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to flow uphill after the hole. Right now the water level was rising. The river would be at its greatest volume in another month, and the town of White Falls would have its festival on the green.
    Pat Friedman felt the wind against his cheek, and pulled his collar up. He was not ready to go home yet. The truth was, his wife did drive him crazy (as Jeb Taylor suspected). He had married her because she was the sexiest thing he had ever seen, but he had found over the ten-plus years of their marriage that she was a flirt and a control freak. He suspected her of having an affair, maybe more than one. But he was eleven years older than she was, and a shy man around women. She had been the one to ask him out when they met. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to find another suitable wife, and so he had given everything up to her long ago. Besides, a messy divorce in a small town would ruin his law practice.
    He often wound out the hours at Johnny’s instead of at the office. He hadn’t expected to see Jeb here, though. That was certainly strange. Jeb wasn’t old enough to drink yet; couldn’t be much over eighteen. Pat used to see Ronnie Taylor tying one on at Johnny’s years ago, and damned if his boy wasn’t starting to look just like him. In fact, when Jeb had come stumbling out tonight and sped away in that big car, Pat had felt as if he were seeing a ghost.
    Jeb hadn’t looked well. That Ronnie Taylor had been a bad seed, but he
was
the boy’s father. Pat hoped Jeb was taking his death okay. One of the reasons he had agreed to hire the boy in the first place was he had felt sorry for him. And Julie seemed to like him.
    As he stood in the near darkness, Pat had a moment of sudden clarity, as if everything around him had come into sharp focus. He glanced at the market across the road and the light was so bright it hurt his eyes, and the sound of the falls was like the roar of a great beast breathing down hisneck, and he thought, Something’s in the air tonight. Something horrible .
    He stood there frozen for a minute. A car drove by the bar, and Pat watched as its brake lights blinked once, twice as it went around the corner and out of sight.
    Silly , he thought to himself. It’s just a cool night in April, that’s all . Julie would have told him he was drinking too much.
    Pat Friedman turned quickly and returned to the warmth of the bar, and left the people of White Falls to settle in against the sudden cold and an uneasy sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR
    On the third day following Jeb’s discussion with Ruth, a Friday, the strangers arrived in White Falls. Morton Kane, the high school English teacher, saw them as he was crossing the bridge to go down to Brunswick for his weekly shopping trip. A pale young woman, blond-haired, quite pretty, he thought, and a tall, intense-looking man driving a gray Volkswagen with California plates. He just caught a glimpse of them in passing, but he remembered being oddly shaken by the sight. Maybe they were tourists. He thought, Little early for the festival, isn’t it? And then he continued on, and didn’t think about them again until much later.
    Just before they went past the intersection of Indian Road and continued into town, they stopped to ask directions from another local, Barbara Trask, who was out with her dog. Barbara lived near the mouth of Black Pond in a white ranch with a perfect garden and a Saint Bernard named Alaska. She was the town gossip, and so the news of the strangers spread quickly from there. By the time they had reached the town square Barbara was already on the phone with her oldest and dearest friend Myrtle Howard, who then called the doctor at the clinic, Harry Stowe, and so on. White Falls didn’t get much traffic in the off-season, and there wassomething about the two strangers that was so odd everybody’s interest was aroused right away.
    They stopped in front of the drug store and went in to ask about a place to stay. The druggist, Alan Marshal, knew