The Town Read online

  He was not able to be as sarcastic and skeptical about that as he wished.

  Nikolai Michikoff had apparently taken over the reins of the ministry—he had both wanted to do so and Vera Afonin had had a dream that he should, which cemented it—but Gregory was not even sure that he had returned to the church since the funeral. Every time he walked or drove past it, the building looked empty, deserted, and he had to admit that the church looked a little creepy even to him.

  The other woman who had been killed last week bothered him as well. The barmaid. Her murder seemed to bother a lot of other people, too, and the concern now was that there was a serial killer in McGuane. The prospect had everyone nervous. In a town where the crime rate was perpetually low and most arrests were for disorderly conduct and drunk driving, violent crime and the potential for repeat violence set everyone on edge.

  He just hoped that it was a killer.

  Killers could be caught.

  But the things his mother worried about . . .

  Gregory pushed the thought out of his mind.

  He finally found the size of bolt that he was looking for, put six of them into one of the tiny paper bags provided, and walked up to the front counter to pay for his purchase.

  3

  Teo sat in the banya and cried.

  Today, once again, she’d been pushed down by Mary Kay and Kim at morning recess and this time she’d had to go to the nurse’s office and get a Band-Aid for her scraped elbow. Later, as usual, she’d had to eat lunch all by herself because no one would sit with her. She hadn’t even gone to afternoon recess but had asked Mrs. Collins if she could stay in the classroom and read, and her teacher had let her.

  Another typical school day.

  She hadn’t said anything to Adam or Sasha about any of this—and definitely not to her parents—but she’d considered talking to Babunya about her troubles. She needed to talk to someone.

  She was miserable.

  She hated school. All of the kids were dumb and mean, and none of them liked her. She knew her parents wouldn’t understand, though. They would pat her on the head, tell her everything was going to be all right, and suggest that she make an effort to talk to other kids and make friends. Adam and Sasha would just make fun of her.

  She wasn’t like the rest of them, though. She didn’t know how to make friends, and no matter what she did, the kids in her class would continue to make fun of her.

  Babunya might understand, but Babunya had been acting weird lately, and Teo figured it would be better just to wait and talk to her later.

  She rubbed her eyes with a finger, wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She’d been forbidden to go to the banya by herself, but she felt like being alone today and the bathhouse was the only place she could be sure of not being bothered. So she told her mom that she was going to play in the backyard and immediately headed over to the far side of their property, to the banya.

  Now she sat on one of the broken bench boards and looked up at the stick ceiling. She liked the bathhouse; she enjoyed coming here for some reason. Babunya, she knew, didn’t like it at all, but she felt relaxed in the banya, at home. It was cool inside, and there was an aura of peace and tranquillity that made her feel cozy and comfortable despite the run-down condition of the place.

  She wiped away one last tear. She could cry in here and no one would hear, she could talk to herself and no one would know. The banya was a place where she could escape from the problems of the world outside and just be by herself. It was nice to be alone sometimes, and this was the perfect place to do it. No parents around, no brother, no sister, no other kids, no other adults.

  Just her.

  She looked around the bathhouse—at the rubble strewn all over the floor, at the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall. If this place was fixed up, it could be like a little fort or a playhouse. If she had friends, she could bring them here and they could pretend this was a home or a castle or a secret hideout or . . . anything. They could clean up this junk and bring in some toys and make this place decent.

  If she had friends.

  That was the problem.

  “Teo.”

  She heard the voice, a whisper, coming from somewhere within the bathhouse. The sun was going down, and the room was filled with more shadows than light, but it was still too small to hide another person, even a child, and she was getting ready to dismiss the voice, to assume she’d imagined it, when it came again.

  “Teo.”

  The shadows shifted, moved. Nothing passed in front of the door, nothing moved outside, but the darkness within the bathhouse flowed clockwise, like a scene in a film using time-lapse photography, and shadows swirled slowly over the rubble in the center of the room before dispersing and once again flattening out on the walls and ceiling.

  There seemed something different about the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall, but Teo couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She knew she should probably be scared, but for some reason she wasn’t, and she adjusted her butt on the board but did not stand up. This was weird, but it was not frightening, and the banya still felt friendly to her.

  “Teo.”

  It was the bathhouse itself that was talking to her, she realized now, and, hesitantly, tentatively, she said,

  “Yes?”

  “I’m hungry,” the banya whispered.

  Into her mind popped the image of a dead animal. A small dead animal, a rat or a hamster. She didn’t know what made her think of such a thing, but she knew with a certainty she could not explain that that was what the bathhouse craved. It was hungry, and it had not been fed in a long time, and it had somehow recognized in her a kindred spirit. It wanted to be her friend.

  “Friend,” the banya whispered, agreeing.

  And again: “I’m hungry.”

  There was the slightest hint of desperation in the voice, and Teo thought for a moment. She’d seen a dead rat somewhere recently. Somewhere nearby.

