Under the Dome

That was the year she had made her often vile temper her number one priority. Killing it completely would be killing part of herself, but she thought if she did not make some fundamental changes, an important part of her would remain fifteen for a long, long time. She had begun working to impose control, and mostly she had succeeded. When she felt that control slipping, she would remember what her father had said, and that open-handed gesture, and his slow walk along the upstairs hall of the house she had grown up in. She had spoken at his funeral service nine years later, saying My father told me the most important thing I’ve ever heard. She hadn’t said what that thing was, but her mother had known; she had been sitting in the front pew of the church in which her daughter was now ordained.

For the last twenty years, when she felt the urge to flash out at someone—and often the urge was nearly uncontrollable, because people could be so stupid, so willfully dumb—she would summon her father’s voice: If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.

But now the red fissure was widening and she felt the old urge to throw things. To scratch skin until the blood came sweating out.

“Did you ask her who did it?”

“Yes, of course,” Ginny said. “She won’t say. She’s scared.” Piper remembered how she’d first thought the mother and baby lying beside the road was a bag of garbage. And that, of course, was what they’d been to whoever did this. She stood up. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“That might not be such a good idea right now,” Ginny said. “She’s had a sedative, and—”

“Let her take a shot,” Twitch said. His face was pale. His hands were knotted between his knees. The knuckles cracked repeatedly. “And make it a good one, Rev.”

13

Sammy’s eyes were at half-mast. They opened slowly when Piper sat down beside her bed. “You… were the one who…”

“Yes,” Piper said, taking her hand. “My name is Piper Libby.”

“Thank you,” Sammy said. Her eyes began to drift closed again.

“Thank me by telling me the names of the men who raped you.”

In the dim room—warm, with the hospital’s air-conditioning shut down—Sammy shook her head. “They said they’d hurt me. If I told.” She glanced at Piper. It was a cowlike glance, full of dumb resignation. “They might hurt Little Walter, too.”

Piper nodded. “I understand you’re frightened,” she said. “Now tell me who they were. Give me the names.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Looking away from Piper now. “They said they would hurt—”

Piper had no time for this; the girl would zone out on her. She grasped Sammy’s wrist. “I want those names, and you’re going to give them to me.”

“I don’t dare. ” Sammy began to ooze tears.

“You’re going to do it because if I hadn’t come along, you might be dead now.” She paused, then drove the dagger the rest of the way in. She might regret it later, but not now. Right now the girl in the bed was only an obstacle standing between her and what she needed to know. “Not to mention your baby. He might be dead, too. I saved your life, I saved his, and I want those names. ”

“No.” But the girl was weakening now, and part of the Reverend Piper Libby was actually enjoying this. Later she’d be disgusted; later she’d think You’re not that much different from those boys, forcing is forcing. But now, yes, there was pleasure, just as there had been pleasure in tearing the treasured poster from the wall and ripping it to shreds.

I like it because it is bitter, she thought. And because it is my heart.

She leaned over the crying girl. “Dig the wax out of your ears, Sammy, because you need to hear this. What they’ve done once they’ll do again. And when they do, when some other woman shows up here with a bloody snatch and possibly pregnant with a rapist’s child, I will come to you, and I will say—”

“No! Stop!”

“‘You were part of it. You were right there, cheering them on.’”

“No!” Sammy cried. “Not me, that was Georgia! Georgia was the one cheering them on!”

Piper felt cold disgust. A woman. A woman had been there. In her head, the red fissure opened wider. Soon it would begin to spew lava.

“Give me the names,” she said.

And Sammy did.

14