Free Spencerville by Nelson DeMille Page B

you're ready."
    Keith smiled at the small-town, low-key approach to sales. In Washington, any car salesman could be an arms negotiator or Capitol Hill lobbyist. Here, nobody pushed. Keith said, "Thanks, Phil." He turned to leave, then the imp of the perverse turned him around and he said, "I remember a guy named Cliff Baxter."
    "Yeah, my brother. He's police chief now."
    "You don't say? He did okay for himself."
    "Sure did. Fine wife, two great kids, one in college, one about to go."
    "God bless him."
    "Amen."
    "See you later, Phil."
    Keith pulled onto Main Street and stopped at a traffic light. "That was a stupid move, Landry."
    He certainly didn't need to go to Baxter Motors; he knew they wouldn't want the Saab, he didn't even know if he wanted a Ford, and surely he didn't have to mention Cliff Baxter's name. For an ex-intelligence officer, he was acting pretty stupid — driving past her house, going to her father-in-law's place of business. What next? Pulling her pigtails? "Grow up, Landry."
    The light changed and he drove west, up Main Street. The downtown area consisted of rows of dark brick buildings, three and four stories high, with retail space at ground level and mostly empty apartments above. Almost everything had been built between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression. The old brickwork and wooden ornamentation were interesting, but most of the ground-floor storefronts had been modernized in the 1950s and '60s and looked tacky.
    Street and sidewalk traffic was light, he noticed, and half the stores were vacant. The ones that remained open were discount clothing places, church thrift shops, video arcades, and other low-end enterprises. He recalled that Annie, in a few of her letters, mentioned that she managed the County Hospital Thrift Store located downtown, but he didn't see the shop.
    The three big buildings in town were also closed — the movie house, the old hotel, and Carter's, the local department store. Missing, also, were the two hardware stores, the half dozen or so grocery stores, the three sweetshops with soda fountains, and Bob's Sporting Goods, where Keith had spent half his time and most of his money.
    A few of the old places remained — Grove's Pharmacy, Miller's Restaurant, and two taverns called John's Place and the historic Posthouse. The courthouse crowd no doubt kept these places afloat.
    Downtown Spencerville was surely not as Keith remembered it as a boy. It had been the center of his world, and without romanticizing it, it seemed to him that it had been the center of life and commerce in Spencer County, bursting with 1950s prosperity and baby-boomer families. Certainly, the movie theater, the sweetshops, and the sports store made it a good place for kids to hang out.
    Even then, however, the social and economic conditions that were to change Main Street, USA, were at work. But he didn't know that then, and, to him, downtown Spencerville was the best and greatest place in the world, teeming with friends and things to do. He thought to himself, "The America that sent us to war no longer exists to welcome us home."
    You didn't have to be born in a small town, Keith thought, to have a soft spot in your heart for America's small towns. It was, and to some extent it remained, the ideal, if only in an abstract and sentimental way. But beyond nostalgia, the small town dominated much of the history of the American experience; in thousands of Spencervilles across the nation, surrounded by endless farms, American ideas and culture formed, took hold, flourished, and nourished a nation. But now, he thought, the roots were dying, and no one noticed because the tree still looked so stately.
    He approached the center of town and saw one building that had not changed: Across from Courthouse Square stood the impressive police headquarters, and, outside, among the parked police cars, a group of police officers stood, talking to a man who Keith instinctively knew was Police Chief