The Summer Man

by S. D. Perry

  “They said that?”

  “They said exactly that,” Vincent snapped. “They apparently didn’t think I’d noticed that crime is up, that we’re having an over-the-top summer this year.” He grinned his tense facsimile of a smile. “And get this—it’s all because of the spores.”

  “Spores?”

  “Spores or pollen or fairy dust. Something in the air or the water, making people feel things. Last week it was an alien invasion; that kid with his tinfoil hat.” Vincent shook his head. “What do you think’s coming next? I’m betting government conspiracy.”

  Henderson nodded but felt an inkling of concern. It had definitely been a whackjob summer, people calling or coming in to talk about some extremely strange shit. Besides the death count, the number of public and private disturbances being reported, the vandalism at the docks and out at the cemetery…it sure as hell seemed like something was up with the citizenry, local and summer. Just in the last couple of days, even. A middle-aged tourist woman had freaked out at the grocery store, crawled into the meat case, and started tearing open packages of hamburger, rolling in it, moaning. She kept saying that the blood would make her young again. Trent and LaVeau had fielded that one. When they’d tried to pull her out, she’d snapped at them with her teeth, like a dog. They’d actually had to call the paramedics in to shoot her up with something. A gay couple had come in a few weeks back, reported harassment, notes on their door, late-night calls—yesterday, someone had smeared feces all over their front porch. And some skeeze had masturbated in front of a bunch of local kids down at the old dock. That was only the weird stuff, too.

  Spores…he vaguely remembered watching a show some years back about the Salem witch trials—how maybe all those people were accused and convicted because there had been this one kind of mold on the crops that made everyone crazy for a little while. Wasn’t he just thinking that Vincent was acting different, that he’d changed?

  “They wanted to know how I’m feeling,” Vincent sneered. “How the fuck do I know? I feel fucking stressed, and is it any wonder, with all the shit going down? Like I don’t have enough to do without taking our town’s emotional well-being into account.”

  “People have been…ah, more tense lately,” Henderson ventured.

  “Of course they have! I’m right there with ’em!” Vincent had started to pace again. “Spores, aliens, Saturn rising. All the nutcases are out and about, and maybe there is a reason.”

  He stopped to look at Henderson. “Bottom line, though, who gives a shit? I mean, really. What matters isn’t how people feel, I feel all kinds of crappy. I’m understaffed for this shitstorm of a summer, I can’t seem to get to the goddamn budget for next year—hell, my wife left me—but that doesn’t give me the right to just, just fuck off, does it? Do whatever the hell I feel like?”

  He spread his arms, his expression echoing his words: Does it? Huh?

  “Ashley left?” It slipped out before he could think twice. Vincent was a solid family man. He didn’t go on and on about his wife and kid like some, but when he did talk about Ashley—a petite, shy brunette who sometimes brought double batches of homemade cookies to the station—it was always with warmth and respect. And he obviously doted on his little girl.

  “She took the baby and went to her mother’s for a while,” Vincent said, looking away. His hands fell to his sides. “Said I was letting it all get to me, and she didn’t want Lily to…”

  He trailed off, shook his head, and then he was walking again. “Ah, we’ll work it out,” he said. “Maybe I am going crazy, maybe they’re all right, there’s a conspiracy or something. Thing is, it’s what we do that matters, isn’t it? Isn’t that the fucking point?”

  “Fucking A,” Henderson said, thinking of Annie, who’d died trying to do the right thing.

  “We’ve got to keep the citizens in line, keep it tight,” Vincent said. “And if they fuck up, we’ve got to make sure they’re held responsible for their actions.” Henderson nodded along with him. “It’s our yard, am I right? Our yard, our house, our business.”

