Ogden Salsbury was in the corner booth at the north end of the cafe. He was drinking a second cup of coffee and watching the other customers.
At 1:50 in the afternoon, most of the lunch-hour rush had passed. Ultman’s was nearly deserted. In a booth near the door, an elderly couple was reading the weekly newspaper, eating roast beef and French fries, and quietly arguing politics. The chief of police, Bob Thorp, was on a stool at the counter, finishing his lunch and joking with the gray-haired waitress named Bess. At the far end of the room, Jenny Edison was in the other corner booth with a good-looking man in his late thirties; Salsbury didn’t know him but assumed he worked at the mill or in the logging camp.
Of the five other customers, Jenny was of the greatest interest to Salsbury. A few hours ago, when he talked to Dr. Troutman, he learned that neither Jenny nor her father had complained of the night chills. The fact that a number of children had also escaped them did not disturb him. The effect of the subliminals was, in part, directly proportionate to the subject’s language skills and reading ability; and he had expected that some children would be unaffected. But Sam and Jenny were adults, and they should not have gone untouched.
Possibly they hadn’t consumed any of the drug. If that was true, then they hadn’t drunk any water from the town system, hadn’t used it to make ice cubes, and hadn’t cooked with it. That was marginally possible, he supposed. Marginally. However, the drug had also been introduced into fourteen products at a food wholesaler’s warehouse in Bangor before those products were shipped to Black River, and it was difficult for him to believe that they could have been so fortunate as to have avoided, by chance, every contaminated substance.
There was a second possibility. It was conceivable, although highly improbable, that the Edisons had taken the drug but hadn’t come into contact with any of the sophisticated subliminal programming that had been designed with such care for the Black River experiment and that had inundated the town through half a dozen forms of print and electronic media for a period of seven days.
Salsbury was nearly certain that neither of these explanations was correct, and that the truth was both complex and technical. Even the most beneficial drugs did not have a benign effect on everyone; any drug could be counted upon to sicken or kill at least a tiny percentage of those people to whom it was administered. Moreover, for virtually every drug, there were some people, another extremely small group, who were either minimally affected or utterly untouched by it, owing to differences in metabolisms, variances in body chemistries, and unknown factors. More likely than not, Jenny and Sam Edison had taken the subliminal primer in water or food but hadn’t been altered by it-either not at all or not as they should have been-and subsequently were unimpressed by the subliminals because they hadn’t been made ready for them.
Eventually he would have to give the two of them a series of examinations and tests at a fully equipped medical clinic, with the hope that he could find what it was that made them impervious to the drug. But that could wait. During the next three weeks he would be quietly recording and studying the effects that the drug and subliminals produced in the other people of Black River.
Although Salsbury was more interested in Jenny than in any of the other customers, most of the time his attention was focused on the younger of Ultman’s two waitresses. She was a lean, lithe brunette with dark eyes and a honey complexion. Perhaps twenty-five years old. A captivating smile. A rich, throaty voice perfect for the bedroom. To Salsbury, her every movement was filled with sexual innuendo and an all but open invitation to violation.
More important, however, the waitress reminded him of Miriam, the wife he had divorced twenty-seven years ago. Like Miriam, she had small, high-set breasts and very beautiful, supple legs. Her throaty voice resembled Miriam’s. And she had Miriam’s walk: an unstudied grace in every step, an unconscious and sinuous rolling of the hips that took his breath away.