Page 20 of Nothing Ever Happens Here

“Burned?” I ask, finding that my heart is beginning to speed up and my mouth is suddenly very dry.

“Yeah, like someone took a freakin’ blow torch to it or something. Never seen anything like it in all my thirty-two years.The owner filed a police report, but I won’t have an estimate for the total rewiring for a day or so, sorry.”

“Burned. Deliberately?” I ask.

“Oh yeah. Torched to a crisp.”

“And the backup generators—why didn’t they come on? Sorry if you already went through this. For our records I just wanted to…”

“Same thing with the generator. Someone was back there and destroyed all of it. Could have killed people in this cold, that’s for sure. It seems like that’s exactly what someone was trying to do, ’cause it sure ain’t easy to melt metal. I’m sorry to bear the bad news, some people are just crazy. Like I told the other lady, I’ll try to get it all back and running for you this weekend if we have all the parts in,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say, numbly, ending the call. I go back inside, taking in the warmth of the entryway for a moment, then sit on a heating vent and stare across at a poster of a kitten holding on to a branch by one paw. It says “hang in there.” Something like rage begins to bubble up inside me—fury for my dear friends, for Shelby, for poor Otis.

Someone did this on purpose; my God. Someone wanted at least one of us dead.

9

SHELBY

“It vanished into thin air,” I tell Mack when she asks why I’m setting up a new iPhone when I just got an upgrade for Christmas a few weeks ago.

She brought a couple of day-old boxes of eclairs for the gang to have and we sit together in the front office, rocking in the old leather chairs and eating custard out of the middle of the pastries with our fingers. She feeds broken-off ends to the dog wrapped inside her coat.

“You had to have dropped it in the snow and it died, and that’s why it can’t be tracked. What else makes sense?” she says and I shrug, uninterested in talking about it any further. I’ve been on calls with the phone company and in the damn AT&T store half the day already. She’s also acting off. I know she tried to tell me about the security footage before it showed up on the news, and what else can either of us say about it except that it’s creepy but not helpful?But it does bring up the question of whether or not there is a second person involved because of the scarf. A feminine scarf, she points out, but I don’t know about that. It seems like a stretch. I’m not apathetic to the video—of course it’s horrifying to see, but it’s seemingly worthless.

“Can I put him down?” she asks as Gus wiggles off her lap and shakes out his ears. Before I even answer he’s marched out to the common area, and I can hear a symphony of squeals and kissy noises as the residents delight over him.

“Do you have a gun?” I ask her out of nowhere, and her face changes, tenses, she puts down her eclair.

“Somewhere” is all she says, and we both stare out at the skeletons of trees and the frozen parking lot outside the front windows. We were both lovingly forced by our husbands to learn how to use one in case of a self-protection emergency, and just like me, she probably forgot how, and where it even is.

I told her about Winny and the note and how it named us—how it was some sort of warning to us. We’ve both been quietly paralyzed in fear that this could happen—that since Leo’s disappearance is a mystery and nobody was ever caught for my attempted murder, whatever insane, evil, freak thing that happened that night isn’t over. She was quiet when I told her—just petted Gus’s head and stared. We’ve exhausted every possible suspect, angle, theory, and fear over the last months. And all the tears and the rage too, so what’s left to say? We’ve always felt someone lurking in the shadows.

“I’ll find it,” she says.

Herb appears in the doorway, holding Gus in his arms.

“This little guy took a big ole Stanley Steamer right in Bernie’s slipper.”

“Oh, sorry about that,” Mack stands. Gus wriggles from Herb’s arms and runs over to Bernie who’s laughing and slapping his knee at the ordeal.

“Who knew all Bern needed was a pile of dog shit to cheer him up,” Herb says.Mack and I stand in the door frame and look out to see Gus hopping around, getting pets from everyone and then taking off with one of Millie’s half-knitted pot holders, which makes Bernie hoot even louder.

“I thought he wouldn’t leave your side,” I say, smirking at Mack. She shrugs and watches Herb play tug-of-war with him over the pot holder.

“Well, that’s just rude,” she says, hands on hips, both of us thrilled to be changing the subject. “You could take him overnight if you…”

“Yes,” I answer before she finishes. “I think everyone could use that right now,” I say, and I can still see the techs through the side window—the guys from Willard’s finishing up some final wiring that was damaged. It’s been a handful of days since the electricity was purposefully cut, and even though that was fixed, now they are repairing the generator. And although everyone is back in their routine, there is a quiet pensiveness around the place, and it’s clear the residents are still frightened to some extent. Back inside the office, Mack shrugs on her coat and picks at the rest of her eclair.

“You wanna tell me what Evan Carmichael is doing hanging out at the Ole? I thought I was having a high school flashback.”

“You think I’m setting you up with him,” I say flatly, but a smirk plays at my lips.

“I mean, I was there the other day with Billy. Your subtlety was Oscar-worthy.”

“Well, for your information, I got him to work here part-time while he fixes up his dad’s place.”

“Well, they all seem to be getting along,” she says, pulling on her hat and nudging her chin in the direction of Herb, Evan, and Florence, who are huddled around the old computer at an ancient particle board desk in the corner of the room.

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