Now Sean wore his father's badge: number one. In his holster, when he remembered to wear it, swung Marty's battered revolver, drawn only once in his father's career, at a fellow policeman shooting seals. Sean sat daily in his father's squealing swivel chair and wrote parking tickets in the same scuffed citation book.

A dead-end job, his brother Michael said. But somebody had to do it. There were worse role models than his dad, and God knew what would become of her if he ever decided to leave.

She passed Nate Starbuck's Pharmacy, where the second of the Troubles had begun. The freshly developed photo of the great white lying on the counter, of the idiotic scuba diver leering at the camera while the monster ran him down, had started it all and lost her the only man she had ever truly loved.

It was Amity's second shark—which had died in a searing flash of voltage on the Cape North Light power line—rather than the first, which had ruined Martin's heart. Dr. MacIntosh had said, "That thing killed him, Ellen, just as if he'd torn him limb from limb."

Marty had fought the beast for the town, which didn't give a damn once the evil thing was dead. Sean's job was a sop, an insult. No one wanted it, anyway, except Sean, who would be wearing red suspenders if he thought his father had.

And they hadn't even made Sean chief.

The dread she had known all day was overpowering. Quickly she crossed the square, entered the town hall, and stepped into the police station.

Sean looked up from his desk. He had sent Polly, the clerk and dispatcher, home and was there alone. "Hi, sweetheart! What brings you here on this cold and dreary night?"

She shrugged. "I was passing." She moved closer to the radiator, swinging her hands. "The town is absolutely, positively dead. Fieldstone's is a morgue."

"Um..." He was eyeing the bag. They were having his fiancée, Tiffany, to dinner that night, and to decorate their tree. "What you got?"

"I'll never tell. Look, we're about to have a fallen angel in the square."

He shrugged. "I hope so. That damn thing's older than I am."

She stared at him, shocked. Didn't he care? She felt her eyes misting. Suddenly he was on his feet, folding her into his arms, rubbing the back of her neck.

"Mom, Mom, I'm sorry. I was thinking of something Tiffany said, and I forgot... That act he used to pull..."

She was being silly. "Sean, it's me, not you. I turn everything into a crying spell. I've got to get over it, that's all."

He stepped to his desk and drew a tissue from his drawer. "You're going to." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "I let Polly go home to wrap presents. Lenny won't be here until six. And I have to pick up Tiff. Seven, maybe?"