The Winslow Incident (14 page)

“Not open yet,” she called after
them.

She glanced back at the bank
building. Where was her father when she needed him?

Determined to convince the
Peabodys to close the Crock and urge everyone to go home until things got
sorted out, she pushed open the restaurant door, unleashing the usual riot of
bells.

In the dining room, all eyes were
on Kohl Thacker. The tall bald man stood on his chair, sweating and excited and
running down items they might have eaten in common. “Who had corndogs?”

A few hands were raised.

“Okay then—who ate burgers?”

More or less the same. Hazel
glanced around to see if any Holloway Ranch cowhands were present. There
weren’t. Ranch hands rarely ate in town.

Kohl wrinkled his bare forehead.
“Sick cattle, sick people?”

“Rose doesn’t eat beef,” Hazel
said. “And she’s in the ladies room, sicker than anyone.”

“Oh.” Kohl sounded disappointed.
“Okay then, how about catwiches?”

Hands were raised all across the
dining room.

“I knew it.” Kohl slammed his fist
against his palm. “It’s always the fish that goes bad.”

Gus Bolinger broke in. “I ate no
catfish, so you know squat, Thacker. And my guess is we’ll all be feeling
better in no time, so how ’bout we just leave it at that.”

Looking defeated, Kohl sank to his
seat while everyone turned their attention back to the food in front of them.
It was then that Hazel realized nobody was actually eating anything. Just
poking at their plates. She headed for the kitchen to tell Owen not to cook any
more food, to tell him to get out here and flex his Popeye muscles and make
everyone leave so she could go look for her dad.

As she was passing the Marshes’
table, Julie exploded the sunny side of her eggs with her fork and a look of
repulsion washed over her face. Julie gasped and pushed the plate away, quickly
covering the offending yolks with her napkin. Hazel doubled back to remove the
plate.

“What’s wrong?” Jay asked his
wife.

Julie stared at him with a
helpless expression.

Just as Hazel reached for the
plate, Julie looked at it in squinty-eyed terror and flipped it over. Food
spilled across the table and Hazel’s patience snapped—she’d had it with
these people and their freakish food poisoning. “Why’d you do that?” she said.

Gently, Jay said to Julie, “Settle
down, sweetie.”

“There was something on my plate,”
Julie said.

“What?” he asked.

Hazel looked at the mess she would
have to clean up. “Your breakfast?” she suggested.

“Something else . . . ,” Julie
replied.

Hazel lifted the edge of the
overturned plate. “Let’s see: eggs and bacon and pancakes. Nothing horrible,
nothing moving.”

“Please,” Julie said.

Hazel picked up a piece of bacon,
examined it, then held it out to her. “Just good food.”

“Please, Hazel!” Julie’s eyes
brimmed with tears.

“Sorry,” Hazel said, realizing
she’d gone too far—even if Julie was undeniably irritating.

“It’s not your fault, Hazel,” Jay
said. “We were up all night. Didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

“It’s okay.” Hazel grabbed a bar
towel and began consolidating the food strewn across their table.

Meanwhile, the dining room grew
even noisier.

Concentrating on her coffee cup,
Julie’s pupils were open as wide as saucers.

“Julie?” Jay tried.

She remained fixated on her cup.
When Hazel picked it up to wipe beneath it, her eyes followed the cup up . . . and
then down again.

“Sweetie?” Jay touched the cap
sleeve of his wife’s babydoll blouse. “You feel all right?”

Slowly, she turned to face her
husband. “Yes, I do. I feel all right. I feel just fine. How many times are you
gonna ask?” Her voice rose, “In fact, I feel great. I’ve never felt better.”
Yelling now, “I’ve never felt this fucking great in my whole fucking life!” She
sank her fingernails into his forearm. “How the hell do
you
feel?”

Hazel jumped back while the noisy
Crock went dead silent. Jay glanced around for some sort of help but everyone averted
their eyes. Hazel felt as uncomfortable as he looked.

