Chapter 12: The Town
Millers Crossing heard it the way small towns hear everything worth hearing: sideways, at the diner, with the details sanded down and handed along. Otis Feldman didn't spread it. Otis didn't have to. He just stopped pretending Boone Hartley's coffee was a thing to hurry, and in a town the size of this one a change in Otis's pouring arm was a bulletin.
By the end of the week the plaza had quietly reorganized itself. Men who for four years had crossed the lot to avoid Boone β not from cruelty, just from the cowardice of not knowing what to say to a man who'd buried his whole family β now parked their trucks where they could see down his street and took their time over pie. Ray Dobbins, who hadn't spoken ten words to Boone since the funerals, asked him at the counter how the old Ford was running, and when Boone said it was running fine, Ray nodded like a man filing a report.
"You hear anything, you say it here," Ray said. "Ears everywhere now."
The pastor from the Methodist church came by the house on Tuesday with a casserole Boone did not need, in a dish Boone would have to return, which was of course the entire point of the casserole. It was green beans and something with a crumb top, still warm through the dish towel. They stood on the porch and talked about the weather and the Pirates and everything except the thing, and when the pastor left he put a hand on Boone's shoulder and said, "The town's got its eyes open, Elias," and Boone found he could not make fun of it even privately, because it was true and because it cost some of them something to do it.
Miriam called from Florida that night. His sister had the news from a cousin of a cousin, which meant she had it embroidered.
"Elias, get on a plane. I mean it. I have the spare room and the pullout and that ridiculous dog, and you can stay until they find this β this creature. Please. June would want me to β"
"Miriam."
"Don't Miriam me. You're one man in a house with how many doors? I counted once. Seven doors, Elias. Seven."
"He doesn't get my kitchen, Miriam," Boone said. "He doesn't get my road. I ran this town's pumps for thirty years and I buried my girls from that house and I will not be moved out of it like smoke out a window. Not by him. You hear me?"
The silence on the line had its own geography. He could hear Florida in it β the air conditioner, the dog's tags β and she could hear his kitchen clock, and for a moment they were just two old people on a telephone holding opposite ends of the same rope.
"I hear you," she said at last. "I don't like it, but I hear you. You call me every night. Every night, or I call the troopers my own self."
"Every night."
What Boone did with his days would not have looked like anything to a stranger. He worked his shifts. He swept the plaza lot. He checked his doors the way he had always checked his doors, because a man who changes his habits for fear has already moved out of his house in every way that matters. He also oiled the hinges on the back gate, a job he had been meaning to do since spring, because a gate that doesn't squeak tells you nothing. But he noticed things now that he cataloged without deciding to: which cars belonged on which streets, the hour the streetlights came on, the way the town at dusk arranged itself into sightlines. Otis kept the diner open an hour later without announcing why. The state police cruiser came down his street at hours that never repeated, and once, at two in the morning, Boone stood in his dark kitchen and watched it roll past slow, and raised two fingers from the shadow of the window where nobody could see, in thanks or in acknowledgment β he wasn't sure himself.
People asked him, in the roundabout way of people who are really asking if he was afraid, whether he was sleeping. He told them he slept like a man with a good lock, which was close enough to true to pass.
What he did not tell them was that the waiting had a texture he recognized. It was the texture of the hospital corridor four years ago, the chairs, the vending machine light. His whole life since had been a smaller version of that corridor. Now the corridor had a door at the end of it again, and something on the other side, and Boone Hartley β who had surprised himself by surviving the first walk down it β discovered that he could stand in it without flinching, so long as the town stood in it with him.