Peter Callisher was certainly going to get worse. Amanda knew that because he had been getting worse, ever since they came downstairs just after noon. Timmy had come in soon afterward, and now he was getting worse, too, picking up the tension, sending back little signals of panic and distress. Amanda saw Timmy as her project, a kind of penance for not really being the kind of caring, socially concerned person she told everybody else they ought to be. She also liked him, because he meant well and had none of the complexities of more intelligent people, and none of the subterfuges, either. Timmy either liked you or hated you, pronounced you good or pronounced you evil. He liked Amanda and had hated both Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury without reservation. Nor did this hatred seem to have engendered in him the kind of telescoped guilt it might have in anybody else. If Timmy thought that by hating these women he had secretly done something that led to their deaths, he must also have thought this was perfectly all right. Nor would he understand the injunction to speak no ill of the dead. You spoke ill of someone because there was ill to be spoken of them. It didn’t matter if they were living or dead.
Amanda watched him on the other side of the room, stacking boxes to take out to the truck at the back. He was immensely tall and immensely fat, but he was also immensely strong. He could get two of those boxes into his arms and up on the counter without sweating. He could get the front of the truck up off the ground in one hand, too.
There really wasn’t anything to do in the newsroom today. There never was on the day an issue came out, although Peter always insisted they be there, taking in whatever might come in, listening to the music of town gossip that might someday yield some news. This afternoon there was just this electric-wire snappishness that had begun to spill over to the occasional help. Shelley Dee had been cutting off a phone caller when Amanda first came down. Right this minute, Tara Dessaver was in the middle of a tirade on the environmental disasters caused by the tapping of maple trees. The tourists probably hadn’t noticed it, but the deaths had had an effect. The whole town was strung tight, natives and flatlanders both. Amanda wanted to get into her car and go to Montpelier.
Instead, she got up off her seat and crossed the room to where Peter was standing, leaning over a drawing board and checking the graphics on the ad for the Penderman Funeral Home as if they really mattered. The Penderman Funeral Home had an ad in every edition of the Bethlehem News and Mail, and no matter how often or how forcefully Peter argued with Penderman pére and Penderman fils, it was always the same ad.
“Peter,” she said, “you ought to tell everybody to go home.”
“I’m not going to tell everybody to go home.” His voice was deadly with patience, as if they had had this discussion several times already today, which they hadn’t. “This day is no different from any other day, except that we have the extra to distribute, and that takes more work around here, not less.”
“Then I’m going to take a walk,” Amanda said. “I’m getting so nervous, I’m getting sick all over again. I want some fresh air.”
“I’ve been arguing with myself for the last half hour whether we ought to put out another extra tomorrow,” Peter said. “All the things that keep happening. Finding the rifle.”
“They found the rifle last night.”
“We didn’t hear about it until this morning.”
“All that stuff is going to be on the television news.”
Peter shrugged that off. “Not everybody watches the television news. Not everybody wants to watch it. I’ve got to think, Amanda.”
Amanda supposed he did, but she didn’t see why he had to think about this stuff. This was nothing. Whether Peter liked to admit it or not, everybody watched the television news. They only read the paper if they had nothing else to do. She opened her mouth to tell him something else and then decided not to. It was like playing pick-up sticks: Pull the wrong one and the whole house comes down. Peter was definitely a house ready to come down.
Amanda crossed the room to where Timmy was working, tapped him on the shoulder and had to jump back when he leaped up and swung around, his fists up, too loosely balled, too tightly cocked. He saw her and flushed. Then he seemed to deflate, his body going from taut to flab exactly as if the air had been let out of him. Good grief, Amanda thought.
“It’s just me,” she told him.
“I see you,” Timmy said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. You have to relax.”
“He thinks I did it,” Timmy said. “He thinks I killed those two ladies.”