VII
Jennifer sat in her squad car and drank her coffee as she filled out a request to be transferred to another location. She couldn’t do Stansbury duty anymore. She had been doing it because she felt like it was her town and she was helping to protect it but she couldn’t protect it. Nobody could protect it. Ben couldn’t protect it. He tried and tried for his whole life almost and then he died and all the others died and it kept on happening and now she was supposed to what? To be like Ben? To carry on and try and try only to see another bit of tragedy rock the town and all that you do and that you’ve done means nothing when in just brief moments it all comes undone. She couldn’t keep it safe. She couldn’t keep people sane. And it was worse here because these were her people and this was her town and she had always known them all and she knew that if she stuck around they would start looking to her for comfort and safety and she couldn’t really do anything at all for them. She couldn’t be like Ben and put on a smile and pretend that everything was under control with people she knew.
She could do it with strangers, though. They didn’t need to know much more than she was Officer Kennisaw.
Swanton looked promising. It was a beautiful country town with the culture and charm of Vermont. At least that’s what their website said and in some ways it sounded like Stansbury except that it was way up north away from Stansbury and as far as she knew there were no haunted covered bridges or history of tragic events. She put Swanton down on her form as the center of an area she would like to patrol. It was a little closer to Burlington and just over the border not too far from Montreal where she knew a girl who she liked to see from time to time and maybe she could see her a little more often than that.
She just wanted to protect people and know it meant something at the end of the day. At the end of yesterday, nothing seemed to matter. It was all just chaos and entropy and it would always be that way here no matter what anyone did. Maybe it was time for people to just stop pretending that it was all okay and pack up shop and go. There was one shop that needed packing up more than any and as much as she thought that in all the madness of the last day no one would bat an eye if that damned pharmacy went up in flames and that reclusive vampire bastard inside went up with it, it just wasn’t in her to do it. She could never prove anything she ever thought and to deliver a death sentence to someone just because you thought he was a cancerous life-sucking fiend was just not something she could do. But she wished someone would. She would gladly toast marshmallows over his corpse.
But the town. The damned town. It would go on. All these old towns up here went on. Swanton was going on and she hoped she could keep it safer because she couldn’t do anything for Stansbury anymore.
Jennifer put her car in gear and headed back to her station, slowing down a little as she passed the Winnebago to send the nice couple inside the all the good fortune she could offer. She hoped they would find a friendlier destination for their next stop.
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 56
