drove her to Baltimore, so that she could get it taken care of. Frank Plumley knew a doctor over there. The round trip took all night. On the way back, Wendy almost bled to death. Later, Frank Plumley helped them scrub the blood off the leather.
It was as if the terrible shock of the deaths that spring day in 1938 had knocked something loose in the three boys—a wire that attached itself to another wire, and then that wire was supposed to be attached to a conscience—and now the untethered end was like a vestigial limb. They were vaguely aware of it, but they did not need it, and so they tried to ignore it.
They still did a lot of the things they had done as boys: They fished together, and challenged each other to footraces up and down Main Street. They spent summer afternoons over at Crooked Creek, swinging high out over the cocoa-colored water in an old truck tire tied to an overhanging tree by a spindly bit of twine. At the right moment, one of them would yell, “NOW!” and the one clutching the tire—Vic or Harm or Alvie—would let go, legs bicycling wildly in the bright air, and crash down into the water, making a tremendous splash. They did a lot of bad things, irresponsible things, but they still did the playful, ordinary things, too, the things that had defined their friendship for as long as they could remember.
In the late fall of 1941, the boys were fifteen years old. Vic was still the best-looking of the three of them, with his solid shoulders and his blue eyes and his big I don’t care grin, but Harm was not far behind him now; Harm had dark curly hair, olive-green eyes, and an athletic bounce to his step. Alvie, gray and skinny, still looked like a rat, only a taller one.
On the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, the slanting, broken sidewalks of downtown Norbitt began to fill up with people. All kinds of people. There were layers and layers of them, all swirled on top of one another like a parfait dessert. That was the image Harm came up with. He still loved analogies.
A special edition of The Barr County Herald was available on every corner. Kids had been recruited to sell it, and they yelled out the headline until they were too hoarse to yell out any longer. The papers were snapped up instantly. The kids could have sold double what they had. Triple, even. The news was so profoundly shocking that everyone wanted every piece of information they could get, every scrap, every rumor. Some women were crying. Some men looked angrier than they had ever looked before in their lives, and they locked their hands into fists and loosened them and tightened them into fists once again, over and over.
“How dare they?” the men muttered, and then spat. “How dare they?”
The Japanese, it seemed, had sucker-punched an American military base way over in Hawaii, a place that, until its name showed up in news accounts of the current crisis, was largely mythological to most citizens of Norbitt. There was feverish speculation as well that the Japs had submarines stroking toward the coast of California, vessels vacuum-packed with enemy soldiers, and that this pillaging swarm would hit the beach and then fan out across the country until it reached the streets of Norbitt. These very streets. “My God,” the men said.
The three boys watched and listened.
Chapter Ten
It was late. Bell sat in the living room, cell in her palm. This was her favorite chair, and normally it gave her comfort, but the document she was reading right now—or trying to read, because she could only get so far before she had to stop—made any sort of comfort impossible. Minutes after they ended their call, Sam had e-mailed her a PDF of Carla’s arrest record.
Bell had not turned on the lights. She didn’t need them. The cell gave off plenty of illumination—too much, as a matter of fact. It conveyed too well the glaring reality of what Carla had done, from the list of items she had destroyed in her mini-rampage at the mall to the responding officer’s recollection of the epithets she had hurled at him.
What it could not tell her—what only Carla could tell her—was why.
WHERE R U??
That’s what Bell had texted to her daughter sixteen minutes ago.
Carla’s reply:
On my way. Lost track of time
Then there was a frowny-face emoji.
Bell’s thoughts kept splitting off