out, both unsnapping the handles of their guns without thinking. The smell of cooked rubber hung in the summer air.
'What's this shit?' Jingles cried, and Bent thought, He feels it too. This isn't right, this is part of what was going on back in that creepy little town, and he feels it too.
The breeze stirred, and Bent heard canvas flap stiffly for a moment, and a tarp slid off something in the bed of the pickup with a dry rattlesnake sound. Bent felt his balls climb north in a hurry. It looked like the barrel of a bazooka. He started to crouch, then realized with bewilderment that the bazooka was only a length of corrugated culvert-pipe in some sort of wooden cradle. Nothing to be afraid of. But he was afraid. He was terrified.
'I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent. Parked in front of the restaurant.'
'Who's there?' Bent shouted.
No answer.
He looked at Jingles. Jingles, eyes wide and dark in his white face, looked back at him.
Bent thought suddenly: Microwave interference? Was that really what was keeping us from getting through?
'If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!' Bent called. 'You - ' A shrill, crazed titter came from the truck-bed, then drifted into silence. 'Oh Christ, I don't like this,' Jingles Gabbons moaned. Bent started forward, raising his gun, and then the world was filled with green light.
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN Chapter 5. Ruth McCausland
1
Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger - fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had. It was because her husband had been a state trooper, some said. Others said it was simply because Ruth was Ruth. Either way, they agreed Haven was lucky to have her. She was firm but fair. She was able to keep her wits in an emergency. Haven folk said these things about her, and more besides. In a small Maine town run by the men since there had been a town to run, such testimonials were of some note. That was fair enough; she was a noteworthy woman.
She was born and raised in Haven; she was, in fact, the great-niece of the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley, who had been so cruelly surprised by the town's vote to change its name back in '01. In 1955 she had been granted early admittance to the University of Maine - only the third female student in the history of the university to be granted full-time student status at the tender age of seventeen. She enrolled in the college's pre-law program.
The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also a pre-law. He was tall; at six-five he was still three inches shorter than his friend Anthony Dugan (known as Butch by his friends, as Monster only by his two or three close friends), but he towered a full foot over Ruth. He was oddly - almost absurdly -graceful for such a big man, and good-natured. He wanted to be a state trooper. When Ruth asked him why, he said it was because his father had been one. He didn't need a law degree to join the fuzz, he explained to her; to become a state trooper he needed only a highschool education, good eyes, good reflexes, and a clean record. But Ralph McCausland had wanted something more than to do his father the honor of following in his footsteps. 'Any man who gets into a job and doesn't plan a way to get ahead is either lazy or crazy,' he told Ruth one night over Cokes in the Bear's Den. What he didn't tell her, because he was shy about his ambition, was that he hoped to be Maine's top cop someday. Ruth knew anyway, of course.
She accepted Ralph's proposal of marriage the following year on condition that he would wait until she had her own degree. She did not want to practice law, she said, but she did want to help him all she could. Ralph agreed. Any sane man confronted with Ruth Merrill's clear-eyed, intelligent beauty would have agreed. When Ralph married her in 1959, she was a lawyer.
She came to their marriage bed a virgin. She had been a little worried about this, although only a deep part of her mind - a part over which even she could not exert her usual iron control - dared to wonder in a murky