He shook his head. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
He heard the neediness in her voice, the desperation, and he had to force himself to meet her gaze. “There’s someone else I care about.”
She took a step back, retreating into the shadows, but not before he’d seen the tears in her eyes. “I suppose I already knew that?’
“I’m sorry.”
“No. No, there’s no reason to be sorry” She shook her head and laughed. “It’s just the story of my life.”
He watched her turn back to the building. She paused to square her shoulders, regain her pride. Why couldn’t Fern have been the one? he thought. Had he fallen in love with her, had they married, it might have been a reasonably happy union.
She was attractive enough, intelligent enough. Yet something between them had always been missing. The magic.
In sorrow he watched her cross to the gym door and pull it open. At that instant, the sounds of shouting and running feet suddenly spilled out the open doorway.
“What’s going on now?” said Fern, and she ran into the building with Lincoln right behind her.
Inside, they found mass confusion. The punch bowl had tipped over, and a pool of strawberry-colored liquid was spreading across the gym floor. The music was still pounding away, but half the students had retreated against one wall, where they milled together in alarm. Others were clustered in a circle near the sound system. Lincoln couldn’t see what was happening at their center, but he heard a loudspeaker thud to the floor, and heard Pete Sparks and the chaperones all shouting: “Break it up! Back off, back off!”
As Lincoln pushed into the circle, another amplifier tipped over and splashed into the river of punch. There was a deafening squeal and the crowd clapped their hands to their ears, backing away as electrical sparks shot up.
In the next instant, the music died. So did the gym lights.
The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but in that brief pause before the emergency lamp came on, panic seized the crowd. Lincoln felt screaming kids slam into him in their rush to reach the exits. He couldn’t see who was coming at him, could only hear the sound of stampeding. He felt someone go down near his feet, and he blindly reached down and hauled a girl back up by her dress.
The emergency lamp at last flared on, one inadequate spotlight in the far corner of the gym. It was just enough light to see the shadowy chaos of running figures, kids stumbling back to their feet.
Then Lincoln focused on a scene that chilled him to the marrow. Pete Sparks had fallen to his knees and seemed too dazed to notice the overweight boy standing beside him. The boy reached down and removed the weapon from Pete’s holster.
Lincoln was too far away to disarm the boy with a tackle. He managed to take only two steps forward, then froze as the boy turned to face him, rage glowing in his eyes. Lincoln recognized him. It was Barry Knowlton.
“Put it down, son,” said Lincoln quietly. “just put the gun down on the floor.”
“No. No, I’m tired of being kicked around!”
“We can talk about it. But first you have to put it down.”
“Like anyone ever bothers to talk to me!” Barry turned, his gaze circling wildly around the gym. “You girls, you never bother. You just laugh at me! All the time, that’s all I hear, the laughing.” His focus shot to another part of the room. “Or you, stud! What’d you call me? Fat ass? Say it now! Go ahead, say it now!”
“Put the gun down,” Lincoln repeated, slowly reaching for his own weapon. It was the last resort; he didn’t want to shoot the boy. He had to talk him down.
Negotiate. Anything to keep the bullets from flying.
Footsteps scurried in the shadows and he caught a glimpse of Fern’s blond hair as she rushed a group of students out the door. But there were still dozens of people trapped against the far wall, unable to flee.
He took another step forward. Instantly the boy turned to face him.
“You’ve made your point, Barry,” said Lincoln. “Let’s go in the other room and talk, okay?”
“He called me fat ass.” Anguish had crept into the boy’s voice. The desolation of the outsider.
“We’ll talk, just the two of us,” said Lincoln.
“No.” The boy turned toward the trapped students, cowering against the wall.
“It’s my turn to call the shots.”
Claire drove with her radio turned off, the silence interrupted only by the sweep of her windshield wipers as they cleared away the dusting of snow. She had spent the hour’s drive from Bangor deep in thought, and by the time she reached the Tranquility town line, she had pieced it all together. Her theory centered on Warren Emerson.
Emerson’s farmhouse was located on the lower slopes of Beech Hill, only a mile upstream from the lake. It was remote enough that it required its own septic system, which drained into a leach field. If a parasite had matured in his intestines, he would have been a continuing source of parasitic eggs. All it took was a leak in his aging septic tank, a year of heavy flooding, and those eggs could have been washed into the nearby Meegawki Stream.
Into the lake.
An elegantly logical explanation, she thought. It’s not an epidemic of madness.
Nor is it a centuries-old curse on this town. It’s a microorganism, a parasitic larva lodging itself in the human brain, wreaking havoc as it grows. All they needed to confirm the diagnosis was a positive ELISA blood test. One more day, and they’d be certain.
A siren alerted her to an approaching police car. She looked up at the lights flashing in her rearview mirror, and saw a cruiser from Two Hills. It barreled past her and raced toward Tranquility. A moment later, a second cruiser screamed by, going in the same direction, followed by an ambulance.
Up ahead, she saw that the flashing lights had turned onto the road toward the high school.
She followed them.
It was a replay of the frightening scene from a month before, emergency vehicles parked at crazy angles outside the gym, clusters of teenagers standing in the road, crying and hugging each other. But this time snow was fluttering from the night sky, and the vehicles’ flashing lights were muted, as though seen through white gauze.
Claire grabbed her medical bag and hurried toward the building. She was stopped half a block from the gym by Officer Mark Dolan, decked out in body armor. The look he gave her confirmed what she’d long suspected: their dislike for each other was mutual.
“Everyone has to stay back,” he said. “We’ve got a hostage situation.”
“Has anyone been hurt?”
“Not yet, and we want to keep it that way.”
“Where’s Lincoln?”
“He’s trying to talk the kid down. Now you have to move back, Dr. Elliot. Away from the building.”
Claire retreated to where the crowd had gathered. She watched Dolan turn and confer with the police chief from Two Hills. The men in uniform were in charge here, and she was merely another annoying civilian.
“Lincoln’s all alone,” said Fern. “And these goddamn heroes aren’t doing anything to help him.”
Claire turned and saw that Fern’s blond hair was in disarray, the loose strands crusted with snow. “I left him in there,” said Fern softly. “I didn’t have a choice. I had to get the kids out..
“Who else is inside?”
“At least a few dozen other kids.” She stared at the building, melting snow dripping down her cheeks. “Lincoln has a gun. Why doesn’t be just use it?”
Claire looked back at the gym, the situation inside that building now vividly clear to her. An unstable boy. A room with dozens Of hostages. Lincoln would not act rashly, nor would he shoot a boy in cold blood, if he could avoid it. The fact that there had been no gunfire yet meant there was still hope of avoiding bloodshed.
She glanced at the policemen gathered behind their parked cruisers, and she saw their agitation, heard the excitement in their voices. These were small-town cops, facing a big-city crisis, and they were champing at the bit to take action, any action.
