In honor of Halloween, gentle readers, here’s some fiction for you!

It was a sunny day when we moved into the house on Fir Street. The neighbors glanced curiously at us as we carried our belongings up the path, wrestling with mattresses and heavily-laden boxes of books, and periodically they drifted over to say hello, sometimes bringing a lamp in or steadying an imbalanced box.

My wife picked the house. She said she liked it because of the Victorian architecture and the established garden, with squash vines and corn stalks already firmly rooted. It reminded her of the small backyard garden at our old house in Cincinnati, and since I was indifferent to where I lived, as long as there was a roof and four walls, I consented. The realtor assured us that the house was a “real charmer,” and that we were “lucky to get it.” It had only been on the market a few weeks, and I wondered who planted the garden and then abandoned it, letting it wilt a little in the summer sun before the day we moved in and my wife watered the garden deeply at dusk, barefoot in her torn jeans.

It was a sleepy little town, and it didn’t take long for us to get the story of the house and its former gardener. The man who owned it before us left suddenly, apparently, after his wife disappeared in June without a trace. He stuck it out for a month or so, the neighbors told us, but everything in the house reminded him of his wife, so he left, moved to another city far away.

Like all old houses, the house on Fir Street had its problems. It creaked and groaned in the night as it settled, and sometimes the pipes clanked mysteriously. Part of the porch was rotted out, and would need to be replaced, but the garden flourished, with the plants growing big and lush, almost comically oversized. And we were happy there, settling in to our new jobs and getting to know the neighbors, who seemed like friendly, decent people.

In August, the house started making me uneasy. Those Victorian Gothic moldings which looked so bold in the July sun seemed almost malevolent on the first overcast day, and I realized that the tall trees along the property line shaded much of the house, making it dark, damp, and gloomy. The rustlings in the walls made me fear mice, and the groaning of the floors led me to beg the contractor for a repeat visit to check the joists again.

Sometimes, doors I thought I left shut were wide open, and sometimes I couldn’t close a door at all.

“Happens a lot in these old houses,” the contractor told me. “Frame swells right up. We can shave it down for you.” He replaced the lock on the front door after it kept popping open, assuring us that “these old locks fail all the time, you know,” and he insulated the pipes to muffle the clanking, but it continued.

The neighbor’s dog kept digging in the back yard, leaving black oozing clots of dirt which were dark with compost, which attracted the crows. My wife put up a scarecrow in the corn to frighten them away, but they just settled on its arms, cackling to themselves like a gang of juvenile delinquents. Even with the crows, the garden kept growing, the pumpkin vines putting out big bold flowers and the last of the tomatoes swelling and bursting on their trellis.

One misty night, I looked out the window and saw a tall, dark woman sitting in the garden, looking at the last of the beets. I opened the window to call out, and she vanished. My wife said that I was probably imagining things, but I heard the back gate creak, and the next morning, there were footprints filled with water in the thick soil. I started losing things. House keys, my morning coffee mug, my favorite socks. My wife thought I was being absent-minded, and said I should get out more.

At the community barbecue in late August, I pledged to donate our growing pumpkins to the pumpkin carving contest. They were the envy of all the neighbors, huge, and so orange that they were almost red. They seemed vibrantly alive, and some days I could have sworn I heard the sap pulsing through the vines and leaves.

In September, I was picking apples and I fell and broke my leg. I felt the step in the ladder rot and give way beneath my feet, but when I hobbled out several days later, the ladder was right where the EMTs left it, perfectly intact and lying on the ground, coated in a thick layer of goo from the fallen apples. The crows had flocked around it, and they gave me bored, almost resentful looks as I approached before fluttering away at the last minute, beating the air viciously with their wings.

My wife said I must have imagined the crunch of the step, said that maybe it was the sound of the supportive branch giving way, but all the branches on the apple tree were present and accounted for, with not even a snapped twig. I said that maybe the same spirit who was playing with the doors was responsible, and she gave me a scathing look. My wife, ever the practical ob/gyn, did not believe in spirits or malevolent presences, but I did.

Sometimes, after bringing her food at the hospital when she was working late, I thought I saw someone in the window of our bedroom, the same dark woman I saw in the pumpkins, but after I fought with the suddenly recalcitrant lock and pried the door open, everything was as I had left it, clock ticking on the table and curtains hanging silently to keep out the cold.

When I asked the neighbors about her, they looked at me strangely, and explained that the missing wife had been tall and dark, “quite attractive, really,” the policeman who lived next door said. Some of the people in the neighborhood privately thought the disappearance of the wife was fishy, that there was more to the story than the husband had told them. He said he woke up one morning and she was gone, her half of the closet emptied out and her car missing from the driveway. No note, no call, no nothing, her house keys lying on the table where she always left them after coming home at night. She’d been taken into the witness protection program, one person said. Another said that the couple hadn’t been happy, had fought bitterly, even on the last night that she was seen. She certainly hadn’t turned up anywhere else, and no one had heard from the husband.

I kept losing things, coming home to find the oven on when I knew it had been off, finding the taps dripping in all the bathrooms. My wife said I was being absent-minded again, and suggested that I cut down on work.

“You’re stressed out,” she said. “It’s a new place, we’ll get used to it.”

The pumpkins grew and grew, developing strange blood-like splotches on their swollen rinds, and the neighborhood children peered over the fence every day in awe. The house creaked and groaned during the day now too, not just at night, and my wife got testy when I mentioned the strange dark woman. I started avoiding the third floor altogether, because I thought I heard voices and whispers there.

My wife didn’t seem to notice anything strange in the garden, that strangely lush garden with its mammoth vegetables, and she cheerfully harvested them and served them at dinner. I started coming home late, to avoid dinner altogether, and she took the leftovers to the hospital, eating them on her breaks. Like the garden, she seemed to be growing strangely large, hale, and hearty, but when I measured myself against her, she was the same size as always.

The Saturday before Halloween was earmarked as the big pumpkin harvesting day, and the neighbors helped us hack through the sighing vines and stack the pumpkins on the sidewalk for the community pumpkin carving. The sap seemed strangely dark, but no one else seemed to mind. I proposed tearing the vines out and plowing everything under to get ready for the winter, but my wife said that we should let the vines dry up a bit first.

The children swirled around the pumpkins, picking out their favourites, and I could still hear the sap beating, like a heart, in the severed stems, which oozed dark liquid like blood. My wife picked one out to bring into the house and carve, while I sat on a chair on the lawn, propping my broken leg on an apple crate and supervising the laying out of the pumpkins and the assembly of newspaper and tools for carving.

The chattering of the children and the music from the impromptu band was so loud that I didn’t hear her scream. Apparently no one did, and everyone said I couldn’t have been responsible for not hearing her. The policeman got thirsty, chasing his two daughters around, and he’s the one who went into the house for a glass of water and found her while I was sitting on the chair on the lawn.

She was lying in a pool of blood and pumpkin pulp, like she’d been surprised in the act of carving, and the carving knife had been turned against her. Her eyes gaped and her bloody throat frothed and bubbled as she tried to form a sentence, he told me later. As the policeman picked up the phone to call the ambulance, the children were taking the tops off their pumpkins and screaming too, because inside each pumpkin was a piece of her, the dark woman. The throbbing heart, right hand with fingers writhing blindly, severed legs and feet and, most horrifying of all, her head, with the eyeballs gouged out of their sockets and hanging limply against her cheeks.