  That sure as hell hit home. The two of them had led the team (if you could call Frank LaVeau and Dave Miller a team, anyway) that had collared the trio of teen rapists. The very hour that county got wind of the arrests, Wes Dean had been in motion, moving the kids and their squawking families to the county seat to await processing. To the sheriff’s house. Rick Truman was in Seattle being held on aggravated murder—the lawyers were trying to hammer something out to save him from a needle in the arm—and Sheriff Dean had managed to turn the wrap-up on Poisson over to the SPD, gotten a friendly city judge and an assistant DA to make it happen by piecemealing out the forensics to Seattle’s lab and assigning some suck-ass lieutenant to run the interviews. For whatever reason, the sheriff had a hard-on for Vincent. Jurisdictional strife could get nasty, and was so common that it had become a cliché; Henderson had seen grown men bicker over whether a warrant would stand like snot-nosed preschoolers screaming about who got to play with a toy—but the animosity that the sheriff directed at the police chief seemed both sincere and personal. With the way Dean had been fucking them lately, Henderson could get behind the idea of cutting him out of the loop.

  “Our business,” Vincent repeated. Henderson nodded again and felt a renewal of fierce loyalty to the man. So what, the chief didn’t want to kiss ass anymore? He was a strong, brave cop trying to do what was right, and why the fuck had Henderson wanted to be an officer in the first place, if not to take care of business? To protect and fucking serve?

  “You’re with me on this, aren’t you, Ian?”

  “You know I am,” Henderson said, and clapped his hand on Vincent’s shoulder, which seemed much thinner than it should be. “All of us are, Chief.”

  Vincent’s smile was finally sincere. “We’ll do whatever needs to be done,” he said. “And we’ll just see what happens, next time the sheriff decides to drop by to play catch.”

  Henderson laughed, thinking of how good it would be to stick it to ol’ Western Dean, not thinking at all of spores or mold or some TV show he’d seen a million years back about seasons of insanity. Not that it mattered, anyway.

  Sarah hung up the phone, one hand pressed to her heart. She immediately started for Tommy’s room, feeling dazed. Feeling hurt. Guilt would come next, she suspected. Upstairs, Karen was asleep, so she stepped quietly down the hall. Tommy’s door was closed, and she stopped in front of it. When had he started to close his door? Why hadn’t she noticed?

  Because of John, she thought, and yep, there was the guilt, right there. It had taken less than a week for her to fall madly, passionately in love with John. She’d thought she’d been doing a good job since Tommy had come home from his father’s, making sure he was OK, focusing on being the mom of an almost-teen, but she’d only been going through the motions; she’d taken her son at his word that he was fine and gone back to counting the hours until John was with her. That too-brief moon-shadow time in the dark of her bedroom, touching him, being touched.

  Selfish, she told herself. Selfish and blind. She believed John’s theory, that emotions were being heightened somehow, that the citizens and natives of Port Isley were being affected; people might have died, her own sister had been raped…and all she’d been able to focus on were her feelings for John, so sudden and surprising that she’d let her common sense take a vacation. She’d chosen to decide that everything was fine because she was fine.

  Are you, though? She couldn’t look at his closed door any longer, by herself out in the hall. She tapped. “Tommy? Got a minute?”

  A long pause, then a reluctant, “Yeah.”

  She opened the door and stepped inside. Tommy was at his computer, his back to her. On his monitor, a ghost was running over dark fields. She winced, looking at the dark, angry red of his neck. He’d come home two days ago with a bad sunburn and a distant countenance after going out with his friends without permission. She’d rationalized the minor act of rebelliousness:
he’d just come back from time with his father; he was pushing boundaries. And he had left a note. He hadn’t had much of an appetite for lunch or dinner, which she’d chalked up to the sunburn. She’d given him aspirin and run a soda bath and hadn’t suspected that anything…that anything terrible might have happened.

  “Pause your game?” she asked.

  “Just a second.” He typed something out, taking his time, and she felt a surge of intense frustration, there and gone in a second—and it finally occurred to her to wonder what she meant to say to him.

  He turned and looked at her with a carefully bland expression and worried eyes. He couldn’t hide his anxiety from her…at least there’s still that…and a small, rational thought floated through her head, that everything was crazy and going too fast, that no one was OK, that she should pack up her son and her sister and get out, get away. People weren’t supposed to feel so much or change so quickly—

  “What?” Tommy said, and that single word was so sullen, so petulant, that she snapped back to the moment. To her relationship with her son.

