Besides, I heard The Store pays better. Five bucks an hour, part-time.'
'Wow,' Shannon said. 'That is pretty good.' She walked up to the counter.
'Maybe I can work there, too.'
'If your grades don't improve, you're not working anywhere.'
Shannon leaned across the counter, grabbed a piece of lettuce.
Ginny blinked, feigned shock. 'Are you actually eating voluntarily?'
'Of course.'
'Shannon Davis? This can't be true. Are your eating disorder days actually over?'
'They were never here. Except in your mind.' Shannon stole another piece of lettuce and retreated back into the living room.
'So what do you say?'
Ginny looked at Samantha, sighed. 'All right,' she said. 'I'll give it a shot. But I'm not promising anything.'
'You're the most wonderful mom in the world.'
Ginny laughed. 'Just remember that when your father turns you down.'
FIVE
1
There was a light layer of frost on the ground, but Bill awoke early as usual, put on his sweat suit, put on his gloves, put on an extra pair of socks, put on the knit ski cap Ginny called his 'homeless hat,' and went out for his morning jog just like he always did. He knew he was being a bit of a fanatic, but he'd made a promise to himself when he'd started exercising that, rain or shine, sleet or snow, he would jog at least three miles every day.
It was a promise he had kept.
He quickly sped through his stretching exercises, then ran down to the edge of the drive. He jogged up the dirt road, through the trees, down the hill, but when he reached the paved road and Godwin's meadow, he continued straight rather than turning into Main.
He had stopped jogging on the highway.
He ran past the trailer park into Juniper's residential area, careful not to slip on the frosty asphalt. He had not varied his jogging route in the ten years that they'd lived in Juniper -- partly out of habit, partly out of intent.
He was not the type of person to arbitrarily change his routine. Once he found something he liked, he stuck with it.
But he had changed his routine now.
He thought about the site of The store, the stretch of land that had been his favorite but was now the area he specifically avoided. There was something about the razed trees and flattened ground that did not sit well with him. It reminded him of Orange County, the place where he'd been born and raised, where he'd seen orange groves and strawberry patches give way to peach-colored condos and cookie-cutter shopping centers, and it depressed him to see the cleared earth, the demolished hillside, the chain-link fencing surrounding the heavy machinery. It upset him, angered him, and it ruined the mood of his morning jog.
But it wasn't just that, was it?
No, he had to admit. It wasn't.
It had been disconcerting at first to realixe that he was not the calm, levelheaded rationalist he'd always believed himself to be, but he had made the adjustment to the new instinctual Bill Davis much more easily than he would have thought possible. It had been a basically painless transition, and he now found himself, without apology, looking for unseen and nonlinear connections between unrelated events in the same way he had previously searched for the logical reason behind every occurrence. It was strangely liberating, this reliance on gut feeling rather than hard fact, and in a way it required more intellectual acumen, more comparative analysis, more of the mental disciplines usually associated with the scientific method than did a strict adherence to a preconceived mind-set.
But that was intellectualizing.
The truth was that he was frightened of The Store. He might be able to come up with reasons for his feelings, but whether or not he could rationalize them, whether or not he could explain their existence, they were there, his natural reaction to the site, and that was why he had changed his jogging route.
The last time he'd been by, the previous Tuesday, when he'd had to drive up to Flagstaff with Ben to buy a water pump for the Suburban, he'd noticed the framework of the building already going up. They weren't wasting any time.
Ordinarily, construction projects dragged on for months around here -- the local contractors were notoriously slow -- but The Store must have offered some sort of early completion bonus, because it had been less than a month since he'd found the body and already the ground had been graded, the unusually deep foundation dug, the cement poured.
There was something creepy about that.
He turned onto Granite, jogged down the street a mile or so to where the houses ended, then took Wilbert back up to Main. His cheeks were burning with the cold, the brisk air harsh in his lungs. The sun was rising but was little more than a bright spot in the uniform gray cloud cover that filled the sky.
Turning left onto Main, his back to the highway, Bill jogged up onto the sidewalk that ran the length of downtown. Instantly, he slowed his pace. Across the street, there was a banner hung in the window of the empty storefront between Yummy Ice Cream and the Video Barn:
NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THE STORE.
Even in this weather, at this hour of the morning, a line of people stood on the sidewalk. Not just teenagers but adults. Well-dressed women and able bodied men.
He stopped in front of the newspaper office, pretending to tie his shoe but glancing across the street instead. It looked like a recruiting office, he thought. There was something vaguely militaristic about the setup of the empty storefront, about the precise lineup of people and the stoic manner in which they were standing. He could see their breath in the cold air, but he could hear no voices, and he realized that no one was talking.
That was odd.
What made it even odder was that he recognized most of the people. Many of them were neighbors -- hell, many of them were friends -- but they were all grimly, uniformly silent, staring fixedly at the empty storefront, not even engaging in the polite, idle chitchat of strangers.
Paul Mitchell, the KFC manager, glanced across the street, caught his eye, and Bill straightened, smiled and waved, but the other man did not respond and refocused his attention on the banner.
Bill began jogging, heading quickly through downtown Juniper. The sweat was cold on his skin, and his heart was pounding. He was more unnerved by the waiting applicants than he wanted to admit, and he could not help noticing that there were large shadowed sections of the street, dark areas untouched by the dim, cloud-shrouded sunrise where night still held sway, and he did not relax until he had turned off Main and was heading past Godwin's meadow toward home.
2
Christmas was not the holiday it should have been.
Ginny surveyed the damage in the living room as Bill gathered up all the boxes and wrapping paper and carried them to the trash can outside. Christmas vacation had started late this year, and she hadn't had much time to go shopping for presents. They'd gotten up to Flagstaff but hadn't made it down to Phoenix, and they'd had to choose from what was available, making compromises on their gifts for just about everyone. Next year, she thought, it would be easier. She'd be able to shop in town, at The Store, and they wouldn't have to worry about traveling to a bigger city in order to buy presents.
Both Samantha and Shannon were in their rooms, listening to the new CDS they'd gotten, looking at or putting away their other presents. For the first time, none of their grandparents had been able to make it -- Bill's parents spending the holiday with his sister in San Francisco, her parents visiting her brother in Denver -- and both girls had obviously missed their presence. The mood this year had been subdued, and they'd all unwrapped their gifts rather perfunctorily, without the usual greedy gusto.
Bill hadn't been himself, either, but then he hadn't really been himself since he'd found the body of that transient. That was understandable, she supposed, although she didn't really understand this phobia he seemed to have in regard to The Store. Yes, the body had probably freaked him, and she understood his anger toward The
