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  I dropped my spoon, threw money onto the table, and raced for my car. Soon I was following a silver-haired city father at the sedate pace at which he liked to cruise the town he thought of as his own. Cleo had already turned off, with a jaunty, triumphant thumbs-up for me.

  I saw Pete notice me in his mirrors.

  I also saw the little smile he gave himself, which goaded me into pulling my car out and around until I paralleled him in traffic. Both of us had the tops of our cars down. “Pete! Pull over! I want to talk to you!”

  With a self-satisfied smirk that he didn’t even try to hide, Pete did as I asked, turning into the first available parking lot, which turned out to belong to a grocery store. Why shouldn’t he smile, I thought, as I parked and got out of my car to walk over to him; as far as he knew, he had nothing to fear from me.

  He surprised me by getting out.

  Then I realized that enabled him to look down on me, no doubt putting him more at his ease. We stood there beside his car, facing one another.

  “What do you want, Jennifer?”

  Nothing about insurance, I noticed, no gibe about the news and the rumors.

  “Don’t you want to make some joke at my expense about the insurance, Pete?”

  Something like humor glinted in his eyes, but he put on a sober mien for me. “It isn’t an amusing situation, Jennifer. When you build the hopes of an entire city, only to tear them down after so much work, and so much expense, you cannot expect people to laugh it off.”

  “I’d think you’d be glad, Pete. You never approved of my festival. You know that if it doesn’t come off, Ardyth’s chances to be elected will rise astronomically.”

  “I would never think of myself and my own interests at a time like this, Jennifer.”

  “Pete? When you talk to me, why do you end nearly every sentence with my full name?”

  He looked startled, then disgusted.

  I was having way too much fun, I warned myself.

  “If this is why you stopped me—”

  “I don’t want to stop you. I want to get you started.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes. I want to get you started moving to your car phone to call our insurance company in Boston.”

  “I? I can’t save you, Jennifer.”

  “Really? You’re helpless? A member of their board of directors?”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it. Fury glared out of his eyes, until he lowered his lids so that I could barely read any expression. He was caught. And he knew it. And he didn’t know what I was going to do about it Would I spread it all over the news that one of our very own most powerful city fathers, one of Ardyth Kennedy’s most influential backers, sat on the board of directors of the insurance company that scuttled our festival?

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Pete. You’ve been telling them stories and frightening them with your opinions about what a risk this festival would be, and what an irresponsible person is running it, haven’t you? You scared them off, and they turned us down. I won’t even ask why, Pete. Maybe it’s just because you hate me and my family. Is that all it is? No? Maybe it was solely to advance Ardie’s candidacy, to give you the power behind her throne. I don’t think I care why. But here’s the what of it: You will get on your car phone and call the powers that be, the ones you convinced to reject us, and you will change their minds. You can plead, you can threaten, you could even try telling them you made a mistake about me, but you can and will do it.” I looked him square in the eye, toe to toe. “Won’t you,” I said, not asked.

  He was a very intelligent man, Pete Falwell was, canny as the clam plant he stole from the Cains. A good, ruthless general always knows when he’s licked, and he never risks a further hair on his head after that point. He knew what I would do, because it was exactly what he would have done, in my place.

  “If I don’t,” he said, brisk as if we were conducting business, “you’ll announce my affiliation with the insurers at the council meeting tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, as if seeing the wisdom of that move. “All right. But if this gets out, Jenny, I’m dead in this town, so I’ll have nothing to lose.”

  “And you’ll reverse field again. I understand. You get me my insurance, Pete, and I’ll never mention that you ever heard of that company.”

  He turned to his car, got in, and picked up the receiver. As he started to dial, he looked up at me. “Go away. I don’t want you to listen to this. And keep your mouth shut until the meeting tonight. I will tell you then.”

  “I want to know now.”

  His smile was sudden, oddly charming, and deeply ironic. Until that moment, I hadn’t known Pete had any irony in him. It was kind of a shock to see a more interesting element of his personality revealed. “You may take it for granted that your faith in me is not misplaced.”

  I was so surprised that I laughed.

  And then I acceded to his request and walked away, thinking of my victory: Pete hadn’t ended the sentence with “Jennifer.” Whether he knew it or not, the patriarch of Port Frederick had just acknowledged my coming of age.

  So did the other four trustees of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation when they appeared—led by Miss Lucille Grant—on the news that evening to vent their collective and individual outrage at the burning of the “witch” on the common, and to voice their confidence in their former employee: me.

  Even Roy Leland was shown among them.

  When I called each one of them afterward to thank them, Roy said, “That witch burning, that was too much for any of us to take, Jenny. We think the world of you, no matter what Pete says, and we decided it was high time to say so to the rest of the world. No matter whether you hold that damn festival or not, you’ve done your damnedest, and we want you to know you have the support of all of us, er, almost all of us.” All of them but Pete, he meant, without knowing that now I even had that “support.” They may have been a shade late in coming forth, my old bosses, but I found it no less heartwarming, for being beside the point.

  But Pete got the last laugh, after all, at the town council meeting that night.

