The Leftovers (22 page)

“We don’t call them orgies,” he explained. “It’s more like a spiritual retreat. You know, like a bonding ritual.”

“I’m down with that. I wouldn’t mind bonding with a few cute hippie girls.”

“Really?” Tom couldn’t resist. “Even if they hadn’t changed their underwear for a week?”

“What the hell?” Henning said with a grin. “Purity comes from within, right?”

*   *   *

CHRISTINE NUDGED
him awake as they pulled into the terminal in Omaha. Tom’s head felt big and unsupportable, way too heavy for his neck.

“Oh, God.” He shut his eyes against the onslaught of daylight through the tinted windows. “Don’t tell me it’s morning.”

“Poor baby.” She patted him gently on the forearm. They were sitting next to each other, Tom in the seat where Henning had been.

“Ugh.” He swirled his tongue around the inside of his mouth. There was a vile taste in there—stale bourbon, pot smoke, bus exhaust, sadness. “Just shoot me and get it over with.”

“No way. It’s more fun to watch you suffer.”

Henning was gone. They’d hugged him goodbye around four in the morning, at a travel plaza in the dead center of the middle of nowhere.

“I hope he’s okay,” she said, as if reading his mind.

“Me, too.”

He was on his way to San Francisco, hitchhiking westward with a piece of paper in his wallet, on which Tom had written the address of Elmore’s Café and instructions to “Ask for Gerald.” There was no Gerald, as far as Tom knew, but it didn’t matter. The Barefoot People would take him in, with or without an introduction. Everybody was welcome, even—especially—a soldier who’d decided that he wanted no part of the killing and dying.

“It’s kind of amazing,” Christine remarked, as they stood with the other passengers on the concrete apron, waiting to retrieve their luggage. “You converted him to a religion you don’t even believe in yourself.”

“I didn’t convert him. He converted himself.”

The driver was in a bad mood, tossing suitcases and canvas bags onto the ground behind him, paying no attention to where they landed. The crowd retreated a few steps, giving him room.

“You can’t really blame him,” Christine said. “He’ll have more fun in San Francisco.”

Their backpack landed with a thud. Tom bent down to get it, but must have straightened up a little too quickly. His legs went rubbery and he wobbled in place for a second or two, waiting for the dizziness to pass. He could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead, one clammy drop at a time.

“Oh man,” he said. “Today is gonna suck.”

“Welcome to my life,” she told him. “Maybe we can throw up together.”

A redheaded family was standing inside the terminal, anxiously scanning the arriving passengers. There were four of them: a skinny father and a plump mother—they were around the same age as Tom’s own parents—a sullen teenage girl, and a haggard, one-legged guy in a wheelchair.
Adam,
Tom thought. He was smiling wryly, holding up a piece of paper, like an airport chauffeur.

MARK HENNING,
it said.

The Hennings barely noticed Tom and Christine. They were too busy checking every new face that came through the door, waiting patiently for the right one to appear, the only face that mattered.

SNOWFLAKES AND CANDY CANES

KEVIN GOT TO TOWN HALL
around eight that morning, an hour earlier than usual, hoping to squeeze in a little work before heading to the high school for a meeting with Jill’s guidance counselor. Fulfilling a campaign pledge, he’d opted for a hands-on style of governing, making himself available to meet with constituents on a first-come, first-served basis for an hour every day. This was partly a matter of good politics, and partly a coping strategy. Kevin was a social animal: He liked having somewhere to go in the morning, a reason to shave and shower and put on decent clothes. He liked feeling busy and important, certain that his sphere of influence extended beyond the boundaries of his own backyard.

He’d learned this the hard way after selling Patriot Liquor Megastores, a sweet deal that left him financially independent at the age of forty-five. Early retirement had been the dream at the center of his marriage, a goal he and Laurie had been moving toward for as long as he could remember. They never said it out loud, but they aspired to be one of those couples you saw on the cover of
Money Magazine
—vigorous middle-aged people riding a tandem bike or standing on the deck of their sailboat, cheerful refugees from the daily grind who’d managed, through a combination of luck and hard work and careful planning, to get a chunk of the good life while they were still young enough to enjoy it.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. The world had changed too much and so had Laurie. While he was busy managing the sale of the business—it was a stressful, protracted transaction—she was drifting away from the life they’d known, mentally preparing herself for an entirely different future, one that didn’t include a tandem bike or a sailboat, or even a husband, for that matter. Their shared dream had become Kevin’s exclusive property, and useless to him as a result.

