van, she pivoted to face one of the cops. She stood straight with her shoulders back, and Walker could see from the way she held her head up to look down her nose at the cop that what she was saying was not calculated to make him happy.
The cop finished guiding the older man into the opening of the van, then turned to reach for the woman’s arm, as he had done with the others. She twisted her body angrily to pull the arm out of his reach, but the cop seemed to have been waiting for this. He extended his reach, spun her body around, and gripped her hair from behind. He jerked her head back and dragged her to the van. Instead of stopping at the side door as he had done before, he stepped up into the van without letting her go. Walker could see her legs working quickly to keep up with him, then to push herself up into the van to stop the pain. The feet slid inward on the floor, and one of the cops from the patrol car pushed the door shut and banged the side of the van twice before he went back to join his partner.
The van pulled forward, swung around in a wide circle and out of the parking lot, crossed the bridge onto Main Street with the patrol car behind it, then was lost to sight behind the buildings.
Walker whispered, “They’re tourists. How can the police think they have anything to do with this?”
Mary said softly, “What if they’re looking for us?”
“We’re just witnesses. I don’t think they’d look this hard for witnesses,” Stillman said. “Besides, they’ve seen us. Two of us, anyway. They know what we look like. Nobody’s going to mistake that girl down there for Max Stillman.”
“Then what are they doing?” asked Mary.
“Probably something happened in the restaurant,” said Stillman. “A fight in the bar or something. If you’re looking for two men, you don’t arrest four and throw in a girl for equal-opportunity purposes.”
“You mind if we get away from the river?” said Walker. “Everything seems to be going on down here.”
“Hold on a little longer,” Stillman said. “If you’re not where everything’s going on, you won’t know what it is.”
They crouched between the two houses, watching. After the disturbance at the Old Mill, the night subsided into quiet again. Walker could hear frogs peeping somewhere in the shallows on the other side of the river. The men who had been walking the banks with flashlights had long ago moved beyond his sight, and had not returned. Time passed, and its passage was soothing, making the shock and alarm of the scene outside the restaurant slowly diminish. He sat down beside Mary near the back of the house, and after a time she leaned on his chest and burrowed to place his arm over her shoulder. She whispered, “Walker, are you scared?”
The question should not have surprised him, but it did. It was what he had asked Stillman once. He had no answer at first. The word didn’t seem to describe what he felt tonight. He was aware that there was danger out there in the riverbed and maybe even on the streets in this neighborhood, but he had begun to feel that he knew how to stay away from it for the moment. He searched for another term, but each seemed to be unsatisfactory because it complicated the feeling rather than elucidating it.
“I think it’s probably not as bad as it feels right now,” he said. “Seeing the cop grab that woman by the hair, that was horrible, upsetting. Maybe we’ll get to testify for her when she sues the town.”
“If they can get a jury around here that isn’t related to the cop,” said Mary. She sat up in sudden frustration and looked toward the front of the house. “What’s keeping him?” Her body became very still, and she slowly rose to her feet, not taking her eyes away from the slice of clear space between the houses. As she took a step forward, Walker heard her mutter to herself, “What now?”
Walker was on his feet, moving past her to Stillman’s side at the front of the house. Beyond the river and the Old Mill, far across the open fields where the road cut between the hills, there were headlights. He saw lights moving into the woods where the loop in the river brought it back and the covered bridge crossed it. The lights came out of the woods toward the empty fields, past the two old barns. He counted eight sets of lights, then ten, then fourteen. The first of them made the final turn and the headlights swung and settled, aiming along the straight stretch so the brightness seemed to build and the glow cast shadows of trees on the walls of the old buildings on this side of the river.
“Have you figured out what it is?” asked Walker.
“It’s not our two burglars,” Stillman answered. He pointed at the parking lot beside the Old Mill. “They seem to be expected.”
There were police cars in the lot again, this time four of them. There were a couple of policemen out of their cars and standing by the entrance to the lot. When the headlights of the first car to arrive shone on them, the cops waved the driver into the lot, and kept waving. As each car after it came within range, the cops waved it in toward the row of parking spaces at the wall of the building near the front door. “It looks to me like the party of forty they were getting ready for this afternoon has arrived,” said Stillman.
As each car parked, the occupants opened their doors and got out. They all seemed to be men, most of them in pairs, but some in threes or fours. There were cops near the door of the restaurant who moved along the row of cars, shaking hands with the newcomers, talking, gesturing. A few of the men went into the restaurant, but most of them walked around in the lot, talking with men from other cars. As more cars arrived, the drivers and passengers gathered into an amorphous crowd.
They did not look to Walker as though they had come for a party—at any rate, not the same party. Some of them wore jeans, some pressed pants and sport coats, and a few wore ties. One of the police cars started and made a wide turn, throwing its headlights on the row of parked cars. “The cars all look new,” said Walker.
The police car pulled to one end of the row and stopped, and another pulled up at the other end. Stillman said, “Now, why do you suppose the police would come to the party?”
Something else was going on now. The men were moving, forming themselves into two ragged lines near the two police cars. Policemen opened the trunks of their cars, and the lines began to inch forward. As each man arrived at the back bumper of a police car, the cop leaning into it handed him a short-barreled pump shotgun. The man would move around the car and stop at the hood, where there was a big cardboard carton. He reached in and took a box of shells out of it, stood apart a few yards, filled his pockets with shells, and handed the rest of the box to the man nearest him, who would do the same. Others would stop to push a few shells into their shotguns’ magazines before they did anything else.
“Looks like reinforcements,” said Walker. “Maybe cops from other towns?”
Mary tapped Stillman and Walker both on their shoulders. “Can we please go now?”
“I’d like to see which direction they’re going first,” said Stillman. “When you see a man with a shotgun, it’s better to be behind him than in front.”
Almost all the men were carrying their shotguns differently now, with the muzzle upward, so Walker could tell that they were loaded. The men began climbing back into their cars. There was a discussion between one of the cops and the driver of the lead car, and then they began to move. The first one came up over the bridge, turned right onto Washington Street, and stopped to wait for the others, only fifty or sixty feet from their hiding place.
Stillman said, “Now we can go.” He hurried back the way they had come. When he reached Mary, he pulled her along with him. They moved through the yards they had crossed on the way to the river. When they reached the first cross street, Stillman stopped and looked both ways, then ran across, and kept running up the sidewalk on Constitution Avenue. It was several blocks before he decreased his pace.
“What is it?” asked Mary. “What are they doing?”
“They’re getting ready to make a sweep,” said Stillman. “It’s not a good time to be outdoors. We’d better head for the church.”
Mary said, “The church?”
But Stillman set off again at a run. Mary let out a sigh and set off after him. Walker kept his eyes on Mary as they ran, but he sensed that she was not having trouble keeping up. He knew that she was frightened and confused, but she seemed to have made a decision to hold those feelings apart for now and concentrate on the need to run. After a few more blocks, Walker could tell that Stillman was beginning to feel the strain of the long hours and the running, but Mary looked like any young woman out for a jog on a summer night. She ran with her fists clenched and her head up, her knees rising high. He found himself wishing she had a dog, or a pair of earphones over her ears, instead of two male companions.
When they reached the back of the church, they stopped in the shadowy space behind the building to let their breathing slow and their hearts stop pounding. Walker said, “I’ll go around and see if it’s still open.”
Mary’s hand came up and pressed against his chest. “I’ll go. They haven’t seen me.” She slipped around the
