The Dark Half

Beyond it, as he had more or less suspected, he could see other prints smashed into the grass. They were widely spaced. Looking at them, Digger didn't think the fellow had been running, but he sure hadn't been wasting any time. Forty yards farther along, he found his eye could mark the fellow's progress in another way: a large basket of flowers had been kicked over. Although he couldn't see any prints that far away, the basket would have been right in the path of the prints he could see. Man could have gone around that basket, but he hadn't chosen to do so. Instead, he had simply kicked it aside and kept on going.

Men who did things like that were not, in Digger Holt's opinion, the sort of men you wanted to fuck around with unless you had a damned good reason.

Moving diagonally across the cemetery, he had been, as if on his way to the low wall between the boneyard and the main road. Moving like a man who had places to go and things to do.

Although Digger was not much better at imagining things than he was at fooling himself (the two things, after all, have a way of going hand in hand), Digger saw this man for a moment, literally saw him: a big fellow with big feet, striding through this silent suburb of the dead in the darkness, moving confidently and steadily on his big feet, booting the basket of flowers out of his way without even breaking stride when he came to it. He was not afraid, either — not this man. Because if there were things here which were still lively, as some people believed, they would be afraid of him. Moving, walking, striding, and God befriend the man or woman who got in his way.

The bird scolded.

Digger jumped.

'Forget it, Chummy,' he told himself once more. 'Just fill the friggin thing in and never mind thinkin about it!'

Fill it in he did, and forget it he intended to, but late that afternoon Deke Bradford found him out at the Stackpole Road burying ground and told him the news about Homer Gamache, who had been found late that morning less than a mile up from Homeland on Route 35. The whole town had been agog with rumors and speculation most of the day.

Then, reluctantly, Digger Holt went to talk to Sheriff Pangborn. He didn't know if the hole and the tracks had anything to do with the murder of Homer Gamache, but he thought he'd best tell what he knew and let those who were paid for it do the sorting out.

Four

Death in a Small Town

1

Castle Rock has been, at least in recent years, an unlucky town.

As if to prove that old saw about lightning and how often it strikes in the same place isn't always right, a number of bad things had happened in Castle Rock over the last eight or ten years — things bad enough to make the national news. George Bannerman was the local sheriff when those things occurred, but Big George, as he had been affectionately called, would not have to deal with Homer Gamache, because Big George was dead. He had survived the first bad thing, a series of rape—strangulations committed by one of his own officers, but two years later he had been killed by a rabid dog out on Town Road #3 — not just killed, either, but almost literally torn apart. Both of these cases had been extremely strange, but the world was a strange place. And a hard one. And, sometimes, an unlucky one.

The new sheriff (he had been in office going on eight years, but Alan Pangborn had decided he was going to be 'the new sheriff' at least until the year 2000 — always assuming, he told his wife, that he went on running and being elected that long) hadn't been in Castle Rock then; until 1980 he had been in charge of highway enforcement in a small-going-on-medium-sized city in upstate New York, not far from Syracuse.

Looking at Homer Gamache's battered body, lying in a ditch beside Route 35, he wished he was still there. It looked like not all of the town's bad luck had died with Big George Bannerman after all.

Oh, quit it — you don't wish you were anyplace else on God's green earth. Don't say you do, or bad luck will really come down and take a ride on your shoulder. This has been a damned good place for Annie and the boys, and it's been a damned good place for you, too. So why don't you just get off it?

Good advice. Your head, Pangborn had discovered, was always giving your nerves good advice they couldn't take. They said Yessir, now that you mention it, that's just as true as it can be. And then they went right on jumping and sizzling.

Still, he had been due for something like this, hadn't he? During his tour of duty as sheriff he had scraped the remains of almost forty people off the town roads, broken up fights beyond counting, and been faced with maybe a hundred cases of spouse and child abuse — and those were just the ones reported. But things have a way of evening out; for a town that had sported its very own mass killer not so long ago, he had had an unusually sweet ride when it came to murder. Just four, and only one of the perps had run — Joe Rodway, after he blew his wife's brains out. Having had some acquaintance of the lady, Pangborn was almost sorry when he got a telex from the police in Kingston, Rhode Island, saying they had Rodway in custody.