  No. A bird. It was a bird she’d seen, on the side of the path on her way over here, and she stood up and hurried out of the bathhouse and back down the path the way she’d come. Sure enough, there it was, lying in a small tuft of dried brown weeds, several dead cottonwood leaves having blown against its unmoving form, one covering its feet like a blanket, one next to its head like a pulled-over pillow.

  She crouched down next to the weeds and examined the bird. It looked like a baby. It was small, and there was something innocent and delicate about its little body. Usually, things like this grossed her out. Adam was always pushing dead bugs on her, holding up worms and dried beetles in front of her face, forcing her to look at flattened frogs in the road. And she supposed that was why she had passed it by on her way to the banya.

  But it did not gross her out now, and while she felt sorry for the little birdie, she realized that it still had a function to perform, that even though it was dead it was still useful. Everything had more than one purpose, and it made the birdie’s death seem not so sad when she understood that it could help maintain the life of the banya.

  She wished she had a shovel, but it was getting late and even if she ran all the way back to the house to get one, it would be too dark for her to find this spot again. Already the light was fading and the bird’s body had started to blend in with the weeds and leaves on the ground. She reached out and picked up the bird, scooping it up using both hands. The lifeless body felt surprisingly stiff and cold, and instinctively she curled her hands around it, trying to warm it up. It was not disgusting to her at all, and she wondered why she had once been afraid of things like this. Death was perfectly natural, and there was nothing scary about it. After creatures lived, they died. That was the way it was supposed to be.

  She carried the dead bird back to the banya and placed its body on the pile of small bones in the center of the room. Immediately, she felt the play of cool wind on her face, light, soft breezes that came in from all directions, caressing her skin with a feathery touch and then disappear
ing into the dark. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before, the most sublime form of thank-you she had ever known.

  There was a pause. A hush.

  She sensed that the banya was grateful, that it was anxious to satisfy its hunger. But it did not want her here while it ate—she sensed that as well—and so she retreated, walking back outside.

  She turned, once she was through the doorway, but the body of the bird was already gone, swallowed by shadows.

  From inside the building came the whisper of air against her face: “Thank you.”

  She smiled back into the darkness. “You’re welcome.”

  4

  Julia and Deanna sat at the small table on Deanna’s back porch, sipping iced tea.

  “I love what you’ve done here,” Julia said.

  Her friend smiled. “Thank you.”

  Julia really was impressed. The yard looked like something out of Country Living or one of those kinds of magazines. A rustic birdhouse emerged from an overgrown patch of pink Mexican primrose, and a narrow dirt path wound between purple-blooming sage and a host of wildly growing desert plants. She and Gregory hadn’t had time to get their yard in shape—they’d cleaned it up a bit, but they hadn’t started planting—and looking at Deanna’s backyard gave her quite a few ideas, making her eager to start working on her own garden. Maybe this weekend, they’d go over to the nursery and buy some seedlings.

  “Paul told me that Gregory had a run-in with our old pal Marge.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a run-in. He went in the library to use their computer and she put on a big fake smile and told him that they all missed me.”

  “Kind of creepy, isn’t it? I stayed away from that place the first couple of months after I quit because I didn’t want to face Marge or her gang, but then I thought that was stupid. This is my town, too, and I’m not about to go around being afraid to do something or go somewhere because of them.

  “So I started going to the library once a week. At first I was militant about it. I’d just go in there and grin at her as she checked out my books for me, but gradually things simmered down, and now I’m just like a regular patron. We sort of peacefully coexist.”

  Julia shook her head. “Strange.”

  “There’s something to be said for the anonymity of a big city. There, if you have a problem like this, you just go somewhere else. You pick another library.”

  “Or talk to that person’s supervisor.”

  “Exactly. But here, you’re bound to see that person again. You have to deal with her. It’s tough.”

  “I take it McGuane has a lot of . . . ‘militia sympathizers, ’ for want of a better word.”

  “You’re right about that,” Deanna said.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  Deanna shrugged. “Who knows? My theory is that these people are basically dissatisfied with their own lives, unhappy with their marriages or their jobs or whatever, and they need someone to hate. For some reason, hating someone else makes them feel better about themselves. And with the Soviet Union gone, they have no real enemy anymore. No organized enemy, that is. No one they can blame all their conspiracies on.”

  “So now they hate our government.”

  “Pretty much. I mean, these are the same people who were so pro-American back in the eighties that they wanted to bomb Libya and bomb Iran and bomb Iraq and bomb Russia. Now they want to bomb abortion clinics and government offices.”

  Julia smiled. “Maybe they just like to bomb things.”

  “Maybe. But it seems to me that if everyone would just live their own lives, would just concentrate on themselves and not worry about what everyone else is doing, we’d all be a lot better off. Happy people don’t march in protests or spend their weekends playing soldier. These guys are losers, and if they’d just try to fix their own lives rather than dictate to everyone else how they should think and what they should do, we’d all be a lot better off.”

