as the tightly packed carpet of dried needles underfoot, and as oppressive as the weight of air so still it almost seemed to have substance.
Eventually, the trees seemed to thin a bit, and then abruptly, the woods opened before them, like a door onto a lighted room. They took a step out of the trees onto a circle of old, broken asphalt that formed a crude cul-de-sac. It narrowed into a strip of potholcd tar that intersected a road a hundred feet ahead.
'Thank God,' Annie muttered, fanning her perspiring face with a plump hand. 'Damn woods is like a sauna.' Then she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the bright afternoon sun and looked around. 'Good heavens. Is this supposed to be a town?'
There was an old frame house nearly backed into the woods on their right, a pair of concrete-block buildings up on each corner, and not much else.
'At least there's a gas station,' Sharon said, nodding at the rusting hulks of old cars jammed together behind the building on the left.
'Well,' Annie said, plucking at her bodice. 'Good luck to us all if that's the Range Rover service center.'
Sharon smiled. 'You might be surprised. Some of these smalltown mechanics can fix just about anything.'
Grace stood very still for a moment, watching, listening, trying to shake the feeling that she'd just crept uninvited through someone's back door. 'All we need is a phone,' she finally said, and started toward the gas station.
Up at the intersection, they all hesitated and squinted up and down the empty two-lane road. The woods on the other side looked almost solid, like a living green glacier moving inexorably to swallow whatever puny structures man had erected here. To the left, just past the gas station, the road curved quickly out of sight into the thick woods. It disappeared just as quickly to the right over the crest of a small hill. There was no movement and no sound. Grace could almost hear herself breathe.
Annie looked around, irritated. 'Four Corners my foot. There are only two corners in this town. Talk about delusions of grandeur.' The silence seemed to swallow the echo of her voice, and she frowned abruptly. 'Damn, it's quiet here.'
Sharon chuckled. 'You've never spent much time in the country, have you?'
Annie snorted. 'Of course I have. The country's what you drive through on the way from city to city.'
'Well, this is what it's like when you get out of the car. It's a hot, lazy, summer Saturday in a little nowhere burg, and quiet is one thing you get in abundance in a place like this.'
Grace thought about that. Sharon was the native, the country deputy from Wisconsin, and as alien as this kind of quiet was to Annie and Grace, Sharon accepted it as perfectly normal, and Sharon would know. Still, she felt uneasy.
It wasn't just that there were no people in sight-that wouldn't have been so odd in a little town where the census takers probably counted on their fingers-but there was no evidence that there were people anywhere. No radios, no dogs barking, no muted laughter of children in the distance-no sound at all.
She looked at the building to their right, at the sign hanging from a wrought-iron bracket with letters spelling out 'Hazel's Cafe.' To the left was the gas station, obviously showing its best side to the highway. The two old- fashioned pumps squatted on a concrete island between the building and the road, their metal cases polished and oddly clean. A faded blue sign hung on a tall metal post, advertising 'Dale's Gas' in white block letters. At least the door was wide open, suggesting that someone might be inside, out of the heat.
Her boots clicked on the concrete as she crossed the apron toward the door. It seemed strange not to hear the syncopated accompaniment of Annie's omnipresent high heels next to her, just the soft slap of the borrowed high-tops and the leather squeak of Sharon's laceups. It bothered her that she could hear these sounds so clearly.
The gas station was as empty and still as the town itself. Grace stepped inside, listened for a moment, then moved toward an interior doorway that opened onto a darkened, deserted garage. Her nose wrinkled at the ripe smells of old oil, gasoline, and solvents, advertising that this was a working garage, even though the picture didn't match the smells. From what she could see in the shadowy garage, the entire place was coated with layers of grime that could probably count the years like rings on a tree. But the inside of the station proper seemed almost spit-shined. Hands that touched an oil can apparently never made it to the register. There wasn't a single greasy fingerprint smeared across its keys or the white Formica countertop it sat on. Even the inside of the window bore the streaked circles of a recent washing, which seemed strange since the outside of the glass was still spotted from the last rain.
Sharon was preoccupied with a map of Wisconsin tacked to one wall, but Annie was looking around the station, hands on her hips. 'Good Lord, who owns this place? The Amish?' She ran a fingernail over the top of the counter, then inspected it. 'Harley's kitchen should be so clean.'
'Oh, boy.' Sharon was tapping a point in the map. 'You are here,' she pronounced. 'We're a little more off the track than I thought.'
Grace looked over her shoulder and winced. 'Looks like we're still about a hundred miles from Green Bay.'
'I'd better call them, give them a heads-up on the delay. I told the detectives we'd be there by four, and there's no way we're going to make that.' Sharon went to the phone on the counter, picked up the receiver and put it to her ear, then frowned and pushed the disconnect button a few times before she hung up. 'Damn thing's broken.'
Annie rolled her eyes and turned in a flutter of limp silk, grumbling about small towns stuck in the dark ages, cars, heat, humidity, and the telecommunicating world in general. She kept up her monologue as Grace and Sharon followed her all the way across the crumbling side street and up the three concrete steps that led to the cafe's screen door. 'I'm going to order myself a quart of iced tea and then-' She stopped in mid-sentence as she opened the door, then released a great breath. 'All right, ladies. This is starting to get a little weird.'
Grace eased the screen door closed behind them, and the three women stood there for a moment in the silence, staring at the empty booths, the empty stools by the counter, the empty galley cooking area behind it. Everything was spotless. If it hadn't been for the odors of fried food and baked goods still lingering under an acrid, antiseptic smell, Grace would have thought the place hadn't been a working cafe for years.
Sharon went to the counter and picked up the phone that sat by the register. She looked sheepishly at the other two when she put it down again. 'So the phones are out all over town.' She shrugged. 'Probably takes the phone company days to get out to a little spot like this and make repairs.'
Annie raised one perfectly arched brow. 'And the people?'
'Who knows? Fishing, town picnic, siesta...' Sharon looked from Annie to Grace, saw the uncertainty in one face and the hard tension in the other, and realized for the first time how very different they all were. She knew the origins of Grace's paranoia-hell, if she had lived with a serial killer's bull's-eye on her for ten years, she'd be paranoid, too. And from the first time she'd met her in the hospital, she'd pegged Annie as a woman who'd learned the hard way not to trust in much. But Sharon had her own history now-had been living on the edge of panic for months, ever since she'd taken a bullet in the Monkeewrench warehouse. But for the first time since she'd feltthat slug plow into her neck, she felt oddly comfortable and safe in this place where the emptiness and quiet were so disturbing to the other two.
She laid her shoulder bag on the counter and sank onto a stool. 'Okay. I get that you're weirded out by this place, but what you have to understand is that this is normal. I spent most of my life in a little town not much bigger than this, and you know the first time I locked a door? When the FBI put me in that Minneapolis apartment nine months ago, right after I got out of the hospital.'
Annie scowled at her. 'These are businesses. You don't walk away from a business on a Saturday afternoon and leave the door unlocked, no matter where you live. That's just plain crazy.'
Sharon sighed. 'I'm telling you, that's the way it is in a place like this. What customers are they going to miss? Their neighbors? They'd probably help themselves and leave the money on the counter. And neighbors don't steal from neighbors out here. Grace, what are you looking for?'
She'd been wandering around the cafe, eyes sweeping the floor, the empty booths, and finally the front window. 'Hmm?'
'You see something out there?'
'Outside? No. But I'm going to take a walk, check out the house we passed on the way in. Be right
