Phantoms

faced directly onto the sidewalk. Jenny climbed the steps at each house and rang the bell. No one answered, not even at those houses where light shone beyond the windows. She considered trying a few doors and, if they were unlocked, going inside. But she didn’t do it because she suspected, just as Lisa did, that the occupants (if they could be found at all) would be in the same grotesque condition as Hilda Beck and Paul Henderson. She needed to locate living people, survivors, witnesses. She couldn’t learn anything more from corpses.
    “Is there a nuclear power plant around here?” Lisa asked.
    “No. Why?”
    “A big military base?”
    “No.”
    “I thought maybe… radiation.”
    “Radiation doesn’t kill this suddenly.”
    “A really strong blast of radiation?”
    “Wouldn’t leave victims who look like these.”
    “No?”
    “There’d be burns, blisters, lesions.”
    They came to the Lovely Lady Salon, where Jenny always had her hair cut. The shop was deserted, as it would have been on any ordinary Sunday. Jenny wondered what had happened to Madge and Dana, the beauticians who owned the place. She liked Madge and Dana. She hoped to God they’d been out of town all day, visiting their boyfriend over in Mount Larson.
    “Poison?” Lisa asked as they turned away from the beauty shop.
    “How could the entire town be poisoned simultaneously?”
    “Bad food of some kind.”
    “Oh, maybe if everyone had been at the town picnic, eating the same tainted potato salad or infected pork or something like that. But they weren’t. There’s only one town picnic, and that’s on the Fourth of July.”
    “Poisoned water supply?”
    “Not unless everyone just happened to take a drink at precisely the same moment, so that no one had a chance to warn anyone else.”
    “Which is just about impossible.”
    “Besides, this doesn’t look much like any kind of poison-reaction I’ve ever heard about.”
    Liebermann’s Bakery. It was a clean, white building with a blue-and-white-striped awning. During the skiing season, tourists lined up halfway down the block, all day long, seven days a week, just to buy the big flaky cinnamon wheels, the sticky buns, chocolate-chip cookies, almond cupcakes with gooey mandarin-chocolate centers, and other goodies that Jakob and Aida Liebermann produced with tremendous pride and delicious artistry. The Liebermanns enjoyed their work so much that they even chose to live near it, in an apartment above the bakery (no light visible up there now), and although there wasn’t nearly as much profit in the April-to-October trade as there was the rest of the year, they remained open Monday through Saturday in the off season. People drove over from all the outlying mountain towns—Mount Larson, Shady Roost, and Pineville—to purchase bags and boxes full of the Liebermanns’ treats.
    Jenny leaned close to the big window, and Lisa put her forehead against the glass. In the rear of the budding, back in the part where the ovens were, light poured brightly through an open door, splashing one end of the sales room and indirectly illuminating the rest of the place. Small cafe tables stood to the left, each with a pair of chairs. White enamel display cases with glass fronts were empty.
    Jenny prayed that Jakob and Aida had escaped the fate that appeared to have befallen the rest of Snowfield. They were two of the gentlest, kindest people she had ever met. People like the Liebermanns made Snowfield a good place to live, a haven from the rude world where violence and unkindness were disconcertingly common.
    Turning away from the bakery window, Lisa said, “How about toxic waste? A chemical spill. Something that would’ve sent up a cloud of deadly gas.”
    “Not here,” Jenny said, “aren’t any toxic waste dumps in these mountains. No factories. Nothing like that.”
    “Sometimes it happens whenever a train derails and a tank car full of chemicals splits open.”
    “Nearest railroad tracks are twenty miles away.”
    Her brow creasing with thought, Lisa started walking away from the bakery.
    “Wait. I want to take a look in here,” Jenny said, stepping to the front door of the shop.
    “Why? No one’s there.”
    “We can’t be sure.” She pushed the door but couldn’t open it. “The lights are on in the back room, the kitchen. They could be back there, getting things ready for the morning’s baking, unaware of what’s happened in the rest of the town. This door’s locked.