From the table by the door, a low
laugh escaped Kohl Thacker. Then he let loose with a full belly laugh, gasped
for air, laughed some more. A woman at the next table began to snicker. Another
started up. Soon the entire room reverberated with laughter.

Tension twisted Julie’s face
before it lifted and she released hysterics of her own.

Jay gave a halfhearted, “Heh heh,”
while looking at Hazel as if to ask,
Are they outta their ever-loving minds?

Hazel glanced around the dining
room: this was not funny
at all.
More like frightening. Watching these
people she’d known all her life become sudden strangers, she recalled how Sean
had asked her yesterday, “Where did I go?”

At that, she felt the mountainside
tilt beneath her feet.

She left the towel and the mess
and dashed into the kitchen where she found Owen in the cooler muttering,
“Bacon eggs cheese milk.” He grabbed a handful of sausage off the shelf, sniffed
it, dropped it to the floor.

“What are you doing?” Hazel asked.

Startled, Owen spun around and she
noticed that his pupils were huge too. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

Turning back to the shelf he poked
at a package wrapped in white butcher paper, meat most likely. Then he picked
up the bundle and examined it. “A definite possibility,” he said before
flinging it to the ground.

He strode out of the cooler, not
bothering to close the door, and went over to the toaster oven. There he tore
open a plastic bag containing a loaf of bread. He shook his big head. “This is
wrong.”

“What do you mean?” She moved next
to him and looked at the pieces of bread strewn across the cutting board.
“What’s wrong?”

Owen held up a slice in the bright
sunlight flooding the kitchen to reveal a slight grayish hue. “See?” He looked
at her with an expression of wonderment. “It’s the water, Hazel, it’s gotta be.
Something’s wrong with the water. And it’s gotten into everything.” His face
went ashen. “Including us.”

T
hat sun is blinding me
, Sean
thought, placing his hand across his forehead like a visor.

He ducked into Clemshaw Mercantile
and swiped a pair of sunglasses off the circular rack next to the front door.
Once back outside he donned the shades and realized that he couldn’t recall it
ever being this bright or hot so early. Waves of heat rose from the sidewalk,
blasting him like when the door is finally opened on a car that has sat in the
sun all afternoon.

At least his stomach felt better
than last night. But while the nausea had departed, an uneasiness had moved in
that he didn’t really understand. Actually, he was having trouble understanding
anything
today. Everything felt different somehow, as if somebody had
changed the channel during the night. Or more like it was the same show, only a
different episode. And everything sounded louder. Maybe that was why the
headache that’d been looming since early that morning had now arrived in full.
No matter, Sean continued on rubbery legs toward the bakery, despite the
nagging thought that he should just go home, get into bed and stay there for a
very long time.

In the back of the bakery he found
Zachary Rhone staring into the big oven. The place was immaculate, not a speck
of sugar or flour dotted the countertops or floors. And there was no bread
rising, no donuts frying, no buns cooling. Sean said, “Sorry I’m late—”

Zachary shot up so hard Sean
worried the man might jump right out of his skin. And Sean noticed that
Zachary’s face looked craggier, as if his bad temper had etched itself deeper
into his complexion overnight.

After what felt like forever,
Zachary finally said, “Go home.”

“I’ve been sick,” Sean said and
his brain pounded against his skull in agreement.

“I know,” Zachary said quietly, and
his stony eyes seemed to drill all the way past Sean’s aching eye sockets right
into his sore head.

“You know?” Sean asked.

“Don’t say anything to anybody.”

“Huh?”

“There’s no need to say anything.”
Zachary’s eyes were as dark and shiny as black marbles. “To anybody.”

Oh, shit . . .
Sean’s stomach clenched.

“Just go home.”

Sean noticed then that Zachary was
trembling and felt more than glad to get away from him.