It took him a while to figure this out. All he really knew at the time was that retirement didn’t agree with him, and that it was possible to feel like an unwelcome guest in your own home. Instead of doing all the exciting things he’d dreamed about—training for an over-forty triathlon, learning to fly-fish, reigniting the passion in his marriage—he mostly just moped around, an aimless man in baggy sweatpants who couldn’t understand why his wife was ignoring him. He put on weight, micromanaged the grocery shopping, and developed an unhealthy interest in his son’s old video games, especially John Madden Football, which could consume whole afternoons if you weren’t careful. He grew a beard, but there was too much gray in it, so he shaved it off. That was what passed for a big event in the life of a retired man.

Running for office turned out to be the perfect antidote for what ailed him. It got him out of the house and into contact with lots of other people without being anywhere near as demanding as a real job. As Mayor of a smallish town, he rarely worked more than three or four hours a day—a good part of which was spent wandering around the municipal complex, chatting with various clerks and department heads—but that little bit of structure made all the difference in his daily routine. Everything else fell into place around it—afternoons were for errands and exercise, evenings for relaxing; later on, there was always the Carpe Diem.

*   *   *

ON THE
way up to his office, he popped into police headquarters for his daily briefing and caught Chief Rogers eating a massive blueberry muffin, a clear violation of his heart-healthy diet.

“Oh.” The Chief cupped his hand over the broken dome of his muffin, as if to protect its modesty. “Little early, isn’t it?”

“Sorry.” Kevin retreated a step. “I can come back later.”

“That’s all right.” The Chief waved him in. “It’s no big deal. You want some coffee?”

Kevin filled a foam cup from a silver push-button thermos, stirred in a packet of creamer, then took a seat.

“Alice would kill me.” The Chief nodded with guilty pride in the direction of his muffin. He was a sad-eyed, flabby man who’d had two heart attacks and a triple bypass before the age of sixty. “But I already gave up booze and sex. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna give up breakfast.”

“It’s your call. We just don’t wanna see you back in the hospital.”

The Chief sighed. “Let me tell you something. If I die tomorrow, I’m gonna regret a lot of things, but this muffin won’t be one of them.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. You’ll probably outlast all of us.”

The Chief didn’t seem to think this was a very likely scenario.

“Do me a favor, okay? If you come in here some morning and find me keeled over on my desk, just wipe the crumbs off my face before the ambulance comes.”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “You want me to comb your hair, too?”

“It’s a matter of dignity,” the Chief explained. “At a certain point, that’s all you have left.”

Kevin nodded, letting his silence mark the transition to official business. If you weren’t careful, small talk with Ed Rogers could last all morning.

“Any trouble last night?”

“Not much. One DUI, one domestic, a pack of stray dogs on Willow Road. The usual crap.”

“What was the domestic?”

“Roy Grandy threatened his wife again. He spent the night in the holding cell.”

“Figures.” Kevin shook his head. Grandy’s wife had gotten an order of protection over the summer, but she’d allowed it to lapse. “What are you gonna do?”

“Not much. By the time we got there, the wife was claiming it was all a big misunderstanding. We’re gonna have to turn him loose.”

“Anything new on the Falzone thing?”

“Nah.” The Chief looked exasperated. “Same old story. Nobody knows anything.”

“Well, let’s keep digging.”

“It’s blood from a stone, Kevin. You can’t get information from people who won’t talk. They’re gonna have to realize this is a two-way street. If they want us to protect them, they’re gonna have to play ball.”

“I know. I’m just worried about my wife. In case there’s some kinda nut out there.”

“I hear you.” The Chief’s somber expression turned sly. “Though I gotta tell you, if my wife took a vow of silence, I’d support her a hundred and ten percent.”