  “I agree.” Julia looked out at the garden and sighed.

  “The frightening thing is not just how paranoid and cynical these people are, but how stupid. They don’t trust the government. Fine. But they don’t trust anything else, either. Except their own loony little network of people. Researched, verified stories from newspapers they don’t buy, but some anonymous posting on the Internet they accept as gospel. Some disgruntled janitor from Kentucky comes home after work, eats his Hamburger Helper and starts ranting on the computer, and they believe him more than they do the trained journalists who work for legitimate news-gathering services. It’s scary.”

  Deanna laughed. “I knew I liked you.”

  “You know, Gregory wanted to move back to McGuane because he thought it would be a better place to raise the kids. Southern California’s so full of drugs and gang violence and everything that it didn’t seem like a great environment for Adam and Teo to grow up in. He wanted to come back here because he thought a small-town atmosphere might be better. I thought so, too. Originally.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Deanna smiled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that it’s still hard for me to think of Gregory Tomasov as someone’s dad, as a middle-aged guy worried about where to raise his kids. In my mind, he’s still that obnoxious teenager who tried to sneak into the girls’ locker room.”

  “Gregory?”

  “Him and a couple of his friends. The coach caught them and gave them the choice of being suspended or joining the track team. At the time, McGuane High didn’t have enough boys to even have a track team. Gregory, Tony, and Mike pushed them just above the minimum limit.”

  Julia laughed. “So tell me about Gregory back then. I can’t even see him trying to sneak into a girls’ locker room.”

  “Oh, he did more than that, let me tell you. A lot of those Molokan boys were hell-raisers. I don’t know if they were trying to rebel against their background or what, but they were holy terrors back then.”

  “Same thing in L.A.,” Julia said. “I even dated some of those boys.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. And Gregory was one of them. He was smarter than most of the other kids, more . . . I don’t know . . . modern, I would say, but outside the classroom he was just as bad.” She grew thoughtful. “Although he seemed to change quite a bit after his dad died. He wasn’t here that long afterward—he and his mom moved to California—but there was a big difference in the way he acted. It was like he suddenly turned into an adult or something. He was quiet, serious, seemed to have lost his sense of humor.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I guess I can imagine him as a middle-aged man. I’d almost forgotten about that Gregory.”

  “Every time I ask his mother about what he was like as a boy, she tells me what a perfect and well-behaved child he was.”

  Deanna laughed.

  “I always suspected she was whitewashing the truth.”

  “Or she didn’t know the truth.” Deanna leaned forward. “Let me tell you what he was really like . . .”

  “I talked to Deanna today.”

  Gregory shifted his pillow against the headboard, opened his Time. “Yeah?”

  “About you.”

  He laughed. “I’ll bet she had some stories to tell.”

  “And tell them she did.” Julia pushed down his magazine. “Did you really put red dye in the school swimming pool and then claim it was from girls who were having their period?”

  “I didn’t put the dye in.”

  “But you were there.”

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  “And you told the gym teachers that it was from girls’ periods?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  She hit his shoulder. “You were a brat!”

  “I probably was,” he admitted, laughing.

  “That’s it!” she said. “That’s it!” She started tickling him, and h
e dropped his magazine to defend himself. She got in a few good underarm shots before he grabbed hold of both her hands.

  She gave him a quick kiss even as she struggled to escape. “So what was Deanna like?”

  He shrugged. “Stuck-up bitch.”

  She stopped struggling. It had been clear from what Deanna said that she and Gregory had not gotten along as kids, but there hadn’t been any maliciousness in her descriptions, any resentment in her retelling of old stories. These were things that had happened long ago, and she obviously viewed them as simply humorous anecdotes from childhood.

  There hadn’t been this pettiness in her voice, this flat meanness.

  Julia pulled her arms free. “What did you say?”

  “I said she was a stuck-up little bitch.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  “And she was.”

  “She’s not now.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

  She moved away from him. “I don’t believe this.”

  “I know you’re friends and all, and I’m glad you’ve met someone you like, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

  He reached for her, but she pushed him back. The mood was shattered, and though she’d wanted to make love tonight, she rebuffed his advances and turned away, pulling the covers over her, as he picked up his Time and resumed reading.

  5

  Jesse Tallfeather dropped the empty Mountain Dew can on the ground at his feet and kicked it into the pile next to the kiln. He walked slowly through the statuary.

  Business sucked.

  If things didn’t improve—and fast—he was going to have to declare bankruptcy. He wished he could get out from underneath this, but he’d looked at it from every angle possible, and he just didn’t see a way. He sure as shit wouldn’t be able to sell the business. No one on the reservation had the cash. Hell, no one in McGuane had the cash. Most of the other shop and store owners were barely hanging on themselves. Unless he could somehow convince that Molokan who won the lottery to either purchase the place or come in as a partner—and the chances of that were pretty damn slim—he was going to go down with the ship.