The policeman saw the disembodied left hand grasping the carving knife and inching across the floor and didn’t know quite how to react, since police officers are not trained to deal with that sort of thing, but he recognized the heavy gold wedding ring on the finger and whispered “Lucy,” and the hand whirled around to face him, knife raised, and he shot it, not knowing what else to do, and it abruptly decomposed, turned into a pile of fingers and a few tendons covered in dense soil, like the hand of a woman who was cut up on a hot June night and buried under the pumpkin patch, and all of the other pieces of her withered and wasted away, splayed on the sidewalk in a sea of screaming children and pumpkin gore. The dark woman had her day in the sun and she was finished.

To explain what Clay Harper and Paul Goodman were arguing about, it is probably easiest to simply go back into time for a moment, to explain what happened on the night that Amy Tilly ended up under a pier. The cast of characters that night included the brother and sister Clay and Sarah Harper, Sarah’s friends Amy and Kristin, and Clay’s friend Paul. The five students had been friends for most of their lives, but like all relationships, theirs was complex, and it had undercurrents which might not have been readily apparent.

The bioluminesence was out that night, causing the waves to glitter where they broke on the shore, and the five friends decided to go swimming. They headed north of town, filled with high spirits and perhaps some beer, scattering their things across the sand of a remote beach and diving into the icy waters, watching the brief flares of light as the waves broke around them.

If you haven’t seen bioluminescence, it’s hard to explain what it felt like that night. The entire world turns surreal and almost magical, and the ocean seems alive, with every twist and churning motion illuminated. The ethereal nature made everything that night seem very distant, as though everything was happening at the end of a long tunnel, abstracted.

Amy was first out of the water, breathless, and she pushed through the thick undergrowth along the edges of the beach to gather driftwood, assembling the makings of a fire which was roaring by the time the other four emerged from the water. She had always been handy with that sort of thing, and she shouldn’t help but be pleased when Paul Goodman smiled at her over the flames and waved his hand lazily, suggesting that they walk up the beach.

What happened when they walked up the beach is somewhat unclear in the minds of those who were there that night, primarily out of a deliberate desire to suppress the facts. The Harpers talked with Kristin about the biology project, and at some point more beer was drunk, and Clay began to wonder what had happened to Amy and Paul, if perhaps they had become disoriented, as sometimes happens at night, especially when you are flushed with youth and intoxicants.

As Clay started off up the beach, he heard a strange rustling in the undergrowth, but when he cast his flashlight over the bushes, he saw nothing, only the tight tendrils of sweet peas quivering in the breeze. He shook his head, dismissing the idea that the vines were moving on their own, and meandered on until he heard shouts and laughter, and realized that Amy and Paul had climbed back into the water to swim again.

It is perhaps easy to say what each of us would have done in this situation, but none of us were Clay Harper, who was suddenly filled with a stomach churning bitterness. It was this that distracted him as the tenor of the shouting changed, and it was the pounding of his heart and the sudden hot prickling feeling around his eyes which consumed him as Amy Tilly drifted beyond the breaking waves, feeling herself sucked out to sea.

Coastal currents are strange.

Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they aren’t. And, always, there is a strong current which runs along the shoreline, quite close to shore, actually. Sometimes it rushes north, whispering about bikini-clad bodies and ceviche, and at other times, it veers south, bringing a rush of briny, cold water. By the time Amy reached this current, she was probably dead, sucked under by a rip tide and battered against the ocean floor, and she had inhaled enough water to sink below the surface of the ocean, so no one other than a few curious fish marked her passing.

By the time Paul realized that she had truly vanished and he clambered ashore, Clay had turned back to the fire, and he was sitting there with tight lips when Paul returned, alone, to tell the first story in the disappearance of Amy Tilly.

It was then that the argument began. Kristin wanted them to call the Coast Guard, the police, to rescue Amy, while pragmatic Sarah pointed out that Amy was probably already dead, and that the fact that they were all drinking would stand against them, especially if anyone thought to search the car, and found Paul’s weed. For Sarah, the choice was obvious; she didn’t want to jeopardize her acceptance into an expensive college, her financial aid, her life, and she fought vigorously against Kristin’s determined efforts to report the situation.

In the end, Sarah won, as fear often does in these situations, and the four concocted a plan and an alibi.

It was this that Paul Goodman and Clay Harper argued about while Sarah’s body was meticulously deconstructed in the morgue and the tendrils of the Harper’s garden shuddered around them. Clay’s desire to protect his sister was perhaps understandable, as was Paul’s guilt about the disappearance of Amy Tilly and their knowledge of the situation, and the situation might have been intractable if Kevin Carlisle hadn’t been riding Intifada down the alleys of the town that evening, taking advantage of the quiet to get used to the horse. Perhaps if the alley near the Harper house had been paved, instead of gravelled, the two boys would have heard the tell-tale clop of hooves, but they didn’t, and as a result Officer Carlisle could clearly hear the boys arguing.

As he understood the tone of the argument, his eyes widened, and he found himself facing a dilemma: to wit, where does one put arrestees on a horse?

Once government agents make a decision, they tend to move rapidly. Unfortunately for the DEATH agent with dreams of quarantine and grandeur, his request was flatly turned down, although he was allowed to write a “travel advisory” which suggested that people stay out of the town. More decisively, the mayor and city council unanimously decided to erect several garish warning signs in close proximity to the slick, with the hopes of discouraging curious visitors.

The anti-tourism lobby in the town may have been heard to give a faint cheer, but that might also have been the crowd at the stadium for the annual and often extremely bitter match between the town and its nearest rival. In either case, Dr. Pace probably didn’t hear it, because he was standing in the hospital morgue with a frosty government official and Sarah Harper’s parents, trying to explain that the autopsy wasn’t really  optional and that no, they would not be allowed to see the body.

The girl’s mother seemed to have a firm grasp on the situation, but her father was much less rational, and he was arguing that they had been in and out of her hospital room the whole time, so surely it wouldn’t matter if they saw her body. Privately, Dr. Pace agreed, but he was not about to attempt a coup under the nose of the frosty government official, who had come to supervise the autopsy and subsequent cremation of the body.

He took little pleasure in the task ahead, but since the DEATH agents had not brought along a pathologist, time was of the essence, and the minute hand had stopped on him. The government official was supposed to be taking samples on behalf of the lab in the capital, although considering that the slick had essentially eaten through Harper from the inside out, Dr. Pace didn’t really see how the samples would be contained.

The case of Sarah Harper was interesting, because she alone among the students had gotten sick, although some interesting skin conditions were certainly starting to manifest. Dr. Pace theorized that she had somehow ingested water from the river, although the girl had claimed that she hadn’t, when she was still talking. He suspected that the story behind Sarah Harper and the slick might be a bit more complicated than it appeared on the surface.

As the girl’s father got more strident, Agent Parker rounded the corner into the morgue, looking somewhat astonished at the tableau in front of him. He had taken advantage of the generally licentious atmosphere created by being an independent operator to don a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with what appeared to be a formation of F-16s dropping roses onto a crowd, and he seemed quite discomfited to encounter the grim scene, pulling his jacket rapidly across his front and buttoning it in the hopes that no one had made out the graphic.

Agent Parker was annoyed, as he often was, that he had been dispatched to the morgue on a day he was planning to take off, but once again his superiors seemed to feel that he should meddle in a situation he wouldn’t normally be involved with, so he had duly called the hospital to find out when the autopsy was scheduled, only to discover that it was supposed to be already happening. Having absolutely no inclination to put on a suit after a day spent skulking in cafes and pretending he belonged there, Parker decided to go as he was.

“Who,” said Dr. Pace, “are you?”

“Agent Parker,” he said. “FBI.”

He still took a rather childish glee in adding “FBI” to his introductions, but the moment fell somewhat flat, as Dr. Pace looked confused, the government agent looked suspicious, and the Harpers looked blank. Suddenly, Agent Parker realized that a prime opportunity to avoid witnessing the autopsy had presented itself, and he turned to Mrs. Harper.

