of things going on at any one time, and Daniel reveled in all of it; and what kept it from becoming overwhelming was that the sheer volume of such things tended to become a comforting background noise. The problem with small towns was the mind-numbing boredom, accompanied by oddities that stood in stark relief against the surrounding normalcy. Daniel’s mind would want to slow down, to sync with a more linear lifestyle, but then he would round a corner and see something unexpected, something like one of the grotesques out of a Sherwood Anderson novel.
In Chicago or New York, he was prepared for anything that happened along. Here, his vigilance would wane, and then he’d come upon something unexpected, like when he walked into the living room of the Baxter house to see Uncle Edward frightening the grandkids with the stump of his left arm, the detached prosthetic hand resting on his head. Or when he came into town to help Graham set things up with the VFW and witnessed a member of the local decorating crew—a man who looked to be in his midfifties and wearing badly stained work clothes—hanging from a telephone line in what appeared to be the center of Main Street. Directly beneath him, working the controls of a cherry picker whose basket rested on the road, was a similarly dressed, frantic man. A crowd had gathered, and inexplicably, no one seemed worried. In fact, this was one way that small-town life seemed to correlate with existence in the city, except that in the latter, people would have been looking up at someone perched on a ledge and urging them to jump. Daniel and Graham had hung around long enough to see the ground-based man gain control of the cherry picker and raise the bucket until the dangling man could drop into it.
Nevertheless, Daniel was good at adapting to his surroundings, especially when doing so meant a decent payoff. Weidman had already spent a great deal positioning his pieces in just the right places. But everything hinged on Graham’s win—on the placement of a sympathetic ear in a position of influence. Graham’s win was the final piece to the puzzle. And Daniel’s job was to secure that victory—to make absolutely certain that nothing went wrong.
The problem was that there was something going on here that eluded him—something that colored family conversation but that never poked its head into view. There was something Graham didn’t want to talk about, and while Daniel didn’t normally begrudge a man his secrets, he did when there was a chance the secret could derail the campaign.
He’d asked around, and the consensus was that Ronny’s and Maggie’s were the two places to make nice with the locals. As much as he disliked small towns, they were good for one thing: gossip. If there was something going on that Graham wouldn’t talk about, there was a good chance someone in town knew about it. And Daniel was confident he could pull that information from the right subject.
Before walking into Maggie’s, Daniel adjusted his tie, pulling it down and to the side. There was such a thing as looking too polished.
Chapter 10
CJ didn’t hear Julie come in over the sound of the miter saw. He and Dennis stood with their backs to the door, nary a piece of wood in sight, the saw roaring away as if it were newly bought, instead of having made a journey of several hundred miles less than a week and a half ago while crammed into the trunk of CJ’s Honda.
They were still a long way from needing the saw, but Dennis had complained about the grunt work, how he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything unless he could play with a power tool. So he and Dennis had carried it in, set it up in the kitchen, and let it rip.
Julie stood in the doorway and watched them, two Wendy’s bags in her hands, and when they finally powered the saw down, she said, “Ben and I once paid a contractor to build a deck, and I’m certain that’s what I saw him doing.”
The moment she started to speak, both CJ and Dennis jumped in surprise.
“Ooh, sorry about that,” Julie said. She lifted the bags. “I brought lunch.”
“That’s sweet of you,” CJ said, removing his safety goggles, “but I don’t have any fingers to eat with.”
Dennis decided not to sully the moment with talking. Instead he accepted a bag, nodded thanks to Julie, and left the kitchen.