  “The police just called,” she said, and was gratified to see him drop his gaze. She was ashamed of the petty satisfaction but couldn’t seem to help it. “They wanted to know when I was going to bring you in to make a statement. About what happened at the pier.”

  He didn’t speak, didn’t look up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, and she sounded whiny to her ears. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  No answer, and she took a step closer to him. “Were you—were you scared to say anything, or maybe a little embarrassed?”

  “No,” he said. “It just wasn’t a big deal.”

  A grown man masturbating in front of children? She couldn’t imagine that he hadn’t been distressed. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it; he was still staring at the floor. She didn’t want to handle this wrong, but she wasn’t sure what to say. “Honey, I know that you’re—you’re growing up, and I couldn’t be more proud of you, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t look up.

  “I just—if something bad happens, I really want you to tell me. It’s my job to protect you and make sure that…that if you want to talk about something, you feel like you can. To me.”

  He mumbled something, still staring at the floor.

  “What?”

  He finally looked up, and his expression was as unpleasant as his tone. “I said you’ve been so busy lately, with that guy. That doctor. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  Sarah crossed her arms, and it was her turn to look away. She took a deep breath. “Did you—did you see us, or…”

  “I heard you, OK?” The red in his face deepened, and the words spilled out, angry and miserable. “I keep hearing you, and it’s, it’s gross and you don’t even know him.”

  He had completely changed the subject, and she got it, then, understood what he was telling her. She hadn’t told him about John, so he’d decided to keep something from her. Her guilt intensified, but there was some relief, too. He’d had a reason, he wasn’t growing up and away from her, he won’t keep anything like this from me again. Even telling herself, she knew better.

  “I should have told you,” she said. “I’m sorry. When Karen got hurt, John—Dr. Hanover—came to help her, and he and I—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, Mom. God!” His embarrassed shock was melodramatic, so essentially teenage that it might have been funny to someone watching. She wasn’t laughing; what must he think of her? What did twelve-year-old boys think about sex?

  “I’m trying to tell you that we’re—that it may be serious between us,” she said. “I know it’s happened fast, but we’re not—it’s not casual, I wouldn’t want you to think that I do that kind of thing without—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now,” he said.

  “Honey, I really think—”

  “Seriously,” he said, and now his look was pleading. “Later, OK?”

  No, it’s not OK, she said, but only inside. She didn’t want to push him, and she’d always respected his boundaries as best she could, and she didn’t know what to say; that was the problem: she didn’t want to make things worse. She needed to think, to decide what to do. She needed to talk to John.

  “OK,” she said. “Later, though.”

  He went back to his game. She was dismissed. She stared at him for a few more seconds, frustrated and worried and terribly wistful, then turned and walked out. She left his door open behind her, but halfway down the stairs, she heard it close.

  After Stan Vincent had pretty much tossed them out of his office—Amanda had been right, the police chief had as much as told them they were full of shit—they’d gone to Bob’s house, where he’d put in a call to the county sheriff. The lady deputy he’d spoken with had sounded harried and indifferent to the idea that crime was up in Port Isley; she’d offered to mail him a report to fill out, or welcomed him to download one from their website. John had needed to get back to work—he was surprised and discouraged by the lack of authoritative interest—and Amanda, not even slightly fazed, had gone back to Devon’s, to do whatever it was that teenage girls did when they weren’t giggling in public. Not that Amanda was the giggling type; Bob couldn’t remember ever meeting such a sarcastic young person. She hadn’t been able to get much from the police chief, saying that in spite of his surface bluster, he was closed off beneath, tightly controlled. She’d called Vincent a clenched fist, and Bob thought that an apt metaphor for a lot of people around Isley lately, those that weren’t actively high-diving off their sanity boards.