“Mrs. Harper? There were a few questions I was wanting to ask you,” he said, “if you and your husband wouldn’t mind, ah, coming with me to…”

He glanced at the doctor, who took a moment to comprehend and then nodded and pointed towards his office. Agent Parker deftly steered the parents down the hall, while the doctor and the government official vanished into the depths of the morgue.

Once they arrived in the office, of course, Agent Parker had no idea what to ask the parents, as he had already talked to them at the hospital twice, and doubted that they had much more to add. As he settled them in their chairs, he racked his brain for something else to ask them, and suddenly remembered one of the issues which had been niggling at the back of his mind.

“Your daughter was a friend of Amy Tilly’s, wasn’t she?”

It was simply a guess, given the size of the town, but, as it turned out,  he struck paydirt.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Harper said. “Sarah, Kristin, and Amy are very close. Were. The Three Graces, we called them. They’ve been friends since preschool. We’ve been terribly concerned about Amy, but with everything…I don’t think anyone even told Sarah she was gone, she was in the hospital before anyone realized.”

“Kristin…”

“Kristin Ballantine. Keith Ballantine’s daughter; he’s a big official at the mill, lots of money. But she never let it go to her head, wanted to be treated just like everyone else.”

With a bit of careful poking and prodding, Agent Parker unraveled the life story of a friendship, and decided that, big official for a father or no, he would be having a conversation with Kristin Ballantine on Monday. The “Three Graces,” as it turned out, were found of scrapes, and it seemed possible that the disappearance of Amy Tilly was, perhaps, linked to this. Moreover, her brother often accompanied them, and Agent Parker suspected that he knew more than he was telling.

As Agent Parker collected scattered pieces of the puzzle, Clay Harper and Paul Goodman were arguing about the biggest puzzle piece of all.

A moment of silence followed the young man’s pronouncement, after which a hubbub proceeded to explode, rippling outwards from the back of the room to the front. The DEATH agents looked slightly disconcerted, as though the young man had slipped something past them, which in a sense he had, while the mill representatives looked decidedly anxious. The teens behind the young man, who was named Clay, according to Officer Carlisle, had strangely triumphant expressions, mingled with pity.

The mayor was the first to recover himself, tapping a volume of the state code against the table for attention, since town hall lacked a gavel. It took a moment for the heavy thuds to penetrate the room, and then the talking slowly tapered off, and everyone looked expectantly forward.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the official said, weakly, shooting a pleading look to the mayor, who appeared quite happy to lean back perilously in a folding chair and watch the situation unfold. “We will, ah, yes. Well. I suppose we should adjourn the meeting for the time being, Mr Mayor?”

The mayor looked almost reluctant, but eventually agreed that yes, the meeting should be adjourned, and the crowd began to shuffle out, regrouping in fevered knots on the sidewalk. Officer Carlisle and Henry Makepeace remained behind, as did Agent Parker and a weedy man who turned out to be the biology teacher from the high school.

Vague sounds could be heard from outside, where people seemed to be loosely divided into camps. Some clearly believed that the slick represented some sort of major threat, perhaps planted by capitalist thugs in the dead of night, while others thought it might be a bad thing, but were unwilling to commit, and a minority thought it was all hogwash, apparently, scare tactics on the part of the hippies. Parents in particular seemed to be gathering on the “major threat” side of things, and there was some talk of a parents’ organization, which smelled like trouble to Officer Carlisle.

Clay Harper also remained, with a few other teens, clearly planning to lie in wait for the DEATH agents, and Agent Parker drifted over, sensing that herein lay a story, before everyone in the room became riveted on the heated conversation between the biology teacher and the DEATH official.

The biology teacher, it turned out, had provided DEATH with the samples the class had taken on the day the slick was discovered, along with an assortment of earlier samples for reference, and he was curious to know what was going to be done about it, the slick, and why no one had alerted him or the class to the fact that the slick might be toxic.

“Well obviously it’s toxic,” Mr Delaney was retorting, “if a student died from exposure.”

“We are not yet ready to confirm the toxicity of the slick,” said the official, “as it is still under investigation. You were decontaminated, and your clothes were destroyed, and that seems to be enough, for the time being.”

“For the time being? What about this,” Mr. Delaney said, peeling his shirt sleeve up to reveal a swath of angry red skin, peppered with pustulating sores and half-formed scabs. “I’m not the only one, I’ll bet. I’m sure some of my students have it too. Starts out as a rash.”

The teenagers in the back of the room nodded assent, and the official started to look extremely uncomfortable, while the mayor looked on with unconcealed interest.

“This wasn’t reported to me,” the official said stiffly, trying not to look at the teacher’s oozing arm. “We were, ah, not made aware of this. Hospital personnel were alerted to inform us about any unusual skin-”

“Hospital personnel? You think I can afford to go to the hospital, on this salary? I was putting hydrocortisone on it and hoping it would go away!”

The DEATH agent blanched visibly, and one of the mill officials jotted something on the corner of his legal pad as the students in the back came forward, pulling up their sleeves and pants to display rashes of their own. One of the biologists separated from the pack of DEATH agents and officials to examine them, while another agent conferred with the first official, and then beckoned to Agent Parker, who was puzzled about why they would need him.

“I think we should quarantine them” the second agent said to Agent Parker.

“Them? The students?”

“No,” the agent said. “The whole town.”

“Are you,” the mayor said, “allowed to do that?”

“Like Eyam,” Kevin said, unexpectedly.

“Oh,” said the mayor.

“What,” said the DEATH official.

Agent Parker wedged himself into the temporary headquarters of the Division of Environmental Assessments, Toxins, and Hazards (DEATH), which happened to be located in the police station. As soon as DEATH agents began descending upon the town, they had demanded a temporary base of operations, suspecting that the slick might occupy them for some time, and enjoying their ability to commandeer a workspace. As if taking over a conference room in the police station wasn’t enough, the agents also had a massive mobile lab parked crossways in the parking lot and surrounded with ominous police tape. Of course, the lab didn’t have very much work just yet, because, thus far, no one had been able to figure out how to take a sample of the slick, but the scientists didn’t really mind, since it meant that they could go surfing, sit in the coffee house and argue with each other, or engage in various other vacation-like activities.

Agent Parker had rather been enjoying himself back in Washington, where the tapas were abundant and there were a myriad of professional theatre companies offering an assortment of tantalizing offerings, but as soon as the slick emerged, he was dispatched back to the town, under the rationale that because he had been going through paperwork which might be related to the issue, he would be more effective there.

In what the FBI politely termed an “interagency loan,” Agent Parker found himself working under the head of the DEATH strike team, which apparently required sitting through interminable meetings like the one which was about to begin. In fact, the meeting was simply a practice for the meeting which would be held later, in the town hall, to discuss the issue of the slick and its silently growing menace. An assortment of chairs were scattered haphazardly around the room, and the central table was mounded with electronics, reams of paper, pagers (which didn’t seem to work here, for some reason), and disposable biohazard suits. At a far corner of the table, a secretary had cleared a space to assemble brightly colored poster boards which said nothing in particular, apparently common practice for public information meetings.

Agent Parker wasn’t quite sure what his purpose at this meeting was. He had already been informed by his superior at the FBI and the head of DEATH that he would not be allowed to speak publicly, for fear that someone might draw conclusions about the FBI’s involvement. He was to cooperate with the investigation and stay silent the rest of the time, apparently, but the thought seemed to be that he should sit in on the city meeting anyway. Despite his pleas to be dismissed from the prepping meeting, arguing that he didn’t really need to be briefed on the material for a fourth time (once on the plane, once in the first day’s strike team meeting, and again in a meeting with the Governor’s aides), he was forced to attend.

