‘You wouldn’t believe there’s any kind of a crisis going on at all!’ He had switched on the TV and changed to the local public service channel, but so far there had been no updates on the drought, or the water supply, or the riots. All that was showing was Julia Child ‘in my own kitchen’, baking madeleines. ‘There’s no question at all that the powers that be are deliberately keeping us in the dark,’ said John Wilson, who lived on West Mirada Avenue, opposite the elementary school. ‘To my mind, that means only one thing – the situation is a heck of a lot worse than they’ve been telling us.’ ‘Well, I’ve tried calling City Hall more times than I can tell you,’ put in Dick Bortolotti, who lived five doors away on West 25th. ‘Either they simply don’t want to answer, or there’s nobody there, or the whole darned place has been burned to the ground.’ ‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ said Myron Platt, the association’s treasurer. ‘Did you see all that smoke, first thing this morning?
