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splintered wood as Willy slid in next to him.
    "Far out," Willy said. "We got ourselves a mystery, boss."
    The stones and rocks weren't piled against the coffin. They were spilling out. There was no body within.

Chapter Four
    It was a beautiful day the next morning — sunny, cloudless, pleasant. From the tree-tops, and above, the scene was what brought poets and artists to New England in droves. But below that lay the weather's onslaught and the disjointed distribution of its destruction. Across the entire region, riverbeds were gouged and scoured as by passing glaciers, and left shimmering in the sun, bone white and raw, looking like the castaway skeletons of a geological rampage. They were strewn with rocks and boulders that had blended in harmony with the interstitial soil and vegetation for generations, to the delight of fishermen, boaters, and mere lovers of nature — soil that was now gone, wide and deep, and with it the substance that had made the rivers whole and vibrant.
    What remained were hundreds of miles of hard, broken, shattered water channels, bereft of life and looking like smashed concrete. The vegetation had been stripped from the banks, the fish and frogs swept away, and the rest made to seem poor and exhausted and humiliated in the falsely cheerful sunlight.
    The soil had not simply vanished, of course. It had been removed, as if by scientific process, down to its smallest granules and redistributed by the water across fields, lawns, streets, and into cellars — water that had then retreated almost as quickly as it had arrived.
    Homes and garages were full of the resulting muck, cars were axle-deep in it, inventories from bookstores to machine shops to groceries were cemented in place by it. And artifacts like furniture, clothing, toys, and kitchen appliances had been scattered far and wide, later to be found as half-buried, crooked talismans — like pseudo Easter Island totems — stamped with logos reading GE and Frigidaire.
    Joe Gunther toured his southern Vermont world in the company of a survey team composed of variously initialed agencies, and saw mile after mile of crumpled homes shifted from their foundations, roads returned to their dirt origins, and bridges caved in or missing altogether.
    And yet, people resembling Bedouins in a desert, incongruously alive and active against a desolate backdrop, were at work everywhere they went. Farmers, equipment operators, National Guardsmen, common citizens with pickup trucks — some sanctioned by FEMA and its state-based counterparts, others in defiance of such organizations and the regulations they tried to impose — all were reclaiming their homes, their roads, their bridges, and their other infrastructure, sometimes using the very same, rock-clotted streambeds as sources of raw material.
    It wasn't pretty or easy. In the fine language of the law, it often wasn't legal. But within hours of that ironically cheerful sun's first appearance, it was already beginning to make a difference. By the end of Joe's limited tour, done to show support and to satisfy his own curiosity, he couldn't shake the conviction that — the extent of damage notwithstanding — the worst of it would be dealt with quickly and practically.
    Just as clearly, the same was not going to be true for some of the problems that his VBI had picked up overnight. Phones were down, cell towers damaged, electricity was out, e-mail was affected — not all of it universally, some of it not even badly — but simply getting around was already a problem. Statewide, thirteen entire communities had been effectively sealed off from the surrounding world, with all roads and bridges cut. And some, like Wilmington, Waterbury, Halifax, Killington, Rochester, and others, had suffered devastating damage to the hearts of their downtowns.
    For the short term, at least, pursuing police work was going to be a challenge. Standard operations were about to be made "flexible," in the words of one memo.
    For