For Bobby Babcock, the trouble really began with the storm, but it didn’t end there. As hard as it was to believe, the day only got worse.

He had been answering the phone all morning, calming down all the people without power, without water, as well as those people who were just lonely and wanted company. There were lots of those. It never occurred to them, he supposed, that he might be a tad bit busy, that he might not have the time to sit there and chat about the new disco in Edmundston, or Aunt Judith’s dentures, for Christ’s sake. Quite a few of them reported seeing strange things in their houses, flashing lights, dead relatives, the works. One had even suggested that they were under attack from a bunch of UFOs. If he had thought about it a little more, Bobby would have realized that even the crazy people seemed to be hallucinating a bit more than usual today. But he spent the time trying to calm them all down because he supposed that in some way it was his job to do so. Besides, he wanted to keep the job for a while longer, and people remembered things like this for years to come.

So while the storm caused Bobby some trouble, it kept his mind off those other funny phone calls he had been getting lately. The one from the doc, then yesterday one from some whacked-out psychiatrist from Boston who wanted to know if he had run into a patient of hers.

When she told him the guy could be a few rungs short of a ladder, he had felt a momentary unease, and had the chance to think that maybe he should ponder the possibilities a while longer, and then she was going on again about how worried she was and how she was going to fly on up there to look for him. He told her they hadn’t seen heads or tails of him around St. Boudin, and that was the truth, as far as he knew.

Now he supposed she was in town rooting around for clues like some second-rate Sherlock Holmes. It sure as hell wouldn’t make his life any easier. She’d probably get it in her fool head to go hiking out in the woods somewhere during the storm and get lost, and he would have another missing person on his hands. And the power was bound to go out soon, then probably the phones.

A great big mess, and he would have to clean it up.

But he refused to let that old guilt come slinking in again, no sirree. He’d licked that for good.

Until the door burst open at a little past ten that morning, that is.