in a lounge chair just a few feet away, and she was the one who spotted him first.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d reacted with alarm; any woman in her right mind would be alarmed by the sudden appearance of an armed man, one she knew only slightly, in her backyard. Apparently double-name was not in her right mind. “My goodness!” she said as she stood and headed Ben’s way. “What a nice surprise! I wasn’t expecting visitors. We’ll have supper ready in a little while and we’d love to have you join us. We don’t see many people these days. And we’re eating awfully early to call this supper, but without electricity we go to bed as soon as it gets dark so it all works out. How have you been? What a sweet-looking dog!”
“Ah . . . good.” He reminded himself that this conversation was his choice. Being here was his choice. “I was just passing by, thought I’d check on you.”
Jim smiled and nodded, but he didn’t leave his station at the grill. “A neighbor brought us some venison,” he said. “We ran out of meat a week or so ago. I’m doing the cooking, and a couple of other neighbors will be by shortly. We eat together a lot of times. JD is bringing some of his last tomatoes, and Janet said she’d bring some baked beans.”
They should save the beans for winter was Ben’s first thought, but it was too late for that advice. “Thanks, but I have somewhere else to be. I’m checking on a few other people.”
Mrs. Livingston beamed at him as if he was the biggest, finest Eagle Scout on earth. Jim said, “I didn’t hear your car. Things have been so quiet around here, I thought I’d hear anyone headed our way.”
“The pup and I hiked down.”
They both stared at him for a moment, then Mrs. Livingston said, “You walked down Cove Mountain?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He’d walked a lot farther than that before, and in rougher conditions.
“Oh, call me Mary Alice! The mountain is so steep, I can’t imagine going up and down it on foot.”
Mary Alice. That was it. He committed her name to memory. “Do y’all have everything you need to get by for a while?” he asked, taking a step away. He hoped to make his escape before the rest of the neighborhood showed up.
Mary Alice shrugged. “Oh, I imagine we’ll be fine. We have a few canned goods put back, and plenty of peanut butter to put on some apple slices. We didn’t go to the meeting at the school right after the power went out, but JD did, and he keeps us up to date on what’s going on. Carol Allen is in charge of organizing things, but I don’t think this will go on much longer, do you? People always blow things like this out of proportion, they see disaster in everything.”
Jim frowned and cleared his throat. “The power better come back on pretty soon. Mary Alice is going to run out of her prescription pills in a few weeks. We’ll need to get a ride into town to get refills. My old car’s already out of gas. I had close to a full tank, but JD and I siphoned it to use in his generator, to keep it running a while longer. I thought the service stations would reopen, but so far they haven’t.”
Jesus. They were a disaster waiting to happen. “I hate to tell you, but this is going to last for months.” They both looked dismayed, but they needed to be dismayed; maybe that would wake up what little survival instinct they seemed to have. This wasn’t a damn picnic, and before long their little neighborly cookout was going to look like a damned feast. In spite of himself, he turned to look down at short, plump Mary Alice. Maybe it was his imagination, but she didn’t look as plump as she had when she’d invited him to dinner several months ago. “What meds do you take?”
“Oh, just my blood pressure and heart pills.”
He scrubbed his hand over his face. He didn’t know much about medications, other than to pop an Ambien when he needed some sleep before a mission, or inject morphine in a wounded brother to ease the pain. For years he had slept on the military’s schedule, which was nothing like a normal circadian rhythm. Blood pressure and “heart pills” weren’t in his wheelhouse, and there was no way