One of the others had been vehicular manslaughter, the remaining two plain cases of seconddegree, one with a knife and one with bare knuckles — the latter a case of spouse abuse that had simply gone too far, having only one odd wrinkle to distinguish it: the wife had beaten the husband to death while he was dead drunk, giving back one final apocalyptic tit for almost twenty years of tat. The woman's last set of bruises had still been a good, healthy yellow when she was booked. Pangborn hadn't been a bit sorry when the judge let her off with six months in Women's Correctional followed by six years' probation. Judge Pender had probably done only that because it would have been impolitic to give the lady what she really deserved, which was a medal.

Small-town murder in real life, he had found, rarely bore any likeness to the small-town murders in Agatha Christie novels, where seven people all took a turn at stabbing wicked old Colonel Storping-Goiter at his country house in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh during a moody winter storm. In real life, Pangborn knew, you almost always arrived to find the perp still standing there, looking down at the mess and wondering what the fuck he'd done; how it had all jittered out of control with such lethal speed. Even if the perp had strolled off, he usually hadn't gone far and there were two or three eyewitnesses who could tell you exactly what had happened, who had done it, and where he had gone. The answer to the last question was usually the nearest bar. As a rule, small-town murder in real life was simple, brutal, and stupid.

As a rule.

But rules are made to be broken. Lightning sometimes does strike twice in the same place, and from time to time murders that happen in small towns are not immediately solvable . murders like this one.

Pangborn could have waited.

2

Officer Norris Ridgewick came back from his cruiser, which was parked behind Pangborn's. Calls from the two police-band radios crackled out in the warm late spring air.

'Is Ray coming?' Pangborn asked. Ray was Ray Van Allen, Castle County's medical examiner and coroner.

'Yep,' Norris said.

'What about Homer's wife? Anybody tell her about this yet?'

Pangborn waved flies away from Homer's upturned face as he spoke. There was not much left but the beaky, jutting nose. If not for the prosthetic left arm and the gold teeth which had once been in Gamache's mouth and now lay in splinters on his wattled neck and the front of his shirt, Pangborn doubted if his own mother would have known him.

Norris Ridgewick, who bore a passing resemblance to Deputy Barney Fife on the old Andy Griffith Show, scuffled his feet and looked down at his shoes as if they had suddenly become very interesting to him. 'Well . . . John's on patrol up in the View, and Andy Clutterbuck's in Auburn, at district court — '

Pangborn sighed and stood up. Gamache was — had been — sixty-seven years old. He'd lived with his wife in a small, neat house by the old railroad depot less than two miles from here. Their children were grown and gone away. It was Mrs Gamache who had called the sheriffs office early this morning, not crying but close, saying she'd wakened at seven to find that Homer, who sometimes slept in one of the kids' old rooms because she snored, hadn't come home at all last night. He had left for his league bowling at seven the previous evening, just like always, and should have been home by midnight, twelve-thirty at the latest, but the beds were all empty and his truck wasn't in the dooryard or the garage.

Sheila Brigham, the day dispatcher, had relayed the initial call to Sheriff Pangborn, and he had used the pay phone at Sonny Jackett's Sunoco station, where he had been gassing up, to call Mrs Gamache back.

She had given him what he needed on the truck — Chevrolet pick-up, 1971, white with maroon primer-paint on the rust-spots and a gun-rack in the cab, Maine license number 96529Q. He'd put it out on the radio to his officers in the field (only three of them, with Clut testifying up in Auburn) and told Mrs Gamache he would get back to her just as soon as he had something. He hadn't been particularly worried. Gamache liked his beer, especially on his league bowling night, but he wasn't completely foolish. If he'd had too much to feel safe driving, he would have slept on the couch in one of his bowling buddies' living rooms.

