Free Lord of Lightning by Suzanne Forster

lights out at the quarry?”
    “Yeah!” several of them cried at once. “What about the lights?”
    It was getting out of hand, Lise realized. She sensed a building panic among the crowd that had to be defused before it turned into mass hysteria. She glanced at Stephen and saw his head lifted in frozen agony, his eyes strange and unfocused. Fear flashed through her. Something was wrong with him, terribly wrong. He looked caught in a nightmare, like that night in the cabin when she’d awakened to find him standing over her.
    She turned back to the crowd, determined to distract their attention from Stephen and keep it focused on her. “Listen to me now,” she said, crying out over the excited babble. “Listen to me, dammit !”
    They quickly grew quiet. No one in Shady Tree had ever heard Miss Anderson swear before. Or yell for that matter.
    “There are no UFO’s out at the quarry, do you hear me? Someone made that up, and I’ll admit it’s a rousing good story, but it’s not true. There are no UFO’s at the quarry—and there are no lights either.”
    A mumbling of protest went up, but Lise persisted. She disliked having to lie about the lights, but she also knew her reputation for honesty might be the only thing that would silence the crowd and put a quick end to the craziness.
    “I’ll tell you what you’ll find out at that quarry,” she said. “ Rocks , folks. There’s nothing there but rocks. Harry Barnes”—she turned to one of Frank’s gas jockeys—“did you see anything strange at the Cooper cabin when you were out there this morning?”
    “Just you, Miss Anderson.”
    “Don’t be smart, Harry.”
    He shrugged. “I guess not then. Nothing strange.”
    Somewhere inside of Lise there was a profound sigh of relief waiting to be released. She glanced over at Stephen and saw that he’d raised a hand to his head, as though he were coming out of it, reorienting. Thank Heaven , she thought.
    “All right then,” she said, addressing the crowd, her voice rising with conviction. She was doing the right thing. “You heard Harry. And any one of the other boys here will tell you the same thing. There’s nothing strange going on out there.”
    The “boys” didn’t look terribly happy about having been recruited in the service of Stephen’s defense. But Lise didn’t give them a chance to protest. She worked her way through the pack of men to where Stephen stood and hurriedly hooked her arm through his. “Come on,” she said. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
    “I’m all right,” he said under his breath. “Introduce me to your friends.”
    Lise glanced up at him in surprise and saw that his blue eyes were blazing with life again. They told her to do what he’d asked. No, they commanded her.
    “Uh ... Mr. Gage is a geologist,” she said, turning to the crowd, “and I’d like you all to meet him. He’s on vacation here in Shady Tree, collecting rocks. And now that you’ve been introduced, I know you’ll treat him with the same courtesy that we extend to all our visitors. Why, this town is known for its winter plum pie and its southwestern hospitality.”
    The winter plum pie part was true, anyway.
    The crowd eyed both Lise and Stephen warily. Lise could hear the stir that went through their ranks, the low buzz of conversation. Their reaction now would either make or break everything she’d done.
    The silence extended until a child tugged her mother’s skirt and whispered, “Where’s his green antenna, Mom? You know, like the postman said.”
    The crowd began to titter and laugh.
    Bernice Davenport, a plump, hennaed matron and the town’s librarian, came up first. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gage,” she said shaking his hand. “Oh!” she squeaked, “I just got a little shock.”
    “The dry weather,” Stephen suggested, irony in his tone.
    Bernice’s twin sister, Eunice, followed almost immediately. Both women fluffed their salmon-pink hair and batted their eyes at Stephen