Phantoms

There’s no reason to be so scared of him. It’s wrong to give in to irrational fears. It’s wrong and weak and stupid. A person should face up to fears like that,” Lisa insisted. “Facing up to them is the only way to get over them. Right? So I decided to face up to this .” With a tilt of her head, she indicated the dead man at her feet.
    There’s such anguish in her eyes, Jenny thought.
    It wasn’t merely the situation in Snowfield that was weighing heavily on the girl. It was the memory of finding her mother dead of a stroke on a hot, clear afternoon in July. Suddenly, because of all of this , all of that was coming back to her, coming back hard.
    “I’m okay now,” Lisa said. “I’m still afraid of what might happen to us, but I’m not afraid of him .” She glanced down at the corpse to prove her point, then looked up and met Jenny’s eyes. “See? You can count on me now. I won’t flake out on you again.”
    For the first time, Jenny realized that she was Lisa’s role model. With her eyes and face and voice and hands, Lisa revealed, in countless subtle ways, a respect and an admiration for Jenny that was far greater than Jenny had imagined. Without resorting to words, the girl was saying something that deeply moved Jenny: I love you, but even more than that, I like you; I’m proud of you; I think you’re terrific, and if you’re patient with me, I’ll make you proud and happy to have me for a kid sister.
    The realization that she occupied such a lofty position in Lisa’s personal pantheon was a surprise to Jenny. Because of the difference in their ages and because Jenny had been away from home almost constantly since Lisa was two, she had thought that she was virtually a stranger to the girl. She was both flattered and humbled by this new insight into their relationship.
    “I know I can count on you,” she assured the girl. “I never thought I couldn’t.”
    Lisa smiled self-consciously.
    Jenny hugged her.
    For a moment, Lisa clung to her fiercely, and when they pulled apart, she said, “So… did you find any clue to what happened here?”
    “Nothing that makes sense.”
    “The phone doesn’t work, huh?”
    “No.”
    “So they’re out of order all over town.”
    “Probably.”
    They walked to the door and stepped outside, onto the cobblestone sidewalk.
    Surveying the hushed street, Lisa said, “Everyone’s dead.”
    “We can’t be sure.”
    “Everyone,” the girl insisted softly, bleakly. “The whole town. All of them. You can feel it.”
    “The Santinis were missing, not dead,” Jenny reminded her.
    A three-quarter moon had risen above the mountains while she and Lisa had been in the sheriff’s substation. In those night-clad places where the streetlamps and shop lights did not reach, the silvery light of the moon limned the edges of shadowed forms. But the moonglow revealed nothing. Instead, it fell like a veil, clinging to some objects more than to others, providing only vague hints of their shapes, and, like all veils, somehow managing to make all things beneath it more mysterious and obscure than they would have been in total darkness.
    “A graveyard,” Lisa said. “The whole town’s a graveyard. Can’t we just get in the car and go for help?”
    “You know we can’t. If a disease has—”
    “It’s not disease.”
    “We can’t be absolutely sure.”
    “I am. I’m sure. Anyway, you said you’d almost ruled it out, too.”
    “But as long as there’s the slightest chance, however remote, we’ve got to consider ourselves quarantined.”
    Lisa seemed to notice the gun for the first time. “Did that belong to the deputy?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is it loaded?”
    “He fired it three times, but that leaves three bullets in the cylinder.”
    “Fired at what?”
    “I wish I knew.”
    “Are you keeping it?” Lisa asked, shivering.
    Jenny stared at the revolver in her right hand and nodded. “I guess maybe I should.”
    “Yeah. Then again… it didn’t save him , did it?”
     

Chapter 6
    Novelties and Notions
     
    They proceeded along Skyline Road, moving alternately through shadows, yellowish sodium-glow from the streetlamps, darkness, and phosphoric moonlight. Regularly spaced trees grew from curbside planters on the left. On the right, they passed a gift shop, a small cafe, and the Santinis’ ski shop. At each establishment, they paused to peer through the windows, searching for signs of life, finding none.
    They also passed townhouses that