“We don’t need amateurs policing the neighborhood,” a woman yells at Steve Butler. “You’ll probably end up getting shot.”

“Most of us aren’t armed,” Steve said. “I have an open-carry permit and so does one other home owner here. Mostly what we’re armed with are our cell phones, to capture what happens.”

“We have professional police. We don’t need this,” the woman says.

“We don’t need our single moms murdered in the neighborhood either,” Steve Butler fires back. “You’ve got a teenage daughter, Belinda. Do you feel she’s safe here right now?”

Ponder is now saying that armed patrols are unnecessary; the situation is in hand. But scared people are scared people, and Iris thinks: What have you clowns got to be scared of? I know what fear is. You don’t even know the shape of it. You don’t know what it can take from you.

For a moment, in the hubbub, she thinks she feels the drift of snowflakes, windblown, against her face. The terror of her life being on the verge of ending. The way the fear tunneled into her bones, a living thing claiming her.

But it hadn’t. She’d beaten it.

The discussion has descended into chaos, Ponder and Mike both calling for order, Mike pleading with Steve Butler that no one else start patrolling and no one be armed so no one gets hurt. Butler shouts that they, as concerned neighbors, will still walk the streets and no one is going to stop them.

Iris just wants out. She wonders what Ponder and Ames will make of Carrie Butler’s statement.

People are starting to stand and leave because the meeting has fallen apart. Steve Butler’s face has turned purple with yelling, and she sees something twisted in his eyes. A man who does not deal well with frustration.

Iris’s gaze shifts down and to his left and she sees Carrie Butler looking at her, staring at her. She knows. She knows and she’s not saying. And then Carrie Butler smiles at her, a smile that is cruel and calculating and cold. For a moment there is a naked hatred in that smile, and Iris gasps.

You hated Danielle. Why would you buy a house a few doors down from her?

Steve Butler’s yelling at an objector in the crowd that they don’t understand there is no way the unofficial watch could be a danger, that they’re not going to be firing guns willy-nilly into the darkness. Do they think he’s a total idiot? He’s ex-army. He knows what he’s doing. The families of Winding Creek have to be protected at all costs.

Mike is at the microphone, trying to restore order.