Chapter One
The trouble with life is it can kill you. Just ask anyone in Sitwell, they’ll tell you. All
you need to do is give it half a chance...turn your back, let your guard down. Hell, they could
even prove it if they had to. Anyone on the long list of dead fools could help make the point. Few
people needed more convincing than that.
Maybe that was why the bell in the church tower rang every half-hour. Maybe it reassured them,
reminded the people of this small New England town that they weren’t dead yet. Forty-eight times
each day they were reminded, taking what comfort they could from the warbling peal that echoed
across the valley and broke against the hard granite walls of the mountains. The huge clock set
the rhythm of their lives, and like condemned men watching the executioner’s clock, they clung to
its mechanical beat as if it were the beat of life itself.
Across the street at the general store, Mrs. Dumont had run into Mrs. Malloy, or Mrs. Becker was
talking to Mrs. Sykes, and somewhere amidst the chatter and painted smiles jabbed the sound of Mr.
Friehoff and his staff of one punching the keys of the brass register, mindlessly, with a nerve-rattling
regularity. The other customers nodded politely to each other, taking care to observe proper social
distances as they moved through the convoluted aisles reaching for boxes of Cheerios and jars of
Hellmann’s. Outside, an occasional car passed through town, and the hound at the Texaco station would
challenge the driver not to run him over as he raced him out of his territory...unless it was hot, in
which case these games were suspended, usually by mutual agreement, just more trouble than it was
worth. Down the street in front of his hardware store, old Mr. Taylor rocked in his chair, like a
pendulum, and the floorboards under him creaked and moaned, ticking away the seconds...movements that
were too fine for the enormous hands of the great clock to negotiate. It was a slow life these people
led, a controlled life, lived that way intentionally so it could all last longer, as if by stretching out
the minutes and the hours and the days they could perhaps come out ahead in the end.
But then, despite their best efforts, there were always the things that didn’t fit in with the daily rhythms
of life, the things that got away from them, the ones that couldn’t be reined in, and for a few days after
you’d hear a lot of "Well, these things happen" and "It’s not for us to understand." Like the night in 1938
when Nat Cooke went mad, rode through town on his prize sow Sally waving his rifle and three-cornered hat
and shouting that the British were coming. The fool shot out every window on Main Street and killed Mrs.
Parson’s cat before finally falling into the river and drowning, sow and all. Or like 1945, when Marla Cranshaw’s
apple orchard yielded half a treeful of blue apples. There was an awful lot of head scratching down at the cider
mill after that. And then there was the 1948 clapper caper, in which a disaffected newcomer had it with what he
called the bells from hell, and for three anxiety-filled days those bells didn’t ring, not until the clapper was
replaced. These episodes aside, there was the indisputable fact that people disappeared a lot. Just sort of
dropped out of sight. Permanently.
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