Морган Лливелин - Drop by Drop

Violent crime was up fifty percent by Whittaker’s calculations.

The Change was making everyone meaner, that was for sure. Every little thing that went wrong, some irate taxpayer came running to him wanting him to fix it. They didn’t seem to have any idea what “keeping the peace” meant.

The sheriff’s office consisted of two rooms plus a lockup in a squat brick building at the end of Miller’s Lane. Because the town had never been a major crime area, the facilities were modest. On the rare occasions when secure incarceration was required the police came down from the state capital to take custody of the guilty party.

Today Whittaker wished he had a reason to send the man confronting him to prison. He was a colossal pain in the ass. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded.

The sheriff sighed. By now he knew who almost everyone in town was. “Of course I do, sir, you’re the manager of Friendly Foods. I assume you have another complaint. Sir.” Whittaker added the second “sir” as a precaution.

“That’s right, and I insist you take out a warrant against those Gypsies who’re running the horse-and-buggy service. Their animals keep dropping manure on the street in front of my store. It’s against all the sanitation codes and it’s filthy. Just look here…” He lifted one foot and waggled it in the air. “I even got shit on my shoe!”

Whittaker regarded the soiled shoe impassively. “They’re not Gypsies, they’re local businessmen providing a legal and badly needed service to this community. All I can do is ask them to be more conscientious about cleaning up behind their horses.”

“That’s not good enough!”

“It’s the best I can do. Sir.”

After the supermarket manager stormed out of his office, Whittaker took his cap from the peg and went to see Shay Mulligan.

“I’m sorry to bother you about this, Doc, but we’ve had another complaint about horse manure.”

“From the same source as before?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Sheriff, I can’t hire people to run behind every carriage with a burlap sack.”

“What about attaching sacks to the backsides of your horses?”

“Diapers on horses? Are you serious?”

Shay enlivened the next meeting of the Wednesday Club by recounting his conversation with the sheriff. The society also welcomed a new member; Bea Fontaine arrived with Jack and Nell.

Edgar Tilbury was seated in the booth when they entered. He smiled and raised his glass in a salute. “I’m mighty glad to see you here, Bea. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Jamesons?”

“Bill can’t get any more, I’m afraid; but I’ve got a half bottle of my own stashed behind the bar and it’s all yours.” He patted the seat beside him.

Bea slid into the booth next to Tilbury. “This has become a different world in such a short time,” she remarked. “None of us can keep up with it.”

“Nell Bennett thinks the Change may be slowing down.”

“Does she really?”

He scratched his neck. “Yep.”

“What do you think, Edgar?”

“I’ll admit there’ve been some signs, but it’s too soon to tell. If we start getting the news from abroad maybe we’ll have a better idea.”

“The news from abroad,” Shay echoed. “I never thought that would sound exotic.”

When Morris Saddlethwaite offered a pithy suggestion about what the supermarket manager might do with horse manure, Evan Mulligan laughed so hard he sprayed cola across the table.

Without quite knowing how it happened, the meeting morphed into a party. Bill’s other patrons joined in. When someone suggested a singalong Gerry Delmonico revealed an exceptional baritone voice.

Closing time came and went.

When his sister-in-law came out of the kitchen and announced she was going home—“If you lot want any more food you can fix it yourselves”—Bill Burdick guiltily consulted the railroad clock on the wall behind the bar. He called out, “Closing time!” No one heard him.

With difficulty—Bill had consumed his share of the liquor—he clambered onto the bar and stood up, swaying and waving his arms. “Closing time now !” he shouted.

Jack Reece caught him before he hit the floor.

There was no question of Tilbury trying to drive his “hybrid” the long distance home after drinking so much. Shay and Evan took him to their place in the trap, behind Jupiter. Edgar would awake in the morning to the smell of someone else cooking breakfast for a change.

Jack and Bea accompanied Nell to her house. He drove very carefully because there was horsepower under the hood and not in the shafts.

On the following day the British Ministry of Defense announced that its entire fleet of warships had been called into port.

Looking back on the evening at Burdick’s, it was hard to reconcile it with the onrushing apocalypse.

“We were whistling past the graveyard,” Bea said as she and Jack sat on the front porch, drinking tomato juice liberally laced with Tabasco.

“Aunt Bea, do you think there’s a chance Nell could be right?”

“About what?”

“The Change slowing down. The light at the end of the tunnel. If so, maybe there won’t be a war either.”

“What does your intuition tell you?”

“Nothing, it’s stopped cold. I want to believe Nell’s right, but I don’t know.”

Bea gazed at her small front lawn. A teenager could mow that in ten minutes. “Nell’s a lovely woman, Jack, but she comes with a ready-made family.”

“I know. Hostages to fortune.”

“I fell in love with a man once,” she said slowly. It was the most intimate statement he had ever heard her make. “It wasn’t right; I knew it and I think he knew it, but we went ahead anyway.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t any and . I told you, it wasn’t right. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Shay Mulligan has a cat named Karma. Do you know what that word means?”

“You’re changing the subject, but yes, I know what karma means. A person’s destiny; their fate.”

Bea nodded. “I’ve seen it at work too many times not to believe in it.”

Jack waited for her to continue.

She set her half-empty glass on the floor of the porch and went into the house.

Following the recall of the British fleet other military forces were gathering themselves. The Sycamore Seed dutifully reported every available scrap of information.

Auerbach was allowing Lila to write articles herself. He did not give her a byline, but one morning she came to work to find a neat black-and-white sign propped on her desk: “L. E. Ragland Staff Reporter.”

Dwayne Nyeberger knew where she was now. He made it his business to always know where she was, at any given time.

Spurred by an imminent global war, the manufacturing of armaments went into overdrive. Assembly plants and full-on production facilities sprang up almost overnight, operating not in bold new ways, but in the reliable old ones.

Before the town of Sycamore River knew what was happening trucks full of building material and construction workers began arriving at the site of the former RobBenn complex. The chain-link perimeter fence was reinforced with corrugated panels surmounted by razor wire, making it impossible for anyone to see what was happening inside.

Rumors sprouted like the weeds along the bank of the river.

Finbar O’Mahony, recently returned from his lakeside idyll, told Nell Bennett she was a lucky woman. “I came out of retirement to get you the best possible deal for the property,” the lawyer boasted. “It’s all here.” He gestured at the stack of documents on the large marble coffee table in the great hall of her house. “Survey reports, condemnation orders, site clearances, engineers’ findings; it’s a big project. Mayor Dilworth personally went to Washington to campaign for this; it was his idea in the beginning and he was the man to promote it; the chairman of the Ways and Means committee’s an old friend of his. It’s quite a coup; it’ll put Sycamore River on the map. Think of the jobs this will mean, Nell.”