He hoped that no one would notice that he was doodling in his notebook during the meeting, as was his wont during interminable meetings of all flavors, and as he lost interest in the meaning, his doodling began to turn into a list of issues which seemed to be related to the slick, although no one had proved the link just yet.

To wit:

• Where was Amy Tilly?
• What had this journalist from the Post gotten his hands on?
• Where had McInroe been, and was Brad Whittaker still there?

The Amy Tilly case seemed a bit disorganized at the moment, but now that she had officially been declared a missing person, Agent Parker suspected that he could do a bit of investigating without attracting too much attention, and he made a note to go to the high school the next day to do just that, after talking with the police chief. Since he didn’t see himself doing much good on the quest for the origins and nature of the slick, he thought he might as well dedicate his energies to something reasonably productive.

What Agent Parker and the strike team had not counted upon was the ability of a small town to mobilize extremely effectively within hours, thanks to a brilliantly organized phone tree and local communication network. The community hubs of grocery store, post office, and library had been humming all day, and by the time the team arrived at town hall to set up, a milling crowd had assembled outside, barely held back by the efforts of a single policeman who was patiently explaining to a bewigged woman, for the third time, that the doors would open shortly.

The crowd was greatly mixed, running the gamut from cadaverous mill officials in suits to tie-dye clad hippies with hand-lettered signs. Agent Parker noted a contingent of high school students, most of whom were carrying notebooks, except for a single boy clad in black, who was carrying nothing. Other figures whom he’d seen about town were there as well, as was the Post reporter, sprawled out on the pavement with a bulky camera, taking photographs. Representatives of the local paper were there as well, looking askance at the competition.

The DEATH representatives slipped in with their posterboards to set up and talk with the mayor before their presentation, and Agent Parker drifted through the crowd, feeling very conspicuous in a neat suit and polished shoes until he encountered a plump man in an equally neat suit, also with polished shoes, whom he recognized as one of the residents of Lamprey Street.

“Henry Makepeace,” the man said, stretching out a hand to Agent Parker. “Some crowd, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Agent Parker said, glancing at the policeman, whom he vaguely remembered was named Kevin, or perhaps Kelvin. The policeman was standing under a decorative vine which was waving gently in the breeze, and despite the fact that there was only one of him, the crowd seemed to be fairly respectful, although it jostled against the doors anyway, almost reflexively. Agent Parker marveled at the abilities of a single policeman to control a crowd that large without losing his cool.

When the doors to town hall opened, the crowd burst in, dividing itself into loosely allied camps which were scattered around the room. To the casual eye, of course, the arrangement of the people in the room would have had no over-arching logic, but to those in the know, it was extremely telling, from the mill officials seated up front to the high school students standing quietly in the back of the room. Agent Parker set up camp in a corner, joined, to his surprise, by Henry Makepeace and the policeman, and the head of the strike team called for quiet before turning proceedings over to the mayor, who announced that the meeting would start with a briefing, and end with a question and answer session. Those who wished to stay afterward, he informed the crowd, could examine the posterboards and meet individually with members of the strike team, along with himself and the members of city council, who were scattered about the room, embedded in various factions of the crowd.

The officials were careful to be cagy in their briefing, admitting only that a “slick of unknown origin appears to be spreading in the Callomet River,” and advising the crowd that the matter was under investigation. As a matter of routine, the river was closed until further notice, and the crew was working to identify the chemicals involved to determine the best course of action.

With that, he opened the floor up to comment, and the questions started flying fast while the sign-wavers shifted in their seats. What was the slick? Where did it come from? Was it from the mill? Why were the mill officials there if it wasn’t from the mill? Were the mill officials admitting culpability? Why was it taking so long to figure out what was in the slick? Why were the DEATH scientists at the beach all the time? Was the beach contaminated? Did the slick cause cancer? If it didn’t cause cancer, then why did so many people in town have cancer? Why was the FBI involved? Had someone dumped chemicals into the river? Buried chemicals? Was the slick natural?

Slightly taken aback, the officials attempted to answer the questions, mostly with “I don’t know,” “no,” or “I cannot confirm that,” and the crowd began to settle back down, as crowds always do, in the end. Notes were taken, heads nodded wisely, and the question and answer session seemed to be winding to an end when the young high school student in black stepped forward, prodded by the other students. As he did so, an expectant hush fell over the crowd, and Agent Parker wondered if he had missed something.

“What about my sister,” he said, staring at the floor as he did so.

“Your…sister?”

“My sister,” he said again. “Sarah. Sarah Harper.”

“Ah, yes, well,” said the official. “I am under the impression that her case is being monitored closely, and if we have reason to believe that it is associated with the contamination, we will take any steps necessary.”

“Any steps necessary?”

“To determine the best action in her case, yes,” said the official. “We don’t have enough information to classify it as contamination-related.”

Agent Harper must have looked puzzled, because Henry Makepeace leaned over to explain that the young man’s sister, Sarah, had been in the group of students who discovered the slick, and she was very ill in the hospital. Although he spoke in a low voice, it must have carried to the group of students, because the young man glanced at Agent Parker, and then to the head of the room, and said:

“Sick? Sarah’s not sick. She’s dead.”

The slick drifted lazily in the current while government officials stared at it, with an air of deep puzzlement. Despite a variety of efforts at containment, the slick continued to spread, oozing casually past any number of obstacles put in its way, and no one had been able to identify the source. It was as though the river itself was exuding the ribbons of bright orange goo, a biologist pointed out, and this was not, in fact, that far from the truth. The chemical composition of the slick also eluded explanation, since it had an obnoxious habit of quietly burning through most plastics and metals, and it would silently leach through glass without so much as a by-your-leave.

While it would be anthropomorphizing to say that a sludge of toxic pollutants had feelings or emotions, the slick actually felt somewhat remorseful about escaping its containment drums and bubbling quietly out into the world, where it obviously wasn’t wanted. The slick was the silent, unwanted guest at the otherwise perfectly pleasant party, and some of the party guests were afraid that the slick might start to talk, and then things would get really awkward.

One of those concerned about the slick’s noxious presence was not Brad Whittaker, although it probably would have been, if Brad had known about the slick. Instead, his employers at the mill were growing increasingly concerned about the seeming coincidence of his disappearance and the sudden rise of a whole mess of extremely incriminating documents at the Post. Some reporter had been pestering the office for days, asking for interviews, and a very suspicious-looking photographer had been skulking in the streets of the town earlier, as everyone prepared for a town hall meeting to discuss the slick, and what was going to be done about it.

The brass at the mill had containment on their minds, and not necessarily containment of the slick, which they didn’t particularly care about, except as an inconvenience. They needed containment of information, and it was very evident that something in their plans had gone very, very wrong.

Brad Whittaker was no longer behind the sewage treatment plant, but it wasn’t likely that anyone would find him in his new location, which was even more obscure. He had been moved in the dead of night by his captors, and in silence, despite his attempts at communication. He may even have resorted to bribery, and perhaps petty threats of violence, but his captors would have appeared to be unmoved, and no one was there to witness it if he did try to plead with them. He was cold, and dirty, and distinctly uncomfortable, although if he had known how sentiments were turning against him at the mill, he might have preferred to stay hidden.

As the slick wound its way calmly down the river, it left behind a formidable wake of death, which radiated out from the bank to swallow up reeds, grasses, shrubs, and trees, nibbling at the side of the town almost daintily. Within a few days, the slick would actually start to tease at the edges of the water table, slipping silkily into the wells of those who had them, although, as yet, no one was aware of this.

