“Oh my God,” said Josie.
Nora imagined Adam burning, his arms pinwheeling in flame, and her stomach slipped sideways. She made herself think instead of the last time she’d seen him: in the staff room yesterday morning, putting three creamers and four sugars into his coffee. Kevin Keegan, the language arts teacher, told him he was killing himself with condiments, and Adam had laughed in his uncertain way, not knowing if he was being insulted or teased. He’d had only a few hours left to live, but he’d shuffled out of the staff room with his coffee in one hand and his briefcase in the other as if it were any other day.
Your new math teacher, Bill had called him. He hadn’t even said Adam’s name. But why would he? To the sheriff and his fat, inadequate shoulders, that’s all Adam Merkel was. Seven months hadn’t been enough for him to become anything else. Even seven years might not have been. Back in Reno, Nora was sure, Adam Merkel wouldn’t have been just a dead math teacher. He would have been a dead friend. He might have been a dead brother, or a dead son.
Shit. Her body jerked backward. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. March 14 wasn’t just Pi Day. It was also the day, twenty years ago, when Lovelock’s high school basketball team played in the state championship for the first and only time, and Nora’s brother, Jeremy, senior point guard and team captain, scored 43 points in a win that was still the biggest thing to happen in this town since the last covered wagon pulled out of the Big Meadow. Nora’s father was never more proud of anything than he was of his son that night. He sealed Jeremy’s jersey in Lucite and hung it in the living room. He hung a brass plaque beside it with the date, the score, and the words: 43 points. For the next seven years he bragged about that game to anyone who would listen, and many who would not, right up until the night he drove his truck into the guardrail on the Highway 95 bridge and killed his son instantly.
Fucking March 14. Her father was alone right now, in the camper. He was probably already drunk.
Jake
To get to Marzen from Lovelock, you took Interstate 80 thirteen miles east to the Lovelock-Unionville Road. Then you drove south through three miles of sage and sand, climbed into the foothills of the Humboldt Range, and took a nameless dirt road that forked to the right halfway up Limerick Canyon. This road rose through more hills furred with sagebrush until it ended in a small, square valley where a few dozen buildings huddled together. Only when you were upon them would you see that they sketched a town: a smattering of houses and trailers, a general store and a bar, a small school, a fire station, and a church the size and shape of three shipping containers welded together with marzen baptist painted in red letters on one side.
Two hundred and seven people lived there. Eighty-four men, seventy-six women, and forty-seven children. Most of the men, and some of the women, worked at the open pit silver mine farther up in the hills. Their fathers had been miners, too, and their grandfathers, but they knew the ore would be gone before their children could punch the clock. They didn’t talk about this, though. In Marzen, you took your problems one day at a time.
The town had no police force—its citizens managed the occasional drunken fight just fine on their own—so the fire station was where you had to go if you wanted to report a dead body. Jake Sanchez was the volunteer on duty the morning of March 14, which for him meant watching The Price Is Right on the black-and-white television with his feet on the desk. He didn’t notice the boy in the doorway until the boy said, “Jake?”
Jake put his booted feet on the floor and turned the swivel chair to face him. He knew him, of course. His name was Absalom, though no one called him that, not even his mother. One night, after last call at the bar she ran, she’d told Jake she picked it because she sang in the Baptist church’s small choir and loved the anthem “When David Heard.” O Absalom, my son, my son, it went. Would God I had died for thee! Her own son had no father to weep for him, so she’d decided to name him after King David’s favorite son, whose father beat his breast upon the walls of Jerusalem when he heard Absalom had fallen in battle. Of course she’d known her boy couldn’t really be Absalom, not in a town like Marzen, so she called him Sal. She’d died nine months ago, and sometimes Jake wondered if he was the only one left, other than Sal and the uncles he’d been sent to live with, who knew her son’s secret, unspoken name.
“What are you doing here, Sal? Did you miss the bus?” When Marzen kids finished fifth grade the Pershing County school district sent a bus to take them to Lovelock for middle and high school. Sal had started sixth grade in the fall. Jake looked at his watch. It was just after seven thirty; the bus had left fifteen minutes ago.
Sal didn’t answer right away, and Jake peered at him more closely. He hadn’t liked it when Sal was sent to live with his uncles. Gideon and Ezra Prentiss lived three miles outside town on land that had belonged to their family since the Gold Rush. They were pariahs of long standing, thanks to family history, a reputation for violence, and rumored criminal enterprises that, depending on who was talking and how imaginative they were, included cattle theft, meth cooking, drug running, and money laundering for the Russian mafia. Since Sal had moved up there he’d grown thinner and he always looked tired, but this morning he looked even worse than usual. He was pale beneath the tawny skin that was the only clue to his father’s identity and his shaggy dark bangs flopped into eyes that were sunken with exhaustion.
“I found a dead person,” he said.
Jake rocked forward. “What?”
Sal’s shoulders twitched, as though he thought Jake was going to grab him. “I found a dead body. Up the hill a ways.”
“Holy shit.” Jake stopped and got himself in hand. He was wearing the uniform of the Marzen Volunteer Fire Department, and despite the game shows he took that responsibility seriously. He turned off the television. “Is it a skeleton?” No one in Marzen was missing that he knew of, and every once in a while somebody turned up the bones of a miner or a settler who’d taken a wrong turn on the way to California.
Sal hesitated. “No.”
“Do you know who it is?”
The boy’s dark eyes slid sideways, to the station’s narrow refrigerator. There was a sign taped to the door that warned of terrible consequences if food was left in there too long, or if anybody took food that wasn’t theirs. “I think it might be my math teacher.”
“Your math teacher?”
“There’s a car. I think it’s his.”
Jake didn’t know what to do. He looked around the small station for help, but of course there was none. Leon Petrelli wouldn’t relieve him until two. Maybe he should treat this as a medical call, he thought. Marzen was small enough that its fire department volunteers doubled as paramedics, and Jake was even more proud of his EMT license than he was of his fire department uniform. He could take the ambulance up there, see what Sal had found. He wiped his palms on his pants. “Okay, why don’t you show me.”
They drove up the dirt fire road that led from the town to the Prentiss place. Jake figured Sal had found the body on his way to the school bus, and sure enough, about a mile along they came upon an old brown Corolla parked just off the road, and Sal told him to stop. Jake walked over to the car. He knew better than to touch it, but he looked inside. It was empty.