  In a packed hall, with the fire coverage for the festival the first item on the agenda, with Mayor Mary Eberhardt looking worried and sick at heart every time she glanced at me, and with local journalists abounding, Pete grabbed the spotlight and danced with it.

  He nodded to me across the room when he first entered it. True to my word to him, I’d continued to avoid everyone and managed to say virtually nothing about insurance to anybody.

  Then the mayor gaveled the meeting to order.

  “Under old business,” Mary said, looking grave, “our first issue is the insurance for the festival. I will ask Jenny Cain—”

  “Madame Mayor!”

  It was Pete, stepping forward, looking authoritative.

  “If you please, Mayor, I hold the key to our insurance problem.”

  Her eyebrows climbing nearly to her hairline, Mary threw Robert’s Rules of Order clean out the window and said merely, “What are you talking about, Pete?”

  For my part, I had started to stand up, but now I didn’t know what to do. I sat. My heart rate hit light speed as my life, with Pete at the helm of it, flashed by me.

  He strode forward, looking so distinguished that no doubt every citizen in that room considered him a source of civic pride. He employed quite a few of them, which no doubt helped their attitude. In the spotlight of television cameras, he stopped dramatically, turned around, and smiled like Santa at all of us.

  “I bring you,” he said, “tidings of great joy.”

  Christ! I thought, but anticipatory gasps went up all around me.

  “Few people know that I am a member of the board of directors of the company to whom we have made application for fire coverage.”

  Now a murmuring arose, to accompany the gasps.

  I stared. The man was a marvel of nerve and wit and cunning, a veritable fox. I could see
precisely where he was going, and I nearly grinned in sheer admiration at the gall and brilliance of it.

  Pete told his spellbound audience: “I have not wished to make much of my position before this, because I felt humbled by the task before me, which was to convince a great, cold corporation—in a city where our hopes and plans mean little to them, and against all of their inclinations—to insure us to the full measure of our needs.”

  He paused, looking radiant.

  The crowd leaned toward him, as did the council members. Mary glanced over at me. I wanted to put my face in my hands and either laugh until I cried, or cry until I laughed, I couldn’t decide which. How could I have failed to anticipate this maneuver of Pete’s?

  “I will admit to you tonight,” he said, looking brave, “that I thought I had failed. As late as yesterday, I confided in your fine council member, Ardyth Kennedy—”

  Ardie was at her seat, three down from Mary, looking electable.

  “—that I feared all was lost. Many of you knew that she and I—and many others—have had our doubts about this festival—” He glanced at me and quickly changed his tack. “We could never, however, fail to support it fully, once it was so well established as a dream in the hearts of so many of you and your friends. And so tonight, just before I left home, when I was feeling more discouraged than perhaps I have ever felt before in my long life … just then, I decided to make one last attempt to change their minds. I called the chairman of the board. I must admit to you that I pleaded our case …”

  One beat, two beats of silence.

  “He gave his approval. We will have our Insurance!”

  The room exploded with relief. Cheers. Clapping. Huzzahs.

  And Pete, like the good and ruthless lying son-of-a-bitch general that he was, marched out of the room, before anybody could be so rude as to inquire as to any details. We were getting it. That was all we knew, and all we would ever need to know.

  My own subsequent progress report on the festival seemed downright mundane after that performance.

  “Never mind,” I whispered to Mary after the meeting. “The main thing is we’re insured. The show goes on. And when it goes on perfectly, no one will think of any name but yours on the ballot. You will float in to victory on a tide of goodwill.”

  She gave me a sourly amused look. “You sound just like Pete.”

  “Mary, you really know how to hurt a girl.”

  It was a great night in Port Frederick. Not only because of the insurance and the festival, but also because the good citizens thought we could sleep safe in our homes that night, with the homicidal arsonist in jail.

  A few considerations got forgotten in that rosy celebratory mood. For one thing, the cops could not place Meryl Tyler at the Kennedys’ house when they were attacked, or at the scene of David’s injuries. For another, there were still four days between now and the festival opening, and in that length of time, anything could still happen. We forgot something else, too, those few of us who knew about it: the dead tarantula. Nobody pursued the provenance of that repulsive spider of fate. It was so creepy I didn’t want to think about it, and besides, it seemed so unimportant.

  I should have repressed my shudders and followed that spider back to its dark nest.

  21

  AMAZING, HOW SIMPLE LIFE SEEMED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT.

  That night, I slept one of those delicious deep sleeps that feel as good as chocolate tastes. And the next morning, while David slept in, Geof and I talked quietly over the most relaxed breakfast we’d had together in weeks.

  Between bites of scrambled egg and toasted bagel, I told him: “I don’t think it was Meryl Tyler who burned down the Dime Store.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it seems to me that Meryl is a man who has an instinct for striking sensitive spots. Turning me into a witch was a real nasty antiwoman sort of … statement.” I smiled at my own bland word. I also noted how Geof and I had developed the habit of calling Tyler “Meryl,” contemptuously, as if he weren’t a person to take seriously. Was that a mistake, I wondered? “And when he made fun of the Holy Ghost, he really hit those fundamentalists below the belt, too. So Meryl’s got natural talent, all right, I’ll grant him that much.”