James Farrier, with the Post, had been stonewalled at every turn when he arrived at the town looking for lodgings and mentioning that he was planning to write a story about the mill. To his surprise, the citizens of the town closed ranks against him silently and without discussion, excluding him not, as his waitress explained on his first night, because they wanted to support the mill, but because he was an outsider, and the mill was their affair, not his. His suggestion that a well balanced, carefully written story about the mill would attract attention for the town was also greeted coldly, because, really, who wants to attract attention?

Working from digital copies of the documents, James Farrier was starting to assemble a story in his hotel room, which mysteriously stank of fish, and as he pulled the threads of the narrative together, he made copious notes about whom he wanted to talk to, and when, and what he wanted to talk to them about. His secret hope was that the town hall meeting would provide him with an opening, or at least a chance to see some of the people he was reading about.

In the police station, Officer Carlisle was discussing the problem with the name of the horse to the Police Chief, who seemed to be having trouble grasping the issue.

“Well, you see,” Officer Carlisle said, “I can’t say that ‘Intifada’ is the best name for a police horse, you know? I’m not sure it sends the right sort of message.”

“What’s wrong with In-tee-fah-duh,” the Police Chief wanted to know.

“Ah, well, some people would argue that intifada is in fact sometimes very necessary,” Officer Carlisle said, while the Police Chief looked blankly back. “But still, I’m not sure it’s the best choice. Why don’t we call him ‘Indy’ and leave it at that?”

“Fine, yes,” the Police Chief said, glancing at the shipping papers so that he could look up “Intifada” on Wikipedia later and wondering what to do about the town hall meeting, the slick, Amy Tilly, and Brad Whittaker. “In the meanwhile,” he said, deciding to dispense with one of his problems, “why don’t you supervise the safety at the town hall meeting?”

Officer Carlisle agreed to do just that, and then went next door to feed Intifada the Police Horse a carrot. He was getting rather fond of the horse, actually, despite his habit of taking a deep breath when he was saddled so that his unwary rider would be tipped off after he mounted up.

Using the byzantine phone system at his hotel, Henry Makepiece managed to get through to Gregory, who arranged a ride for him with Officer Carlisle, who was, according to the garbled signal coming through the headset, driving to the City to pick up a whore. The thought of traveling all the way home with a whore made Henry a bit nervous, but Gregory assured him that “it would be riding in the trailer,” and Henry wouldn’t even know it was there, although the drive might be a slow, what with the trailer and all. Officer Carlisle didn’t seem like the type, in Henry’s experience, but, then again, one never knows.

Gregory also suggested that Henry visit the local paper’s website, which was reporting the details on some sort of contamination in the river, and when Henry did so, he was surprised to find that in addition to untangling the riddle of a massive fish kill caused by a mysterious orange goo, the town was also searching for a missing high school student. Not one, but two major breaking news items of importance in one week; astounding that the paper had been able to find enough reporters to cover it.

In a stroke of brilliance, Henry reported his phone as stolen, rather than lost, suspecting that his parsimonious mobile provider would be reluctant to replace the phone if they found out it had actually just disappeared into the bowels of airport security. The helpful woman with the Arkansas office even offered to have the new phone routed to his hotel, but since he was leaving so soon, he thought it would be better to ship it to his house, where he could pick it up on his return.

After completing these items of business and signing them to the insurance company’s account with a flourish, Henry Makepiece hopped into a taxi for the airport, having taken the precaution of leaving his documentation on the fire at the insurance company’s office for shipping so that if he was intercepted by airport security again, he hopefully wouldn’t be detained as long.

Mysteriously, Henry found his ticket upgraded to first class, and a soft-spoken airline employee whisked him through security and into the warm embrace of the airline’s first class lounge. As it turned out, the airline was still afraid that Henry would be switching loyalties, as though he blamed them for his trouble at security, and he had been upgraded to “palladium status,” whatever that was, and that apparently entitled him to disport himself in the first class lounge for the three hours before boarding was called, thanks to the fact that he was, as usual, early.

While Henry was aware, on an intellectual level, that airlines had first class lounges, and that they were probably rather nice, he was unprepared for the reality of the thing, which included trays of fresh fruit, squashy leather armchairs, smiling staff in stylish suits offering drinks, a wide array of books and magazines, and a “television room,” in which several people were intently watching the season finale of some television show Henry had never heard of. The staff even apologized that the massage therapist had gone home for the day, a far cry from the thin carpeting, hard seats, and screaming babies at the gate.

Henry was in a good mood, therefore, by the time he boarded the plane, and he settled in to sleep through the flight until they arrived at the City. Upon disembarking, he found Officer Carlisle standing at the gate in uniform, chatting with the airline staff. When Henry asked how Officer Carlisle had gotten past security without a ticket, he cheerfully explained that he had told the security screeners he was there to arrest Henry, and that they had better be quick on their feet, as the screeners had promised to send “backup,” whatever that was.

“We can grab something to eat after this,” Officer Carlisle explained as they waited at the baggage carousel. “My horse isn’t coming in for another three hours, so I thought we might as well go back into the City for some food and then come back for him.”

“Your…horse,” Henry Makepiece said, as his conversation with Gregory suddenly became much clearer. “Ah. You don’t, er, seem like the type.”

“I’m not, really,” Officer Carlisle said. “But apparently I’m supposed to be training to be a mounted policeman, and the chief of police got all excited, and then his sister got enthusiastic, and because she was married to the mayor, she convinced the mayor to order some sort of, ah, special horse. Which is arriving today.”

“Oh,” said Henry, looking for his bag. “Well what, er, what did you want to eat?”

Officer Carlisle, it turned out, had only been to the City a few times, and he had a hazy awareness of it at best. Henry came up with the brilliant idea of leaving the horse trailer at the airport and taking the train, assuming that it arrived this time, and he suggested that they just get out at whatever station sounded good and explore. He felt rather daring, doing it, and suspected that he was emboldened by Officer Carlisle’s uniform, which gave him a strange sense of security.

Thus it was that the two men found themselves emerging in the middle of some form of political protest, in which Officer Carlisle’s badge was knocked off by a harried documentary film crew, leading the City police to suspect that he was impersonating a policeman, and once they got that straightened out, the policemen sent them to a diner which they couldn’t find, and they ended up eating bagels in an uncomfortably crowded coffeeshop while someone caterwauled over a guitar.

Henry found himself asking Officer Carlisle (”call me Kevin”) about the horse, and Kevin explained that he had been taking riding lessons for all of a week, with a horse who apparently had an irrational phobia of formal wear, which turned out to be a problem when Kevin showed up in dress blues after a “community gathering” held to honor the missing high school student, Amy Tilly. Since the horse now refused to allow Kevin anywhere near him, the timing of the arrival of Kevin’s very own horse was quite fortuitous, although the only thing Kevin knew about the horse was that it was male, and some sort of “fancy horse breed” which allegedly was “gated,” whatever that meant.

Kevin also confirmed that the fire chief had ruled the fire at Giuseppe’s an arson, and that although Giuseppe had been briefly suspected, he was eventually cleared, thanks to none other than George MacInroe, who had insisted that in his brief period of captivity with Brad Whittaker, Brad had confessed to arranging the fire, which had been set by one of his subordinates. Officer Carlisle had always had his doubts about Whittaker, and he was pleased to have them confirmed, although less pleased to learn that the subordinate had since skipped town and apparently dropped off the face of the Earth, no mean feat in this day and age.

The case of the missing student, Kevin informed Henry, was a bit peculiar, and it seemed that more precise details were only just beginning to percolate out. Kevin suspected that there was still more to the story, but everyone was distracted by the HazMat team which had descended to test the river (and decontaminate the high school students who had discovered the problem, along with everything they’d touched that day; apparently the stench of burning wetsuits in the city incinerator hung around the police station for two days).

