Tom Martin always sat in the last row of seats, near the exit, at city council votes. He was rarely called upon to contribute a meaningful opinion, even though he was often the only one with his hand raised. When he missed a Tuesday night session regarding the installation of speed bumps—or so everyone present believed—and then a Thursday night follow-up, where tensions reached a peak over the proper shade of yellow for the proposed bumps, little was thought of his perceived absence.
“Canary’ll make the town look soft on speeders,” Harvey Dobson argued that Thursday. And everyone agreed Neon sent all the wrong signals. When the council turned to the townspeople for an opinion, nary a hand was seen. (Of course Tom was in the last row, as usual, ready with an opinion.) But it was decided: School Bus Yellow.
As rumors swirled about Tom’s sudden disappearance, an uneasy feeling settled over the small town of Under Ridge. Mayor Dinkins liked to say, at locally sponsored barbecues and at the stroke of midnight at New Year’s celebrations, that this was not a town where unusual things happen. In fact, that had been his most recent campaign slogan for reelection: “Dinkins: He makes the unusual unusual.”
So as this unusual feeling elbowed its way into the minds of the usually fair-minded and forgiving citizens of Under Ridge, Mayor Dinkins began to feel a political pinch. Sharon Mowatt, the op-ed columnist for the Under Ridge Reporter, posted a series of scathing blogs about the mayor on her personal website, Understanding Under Ridge, in a space that was normally reserved for interviews with the elementary school P.E. teacher about which local youngsters were showing athletic promise.
Not used to the harsh light of political scrutiny, Mayor Dinkins, after consultation with political and spiritual advisors, launched a full-scale search for the missing man—and, in a speech announcing the search, emphasized the importance of investigating all instances of unusualness, because “that’s what good mayors do.”
Search committees were formed and deployed, hounds were released, and Tom’s own mother was flown in from out of state. She stood in the town square, demanding that Tom come out this instant, young man.
City councilwoman Babette Marcus was an opportunist, as all politicians are. And as more and more of the town’s resources were funneled into the ongoing—and as Ms. Marcus liked to say, pointless—search for Tom Martin, she attracted a modest following, a core of young and Catholic voters. They were adamantly pro-life, though Ms. Marcus believed such decisions should be made at the state level. With just over a year until the next mayoral vote, it was not inconceivable that this upstart crusader would throw her name into the ring.
The councilwoman, a stout softball of a woman, headed a movement to end the search for Tom Martin post haste. “Valuable town funds are being flushed by a reactionary mayor,” she, with her signature underbite, told the news stations, “a man who would rather cover his own fault-ridden tracks than admit he couldn’t protect his most vulnerable citizens. And where are our speed bumps?” Simultaneously, she launched a milk carton campaign in which she intercepted the milk man each morning and pasted the faces of local schoolchildren—who were (as of yet) unmissing—on the backs of families’ 2%, with an ominous message scrawled in a faux blood font: “Who’s Next?” The cartons were said to hit especially close to home.
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