*   *   *

THREE WEEKS
had passed since the body of a murdered Watcher had been found near the Monument to the Departed in Greenway Park. Since then, aside from conducting routine ballistics tests and identifying the victim—he was Jason Falzone, twenty-three, a former barista from Stonewood Heights—the police had made very little progress with the investigation. A door-to-door canvas of the neighborhood bordering the park had failed to locate a single witness who’d seen or heard anything suspicious. It wasn’t all that surprising: Falzone had been killed after midnight, in a deserted area several hundred yards from the nearest house. Only one shot had been fired from close range, a single bullet in the back of the head.

The investigators had also been stymied in their efforts to locate the victim’s partner, or interview anyone within the G.R. itself, which refused, on principle, to cooperate with the police or any other government agency. After a contentious negotiation, Patti Levin, the Mapleton Chapter’s Director and spokesperson, had agreed “as a courtesy” to respond in writing to a series of questions, but the information she provided led absolutely nowhere. The detectives were especially skeptical about her insistence that Falzone was alone on the night of the murder, since it was common knowledge that the Watchers traveled in pairs.

We don’t always have an even number of personnel on duty,
she wrote.
Simple math dictates that some of our people will have to work independently.

Offended by what they saw as stonewalling, not to mention Levin’s condescending tone, some members of the investigation team had raised the possibility of using more aggressive measures—subpoenas, search warrants, etc.—but Kevin had convinced them to hold off. One of his priorities as Mayor was to dial down the tension between the town and the Guilty Remnant; you didn’t do that by sending a group of heavily armed officers into the compound on a vague mission to round up potential witnesses, not after what had happened the last time.

As the days went by without an arrest, Kevin expected the police to come under fire from frightened residents—murders were exceedingly rare in Mapleton, and unsolved, apparently random ones were unheard-of—but the outcry never materialized. Not only that—if the letters to the local paper were any indication, a fair number of citizens believed that Jason Falzone had gotten more or less what he deserved.
I’m not trying to justify what happened,
one writer declared,
but troublemakers who deliberately and repeatedly make nuisances of themselves shouldn’t be surprised if they provoke a reaction.
Other commentators were more blunt:
It’s long past time to expel the G.R. from Mapleton. If the police won’t do it, someone else will.
Even the victim’s parents took a measured view of his death:
We mourn the loss of our beloved son. But the truth is, Jason had become a fanatic. Before he vanished from our lives, he spoke frequently of his wish to die as a martyr. It appears that wish has been granted.

So that was where they were: a brutal, execution-style murder, no witnesses, no one clamoring for justice—not the victim’s family, not the G.R., and not the good people of Mapleton. Just a dead kid in the park, one more sign that the world had lost its mind.

*   *   *

DAISY’S DINER
was one of those retro places with lots of stainless steel and maroon Naugahyde. It had been lovingly renovated about twenty years ago and was now getting old all over again—the banquettes patched with duct tape, the coffee mugs chipped, the once-dazzling checkerboard floor dull and scuffed.

Bing Crosby’s version of “The Little Drummer Boy” was playing on the sound system. Rubbing a clear spot into the fogged-up window, Kevin gazed with satisfaction on the holiday scene outside—oversized snowflakes and candy canes suspended from wire stretched across Main Street, real evergreen wreaths on the lampposts, the business district bustling with cars and pedestrians.

“It’s looking good this year,” he said. “All we need’s a little snow.”

Jill grunted noncommittally as she bit into her veggie burger. He felt a little guilty about letting her skip class to eat lunch with him, but they needed to talk, and it was hard to do that at home, with Aimee always hovering around. Besides, at this point in the semester, the damage was already done.

The conference with the guidance counselor had not gone well, to put it mildly. In some vague way, Kevin had known that Jill’s grades were slipping, but he’d misjudged the gravity of the situation. A former straight-A student with stellar SAT scores, his daughter was failing Math and Chemistry and might eke out Cs at best in A.P. English and World History—two of her best subjects—if she aced her finals and handed in a number of overdue assignments before Christmas break, eventualities that were seeming more remote by the day.