While Amy Tilly continued to deliquesce under the pier, Henry and Kevin managed to make their way back to the airport without mishap, in time to meet the cargo plane with the horse. The horse, as it turned out, was big, and the bits of it they could see under the shipping blanket appeared to be brown. It had been tranquilized, the men were told, before being shipped, and it was still heavily under the influence of the drug.

“He’s a great horse,” the veterinarian informed them. “I’m sure he’ll be great for police work. Very friendly, healthy, totally bombproof. I’m sure you’ll love him.”

Confused by the “bombproof” statement, the two men stared blankly at the vet, who finally handed them the shipping papers and the horse’s lead line. With some trepidation, Kevin coaxed him aboard the trailer, carefully shutting the gate so as not to startle him.

Meanwhile, Henry Makepiece poked through the shipping papers to learn the horse’s name, abruptly bursting out in laughter when he found it.

While Henry Makepiece shifted through the ashes of an extremely charred plane, Agent Parker was poring through the boxes from George McInroe’s house, and Officer Carlisle was gloomily surveying an array of brochures on mounted police training. But it seems like such a nice day, and really there’s no reason to be inside with them, because they won’t be going anywhere any time soon. Well, Henry and Agent Parker are in a different time zone than Officer Carlisle, so they’ll be going to lunch pretty soon, but that won’t be very exciting (Henry’s having a peanut butter and jelly on rye, Agent Parker is having tapas at a trendy little bar tucked away in a corner of Capitol Hill which hasn’t been found by any ravenous Congresspeople yet).

On this shimmering and beautiful morning, Mr. Delaney’s class of AP Biology students was suiting up in wetsuits on the pier, getting ready to hop into kayaks and start rowing upstream to take water samples. He had suggested the sampling as an interesting extra-credit project which could be passed down to future classes, creating an extensive record which could be useful at some point, expecting a few particularly obsequious students to pitch in, and was surprised when the whole class pitched in.

Cassandra White, known to her classmates as Cassie, had even suggested doing fish counts as well, arguing that the water samples would be more interesting in context, and before Mr. Delaney knew what was happening, he’d gotten a grant from Fish and Wildlife and the donated use of a fleet of electric orange kayaks. This being that sort of town, most of the students had wetsuits already, and the few who didn’t borrowed them from classmates, or the dive shop, in the case of monstrously tall Tucker Williams.

For this early on a Saturday, the class was surprisingly excited, zooming up on bikes and in their little used cars and chattering on the dock as they carelessly stripped down to their underwear to suit up, sprinkling the pier with an assortment of teenage garments. A few students helped Mr. Delaney ferry things down from the car, carefully storing them in the kayaks.

At 8:00, Mr. Delaney did a head count, and noticed that Amy Tilly seemed to be missing, but everyone else was present. He shrugged and slipped into the head kayak, and the rest of the students followed suit, rowing upriver with the tide with varying degrees of skill. The students had paired off, with each pair choosing a section of the river to supervise, and the first pair, Tucker and Cassandra, quickly got to work fanning out the kayaks, taking samples, and making notes on any fish they observed, taking photographs for reference.

This was the third time the class had gone out, and they seemed to be getting the hang of it, working in an efficient manner while still enjoying themselves. Jokes flew high over the sluggish water, and the harmony of the group was somewhat marvelous to Mr. Delaney, who had first taught a rougher bunch at inner city schools.

His students had grown up together, which meant that, as seniors, they’d been in school together for 13 years, and sometimes more, in the case of those who had gone to preschool. They knew each other inside and out, remembering everyone’s history, foibles, and attempts at reinventing themselves. Sometimes it seemed like they knew each other too well, knew perhaps a bit too much about each other and their families, but at the same time, it cut through the dance of acquaintance which seems to plague other schools at the beginning of the year. Much like the town itself, his students seemed almost like an anomaly; friendly, helpful, courteous people who did things like getting out of bed at seven in the morning to count fish.

Mr. Delaney was so calm and relaxed that he missed the undercurrents of tension in the group, which is perhaps understandable, because they were subtle. If Sara Harper and Kristin Ballantine had gotten into separate kayaks, despite the fact that the two girls were normally inseparable, Mr. Delaney didn’t notice. Amy’s partner, Paul Goodman, seemed undistressed by her absence, while his friend Clay Harper (Sara’s twin) was on edge, but no more so than usual. Mr. Delaney might have been forgiven for attributing the faint air of nerves and tension to end of the year nerves, and the cloud of uncertainty that always hangs over high school seniors in the spring.

The students broke for lunch at 11, pulling sandwiches and mysterious things in tupperware out of their bags and sitting companionably on a secluded beach they’d found the first time out. They talked, as people so often do, about nothing in particular, dabbling toes in the water and peeling off the upper halves of their wetsuits in the heat. Mr. Delaney noted a new bird for his life list, perched on a piling across the river, and with some reluctance prodded the students to get back to work after half an hour or so.

At 1, the students came across the first dead fish, floating glassy-eyed in the river. It was, Cassie noted, a fish which didn’t even belong in the river at all, but they duly photographed it, and Clay pointed out that there seemed to be a faint oil slick of some kind on the water, perhaps from a motorboat, and that was what had probably done the poor creature in.

When they rounded the oxbow at 1:40, therefore, they were unprepared for the sight which faced them: a veritable sea of dead fish, clogging the river and strangely emanating no scent, suggesting that their demise had been recent. Kristin even found one fish still jerking spasmodically. The oil slick was still present, looking glossy and sinister, suddenly, and Mr. Delaney realized that something, somewhere, must be deeply wrong.

This was about the time that James Farrier, with the Post, picked up a phone to ask a simple and perhaps career-making question.

“This data,” he said. “Can it be verified?”

Sara Harper vomited, profusely, into the river, and Mr. Delaney noted with clinical interest that she didn’t appear to have eaten lunch. Most of the other students turned various shades of green, not even bothering to tease Sara, and Clay paddled over with some water while everyone else floated, motionless, as though waiting for something to happen.

“Mr. Delaney?”

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Should we, ah, that is. I mean. Should we go back, now? Report this?”

“Yes, I suppose we should,” he said. “Would someone like to bag some samples?”

Tucker did so, and they paddled back swiftly, in silence.

Perhaps if the kayaks hadn’t been such a brilliant, eye-watering shade of orange, they would have noticed that the oil slick was clinging to the kayaks as well, leaving streamers behind in the water as the students paddled swiftly back to the pier. And perhaps, if the students hadn’t been so disconcerted, they might have realized that most of them had itchy fingers and toes, growing itchier by the minute. They also failed to notice the peculiar scent clinging around the pier, caused by the gently bobbing body of Amy Tilly.

While Henry Makepeace was eating curry with the traveling nurse, Officer Carlisle was starting balefully at a large, brown horse and a small, chipper blonde woman who was holding out a bright pink riding helmet with a broad smile.

“This is Tuxedo,” she said, patting the horse on the shoulder. “He’s very friendly. Just pop your helmet on and we’ll get started!”

The glare of the lights in the indoor ring wasn’t particularly flattering to Officer Carlisle, or the horse, for that matter, who stared back beadily as he absently shuffled a hoof through the dirt and whiffled softly. A soft breeze caused the vines around the open door of the barn to wave gently. The blonde held the helmet out again, and Officer Carlisle wearily snapped it on and waited for directions.

“Now then,” she said. “You’ve ridden before, right?”

“Ah, no,” Officer Carlisle said, adjusting the strap of the helmet in a vain attempt to get it to stop gouging his chin.

