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there along with Billy and Bonnie Kurtz and Ray Wetmore. I caught sight of half a dozen other neighbors in the glow of a lantern. Paula Renfew was there, so were David and Lisa Ebler and their boys. I passed by them and went over to Al and the cop. He was a big bull of a fellow with a bald head and a neck like a pine stump. He introduced himself as Sergeant Frankovich and began pelting me with questions.
    “So, you can’t say that she did go outside,” he said.
    “Well, she had to,” I told him, “since she’s not in the house. And the back door was open.”
    “Sure,” he said. He entered the pertinent stuff on an iPad and looked around in the darkness. “This is a mess. A real mess.”
    “How long do you think it’ll be until the power’s back on?” Bonnie Kurtz asked him.
    In the glow of Al’s lantern, he looked at me and I saw something in his eyes that seemed to say, never. He smiled at Bonnie and told her he did not know. She complained that she had a freezer full of meat and there was going to be hell to pay if it all went bad.
    “If it goes bad,” Billy said, “we’ll buy some more. Quit your yapping already. We got bigger fish to fry here.”
    She came over to me and clutched my arm. “I’m so sorry, Jon,” she said. “We’re all worried sick about Kathy. I know she’ll turn up. She has to.”
    The way she said it made me think she didn’t believe it would happen at all. The tone of her voice was reserved for funerals when you told the widow what a good man her husband was and how the world was a worse place for his absence. I didn’t blame Bonnie because I felt very much like a widower. I didn’t honestly think I was going to see Kathy again either and my greatest concern was not for what I had possibly lost but how I was going to tell Erin that her mother was gone. I would call Italy only when I was certain there was no hope.
    And then I thought: And who’s to say all this is localized? Maybe it’s national or even fucking global.
    But I wasn’t going there. Not just yet. I didn’t really know what was going on and I wasn’t about to charge into any of it with a defeatist attitude, despite the fact that my optimism was bottomed out and dragging its feet.
    Iris Phelan was there in her bathrobe demanding to know what was being done about it all and asking Frankovich if he would look for her missing cat.
    “Mitzy is always there when I open the door but she wasn’t there tonight,” Iris said. “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”
    Billy Kurtz told her not to worry. “Cats are smart, Mrs. Phelan. Don’t worry. Once the hubbub has died down, she’ll come back. Cats are like that.”
    “Sure,” Bonnie said.
    Ray Wetmore was blaming it all on the ineffectiveness of the town fathers. He told anyone that would listen—and nobody wanted to—that if he was on the board, an outage like this would have been taken care of “lickety-split.” “See,” he lectured, “the problem is accountability. Those bums on the council want to sit on their fat white behinds and rake in the cash from their rich benefactors. They don’t want change. They don’t want to take action. The idea of stirring the waters of the status quo gives them the cold sweats. That’s why they don’t want me involved in the process and have fought tooth-and-nail to keep me out. I’m progressive. I embrace change. I thumb my nose at the rich and their underhanded scheming. I’m for the people. I’m for the majority. I’m a man of action that demands accountability!”
    “Here, here,” Billy Kurtz, who was half in the bag, said. Ray was the only one that didn’t catch the sarcasm beneath his words that was so thick you could have sliced it like cheese.
    Ray was getting worked up. “The power should be on by now! If I was on the council—and you can bet your sweet fucking bippy that I’m going to be, hell yes—I would demand to know what’s going on! I would demand to know why action hasn’t been