  “Sanity boards,” Bob said to himself, and shook his head and poured another drink. If that was the best he could come up with, he should be drinking. It was late afternoon, anyway; no reason to hold back. Wasn’t like he had any place to be, anyone else to impress. He wanted to stay home and relax—

  —drink—

  —and figure out what else he could do, what any of them could do. He understood that someone like Vincent wouldn’t want to accept such a vague, circumstantial theory about an increase in general craziness, but the way Bob saw it, wanting didn’t have much to do with anything. There was evidence, there was a giant bump in the crime rate—and it was a new millennium, for Chrissakes. There were gases and drugs and fanatics willing to use those things on people. Hell, corporations, governments used those things on people; seemed to him, the cops should be open to those kinds of ideas. And it seemed to him that Stan Vincent had to be affected, too, to be so quick to dismiss what they’d laid out.

  After they’d left the police station, after Bob had put in their call to the sheriff, they’d talked over some other options. Bob had suggested that they wait on the water and soil tests, see if they could come up with hard data, then go see the sheriff…but they wouldn’t get the results for another week, probably, and Amanda seemed to think that they wouldn’t prove anything, anyway. She couldn’t say why, but considering her mysterious and powerful talent for knowing things, Bob and John had both lost enthusiasm for the idea. John had pitched calling the press back in, but Bob had been lukewarm on the proposal. The evidence was undeniable, but crime was up everywhere lately, times were tough, and the impression that people were changing, in all different ways…unless you were one of them, it wasn’t really much of a story. Bob had reminded them that if they could get hold of Poppy Peters, he might have some ideas, but their mayor had been conspicuously absent the last couple of weeks. He wasn’t in his office and hadn’t returned any of Bob’s calls. Frustrated by a lack of direction, they’d all agreed to meet again for Miranda Greene-Moreland’s poetry night in the hope that Amanda might be able to find some of the people from her dreams.

  “Dreams,” Bob muttered, and downed his shot. He started to lean back into his tattered old couch—the TV remote was tucked between the cushion and the arm, and he thought there might be a ball game on—then remembered the notebook, Amanda’s notebook. She’d
given it to them after their dismal meeting with Vincent; Bob was supposed to turn it over to John after he’d taken a look.

  He rose unsteadily and walked to the kitchen. The spiralbound notebook was on the table, where Amanda had left it. He took it back to the couch, nearly tripping over his shoes at the end of the scarred steamer trunk he used as a coffee table. Cursing, he lowered himself to one of the tired cushions and opened to the first page of the cheap notebook. DREAM IMAGERY…

  He studied the list, frowning over Amanda’s descriptions, considering each one as fully as he could. He’d had a bit too much booze too fast, maybe, hadn’t eaten since breakfast…he’d live it up, order a pizza, one of those meatball-garlic specials from Rad’s. It might kill his stomach, but fuck it, he had an economy-size bottle of antacid in the kitchen, and no one lived forever. He’d call it in as soon as he was done with the notebook, which suddenly seemed like tedious work.

  He frowned at the page, annoyed by his attitude. He’d brought Amanda and John together; he’d been pushing his hypothesis since the day he’d thought of it—this was happening, really happening, and getting drunk was a distraction. He knew better, but getting drunk was also a relief. Drinking helped him shoulder the responsibility of knowing, because it made him care less; it made him want to eat pizza and watch the game and worry about everything tomorrow.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, and dropped the notebook on the trunk, disgusted with himself. Why wasn’t he doing something?

  What can you do? Obviously, if people were feeling sick or afraid, they’d try to do something about it—go to the doctor, leave town, go to the cops, something. He wasn’t a detective or a social worker, he was a reporter, an editor; there was nothing he could do—

  —people changing, not much of a story…unless you’re one of them.

  Bob sat up straighter, wishing he hadn’t had so much booze as the remembered thought held, began to grow. An editorial, maybe…hell, he could run a full page, front page. He had no doubt that John’s statistics readout was news. The numbers were compelling. Follow it with a few questions, get John to work ’em up: notice any strange behaviors in loved ones, unusual feelings of anger, sorrow, like that…then a call to action, a demand for a town meeting. A demand for a proper investigation, carried out by someone besides himself and a psychic teenager and a lovesick psychologist.