There was one question, though. If Homer had decided to stay at the home of a teammate, why hadn't he called his wife and told her so? Didn't he know she'd worry? Well, it was late, and maybe he didn't want to disturb her. That was one possibility. A better one, Pangborn thought, was that he had called and she had been fast asleep in bed, a closed door between her and the one telephone in the house. And you had to add in the probability that she was snoring like a JimmyPete doing seventy on the turnpike.

Pangborn had said goodbye to the distraught woman and hung up, thinking her husband would show by eleven o'clock this morning at the latest, shamefaced and more than a little hung-over. Ellen would give the old rip the sandpaper side of her tongue when he did. Pangborn would thus make it a point to commend Homer — quietly — for having the sense not to drive the thirty miles between South Paris and Castle Rock while under the influence.

About an hour after Ellen Gamache's call, it occurred to him that something wasn't right about his first analysis of the situation. If Gamache had slept over at a bowling buddy's house, it seemed to Alan that it must have been the first time he ever did so. Otherwise, his wife would have thought of it herself and at least waited awhile before calling the sheriff's office. And then it struck Alan that Homer Gamache was a little bit old to be changing his ways. If he had slept over someplace last night, he should have done it before, but his wife's call suggested he hadn't. If he had gotten shitfaced at the lanes before and then driven home that way, he probably would have done it again last night . . . but hadn't.

So the old dog learned a new trick after all, he thought. It happens. Or maybe he just drank more than usual. Hell, he might even have drunk about the same amount as always and gotten drunker than usual. They say it does catch up with a person.

He had tried to forget Homer Gamache, at least for the time being. He had yea paperwork on his desk, and sitting there, rolling a pencil back and forth and thinking about that old geezer out someplace in his pick-up truck, that old geezer with white hair buzzed flat in a crewcut and a mechanical arm on account of he'd lost the real one at a place called Pusan in an undeclared war which had happened when most of the current crop of Viet Nam vets were still shitting yellow in their didies . . . well, none of that was moving the paper on his desk, and it wasn't finding Gamache, either.

All the same, he had been walking over to Sheila Brigham's little cubbyhole, meaning to ask her to raise Norris Ridgewick so he could find out if Norris had found anything out, when Norris himself had called in. What Norris had to report deepened Alan's trickle of unease to a cold and steady stream. It ran through his guts and made him feel lightly numb.

He scoffed at those people who talked about telepathy and precognition on the call-in radio programs, scoffed in the way people do when hint and hunch have become so much a part of their lives that they barely recognize them when they are using them. But if asked what he believed about Homer Gamache at that moment, Alan would have replied: When Norris called in . . . well, that's when I started knowing the old man was hurt bad or dead. Probably choice number two.

3

Norris had happened to stop at the Arsenault place on Route 35 about a mile south of Homeland Cemetery. He hadn't even been thinking about Homer Gamache, although the Arsenault farm and Homer's place were less than three miles apart, and if Homer had taken the logical route home from South Paris the night before, he would have passed the Arsenaults'. It didn't seem likely to Norris that any of the Arsenaults would have seen Homer the night before, because if they had, Homer would have arrived home safe and sound ten minutes or so later.

Norris had only stopped at the Arsenault farm because they kept the best roadside produce stand in the three towns. He was one of those rare bachelors who like to cook, and he had developed a terrific hankering for fresh sugarpeas. He had wanted to find out when the Arsenaults would have some for sale. As an afterthought, he'd asked Dolly Arsenault if she had happened to see Homer Gamache's truck the night before.

'Now you know,' Mrs Arsenault had said, 'it's funny you should mention that, because I did. Late last night. No . . . now that I think about it, it was early this morning, because Johnny Carson was still on, but getting toward the end. I was going to have another bowl of ice cream and watch a little of that David Letterman show and then go to bed. I don't sleep so well these days, and that man on the other side of the road put my nerves up.'

'What man was that, Mrs Arsenault?' Norris asked, suddenly interested.

'I don't know — just some man. I didn't like his looks. Couldn't even hardly see him and I 4idn't like his looks, how's that? Sounds bad, I know, but that juniper Hill mental asylum isn't all that far away, and when you see a man alone on a country road at almost one in the morning, it's enough to make anyone nervous, even if he is wearing a suit.'