After he stepped out of the bakery
and into the shock of sunlight, he saw Melanie Rhone hanging laundry on the
line. He shuffled up to her despite his thudding head because she waved to him
and he liked her and he felt sorry for her.

Pale as the white sheet she’d just
pinned up, Melanie smiled weakly. “Did you get the food poisoning too?”

“Yeah, we all did. Except my dad.”
Sean tried to sort it all out, what it had to do with sick cows and Hazel and
Hawkin Rhone, but his brain felt like taffy. All of his thoughts were stuck
together in one gooey heap. Whenever he tried to peel one off, it would just
stretch out until it lost its meaning entirely.

“. . . wasn’t anybody’s fault, I’m
sure,” Melanie was saying. “Probably just some mayo got left out too long in
the sun.”

Sean realized he hadn’t been
paying attention to her. “Where’re Violet and Daisy?” he asked. It struck him
as unusual that the girls weren’t in the yard; they were never far from Melanie.

“Inside. Their daddy says they
have to stay—” Melanie gasped and her blue eyes flew wide open.

“Thought I told you to go home,
mister!” Zachary seized Sean by the back of his t-shirt and jerked him away,
choking him with his own collar. Then he turned Sean around and let go with a
hard push to his shoulder. “That’s my
wife
—you have no business
talking to her! Keep away from my wife!”

“Okay, okay . . . ,” was all Sean
could muster as he stumbled down the lawn and off the Rhone property.
Not
coming back
, he decided then. Never.

Once back on Fortune Way he felt
as though he’d never been there before. Everything was in its place but the Old
West–style storefronts now struck him as ridiculous. Laughable. He
guffawed just for the hell of it and Tiny Clemshaw, now standing guard in front
of the Mercantile, glared at him, which made Sean wonder if the shopkeeper had
seen him steal the sunglasses.

The sound of Sean’s tennis shoes
slapping the wood plank sidewalk was so loud he couldn’t believe people weren’t
rushing out to see what all the ruckus was. He laughed again. A humorless,
one-note laugh: “Ha.” He stopped to peek through the window of the Buckhorn
Tavern—it looked invitingly dark and cool inside but wasn’t open yet. The
sun beating down on his back felt like fire so he moved on.

Then he called up to Cal on the
roof of the Fish ’n Bait, “Having any luck?”

“Nibblin this mornin’,” Cal
replied, “shy ever since.”

Sean heard Rose’s Country Crock
before he saw it—the swell of excited voices and the clink clank clatter
of cups and plates and spoons. The sandwich board listing the day’s specials
(often written in Hazel’s sloppy handwriting so you were never actually sure
what they were) was not in its usual spot on the sidewalk.

Reaching the doorway, he was
relieved to spot Hazel amid the crowded tables. But he was afraid to go
inside—too loud and too bright—so he waited there until she finally
noticed him and came over.

“Hi,” she said, a bit out of
breath. Her eyes were extra green today, he noticed, her hair especially
reddish gold.

“Hey.” He felt better already
seeing her.

“Everyone’s freaking out here,”
she said, looking kind of freaked out too. “Did you go to work?”

“I think Zachary fired me. I don’t
know what’s going on.”

Some maniac in the kitchen was
pounding the pick-up bell.

“Sean . . .” She looked at him
with concern. “Are you getting sicker? Do you feel worse?”

“I don’t know.”

Somebody who sounded like Owen
Peabody called from the kitchen, “Hazel? Hazel?”

“You look really bad,” she said.
“You should go home.”

“I don’t want to. Why does
everyone keep telling me to go home? I want to see you.” Nothing had ever been more
necessary.

“Ha-zel!” yelled the Owen-maniac.

Sean reached for her hand.

That bell kept ringing.

That fucking bell.

She gestured at the dining room
with the hand he wanted. Needed.
“I don’t have time right now.”

Suddenly Sean felt crushed beneath
the weight of his humiliation. “I
always
have time for
you
.”