onto the lawn for the fireworks, the flush-faced town collegians on break from summer internships grabbing their third or fourth glasses of champagne as the foreign investors trailed after them remarking to themselves that no matter how weak the dollar or poorly managed the public fisc, really you couldn’t beat the States for all the sights to see. And there, teetering on a riser overlooking the pond stood Glenda Holland soused to the gills, trying to shush the players who’d already struck up the opening largo of the 1812 Overture.
Hal, for reasons he couldn’t later recall, had been in search of twine and a shovel when, at about this time, he flipped the switch on the garage-door opener. The panicked sheep fled as if from the abattoir, waddling at a clip across the drive, bleating as they went, only to be penned again between the tents, driven into the rear of the gathering crowd, who turned in astonishment at this sudden outbreak of the agrarian. When an EverSafe Security employee drew a semiautomatic from under his jacket and held it down toward the shaggy, neglected creatures, a vegan sophomore from Vassar standing nearby cried “Terrorist!” at the top of her lungs. No sooner had she uttered the word, than champagne flutes were tossed aside and crushed under foot as the guests toward the front, blind to the nature of the threat, were sickened by the sudden knowledge that their decision to avoid city crowds had failed to deliver them from danger, and with no other direction to go they hurried down the slope into the grass, scattering toward the woods and the pond and roadway. Others closer to the incident merely returned to their tables, baffled as to the origin or meaning of the episode. For a while, mild chaos reigned, Glenda trying desperately to conscript the guards as shepherds, while some of the younger and more inebriated guests, amused at the folly, began feeding the sheep the remainders of the peanut-butter parfait. Nerves shot, the animals began shitting profusely, on the grass, on the dance floor, on the feet of exhausted partygoers, who sent up new cries, the stink thrown off by the steaming piles mixing with the stale scent of the machine-cooled tents to give what remained of the gathering the air of a barnyard in autumn or early spring.
Emerging onto the terrace, Nate encountered a ewe working a drainpipe loose with the scratching motion of her tubby white flank.
“You!” a man in a baggy gray suit called out. “Have you seen my sister?”
“Shit,” he said, recognizing Ms. Graves’s brother from one of his visits to her house. “I’ll find her.”
It seemed to take forever to wade through the milling crowd. Eventually, he managed to circle around to the parking area, where by the gate he finally saw her. She walked stooped forward and with great effort. When he reached her he saw she had bright-red scratch marks lined all up and down her arms and legs and one across the side of her neck.
“Ms. Graves, the dogs, they’re inside, they’re fine. It’s my fault. I wanted to feed them.”
Tears welled in her eyes, though her kindly, pained smile never faltered.
“These people don’t clear their underbrush,” she said. “There’s a nasty patch of briars in there. A few hours with the clippers is all I’d need.”
Lending his arm for support, he walked her slowly up the path.
“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t tell me these people are your friends.”
No sooner had he found a chair for Charlotte back up on the lawn than Mrs. Holland once more ascended the little riser, waving her arms and calling out to whomever remained to please, please, hurry up and watch. The bleary faces of a few stalwart celebrants turned just in time to see the barge on the pond explode in one single, hammering burst, the flames from the blast shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air before dripping back into the water like burning fuel, and so too over the dry grass, which began at once to burn.
Chapter 14
The heat kept on through July. On the Finden High playing fields, soccer-camp kids drilled from steamy morning to hazy afternoon, and the unfortunates remanded to summer school sweated it out in the same remorseless classrooms they’d tried all year to avoid. Mold flourished in unfinished basements and in the trunks of parents’ old cars littered with sodden swimsuits and damp towels smeared in suntan lotion and