'What kind of suit was he wear — ?' Norris began, but it was useless. Mrs Arsenault was a fine old country talker, and she simply rolled over Norris Ridgewick with a kind of relentless grandiosity. He decided to wait her out and glean what he could along the way. He took his notebook out of his pocket.

'In a way,' she went on, the suit almost made me more nervous. It didn't seem right for a man to be wearing a suit at that hour, if you see what I mean. Probably you don't, probably you think I'm just a silly old woman, and probably I am just a silly old woman, but for a minute or two before Homer come along, I had an idea that man was maybe going to come to the house, and I got up to make sure the door was locked. He looked over this way, you know, I saw him do that. I imagine he looked because he could probably see the window was still lighted even though it was late. Probably could see me, too, because the curtains are only sheers. I couldn't really see his face — no moon out last night and I don't believe they'll ever get streetlights out this far, let alone cable TV, like they have in town — but I could see him turn his head. Then he did start to cross the road — at least I think that was what he was doing, or was thinking about doing, if you see what I mean — and I thought he would come and knock on the door and say his car was broke down and could he use the phone, and I was wondering what I should say if he did that, or even if I should answer the door. I suppose I am a silly old woman, because I got thinking about that Alfred Hitchcock Presents show where there was a crazyman who could just about charm the birdies down from the trees, only he'd used an axe to chop somebody all up, you know, and put the pieces in the trunk of his car, and they only caught him because one of his taillights was out, or something like that — but the other side of it was — '

'Mrs Arsenault, I wonder if I could ask — '

' — was that I didn't want to be like the Philistine or Saracen or Gomorran or whoever it was that passed by on the other side of the road,' Mrs Arsenault continued. 'You know, in the story of the Good Samaritan. So I was in a little bit of a tither about it. But I said to myself — '

By then Norris had forgotten all about sugarpeas. He was finally able to bring Mrs Arsenault to a stop by telling her that the man she had seen might figure in what he called 'an ongoing investigation.' He got her to back up to the beginning and tell him everything she had seen, leaving out Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the story of the Good Samaritan as well, if possible.

The story as he related it over the radio to Sheriff Alan Pangborn was this: She had been watching The Tonight Show alone, her husband and the boys still asleep in bed. Her chair was by the window which looked out on Route 35. The shade was up. Around twelve-thirty or twelveforty, she had looked up and had seen a man standing on the far side of the road . . . which was to say, the Homeland Cemetery side.

Had the man walked from that direction, or the other?

Mrs Arsenault couldn't say for sure. She had an idea he might have come from the direction of Homeland, which would have meant he was heading away from town, but she couldn't say for sure what gave her that impression, because she had looked out the window once and only seen the road, then looked out again before getting up to get her ice cream and he was there. Just standing there and looking toward the lighted window — toward her, presumably. She thought he was going to cross the road or had started to cross the road (probably just stood there, Alan thought; the rest was nothing but the woman's nerves talking) when lights showed on the crest of the hill. When the man in the suit saw the approaching lights, he had cocked his thumb in the timeless, stateless gesture of the hitchhiker.

'It was Homer's truck, all right, and Homer at the wheel,' Mrs Arsenault told Norris Ridgewick. 'At first I thought he'd just go on by, like any normal person who sees a hitchhiker in the middle of the night, but then his taillights flashed on and that man ran up to the passenger side of the cab and got in.'

Mrs Arsenault, who was forty-six and looked twenty years older, shook her white head.

'Homer must have been lit to pick up a hitchhiker that late,' she told Norris. 'Lit or simpleminded, and I've known Homer almost thirty-five years. He ain't simple.'

She paused for thought.

'Well. . . not very.'

Norris tried to get a few more details from Mrs Arsenault on the suit the man had been wearing, but had no luck. He thought it really was sort of a pity that the streetlamps ended at the Homeland Cemetery grounds, but small towns like The Rock had only so much money to do with.

