Under the Dome

She almost said no—she didn’t want to saddle a woman who was still clearly sick with a responsibility like the one in her carrier-bag—but then Andrea said something that changed her mind. Great events often turn on small wheels.

“I’m so sorry about Howie. I loved that man.”

“Thank you, Andrea.” Not just for the sympathy, but for calling him Howie instead of Duke.

To Brenda he’d always been Howie, her dear Howie, and the VADER file was his last work. Probably his greatest work. Brenda suddenly decided to put it to work, and with no further delay. She dipped into the carrier-bag and brought out the manila envelope with Julia’s name printed on the front. “Will you hold this for me, dear? Just for a little while? I have an errand to run and I don’t want to take it with me.”

Brenda would have answered any questions Andrea asked, but Andrea apparently had none. She only took the bulky envelope with a sort of distracted courtesy. And that was all right. It saved time. Also, it would keep Andrea out of the loop, and might spare her political blowback at some later date.

“Happy to,” Andrea said. “And now… if you’ll excuse me… I think I’d better get off my feet. But I’m not going to sleep!” she added, as if Brenda had objected to this plan. “I’ll hear you when you come back.”

“Thank you,” Brenda said. “Are you drinking juices?”

“By the gallon. Take your time, hon—I’ll babysit your envelope.”

Brenda was going to thank her again, but The Mill’s Third Selectman had already closed the door.

19

Toward the end of her conversation with Brenda, Andrea’s stomach began to flutter. She fought it, but this was a fight she was going to lose. She blathered something about drinking juice, told Brenda to take her time, then closed the door in the poor woman’s face and sprinted for her stinking bathroom, making gutteral urk-urk noises deep down in her throat.

There was an end table beside the living room couch, and she tossed the manila envelope at it blindly as she rushed past. The envelope skittered across the polished surface and fell off the other side, into the dark space between the table and the couch.

Andrea made it to the bathroom but not to the toilet… which was just as well; it was nearly filled with the stagnant, stinking brew that had been her body’s output during the endless night just past. She leaned over the basin instead, retching until it seemed to her that her very esophagus would come loose and land on the splattery porcelain, still warm and pulsing.

That didn’t happen, but the world turned gray and teetered away from her on high heels, growing smaller and less tangible as she swayed and tried not to faint. When she felt a little better, she walked slowly down the hall on elastic legs, sliding one hand along the wood to keep her balance. She was shivering and she could hear the jittery clitter of her teeth, a horrible sound she seemed to pick up not with her ears but with the backs of her eyes.

She didn’t even consider trying to reach her bedroom upstairs but went out onto the screened-in back porch instead. The porch should have been too cold to be comfortable this late in October, but today the air was sultry. She did not lie down on the old chaise longue so much as collapse into its musty but somehow comforting embrace.

I’ll get up in a minute, she told herself. Get the last bottle of Poland Spring out of the fridge and wash that foul taste out of my mou…

But here her thoughts slipped away. She fell into a deep and profound sleep from which not even the restless twitching of her feet and hands could wake her. She had many dreams. One was of a terrible fire people ran from, coughing and retching, looking for anyplace where they might find air that was still cool and clean. Another was of Brenda Perkins coming to her door and giving her an envelope. When Andrea opened it, a never-ending stream of pink OxyContin pills poured out. By the time she woke up it was evening, and the dreams were forgotten.

So was Brenda Perkins’s visit.

20

“Come into my study,” Big Jim said cheerfully. “Or would you like something to drink, first? I have Cokes, although I’m afraid they’re a little warm. My generator died last night. Out of propane.”

“But I imagine you know where you can get more,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“The methamphetamine you’re making,” she said patiently. “My understanding—based on Howie’s notes—is that you’ve been cooking it in large batches. ‘Amounts that boggle the mind’ is how he put it. That must take a lot of propane gas.”

Now that she was actually into this, she found her jitters had melted away. She even took a certain cold pleasure in watching the color mount in his cheeks and go dashing across his forehead.