“Oh,” she said. “Well then, we’d better use a mounting block today.”

She led the horse over to a set of wooden stairs and waited expectantly for Officer Carlisle to follow, which he did, reluctantly.

“Now, just step up, and climb into the saddle,” she said. “We’ll adjust the stirrups once you’re up.”

To Officer Carlisle’s jaundiced eye, the saddle resembled a postage stamp, not at all like the very large, chair-like saddles he saw during the town’s annual parades, when the rodeo queen and a team of demonstration riders trotted down Main Street. Nevertheless, he boldly stepped up, hauling himself awkwardly into the saddle from the mounting block.

The stirrups, it turned out, were short, and the blonde fluttered around adjusting them, telling him to “keep a light grip on the reins” while the horse continued to shuffle his hoof. Eventually she had things adjusted to satisfaction, and she snapped a lead-line to Tuxedo’s halter and led him out into the middle of the ring, causing Officer Carlisle to lurch uneasily in the saddle, feeling as though he was perched on a precipice. While the horse hadn’t seemed very large from the ground, Officer Carlisle suddenly felt very high up.

“Since you haven’t ridden before and it’s late,” she said, “I’ll just walk you around the ring a bit, to let you get the hang of things, ok? You can just drop the reins for now, on his neck there. Let yourself settle in and feel your connection with Tuxedo, alright?”

Officer Carlisle nodded curtly back as Tuxedo plodded through the coarse sand, and an uneasy silence settled over the three of them. The air was filled with a distinct tangy scent, and a rich, almost dusty aroma, with notes of leather. Officer Carlisle found himself wondering what the barn did with its manure, as that sort of thing was supposed to be very good for the garden, and just as he did so, the woman abruptly broke into a strange sort of jogging, and the horse promptly sped up into a jolting, extremely uncomfortable gait which caused Officer Carlisle to wonder about his future chances of having children.

“Ahhhh,” he said. “Err.”

“This is a trot,” the blonde said, slowing the horse. “Wasn’t that fun?”

“Er,” Officer Carlisle responded.

“Phhbut,” said Tuxedo.

“So, Kevin,” she said brightly. “What made you decide to start riding?”

What made Officer Carlisle start riding?

It’s a good question, and it is perhaps best answered by explaining that Officer Carlisle was typically the last person into staff meetings, due to circumstances which were somewhat beyond his control. While he had every intention of arriving at meetings on time, for some reason, he never seemed to be able to manage it. On this particular week, the culprit had been his squad car, which had decided not to start when he was leaving the house, forcing him to borrow Henry Makepeace’s bicycle, which Henry had generously mentioned that Officer Carlisle could use in his absence.

“Get out of the car a bit,” were Henry’s words. “Maybe you’ll like it enough to get your own. We could ride together sometime.”

By the time Officer Carlisle arrived at the police station, sweaty and attempting to remember the license plates of the three drivers who had nearly killed him along the way, he was the last person in the door for the meeting, which had already started, and so he was unprepared for what happened next.

“Ah, Officer Carlisle,” the Police Chief said. “You like horses, don’t you?”

“Well, I don’t object to them. Sir.”

“Excellent,” said the Police Chief. “Then you’ll be delighted to know that we’re sending you off for mounted officer training.”

“What? Sir?”

“Well,” the Police Chief explained, “the Mayor thought it might be nice to have a mounted policeman about town, and I thought it might be a good idea too. You can be in parades, you know. Carry the flag, that sort of thing. And, er, a mounted policeman just seems sort of useful, you know? All sorts of things you can do with a horse.”

“Well, I could be a bicycle policeman, sir” Officer Carlisle suggested. “That’s like being a mounted policeman, only with less mess? Where would we keep a horse? Don’t mounted police usually work in squads?”

“Nonsense,” replied the police chief, and it was settled.

Only it wasn’t settled, it turned out, because in order to go to mounted police school, you needed to know how to ride. In fact, the enrollment documents sent from the State suggested that “experienced riders” would be the most suitable for the course, and Officer Carlisle protested that surely someone on the police force had at least been on a horse before, given that many of the officers were local, and it was the sort of community where people had horses. Also, Keven Carlisle didn’t much fancy going to more police school, especially if it was in the Capitol again, because he hated the Capitol with a passion. Entirely too hot for one city, in Officer Carlisle’s opinion.

“Nonsense,” said the Police Chief again. “We’ll give you some riding lessons and then pop you off to school. It’s in the mountains, anyhow, nice and cool. And the basic training is only a month, so if we send you off soon, we’ll have you back in time for the Fourth of July parade! Won’t that be exciting?”

“Yes, sir,” said Officer Carlisle.

“Excellent. I’ll arrange some lessons, and I’ll talk with the school about a mount. Apparently you need to bring your own, but the horse has to have some sort of special training. Something about training it to find bombs or something? Or maybe it’s bomb-proof armor or something. At any rate, I’ll straighten it out.”

“My…own, sir? Bombs?” For once, Officer Carlisle was at a loss for words.

“Well of course the department will provide it, Officer Carlisle. But I want to make sure we get a nice horse for you. A nice, pretty horse. Maybe one with a wavy tail, so it will look especially nice on parade. My sister’s fond of horses, I’m sure she can help pick one out once the school tells us what we need.”

“I’m training to become a mounted police officer,” Officer Carlisle said to the blonde. “But before I go to school, I need to learn how to ride.”

“Oh,” said the blonde. “Well then, that’s enough for today.”

She led Officer Carlisle back to the mounting block, and he stiffly dismounted.

“If you come with me,” she said, “I’ll show you how to untack and groom him.”

She started to lead Tuxedo away, and then hesitated.

“When are you going for your training? I’m just wondering how much time we have to work together?”

“Well, the Police Chief wants me back by the beginning of July. And the training is a month, so I suppose we have until June,” Officer Carlisle said.

“Oh,” she said again. “Well, why don’t you lead Tuxedo over to the cross-ties, then? We’d better start getting you comfortable with him.” She thrust the lead-line into Officer Carlisle’s hand. “Now, don’t wrap it around your hand,” she said. “Just keep a nice, firm grip, and walk him over to the cross-ties, just at the end of the row there. I’ll walk with you.”

Tuxedo studied Officer Carlisle carefully as he started to walk down the row, keeping the required firm grip, but the horse decided that now was not the time for rebellion, and he went along quietly. When they reached the cross-ties, the blonde patiently showed Officer Carlisle how to tie the lead-line, and directed him as he began to take off Tuxedo’s tack, draping it on a saddle rack.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now I’ll show you how to pick his hooves.”

As Officer Carlisle awkwardly held Tuxedo’s front hoof in his left hand while attempting to figure out what to do with the hoof pick, he finally got the nerve to ask the question which had been percolating in his mind for some time.

“Why is he called Tuxedo? It seems like an odd name for a brown horse.”

“Oh,” said the blonde, with a strange smile. “You’ll find out.”

The girl on the plane next to Henry Makepeace smelled like cantaloupes. She was short enough that her feet didn’t touch the nauseatingly patterned carpeting beneath their seats, and she was swinging her left leg impatiently while the stewardesses, or cabin staff, or whatever you call them these days, were roaming up and down the aisles, tucking bags into overhead compartments and telling people to put their trays up. Henry Makepeace had his laptop tucked neatly under the seat in front of him, with the folder of documentation on the plane he was going to examine in the pocket in front of him, wedged in front of the airsickness bag, the tattered safety instructions card, and an abandoned fashion magazine with some vapid star on the cover, tousled hair and sultry eyes.

Henry Makepeace was annoyed.

