Alan smiled. That was one of the things he loved most about Tina - her intel igence. He had tried reading Hemingway a couple of times but just could not wrap his head around it. But Tina would probably burn through the book in a couple of hours, while other customers at the Paperback engrossed themselves in Daniel e Steel and Louis L'Amour. Not that there was anything wrong with L'Amour. He was a personal favorite of Alan's.
Tina was just special. She was something else, not like any other girl he had ever known. Ever since junior high school she had been a tiny flame burning in his heart. When she came back to Buckton after col ege, they found that they had their love of their hometown in common. It was the first of many shared passions they had discovered.
Tina always made Alan feel like the luckiest man on earth. Even after a week like the one he'd been having.
"Good book?" he asked as he slid into the booth across from her.
The smile on his face was genuine, an involuntary reaction to being in her presence, but there must have been something of his melancholy lingering, for when she glanced up at him her eyes narrowed, the skin around them crinkling with concern.
"Oh, Alan," Tina said and sighed. She marked the page in her book and laid it on the table. Then her voice dropped to just above a whisper. "You have just got to stop letting this thing get to you so much."
"I know." He nodded slowly, letting some of the stress seep out of his joints. "It's just . . . this kinda thing doesn't happen in Buckton. Now, in a week, we've had two . . . murders. God, I can barely say the word. Nobody liked Foster, true enough, but Phil Garraty was a saint, Tina. Do you realize we hadn't had an honest-to-God murder in this town since 1957? It's like the natural order is suddenly breaking down. People expect me and the sheriff to keep that from happening, and they're taking it out on us."
Tina sighed. She reached across the table and took his hands in hers. "Alan, nobody blames you for what's happened. People are just upset, that's al . Crimes have been committed, horrible ones, and they look to you and Sheriff Tackett to get to the bottom of them. To find the man responsible."
"If it was a man," Alan replied with a derisive grunt.
Immediately he regretted the words. The papers had reported that the murders were savage, but the details were more gruesome than anyone knew. He had been careful not to discuss them even with Tina. Now he saw the stunned, baffled expression on her face and knew he had made a mistake.
"What do you mean?"
Alan glanced around anxiously, then leaned toward her. Her hands clasped his a bit tighter, as if in acknowledgement of the secret he was about to share.
"Mr. Garraty and Foster? Both of them were . . . they were mangled, Tina. Ripped apart. Not the way you see in serial-kil er movies and the like. Just . . . I wish I had better words to describe it," Alan revealed. He shuddered at the memory of the sight of Phil Garraty's body. "Then again, maybe I don't. Never seen anything like it in my life. We're wondering if it wasn't a bear or something. If it was a man, wel , he wasn't alone, and he sure wasn't in his right mind."
"My lord," Tina rasped, her voice thick with revulsion. Her mouth hung open just enough to make her lower lip bow fetchingly, and her face had gone ghostly pale.
"Don't worry, honey. The sheriff and I'l get to the bottom of it," Alan vowed, though he did not feel half so confident as he sounded. But when Tina looked at him like that, so sweetly unaware of how amazing she was, he would have told her the Earth was flat if that was what she needed to hear.
Tina slid back in the booth. "Maybe that would be better," she said. "If it was a bear. People would realize that was simply its nature; tragic, of course, but just nature."
"I think you're right," Alan admitted. "That'd be better. If it was just animals. I surely hope that's the way it turns out. You can't blame animals for doing what they were born to do."
When the last of the customers had shuffled out on to the Boston street, Jack locked the door of Bridget's Irisk Rose Pub behind them, and only then did he al ow himself to relax. Any time he was around a group of strangers these days - which was every time he worked or, truthful y, went anywhere in the city of Boston - he felt on edge. A seemingly innocent face in the crowd could take on sinister import if that face turned his way for slightly longer than was normal.
Jack didn't flirt anymore. Not that he had given up on it completely, but he always felt a certain reserve in himself, knowing that even the sweetest, cutest girl in the place might be less attractive on the inside. That any face in the crowd could suddenly change.
The pub was already abuzz with closing time activities. Jack flicked the house lights up al the way and the place became almost garish. Waitstaff moved about quickly, wiping down the few tables that had not been taken care of earlier and mopping the floor. Jack slipped down into the restaurant area and began to upend chairs, placing them on top of the tables, so that the waiter with the mop, Gary, wouldn't miss anything.
Behind the bar, Bil Cantwel wiped down the oak counter and stacked clean glasses. Even as Jack glanced at him, Bil flicked
