David grabbed a handbasket from the front of the Old Town grocery store and filled it with canned goods, boxed dinners, milk, bread, a couple of pounds of ground beef. The usual groceries for Ben Senior and Bonnie. His own refrigerator was empty, but all that he picked up for himself was a case of beer.
The store was called The Store—for decades, it had been the only grocery in town. It was four narrow aisles, one checkout counter. The basket was full, but David wandered the aisles. Now there were two other massive grocery stores in town, stocked with everything that grew under the sun, one in the suburbs up north and one out east. But David had never set foot in either of them. All his life, The Store had been where he went for food. He wasn’t about to change now.
He was thinking again over his conversation with Charlotte, about all that he had missed, all that he’d overlooked. He had missed the real her, and then he’d missed everything that transpired between her and his aunt and uncle. And then he never questioned their story. Never questioned them. He’d been young, but it was no excuse. He knew he still had that flaw inside of him, taking people at their word.
“Oh, David, I didn’t expect I’d see you here.”
David turned and at first looked straight over the person who’d spoken to him. It was Bertha Belcher, the owner of The Store. She didn’t stand much above four feet anymore, the way her spine hunched over. Her hair was dyed electric red. Back when he was a kid, David would mow her lawn. She always made him lemonade with lemon slices in the cup, floating atop the ice, and it was the fanciest thing he’d ever seen.
“Hi, Bertha. Just picking up some groceries.”
Something was off in the way she looked at him. Something that seemed both pitying and judgmental.
“Well, I’m glad to see you’re taking it all so well,” she said unconvincingly.
He couldn’t hide the blankness of his reaction.
“Oh,” Bertha said. “You haven’t seen yet.”
She glanced sideways toward the front counter, where a metal rack held copies of the Garden County Gazette. It was a Friday, which meant a new issue was just out.
“I’m sure you’re doing your best,” Bertha said as David walked over and picked up a copy.
At the top of the page was a big announcement for the Crane Dance, but David’s eyes quickly went below it. His heart started beating harder as he recognized a photo of himself. Some old photo of him posing stiffly in uniform. And then the headline: “Residents Lose Faith in Sheriff as Killer Remains at Large.”
“Hell,” David hissed.
He knew it right away. This was Dale’s newspaper; it was his doing. His uncle had some fight left in him after all. He scanned the article quickly. It said he’d lied about the truth. That he had had the killer in his sights and let him get away. That he had blamed locals for the killings. That he should resign or that the county should force a recall vote. His skin prickled as his brain shifted into fight-or-flight mode. It was all bullshit. But it was also all true.
David glanced around him and saw that the few other shoppers all stared his way. Faces he knew. Friends. And now they looked at him with distrust. With fear.
He’d had locals angry at him before. It couldn’t be helped, doing the job. You busted someone for drunk driving, they weren’t exactly happy about it. This was different. His uncle was turning the town itself against him. He had to end this. Find the killer. Close the case. Things could still be normal again.
David started for the door, forgetting the basket in his hand.
“You have to pay for those, you know.”
Bertha’s voice behind him, spoken as if he hadn’t spent all those years mowing her lawn, as if he hadn’t come to The Store to help Bertha out every time there was a shoplifter. She spoke to him like he was a stranger.
“Right. Shoot, sorry, Bertha. Lost my head there.”
He put his groceries on the checkout counter. Bertha settled in across from him and started to scan and bag his purchases.
“And the paper?”
He looked down, realizing he still held it in his hand. He dropped it back into the rack.
“No,” David said. “Just the food.”
All the way to Site One, David felt the anxiety within him growing, metastasizing, until he felt his whole body urging the white van to hurry up in its course. He couldn’t just sit here and let himself be thrown out of office. He had to act. To do something.
There was some small voice inside of him that asked if all this wasn’t a relief. Being sheriff of Little Springs had been David’s dream since he was little. But in the shadow of the giant, it had become a nightmare—even before the murders. These weren’t his people anymore. Not his world. If the town wanted to give him an easy out, let them. He could be done with all of it.
But no, he couldn’t do that. He’d made a promise to find Jason’s killer. Jason, Jimmy, Erickson, all of them needed justice. If David walked away before it was done, he’d carry that with him to the grave.
Also, he alone had seen the killer. And the killer had taunted him, targeting him. Something about it all felt almost personal. While there were people in Little Springs that David had butted heads with, there wasn’t anyone he’d call an enemy. He remembered Sunny’s words, that it could be a local. He shook his head. It couldn’t be a local. Not even Dale.
David was thinking about the newspaper again, about his meeting with Dale. His uncle didn’t know anything about Jason’s death. And it pained Dale, clearly, despite all his history with his son. The attack in the newspaper wasn’t about that. It was because of the bank records. Dale felt threatened, so he needed to threaten David back, find some leverage, try to protect himself.
If Dale wasn’t involved, then David was back again to the beginning. No suspects. No motive. No hope of finding the killer before he claimed another victim.
Mercifully, the van came to a stop in Site One, and David was off and through security and on his way to Building Seventeen, where he planned to throw himself into the files. He had no real plan beyond a hope for luck. That some piece of information would leap out at him, or some detail would jog his memory, or that the pieces of the puzzle would suddenly click together in a new way.
He found himself knocking on the door of Sunny’s office, instead. He both wanted to tell her about the newspaper and didn’t. She was so much smarter than him, she would know what to do. But would it make him seem weak? That he was a failure? Even his own town was turning against him. But then she answered with a welcoming smile, and he was telling her, and she sat and listened, and when she spoke, she didn’t try to coach him through a solution, to problem-solve.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, taking his hand and leaning her body into his. “That has to be so hard.”
David said nothing. He stood there, and all of the anger that had coiled inside of him was suddenly gone.
“You know what you need?” Sunny asked, pulling back from him, a smile on her face.
“What’s that?” David asked.
“Some kind of big, weird bird dance. That’s what.”
“You heard about that, did you?” David asked.
He imagined going now. All the locals would’ve seen the newspaper. All of them would be looking at him and judging.
But then he looked at Sunny’s imploring grin. Hell with it.
“Are you going to ask me or what?” she said.
He couldn’t help but smile.
“How about it, Doctor Lee? Will you be my date to the Crane Dance?”
“I’d love to,” she said.
For a moment, it was possible to imagine that this was all that existed, that the world wasn’t circling around them, faster and faster, threatening at any instant to all fly apart.
The cranes circled about the spire in their massive, shifting circuit, calling out in a voice that sounded alien and godlike. The movement created a glimmered reflection on the surface of the giant, which caught also the blue of the sky and so seemed to be made of water, with waves rippling across it.
The man watched this. Not the cranes but the shifting visual of the giant. His skin prickled at a soft breeze, air that was cool but carried just a hint of warmth and brought with it a message: winter was ending, and spring was coming, and all that had died would live again.
It only reinforced what he already knew to be true—a moment of finality was approaching. He had given himself over to the voice inside him in these weeks, allowed it to subsume him, to make its desires his own. But its appetite never shrank, only grew. And it was hungrier than ever.
So this would be it, he supposed. More blood. More death. And then an end, an end to everything.
Overhead the cranes dispersed, done with their midday ritual.