Empire Falls

time his mother was crossing back over the Iron Bridge into Empire Falls, he’d called Cindy Whiting. “Oh, Miles,” she’d said, her voice immediately rich with tears . “Dear, dear Miles.”

CHAPTER 27
    O TTO M EYER J R . listened to the recorded message that told him the number he was dialing was no longer in service, hung up, and reached for the big plastic bottle of antacids he kept in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. Every principal he knew kept something in the lower right-hand drawer, something to get him through the day, and Otto comforted himself that there were far worse things he could be hiding. Unscrewing the lid, he shook four or five tablets into the palm of his left hand and chewed them somberly. Before replacing the bottle, he counted how many remained through the wide round opening. Nineteen, it looked like. Not enough to last the week, not the way this week was going. Which meant a trip in to the Fairhaven Wal-Mart, where he could buy another family-size bottle of generic equivalents, five hundred a batch for practically nothing. The pharmacist swore they were identical to the national brands, but Otto had his doubts. More and more of the damned things were required to settle his stomach.
    No longer bothering with the recommended dosages, for months he’d been “nuking” his problem stomach at the first sign of a flare-up. The number of antacid tablets he chewed these days was based on the size of the problem that was making the acid in his stomach churn and then rise in his throat until he could taste it on the back of his tongue. Last week, after learning that one of his best teachers had gone home after school and beaten his wife so badly she had to be hospitalized, he’d recommended about a dozen tablets and followed his recommendation to the letter. When he went to visit the man’s wife in the hospital the next day and she looked out at him from between the slits of eyes swollen nearly shut, he went downstairs to the gift shop and bought a roll of the national brand and recommended to himself that he eat about half of them right there in front of the cash register. The next day he paid a visit to the teacher at his home, where he found the man sitting in his kitchen staring at a handgun that lay on the dinette table—which suggested that the correct dosage was the other half. Now this John Voss thing.
    The third note had appeared in his mailbox this morning, though there was no way of knowing whether it had been put there today or late yesterday afternoon, after the staff had gone home. Like the others, this one consisted of a single sentence, typed, then printed out, he had no doubt, on a machine in the media center. Where is John Voss’s grandmother? No salutation. No signature.
    The first had appeared in his box on Friday, and Otto had paid no attention, assuming it to be the work of a crank, several of whom worked regular hours under his jurisdiction. The second appeared in the center of his desk on Monday morning, and at first glance he thought it was the same one, until he remembered wadding the original up and throwing it away. When he asked Gladys, his secretary, who’d put it on his desk, she shook her head and said, “What note?” In response to the second note Otto ate an antacid and asked for John Voss’s file, and now—with the third note and the file spread out before him—he asked Gladys to find out where the boy was during sixth period.
    The answer—in the cafeteria, eating lunch with Christina Roby—Otto might have remembered if he’d thought about it. He himself was responsible for this arrangement, which, Allah be praised, seemed to be working. Well, actually, he had no idea whether it was working or not, except that he generally heard about it when things didn’t work, especially when what wasn’t working was something he’d instigated, in which case he heard about it over and over. The only new development he could recall was the boy’s dishwashing job at the Empire Grill, certainly a positive sign. True, the kid remained generally unresponsive to teachers and other external stimuli, but Otto had noticed an improvement in his appearance these last few weeks. He seemed cleaner, his hair less matted, his thrift-store wardrobe less bizarrely mismatched. Was it possible he’d fallen in love with Christina Roby? Otto supposed it was. After all, the link between romance and personal hygiene was well established, and he remembered how he