Lebanon took pride in not only being a good place to raise a family, but in being a clean town. People kept up their yards and houses. The homes in Lebanon were like the people themselves: nothing ostentatious or overly ornate; solid and strong, built to weather the humid summers and the bitterly cold winters. Property values were low, as they were in most small towns, but the cost of living was also quite a bit lower than it was even up the highway in Senandaga—let alone Manhattan or Boston. It was a town where everyone knew everyone else, where neighbors talked over coffee in the mornings, where you took care of your neighbors when they were sick or laid up, and people just did for each other in general.
Sure, there was a neighborhood—as there is in every town—far away from the town square, where the houses needed painting and the yards were mostly dirt, where it wasn’t unusual to see a beat-up car up on blocks in the yard, but nobody ever had to drive through that part of town on their way to somewhere else. When they did, they just clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the lack of pride revealed by the run-down houses and dead yards and beat-up cars, but at the same time patting themselves on the back for not winding up in one of those houses. It was where the low-wage-earners lived, where every month was a struggle to pay the bills and buy food, where every ring of the telephone could be a bill collector calling with insults and threats. It was very easy to pretend that part of town didn’t exist, which is what most people in Lebanon did. This part of Lebanon was collectively known as “the Banks,” because it was the closest part of town to the shallow Frontenac River. It was generally presumed that any child from the Banks was destined for a bad end—drugs, alcohol, or an early shotgun marriage.
With the college that loomed just west of town over the rolling hills, the town maintained a friendly if distant relationship. The students were all well behaved for the most part (although there was some worry when the school started admitting male graduate students, but so far there’d been no trouble). Best thing about Wilbourne was that the people on campus spent money in town. They bought food at the A&P, got their cars worked on at Mike’s Firestone or Bud’s Shell, bought their makeup at the Rexall, ate at the local diners and restaurants, and opened accounts at the local banks. Many of them, true to the school’s religious traditions, went to the local churches, where they dutifully dropped their money into the collection plates. And there were jobs on the campus as well—groundskeepers and janitors and cooks and secretaries and research assistants—that went to Lebanon locals.
Yet while, as a rule, the members of the college faculty were liked by the members Lebanon natives, they never really quite fit into the fabric of the town. They tended to subscribe to The New York Times, watch movies with subtitles, and their living rooms were filled with books most of their neighbors had never heard of—by authors like Proust and Sartre and Faulkner, instead of Janet Evanovich and Nora Roberts and James Patterson. Dean Gregory himself was a deacon at the local Lutheran Church, and very dedicated to his position there. He was pretty well known and liked by the Lutherans, but outside of church matters, the other church members didn’t have a lot to talk to him about.
The town also took great pride in knowing that Wilbourne College was one of the best in the country—even though no local student had ever been admitted through its gates. The majority of local kids who went to college went to the junior college or the branch of the state university in Senandaga, and there was no disgrace in that—both were fine schools, and affordable.
No one resented the college on the outskirts of town, and it had been there so long it was just thought of as another part of the fabric of Lebanon, like the town square, the high school, or the library. But it was something apart. There was no question about that.
9
The Yellow Bird Café was always the last business around the town square to close, and the only one that stayed open late on Sunday evenings. The Yellow Bird closed every night at ten, even on Sunday. Wally Bingham, who’d bought the place in the 1970s when he came home from Vietnam, didn’t go to church and thought it might not be a bad idea to keep the café open late. Most people had huge meals after morning services, and sometimes wanted something different after evening services rather than the leftovers. So, on Sunday nights, Wally himself worked the grill. Marjorie Pequod, his night-shift waitress for nearly twenty years, stayed with him even on slow nights. She hadn’t set foot in a church since she was a teenager, and would rather work.
Deputy Sheriff Perry Holland was glad the Yellow Bird was open late. As he pulled into a vertical parking spot right in front of the café, he could see Marjorie reading a paperback novel at the counter and Wally washing dishes back in the kitchen. The place was deserted. Perry turned off the car and sat there for a moment. He’d gone off duty at seven after a quiet day. He’d popped home to his small apartment for a quick shower but, hungry as a horse, he’d known he’d be heading out again. His kitchen cabinets were bare of food as usual. Once again, he’d put off going to the A&P until there was nothing in the house to eat. He glanced at his watch, and sighed. The A&P was already closed, so it was either the Yellow Bird or one of the fast-food joints out at the highway junction. The Yellow Bird, Perry decided.
The town was quiet as he headed over to the café—which he pretty much expected. Lebanon was a quiet town, not much excitement. Lights were on in the houses he drove past; sometimes all he saw was the blue glow of a television set. The worst Perry ever had to deal with since joining the force nine years earlier was the occasional drunk driver, or a bunch of teenagers who thought it would be funny to knock down mailboxes with a baseball bat on Saturday nights. Violent crime was pretty much nonexistent in Lebanon, other than an occasional fistfight over at Earl’s Tavern, which was usually over before he pulled into their parking lot. No, if Perry wanted something to break the routine of his life, he had to head up the highway to Senandaga—or the hundred miles or so to Albany.
A bell rang when he pushed through the door. Marjorie wasn’t sitting at the counter anymore, and Perry sat down on one of the round seats, placing his elbows on the counter. The swinging doors from the kitchen bounced open and Marjorie Pequod came out, a Parliament dangling from her lips. She looked tired and grumpy. Her lipstick was an orange smear, and her face was heavily powdered and rouged like always. She wore her graying dark hair pulled back into a bun, and bobby pins glinted in the overhead lights. She was thick in the waist, and varicose veins showed through her stockings. She was wearing a pair of white leather flat shoes that were splattered with ketchup. Her yellow uniform was spotted with grease and God knows what else. Shuffling over to where Perry was seated, she whipped out her order pad and pencil from a pocket in her graying white apron.
“The usual?” she mumbled around the cigarette, not even dropping an ash.
Marjorie had worked at the Yellow Bird ever since the day her husband had run out on her, leaving her to raise their three kids on her own. She knew what everyone ordered. Perry wondered why she even kept that order pad.
For Perry, “the usual” was a well-done cheeseburger and fries swimming in chili with a Coke. He nodded. Marjorie scribbled it down, then tore the page off the pad and shoved it through the small order window, hitting the little bell sitting there.
Perry had been eating at the Yellow Bird since he was a child and his father brought him in for the first time. How he’d looked up to his dad, sitting there so strong and noble in his sheriff’s uniform. Perry had wanted to be just like his father—and he was, going to the police academy and then joining him on the force. Now he was deputy to his father’s sheriff—though he couldn’t help but cringe a little when people would say, “Here comes Andy and Opie.”
Ever since those days when he’d come in with his father, Perry had always ordered the same thing. With dutiful regularity, Marjorie poured his Coke from the fountain and set the red plastic cup in front of him. Stubbing out the cigarette in a dirty ashtray—Perry wasn’t about to get her for smoking in