She invited me to come to her house at eight. On the way, I had the radio tuned to a local phone-in show. “Who says we couldn’t be a target of terrorists?” asked the bombastic host. “Are we too insignificant up here? A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts of Americans? Then go to the heart of America. The big cities are the obvious targets. But why not Promise Falls? Why not—I don’t know—Lee, Massachusetts? Saratoga Springs? Middlebury, Vermont? Duluth? Make Americans feel unsafe wherever they happen to be. That’s what those Islamist fanatics are thinking, and you can be damn sure blowing up a drive-in theater is totally their kind of style. Let’s go to the phones. Go ahead, Dudley.” Dudley? “Yeah, I think we need to be looking very closely at our neighbors, because these people, what they do is, they hide amongst us.”
