Empire Falls

stations now off the air, but where the story had run on the eleven o’clock news. Tomorrow? He didn’t even want to think about that. In a few short hours the lawn outside would be crawling with reporters. He undressed quickly and slid into bed next to his wife, who woke up and took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant to stay awake.”
    “Tomorrow,” he said, “if you think of it, will you call David Irving and see if you can get me an appointment?”
    “Your stomach?”
    No need to answer this.
    “They still haven’t located the boy?”
    “They will tomorrow.”
    “What will happen to him?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “What will happen to us?”
    “We’ll survive,” Otto told her. She was right, of course. This was the sort of thing high school principals lost their jobs over—and probably, though he would never say this to Anne, should lose their jobs over. “It’ll start early,” he told her, giving her hand a squeeze before reaching up to turn out the lamp. “We should sleep if we can.”
    What he meant was that she should. Sleep was pretty much out of the question for him, exhaustion or no exhaustion. In the dark bedroom the events of the afternoon and evening grew even more vivid.
    It was Bill Daws he had called with his suspicions, even confessing that he’d broken into the old woman’s house. When he’d finished, the police chief said simply, “Meet me there.”
    He’d waited out in the car while Daws and Jimmy Minty and another policeman searched the entire premises. Otto had not himself gone into either the attic or the cellar, of course, but even taking into account that there was no light in the house to search by, it had taken a very long time to ascertain officially what everyone seemed to know from the beginning. Bill had had a radiation treatment that morning and when he came back out of the house with Minty, both men silent, he did not look well. Minty went over to his cruiser and talked on the radio.
    “Well,” Bill Daws said, “I suppose the good news is that we don’t know for sure that she isn’t off visiting her sister or something.”
    Otto was grateful to hear this possibility given voice. It was the very straw he’d been clinging to.
    “I got a bad feeling, though,” the police chief added.
    “Me, too, Bill, me, too.”
    “Anyway, neither one of them’s here, so why don’t you go on home?”
    He nodded, understanding that the only reason Bill Daws had wanted him there at all was in case the boy turned up. “I was thinking I’d go back in to school.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Did you notice that stake out back?”
    “I did.”
    “What do you make of it?”
    “I’m trying not to think about it,” Daws admitted. “Listen, if this thing turns out bad, like I think it’s going to, we won’t be able to keep it quiet.”
    “I wouldn’t ask you to.”
    Dusk had fallen completely, and the two men heard the vehicles before the headlights cut through the darkness into the driveway. The first was some sort of police SUV with a German shepherd pacing anxiously in back. The other was Jimmy Minty’s Camaro, and when Zack got out Meyer noticed again that he was limping. His father went over and they exchanged a few words, the boy glancing over at the principal and shaking his head. Then he got back in the Camaro and drove off, back toward town.
    “What was all that about?” Bill Daws wanted to know when Jimmy Minty joined them.
    “I asked him if he wrote those notes,” Minty explained, looking at Otto. “He didn’t.”
    Bill nodded, said nothing.
    “How come you people want to blame my boy for everything?”
    “What people are those?” Otto said.
    “At the school. You. Coach Towne.”
    Otto turned and looked Bill Daws in the face. “He wrote the notes.”
    “Yeah?” Minty said. “Prove it.”
    “All right,” Bill said in a way that made it clear he’d had enough of this. “See if you can get ahold of somebody at Central Maine Power,” he told Minty, effectively dismissing him. “We’ll need some temporary power at this house.”
    The officer who’d driven the SUV now had the German shepherd on a leash. “Where do you want to start?” he called over. “Here at the house, I guess,” Daws said, his voice dispirited. “It’s over across the way we’ll find her, though.”
    Which meant the police chief had thought of it too, and this relieved Otto’s fears that he might be the only one to whom such a horrible notion had