Phantoms

looked down toward Ye Olde Towne Tavern, Big Nickle Variety Shop, Patterson’s Ice Cream Parlor, and Mario’s Pizza.
    There are silences and silences. No one of them is quite like another. There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void. As a physician who had treated her share of terminally ill patients, Jenny was familiar with that special, grim silence.
    This was it. This was the silence of death.
    She hadn’t wanted to admit it. That was why she had not yet shouted “hello?” into the funereal streets. She had been afraid no one would answer.
    Now she didn’t shout because she was afraid someone would answer. Someone or something. Someone or something dangerous.
    At last she had no choice but to accept the facts. Snowfield was indisputably dead. It wasn’t really a town any more; it was a cemetery, an elaborate collection of stone-timber-shingle-brick-gabled-balconied tombs, a graveyard fashioned in the image of a quaint alpine village.
    The wind picked up again, whistling under the caves of the buildings. It sounded like eternity.
     

Chapter 7
    The County Sheriff
     
    The County authorities, headquartered in Santa Mira, were not yet aware of the Snowfield crisis. They had their own problems.
    Lieutenant Talbert Whitman entered the interrogation room just as Sheriff Bryce Hammond switched on the tape recorder and started informing the suspect of his constitutional rights. Tal closed the door without making a sound. Not wanting to interrupt just as the questioning was about to get underway, he didn’t take a chair at the big table, where the other three men were seated. Instead, he went to the big window, the only window, in the oblong room.
    The Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department occupied a Spanish-style structure that had been erected in the late 1930s. The doors were all solid and solid-sounding when you closed them, and the walls were thick enough to provide eighteen-inch-deep windowsills like the one on which Tal Whitman settled himself.
    Beyond the window lay Santa Mira, the county seat, with a population of eighteen thousand. In the mornings, when the sun at last topped the Sierras and burned away the mountain shadows, Tal sometimes found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, forested foothills on which Santa Mira rose, for it was an exceptionally neat, clean city that had put down its concrete and iron roots with some respect for the natural beauty in which it had grown. Now night was settled in. Thousands of lights sparkled on the rolling hills below the mountains, and it looked as if the stars had fallen here.
    For a child of Harlem, black as a sharp-edged winter shadow, born in poverty and ignorance, Tal Whitman had wound up at the age of nine, in a most unexpected place. Unexpected but wonderful.
    On this side of the window, however, the scene was not so special. The interrogation room resembled countless others in police precinct houses and sheriffs’ stations all over the country. A cheap linoleum-tile floor. Battered filing cabinets. A round conference table and five chairs. Institutional-green walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs.
    At the conference table in the center of the room, the current occupant of the suspect’s chair was a tall, good-looking, twenty-six-year-old real estate agent named Fletcher Kale. He was working himself into an impressive state of righteous indignation.
    “Listen, Sheriff,” Kale said, “can we just cut this crap? You don’t have to read me my rights again , for Christ’s sake. Haven’t we been through this a dozen times in the past three days?”
    Bob Robine, Kale’s attorney, quickly patted his client’s arm to make him be quiet. Robine was pudgy, round-faced, with a sweet smile but with the hard eyes of a casino pit boss.
    “Fletch,” Robine said, “Sheriff Hammond knows he’s held you on suspicion just about as long as the law allows, and he knows that I know it, too. So what he’s going to do—he’s going to settle this one way or the other within the next hour.”
    Kale blinked, nodded, and changed his tactics. He slumped in his chair as if a great weight of grief lay on his shoulders. When he spoke, there was a—faint tremor in his voice. “I’m sorry if I sort of lost my head there for a minute, Sheriff. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. But