"Problem, Mavis?" asked Theophilus Crowe. The constable was standing right where the stranger had been.
"Damn, where'd he go?" Mavis looked around behind Theo, then back at the daytime regulars.
"Where'd he go?"
"Got me," they said, a chorus of shrugs.
"Who?" asked Theo.
"Blond guy in a black trench coat," said Mavis. "You had to pass him on the way in."
"Trench coat? It's seventy-five degrees out," said Theo. "I'd have noticed someone in a trench coat."
"He was a perv!" someone shouted from the back.
Theo looked down at Mavis. "This guy flash you?"
Their height difference was nearly two feet and Mavis had to back up a step to look him in the eye. "Hell no. I like a man who believes in truth in advertising. This guy was looking for a child."
"He told you that? He came in here and said he was looking for a kid?"
"That's it. I was just getting ready to teach him some —»
"You're sure he hadn't lost his kid? That happens, Christmas shopping, they wander away —»
"No, he wasn't looking for a particular kid, he was just looking for a kid."
"Well, maybe he wanted to be a Big Brother or Secret Santa or something," said Theo, expressing a faith in the goodness of man for which he had little to no evidence, "do something nice for Christmas."
"Goddammit, Theo, you dumbfuck, you don't have to pry a priest off an altar boy with a crowbar to figure out that he's not helping the kid with his Rosary. The guy was a perv."
"Well, I should probably go look for him."
"Well, you probably oughta should."
Theo started to turn to go out the door, then turned back. "I'm not a dumbfuck, Mavis. There's no need for that kind of talk."
"Sorry, Theo," said Mavis, lowering her baseball bat to show the sincerity of her contrition. "Why was it you came in, then?"
"Can't remember." Theo raised his eyebrows, daring her.
Mavis grinned at him. Theo was a good guy — a little flaky but a good guy. "Really?"
"Nah, I just wanted to check with you on the food for the Christmas party. You were going to barbecue, right?"
"I was planning on it."
"Well, I just heard on the radio that there's a pretty good chance of rain, so you might want to have a backup plan."
"More liquor?"
"I was thinking something that wouldn't involve cooking outdoors."
"Like more liquor?"
Theo shook his head and started toward the door. "Call me or Molly if you need any help."
"It won't rain," said Mavis. "It never rains in December."
But Theo was gone, out on the street looking for the trench-coated stranger.
"It could rain," said one of the daytime regulars. "Scientists say we could see El Niño this year."
"Yeah, like they ever tell us until after half the state has washed away," said Mavis. "Screw the scientists."
But El Niño was coming.
El Niño. The Child.
Chapter 3
HOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Tuesday night. Christmas was still four days away, and yet there was Santa Claus cruising right down the main street of town in his big red pickup truck: waving to the kids, weaving in his lane, belching into his beard, more than a little drunk. "Ho, ho, ho," said Dale Pearson, evil developer and Caribou Lodge Santa for the sixth consecutive year. "Ho, ho, ho," he said, suppressing the urge to add and a bottle of rum, his demeanor more akin to that of Blackbeard than Saint Nicholas. Parents pointed, children waved and frisked.
By now, all of Pine Cove was abuzz with expat Christmas cheer. Every hotel room was full, and there wasn't a parking space to be found down on Cypress Street, where shoppers pumped their chestnuts into an open fire of credit-card swipe-and-spend denial. It smelled of cinnamon and pine, peppermint and joy. This was not the coarse commercialism of a Los Angeles or San Francisco Christmas. This was the refined, sincere commercialism of small-town New England, where a century ago Norman Rockwell had invented Christmas. This was real.
But Dale didn't get it. "Merry, happy — oh, eat me, you little vermin," Dale grinched from behind his tinted windows.
Actually, the whole Christmas appeal of their village was a bit of a mystery to the residents of Pine Cove. It wasn't exactly a winter wonderland; the median temperature in the winter was sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and only a couple of really old guys could remember it ever having snowed. Neither was it a tropical-beach getaway. The ocean there was bitterly cold, with an average visibility of eighteen inches, and a huge elephant seal rookery at the shore. Through the winter thousands of the rotund pinnipeds lay strewn across Pine Cove beaches like great barking turds, and although not dangerous in themselves, they were the dietary mainstay of the great white shark, which had evolved over 120 million years into the perfect excuse for never entering water over one's ankles. So if it wasn't the weather or the water, what in the hell was it? Perhaps it was the pine trees themselves. Christmas trees.