Free Relief Map by Rosalie Knecht

ordinarily do inside the store.
    Noreen shook her head. “Just keep an eye on your friends. You are the company you keep.”
    Livy smiled politely. The bells rattled on the door, and Angela Insky came in. She was wearing a man’s work shirt and boots, and her gray hair was falling out of a topknot. “There are a couple of plainclothes cops watching the highway right behind my house,” she announced. “I’ve been watching out my window all morning.”
    â€œWhat kind of cops?” Noreen said, putting her hand to her ear.
    â€œPLAINCLOTHES COPS!” Angela thundered helpfully, pivoting toward her. Livy snorted into her hand, and then pretended to be comparing the nutrition labels on two loaves of bread.
    â€œHow do you know they’re cops, then?” Jocelyn said.
    â€œYou think civilians are surveilling my house?” Angela said.
    Livy edged around Angela with a loaf of bread and a newspaper from the rack. Jocelyn glanced over her items. “Paper’s free. It’s two days old.”
    Livy paid for the bread and went out on the steps to read the comics. She didn’t want to go home yet. Lena and Paula arrived, and Livy half listened to their conversation through the propped door.
    â€œLet’s think about this logically,” Lena said. “Who would hide somebody from the police? There are some people who would and some people who wouldn’t.”
    â€œYou don’t know anybody’shiding him at all,” Paula said. “Even if he is here, which I have my doubts about, and Tobias has his doubts about.” Tobias was her live-in boyfriend of many years, a cop, who had been on an overnight shift when the roads were blocked off and had not been able to come home. There were a few other halves of couples stuck outside Lomath now—stranded night-shift workers, now sleeping on the couches of relatives nearby—but Paula’s case warranted special attention, since her boyfriend had been coming up to the barricades now and then to give her bits of information.
    â€œYou talked to him?” Noreen said.
    â€œA little bit. He says it’s a mess.”
    â€œIs that all?”
    â€œHe said there’s a bunch of FBI guys taking over the station house. They took his fax machine. And now they’re trying to send him up to Springton Manor to sit in a speed trap all day because they don’t like him coming by to talk to me. He said they’re trying to keep their plans a secret but he thinks there isn’t any plan.”
    â€œWas it them that shut off the power?” Lena said.
    â€œLooks like it was. And the phones.”
    Jocelyn sighed. “Who do you think would do it, though?” she said. “Hide somebody?”
    â€œI’ll tell you who wouldn’t,” Lena said. “Clarence and Aurelia. Noreen. Paula.” She nodded toward her friend.
    â€œWhat makes you so sure?” Paula said.
    â€œOh, don’t make jokes,” Lena said. “It could be one of those war criminals from Sarajevo, those snipers who were shooting little children. You remember that? Schoolkids running across a bridge.”
    â€œThat’s not the Balkans. That’s Bosnia,” Paula said.
    â€œBosnia is in the Balkans.”
    Paula frowned. “It is? Well, I guess I don’t remember. That was forever ago.”
    â€œI don’t think we need to speculate,” Noreen said. She had a slightly mournful tone that Livy thought she’d heard before, in her own grandparents’ voices, when an old fight was getting started again at the dinner table. It must be so tiring to be old enough to know better than everybody. Livy gave up trying to read the paper and leaned in the doorway to listen.
    â€œI wouldn’t hide anybody the police were looking for,” Lena said. “My son, maybe .”
    â€œI don’t think anybody’s here at all,” said Shelly Cash suddenly. She had long,