“Great,” he muttered. Eyes still closed, the shampoo beginning to drip onto his nose and cheeks, he drew aside the shower curtain and felt along the wall for the towel rack. His fingers closed around terry cloth. It felt like one of Tritia’s good towels, the ones that hung in the bathroom for decoration and were not to be used, but this was an emergency and he used it to wipe the shampoo off of his face and out of his eyes. The bathroom was dark. The power had not come back on since last night, and the only illumination came from the small window. He quickly toweled off his hair, then stepped out of the tub. He pulled on his underwear and pants and opened the door, walking out to the kitchen, still dripping. “What happened?”

Tritia was standing in the center of the kitchen, hair sticking out at odd sleep angles, staring at the half-filled coffeepot in the sink. She shook her head. “I was filling the pot and the water shut off.”

“Did you check under the sink?” He opened the bottom cupboard, but the garbage sack and the boxes of cleanser and detergent were all dry. None of the pipes was dripping.

“I’ll go outside,” he said, “see if I can find anything.”

He went out through the back door. The rocks and pine needles hurt his feet, but he walked across the dirt to the side of the house where the pipes connected with the meter. He looked at the numbers through the yellowed glass.

There was no water pressure at all.

He bent down and opened the runoff faucet but nothing came out.

“What the hell…?” He turned the handle at the junction of the water main and house pipes, but nothing registered on the meter.

“What is it?” Tritia asked as he came back in the house.

“Hell if I know. The water doesn’t seem to be turned on.” He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the stickiness of the shampoo against his fingers. “I’ll go find out about the water and electricity after breakfast.”

“And the phone,” Tritia reminded him.

He shook his head disgustedly as he walked back into the bathroom. “And the phone.”

The department of water and power was located in a small brown prefab building adjoining Town Hall. Doug drove slowly over the speed bump that separated the parking lot from the street, and pulled into a marked space next to one of the town’s three police cars. He got out of the Bronco without bothering to lock it and strode across the asphalt to the glass doors of the front entrance. The top of his head felt strange and he realized that he could still sense the subtle stiffness of dried shampoo in his hair.