What followed was something right out of a Three Stooges video. Two people came rushing in, a man and a woman, babbling on about some kind of “real trouble” down at the hydro plant, and that sent the rest of the station into an uproar, people running about like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. It took a full five minutes for Bobby to calm them all down and find out exactly what the hell was going on, and it seemed like hours. It turned out that one of them was that psychiatrist, Dr. Amanda Seigel (and a pretty little thing she was too), but goddamn it if he didn’t wish she had just stayed in Boston where she belonged. There was trouble all right, at least according to them, and some idiot had gone rushing off into the storm to try and do something about it. That was foolish; there was nothing any of them could do until the roads were cleared, and that wouldn’t happen for a while. Andrew Richeleau, who plowed the roads (and owned the only landscaping business in town, to boot), well, he didn’t get up all that early. And besides, the snow was just going to keep on piling up. The radio said they were due to get close to a foot.

He sat them both down, gave them a cup of coffee (decaf, of course), and made them tell him exactly what was going on, slowly this time. And after they had finished, goddamn it if that guilt didn’t come rushing in like the tide. Maybe something was up after all, but it might just be too late to do a thing about it.

And the snow kept falling.

CHAPTER THIRTY

David sped along the narrow roadway towards Jackson, Flint’s words coming back to him: When that didn’t work, they went out and hired you as a backup plan. Maybe they even forged a few documents so that when things thawed out and the shit really hit the fan, it would look like you were the one responsible. How could he have been so stupid? Olmstead’s eagerness to hire him and get him up there, then that strange initial meeting with the FERC and Hydro’s willingness to let him do his thing, with little or no direction—he would have denied it in the end but who would have believed him? Desperate times require desperate measures, as they say.

The snow had thickened while he was inside, falling steadily now in an almost solid sheet. The speedometer read seventy-two; it was as fast as the little car would go over the hills, and it seemed faster than was humanly possible in these conditions. There was a good two inches in most places where the wind hadn’t swept it away, and no sign of a plow truck yet.