.

“We all know her,” Norrie said. “She was even my leader in Girl Scouts before I quit.” The fact that she’d actually been kicked out for smoking did not seem relevant, so she omitted it.

“And I know from Mom what people are saying about the murders,” Joe said. “She told me all she knew. You know, the dog tags.”

“Mom did not
want
to tell all she knew,” Claire said, “but my son can be very insistent and this seemed important.”

“It is,” Rusty said. “Where did Mrs. Perkins go?”

Benny answered this one. “First to Mrs. Grinnell’s, but whatever she said must not have been cool, because Mrs. Grinnell slammed the door in her face.”

Rusty frowned.

“It’s true,” Norrie said. “I think Mrs. Perkins was delivering her mail or something. She gave an envelope to Mrs. Grinnell. Mrs. Grinnell took it, then slammed the door. Like Bennie said.”

“Huh,” Rusty said. As if there’d been any delivery in Chester’s Mill since last Friday. But what seemed important was that Brenda had been alive and running errands at a time when Barbie was alibied. “Then where did she go?”

“Crossed Main and walked up Mill Street,” Joe said.

“This street.”

“Right.”

Rusty switched his attention to Claire. “Did she—”

“She didn’t come here,” Claire said. “Unless it was while I was down cellar, seeing what I have left for canned goods. I was down there for half an hour. Maybe forty minutes. I … I wanted to get away from the noise at the market.”

Benny said what he’d said the day before: “Mill Street’s four blocks long. Lot of houses.”

“To me that’s not the important part,” Joe said. “I called Anson Wheeler. He used to be a thrasher himself, and he sometimes still takes his board to The Pit over in Oxford. I asked him if Mr. Barbara was at work yesterday morning, and he said yes. He said Mr. Barbara went down to Food City when the riot started. He was with Anson and Miz Twitchell from then on. So Mr. Barbara’s alibied for Miz Perkins, and remember what I said about if
not
A, then not B? Not the whole alphabet?”

Rusty thought the metaphor was a little too mathematical for human affairs, but he understood what Joe was saying. There were other victims for whom Barbie might not have an alibi, but the same body-dump argued strongly for the same killer. And if Big Jim
had
done at least one of the victims—as the stitch marks on Coggins’s face suggested—then he had likely done them all.

Or it might have been Junior. Junior who was now wearing a gun and carrying a badge.

“We need to go to the police, don’t we?” Norrie said.

“I’m scared about that,” Claire said. “I’m really, really scared about that. What if Rennie killed Brenda Perkins? He lives on this street, too.”

“That’s what
I
said, yesterday,” Norrie told her.

“And doesn’t it seem likely that if she went to see one selectman and got the door slammed in her face, she’d then go on and try the next one in the neighborhood?”

Joe said (rather indulgently), “I doubt if there’s any connection, Mom.”

“Maybe not, but she still could have been going to see Jim Rennie. And Peter Randolph …” She shook her head. “When Big Jim says jump, Peter asks how high.”

“Good one, Mrs. McClatchey!” Benny cried. “You rule, o mother of my—”

“Thank you, Benny, but in this town, Jim Rennie rules.”

“What do we do?” Joe was looking at Rusty with troubled eyes.

Rusty thought of the smudge again. The yellow sky. The smell of smoke in the air. He also spared a thought for Jackie Wettington’s determination to break Barbie out. Dangerous as it might be, it was probably a better chance for the guy than the testimony of three kids, especially when the Police Chief receiving it was just about capable of wiping his ass without an instruction booklet.

“Right now, nothing. Dale Barbara’s safe right where he is.” Rusty hoped this was true. “We’ve got this other thing to deal with. If you really found the Dome generator, and we can turn it off—”

“The rest of the problems will just about solve themselves,” Norrie Calvert said. She looked profoundly relieved.

“They actually might,” Rusty said.

7

After Petra Searles went back to the drugstore (to do inventory, she said), Toby Manning asked Rommie if he could help with anything. Rommie shook his head. “Go on home. See what you can do for your dad and mom.”

“It’s just Dad,” Toby said. “Mom went to the supermarket over in Castle Rock Saturday morning. She says the prices at Food City are too high. What are you going to do?”

“Nothin much,” Rommie said vaguely. “Tell me somethin, Tobes—why you an Petra wearin those blue rags around your arms?”

Toby glanced at it as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Just showing solidarity,” he said. “After what happened last night at the hospital … after
everything
that’s been happening …”

Rommie nodded. “You ain’t deputized, nor nothin?”

“Heck, no. It’s more … you remember after nine-eleven, when it seemed like everybody had a New York Fire Department or Police Department hat and shirt? It’s like that.” He considered. “I guess if they needed help, I’d be glad to pitch in, but it seems like they’re doing fine. You sure you don’t need help?”

“Yuh. Now scat. I’ll call you if I decide to open this afternoon.”

“Okay.” Toby’s eyes gleamed. “Maybe we could have a Dome Sale. You know what they say—when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”