He had a habit of arriving at airports early, and he had intended to do just that, taking the train so as not to inconvenience Gregory’s wife, as the airport was rather distant from the hospital and her lodgings. He had a carefully arranged schedule all worked out, which involved taking the 7:09 train, or the 7:24. Either way, he would be there in plenty of time to check in and go through security, with his laptop and light overnight bag.

He arrived at the station at 7:00, after eating Indian food with Gregory’s wife, and with a faint hint of indigestion rippling through his stomach, Henry started thinking about the events of the last week, and wondering what would come of them. Officer Carlisle, he suspected, was doing a bit of investigation on the side, FBI be damned, and the policeman seemed to suspect that the arson at Giuseppe’s and the disappearance (and subsequent reappearance) of George McInroe might be linked. Where Brad Whittaker was, nobody knew.

The 7:09 didn’t come, though, and the commuters on the platform got restless, shuffling their feet and sighing deeply as the platform grew steadily more packed, gradually filling with strange smells and a cacophony of sound, interrupted occasionally by unintelligible announcements from the speakers overhead. Trains seemed to come from the other direction every few minutes, causing even more expressions of irritation from commuters as they craned their necks hopefully, hearing the distant screech and thunder, only to realize that it was coming from the train pulling up to the other side of the platform.

At 7:20, Henry Makepeace began to fret, on a low level, and by 7:30, he was beginning to be extremely irritated, so he cornered a harried looking policeman and asked him where the train was, but the policeman didn’t know, and the speakers crackled and gargled overhead, but nothing came out. And then, as seems to happen in large masses of people, a rumor spread, slowly at first and then flashing like wildfire across the platform. There was a fire, maybe, a station down, or perhaps someone had fallen in front of a train, and suddenly there was a stampede for the exits.

Henry was not familiar with this city, The City, as the people in his town called it, and when he was disgorged into the surface streets among a mass of teeming humanity, he was deeply confused. There were buses, he knew, and some other train, perhaps, but he didn’t know where it went, or where the station was, and he ended up flagging an electric green cab and asking for the airport, only the cabbie didn’t know which airport, so first they went over the wrong bridge, and once that was straightened out with a rapid turnaround in some desperately rundown looking industrial neighborhood, Henry Makepeace despaired of ever making his flight.

Fortunately for Henry, traffic was light that evening, no shootings or accidents or roadwork, and he arrived at the airport at the time passengers are usually expected to arrive for 11:00 flights. He rushed through the self check-in kiosk, and muttered in despair because his preferred bulkhead or exit seats were all taken, so he would be forced to sit in a regular seat, hemmed in on all sides by seats which were altogether too tightly packed rather than being able to stretch out, and then he cooled his heels in the security line, and then, inexplicably, he was pulled aside.

He could see several uniformed officials conferencing over the chipped plastic tub with his laptop in it, but he couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, and the man who pulled him aside told him they would “get his things,” so Henry Makepeace stood, barefoot and humiliated, while passengers streamed around him, some looking back curiously at the portly man with the woeful expression and the wrinkled suit, stained with Henry’s nervous and frustrated sweat, and then an official picked up the wrong bag, and a thin, strident woman started shrilling about search and seizure, and finally Henry Makepeace and his two bags and his shoes and a little plastic tray full of his watch, wallet, phone, and keys were sitting at a table in a room off some shadowy hallway, and he was clinging limply to his ticket.

There were, it emerged, two separate problems.

The first was that something in his laptop had looked suspicious, so the airport personnel had swabbed it, and it was positive for some sort of residue, fertilizer, maybe, and Henry tried to say that his gardener had borrowed the laptop for a few days, and maybe it was that, but the officials weren’t looking at him, and they were discussing what should be done, and then the second problem emerged.

And that problem was that Henry Makepeace had a folder stuffed with plans for an airplane, along with a sheaf of images of a flame-gutted airplane, and a stack of documents about propellants and accelerants and vectors and other complicated things. And while Henry Makepeace could see how such a thing might be misunderstood, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to explain, and he began to realize that he might, in fact, be in serious trouble, and he asked if perhaps he could call his employer, and then they took his phone away.

After that, Henry Makepeace was left alone, for a time, while his bags went somewhere else, and so did his shoes, and presently a policeman appeared, a real policeman, not one of the nebulous uniformed people who manned the security gate, and the policeman asked a lot of questions, which Henry tried to answer. At one point, he snapped irritably that if he was planning to bomb the plane, surely he didn’t need to take the plans for the bomb with him, since presumably a bomber would have his plan together by the time he arrived at the airport, but this didn’t seem to impress the policeman. He told them to call Halcyon, to call his boss, to look through the files on the laptop, whatever it took, and he tried to tell them that it was crucial that he get on the 11:00 flight, someone was meeting him on the other side, and he was very tired, and then the policeman went away again.

There was no clock in the room, and Henry’s watch was gone, along with the rest of his possessions, so he stared blankly at the table and wondered if the airline would re-seat him because he had been mistakenly held captive by airport security, but he doubted it. Henry Makepeace was also hungry, and longing for the extra pakoras he had packed away in the front pocket of his laptop bag, and he wanted his shoes, very passionately.

Have you ever been in one of the bland, windowless rooms along the dull, nameless corridors of an airport? If you have, you probably know how Henry Makepeace felt, and you can understand why he was so glad when four people burst through the door, three security people and someone in a uniform from the airline, all of them extremely apologetic.

It transpired that because Henry flew on that airline rather a lot, and always took the same flight when he did, the staff grew concerned when he checked in at the counter and failed to show up at the gate. And one of them had the presence of mind to assume that he had been caught by security, so she went to the security office to find out, and after some hemming and hawing, the security people admitted that they did indeed have Henry, and she radioed the gate and told them to hold the plane, and she plunged into the fray to rescue Henry, along with his luggage, which is how Henry found himself running down that bland, nameless corridor barefooted and trailed by three contrite security officers holding his luggage, shoes, and the little plastic tray, with the airline employee keeping pace with them and talking rapidly into her walkie.

Have you ever been the last person to walk onto a plane? And had all the passengers staring at you, wondering if you are the reason the plane was held? If you have, you know how Henry Makepeace felt, slinking barefoot down the aisle trailed by the three security officials with his luggage. And when he reached his row, of course, the girl was sitting in his seat, clearly under the impression that today was her lucky day, and she would have three seats to herself, and the girl glared at him, and a stewardess glared at him, and while the security agent stowed his overnight bag in the luggage compartment, all of the compartments on the other side popped open, raining luggage on the passengers below, and the other two security officials wordlessly thrust his laptop, shoes, and plastic tray of tawdry personal effects on him before fleeing the plane.

Henry, being courteous, asked if the girl wanted the window or the aisle, and she shrugged indifferently but kept standing in the aisle, as though she expected Henry to take the window. He was also an orderly sort, so stacked his belongings on the empty seat between him and the girl and set about organizing them, replacing his watch, keys, and wallet where they belonged and then stowing the laptop under the seat, after pulling out the folder and wedging it into the seat pocket, and tucking his shoes in on either side of the laptop bag. The pakoras, mysteriously, were gone.

He was left holding the plastic tray from security, and eventually he decided to stuff it into the seat pocket of the middle seat in front of him, while the cantaloupe-scented girl bobbed her head and tried to look as disinterested as possible, and finally the “fasten seatbelts” light clicked on, and the plane was rolling back from the gate, and the stewardesses were doing the safety presentation, which Henry ignored, and then the plane was pulling away from the tarmac and Henry was watching the lights of The City recede behind him.

It was then that he realized he’d failed to make arrangements to get a ride home upon his return.

And that he hadn’t gotten his phone back.