signs of life to anyone driving through town would be the occasional light in the windows of a house. It made the sheriff’s life much easier, and the night shift for the deputies was generally slow and quiet, disrupted only by occasional acts of vandalism or a drunk driver every once in a while. Lebanon was a quiet town, and as the mayor, Robbie Kendall, was fond of saying whenever making a speech, “a fine place to raise a family.”
Unlike other small towns around the country, Lebanon wasn’t drying up and blowing away. Sure, every year after graduation, a high percentage of teenagers hit the road and never looked back—an interesting mix of the slackers and the top students. The top students went away for college, incurring years of debt in student loans, and the slackers headed for bigger cities—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Albany. Some of the college-bound kids came back after graduation if there was a job to bring them back—working in the Walgreen’s pharmacy or teaching, for example. But the slacker kids didn’t come back, and outside of their families, no one really cared. Those kids were lazy, a bad element, and the ones the adults in town automatically thought of whenever drug use came up in conversation. The sooner they left town, the better.
Yet enough of their classmates stayed around and went to work after getting their diplomas, settling into life in Lebanon as adults. They married and had enough kids to keep the population steady each year as another group of kids left. The town folk worked hard. They paid their bills, and rarely complained. If there wasn’t a decent job in town, there were the paper mills and meatpacking plants forty minutes north on the highway in Senandaga, the county seat. The only people who didn’t work were just lazy or drunks.
So far, the scourge of drugs plaguing other small towns had stayed away from Lebanon. Sure, some of the kids smoked pot or drank, but it wasn’t a big problem and for the most part, other than an occasional car wreck, they didn’t bother anyone. Lebanon High School provided a decent education, and had turned out some championship teams in football and girls’ basketball. Robbie Kendall was right. Lebanon was a good place to raise a family. The last murder had been seven years ago, and pretty much everyone agreed Wade DeBolt had had it coming. If he hadn’t been slapping his wife Norma around, she wouldn’t have needed to shoot him.
Still, even if folks in Lebanon didn’t need to lock their doors at night, they did anyway. Better safe than sorry, was the general thought, and above all else, Lebanon folks were practical. There was a great big crazy world out there, and who knows when someone from outside might blow into town and cause trouble?
There were nine churches in Lebanon, and they were all well attended every Sunday. The churches were the centers of social activity in town, with picnics and potlucks and dances for the teenagers. They were all Protestant—the few Catholics in town attended Mass up at St. Dominic’s in Senandaga. There wasn’t any friction between the different congregations, except at the Church League softball games in the summer, and that was just good fun. There were no minorities in Lebanon, other than the Asian family who owned the 7/11 and the video store. Some people considered the French Canadians a minority, but other than their weirdly accented English and statues of saints, most people never gave them a second thought. The majority of them worked at the factories in Senandaga, they didn’t cause any trouble, and they pretty much kept their religion to themselves.
Lebanon took pride in not only being a good place to raise a family, but in being a clean town. People kept up their yards and houses. The homes in Lebanon were like the people themselves: nothing ostentatious or overly ornate; solid and strong, built to weather the humid summers and the bitterly cold winters. Property values were low, as they were in most small towns, but the cost of living was also quite a bit lower than it was even up the highway in Senandaga—let alone Manhattan or Boston. It was a town where everyone knew everyone else, where neighbors talked over coffee in the mornings, where you took care of your neighbors when they were sick or laid up, and people just did for each other in general.
Sure, there was a neighborhood—as there is in every town—far away from the town square, where the houses needed painting and the yards were mostly dirt, where it wasn’t unusual to see a beat-up car up on blocks in the yard, but nobody ever had to drive through that part of town on their way to somewhere else. When they did, they just clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the lack of pride revealed by the run-down houses and dead yards and beat-up cars, but at the same time patting themselves on the back for not winding up in one of those houses. It was where the low-wage-earners lived, where every month was a struggle to pay the bills and buy food, where every ring of the telephone could be a bill collector calling with insults and threats. It was very easy to pretend that part of town didn’t exist, which is what most people in Lebanon did. This part of Lebanon was collectively known as “the Banks,” because it was the closest part of town to the shallow Frontenac River. It was generally presumed that any child from the Banks was destined for a bad end—drugs, alcohol, or an early shotgun marriage.
With the college that loomed just west of town over the rolling hills, the town maintained a friendly if distant relationship. The students were all well behaved for the most part (although there was some worry when the school started admitting male graduate students, but so far there’d been no trouble). Best thing about Wilbourne was that the people on campus spent money in town. They bought food at the A&P, got their cars worked on at Mike’s Firestone or Bud’s Shell, bought their makeup at the Rexall, ate at the local diners and restaurants, and opened accounts at the local banks. Many of them, true to the school’s religious traditions, went to the local churches, where they dutifully dropped their money into the collection plates. And there were jobs on the campus as well—groundskeepers and janitors and cooks and secretaries and research assistants—that went to Lebanon locals.
Yet while, as a rule, the members of the college faculty were liked by the members Lebanon natives, they never really quite fit into the fabric of the town. They tended to subscribe to The New York Times, watch movies with subtitles, and their living rooms were filled with books most of their neighbors had never heard of—by authors like Proust and Sartre and Faulkner, instead of Janet Evanovich and Nora Roberts and James Patterson. Dean Gregory himself was a deacon at the local Lutheran Church, and very dedicated to his position there. He was pretty well known and liked by the Lutherans, but outside of church matters, the other church members didn’t have a lot to talk to him about.
The town also took great pride in knowing that Wilbourne College was one of the best in the country—even though no local student had ever been admitted through its gates. The majority of local kids who went to college went to the junior college or the branch of the state university in Senandaga, and there was no disgrace in that—both were fine schools, and affordable.
No one resented the college on the outskirts of town, and it had been there so long it was just thought of as another part of the fabric of Lebanon, like the town square, the high school, or the library. But it was something apart. There was no question about that.
9
The Yellow Bird Café was always the last business around the town square to close, and the only one that stayed open late on Sunday evenings. The Yellow Bird closed every night at ten, even on Sunday. Wally Bingham, who’d bought the place in the 1970s when he came home from Vietnam, didn’t go to church and thought it might not be a bad idea to keep the café open late. Most people had huge meals after morning services, and sometimes wanted something different after evening services rather than the leftovers. So, on Sunday nights, Wally himself worked the grill. Marjorie Pequod, his night-shift waitress for nearly twenty years, stayed with him even on slow nights. She hadn’t set foot in a church since she was a teenager, and would rather work.
Deputy Sheriff Perry Holland was glad the Yellow Bird was open late. As he pulled into a vertical parking spot right in front of the café, he could see Marjorie reading a paperback novel at the counter and Wally washing dishes back in the kitchen. The place was deserted. Perry turned off the car and sat there for a moment. He’d gone off duty at seven after
