Page 55 of Whistle

“If you say so.”

“We were able to measure a drop in demand, which saves the town money, but in the last few days we’ve seen an uptick. Something drawing more power. So the new bulbs may work for a while, then they start sucking up more juice... and your eyes are glazing over.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what you were sitting out here pondering. I’m guessing it’s more than what happened to Dylan’s friend’s dad.”

Harry took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I might be in over my head, Jan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This... what’s been happening. Something’s not right.”

“No kidding. Someone killed Angus Tanner. That other guy is still missing. I know that’s on your mind.”

Harry had not told her about what had been done to Tanner’s body. There were some things he kept under wraps. Not just from Rachel Bosma, but from everyone. Even those closest to him. Not to protect Janice—she was as tough as they came—but because he didn’t want there to be any chance of information getting out before it should.

But he did say this: “It’s uglier than people know.”

Janice let those words hang in the air a moment. “Okay.”

“I’ve never dealt with something like this.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

He smiled at her. “My biggest fan.”

“Just because it’s something you haven’t faced before doesn’t mean you can’t handle it.”

“Oh,” he said, suddenly remembering something. He dug down into his shirt pocket and brought out the single lens from a pair of sunglasses that he had found earlier in the day. “You can use this like an eyepatch until you find the ones you lost.”

“How thoughtful,” she said as he handed it to her. The lens was dusty, with small flecks of dirt stuck to it. Janice brushed much of it away with her thumb. “Where’d you find this?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She had a close look at it, held it up to the light. “Might actually be from the ones I can’t find. See here?”

She pointed to the upper left corner of the lens. Written on it was the word “Ray,” followed by a hyphen. “It’s supposed to say Ray-Ban, but the ‘Ban’ part got worn off. Mine were like that.”

Harry held out his hand, and Janice placed the lens on his palm.

“What? You’ve got a weird expression on your face.”

“Any idea where or when you lost them?”

“As best I can remember, it was when I went in to pay for gas. Filled up, went inside, probably took them off when I was doing the credit-card-and-keypad thing, got back in the car, drove off, realized I didn’t have them. I went back, but they weren’t there and the cashier said he hadn’t seen them.” Again, she asked, “What?”

“Nothing,” Harry said. “Nothing.”

Eighteen

Gavin heard a buzzing.

At first he thought he was having a dream about a bumblebee. No, not just one. Given how loud it was, it had to be a swarm of bumblebees. Hovering around his head. Wait, now some of them were crawling around in his hair. He wanted to swat them away, wave his arms around wildly to try to disperse them, but when he tried to do that, he found that his arms would not work, as if pinned to his side.

“Get off me! Get off me!”

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