The truth was that the air of menace he felt here on Main had spread outward to the entire town. Montgomery was no longer the safe happy community in which he’d grown up, the one where he’d married his high school sweetheart and raised his son. There was about it now an anxious uneasy vibe, a feeling that things were going wrong. Some of it, to be fair, might be unconnected to the bank. But it all coincided with the bank’s appearance, so the timing linked everything together.

The lights in the store came on. He heard the beep beep beep of the alarm and hurried over to disarm it before it went off. Whatever the problem was, it had been fixed and—

The lights went off again.

Instead of calling Trixie to find out if she was having problems too, he called the electric company directly and was told that the entire downtown had suffered an overnight blackout because of an unexpected and unexplained power drain.

The bank.

He knew it was true even before any facts could be confirmed. He had no idea why the bank had used so much power, but there was not a doubt in his mind that it had done so.

“We haven’t located the source yet, but we’re working on it,” the woman on the other end of the line told him. “Everything should be up and running within the next twenty minutes.”

Immediately after he got off the phone, the lights came on again and the alarm started beeping. He hurried over to the keypad to punch in the code. The power went off again, but moments later the electricity came on and this time it stayed on.

He called 911 to report a break-in, and an hour later, after he’d opened, a sheriff’s deputy came by and took a report. The deputy didn’t bother to dust for fingerprints, and when Kyle suggested he do so, he said that they were responding to a lot of calls this morning and that someone would be by later to follow up.

Kyle was still waiting for that to happen when his first customer of the day came in shortly before eleven. It was Durl Meadows. Kyle had blocked off the last aisle to preserve whatever evidence might be found there, but access to those books made no difference to Durl. He wasn’t shopping but was continuing his efforts to raise money to stave off foreclosure. While clearing out his closets, he had found more books to sell back, and he lifted a box onto the counter. “What can I get for these?” he asked. “I need every cent I can find.”