  “But?”

  “How’d you know there was a but?”

  “Because you’re taking so long to get to the point.”

  I slapped his arm; he laughed and said, “I didn’t mean it.”

  “You did, too, and just for that I’m going to say the rest of this very slowly.”

  “I will hang on your every syllable.”

  I shook my head at him and smiled. “But … Meryl’s a prankster, I think. A drunk. And while I wouldn’t advise you to turn your back on him, if you did, he might only tape a ‘Kick Me’ sign to your shirt.”

  “So you don’t think Meryl’s up to arson?”

  “I don’t know what Meryl’s up to, but the fire seems so much more … serious than what he did to me, for instance.”

  “He halfway beat you up.”

  “He was drunk, and I was in his path.”

  “Maybe he was drunk Saturday night at the Dime Store. And doesn’t lighting candles sound more like a drunken prank then it does arson?”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s true.”

  “If I were arguing against him as our arsonist … ,” Geof began.

  “Yes?”

  “I would tend to think that a man who was drunk enough to do something as stupid as burn down a store at nine o’clock would either be too drunk or too passed out to organize himself into a witch burning at three o’clock.”

  I thought he had a good point there.

  “Can you keep him in jail through the weekend, Geof?”

  “I don’t know if we can. Even assholes have constitutional rights.”

  “Damn, there ought to be an amendment against that.”

  “Are you worried, Jenny?”

  “I don’t relish the notion of his being loose in town over this weekend, no.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “So?”

  “So you’ll have to hope we either definitely pin the arson death on him, or else he hires himself a really bad lawyer.”

  “That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Given our boy Meryl’s level of intelligence, I’d say so, yes.”

  On that perverted note of “hope,” we finished breakfast.

  At the office, work flew by so smoothly you’d have thought our festival had never been bothered by so much as a ripple of a problem. Everyone, everywhere seemed so happy. Our volunteers were released from the understandable worry that they’d been working in vain for a festival that wouldn’t happen. As one of them said to me that Tuesday, the morning after the council meeting, “I didn’t realize how much pressure we were all under until it was over. I’m so excited now, I can’t wait for this weekend to come.”

  Probably because everybody felt as sprung as pebbles in a slingshot, they sprang to work with an efficiency that left me with little to do. I congratulated myself on good delegation and decided I could spare the time on the following day for two unrelated chores—checking on the condition of the Kennedys, and completing my evaluation of Melissa Barney’s project. When, with a single phone call, I made an appointment with the Kennedys at their house, I figured it was going to be a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of day. Or, as a vegetarian friend of mine prefers to say, “Maybe I can feed two birds with one thistle.”

  On Wednesday, my drive out to the Kennedys’ house seemed blissfully peaceful—almost humorously so compared to some of my other treks along that road. First, there’d been the January drive that turned into a snowstorm. Then there’d been the harrowing ride to the hospital with an unconscious David, and finally, our high-speed chase in response to Nellie’s urgent telephone summons the night of the fire. But now, after everything that had happened, nothing at all was happening. “And thank God,” I said to that.

  Top down, with an I
ndian summer breeze ruffling my hair, I could take this latest drive at the speed limit, enjoying the scenery. No hurry. No siren. No snow.

  We’d picked our timing just right for our festival. All along the city streets and into the suburbs, I drove under canopies of trees glowing with the luminous colors of a Massachusetts autumn. So rich were the reds of the maple leaves that my skin on top of my hands looked pink, when I drove under those trees. And when the yellow leaves of the oak trees shimmered above me, the white Miata turned golden, and I felt as if I were driving through clarified butter. The sun warmed the crown of my scalp, the back of my neck, and my shoulders and arms. I kept inhaling deeply, as if I could breathe all of that sweet scented beauty into my cells and carry it with me forever.

  I stopped at the sign just before Nellie’s home and gazed down the hill for as long as the traffic behind me would allow me to sit there. Below, I could see the tops of the trees that spread out from the creek, forming the band of woods that ran for miles. It was a palette today—Renoir’s, I decided—with dots and daubs of color everywhere. The sky was a swath of a watercolorist’s cerulean, and the houses were romantic dabs of oil paint, not real at all.

  “So this is what peace feels like,” I said to myself.

  The Kennedys’ home seemed peaceful, too, and rather unexpectedly so, given the circumstances for their being here, rather than at work. I suppose I had been imagining the two of them—and their house—in the same shattered state in which we’d last seen them. But the Nellie who answered my knock was smiling, and the rooms behind her were all cleared up.

  “Jenny, come in,” she said warmly. “The coffee’s ready, and you’d better not say you’re not hungry, because I made my famous orange peel muffins, and they’re still warm from the oven.” She bustled me inside, talking all the while. This was a verbose, relaxed, off-work Nellie I’d never seen before. She was even wearing a pink sweat suit and tennis shoes, a far cry from the business attire I was used to seeing on her. “How’s that teenage friend of yours and Geof’s, the boy who got hurt? We weren’t here when that happened, you know. I felt so bad that we weren’t here when you needed us, but Bill and I were both still at the store.”