It had been a suit, she was sure of that, not a sport-coat or a man's jacket, and it hadn't been black, but that left quite a spectrum of colors to choose from. Mrs Arsenault didn't think the hitchhiker's suit had been pure white, but all she was willing to swear to was that it hadn't been black.

'I'm not actually asking you to swear, Mrs A.,' Norris said.

'When a body's speaking with an officer of the law on official business,' Mrs A. replied, folding her hands primly into the arms of her sweater, 'it comes to the same thing.'

So what she knew boiled down to this: she had seen Homer Gamache pick up a hitchhiker at about quarter to one in the morning. Nothing to call in the FBI about, you would have said. It only got ominous when you added in the fact that Homer had picked up his passenger three miles or less from his own dooryard . . . but hadn't arrived home.

Mrs Arsenault was right about the suit, too. Seeing a hitchhiker this far out in the boonies in the middle of the night was odd enough — by quarter of one, any ordinary drifter would have laid up in a deserted barn or some farmer's shed — but when you added in the fact that he had also been wearing a suit and a tie ('Some dark color,' Mrs A. said, 'just don't ask me to swear what dark color, because I can't, and I won't'), it got less comfortable all the time.

'What do you want me to do next?' Norris had asked over the radio once his report was complete.

'Stay where you are,' Alan said. 'Swap Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories with Mrs A. until I get there. I always used to like those myself.'

But before he had gone a half a mile, the location of the meeting between himself and his officer had been changed from the Arsenault place to a spot about a mile west of there. A boy named Frank Gavineaux, walking home from a little early fishing down at Strimmer's Brook, had seen a pair of legs protruding from the high weeds on the south side of Route 35. He ran home and told his mother. She had called the sheriff's office. Sheila Brigham relayed the message to Alan Pangborn and Norris Ridgewick. Sheila maintained protocol and mentioned no names on the air — too many little pitchers with big Cobras and Bearcats were always listening in on the police bands — but Alan could tell by the upset tone of Sheila's voice that even she had a good idea who those legs belonged to.

About the only good thing which had happened all morning was that Norris had finished emptying his stomach before Alan got there, and had maintained enough wit to throw up on the north side of the road, away from the body and any evidence there might be around it.

'What now?' Norris asked, interrupting the run of his thoughts.

Alan sighed heavily and quit waving the flies away from Homer's remains. It was a losing battle. 'Now I get to go down the road and tell Ellen Gamache the widow—maker paid a visit early this morning. You stay here with the body. Try to keep the flies off him.'

'Gee, Sheriff, why? There's an awful lot of em. And he's — '

'Dead, yeah, I can see that. I don't know why. Because it just seems like the right thing to do, I guess. We can't put his fucking arm back on, but at least we can keep the flies from shitting on what's left of his nose.'

'Okay,' Norris said humbly. 'Okay, Sheriff.'

'Norris, do you think you could call me 'Alan' if you really worked on it? If you practiced?'

'Sure, Sheriff, I guess so.'

Alan grunted and turned for one last look at the area of the ditch that would, in all probability, be cordoned off with bright yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tapes attached to surveyor's poles when he got back. The county coroner would be here. Henry Payton from the Oxford State Police Barracks would be here. The photographer and the technicians from the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Division probably wouldn't be — unless there happened to be a couple of them in the area already on another case — but they would arrive shortly after. By one in the afternoon, the state police's rolling lab would be here, too, complete with hot and cold running forensics experts and a guy whose job it was to mix up plaster and take moulage casts of the tire-prints Norris had either been smart enough or lucky enough not to run over with the wheels of his own cruiser (Alan opted, rather reluctantly, for lucky).

And what would it all come to? Why, just this. A half-drunk old man had stopped to do a favor for a stranger. (Hop on up here, boy, Alan could hear him saying, I ain't going only a couple of miles, but I'll get you a little further on your way), and the stranger had responded by beating the old man to death and then stealing his truck.

He guessed the man in the business suit had asked Homer to pull over — the most likely pretext would have been to say he needed to take a leak — and once the truck was stopped, he'd clipped the old man, dragged him out, and —

Ah, but that was when it got bad. So very goddam bad.

Alan looked down into the ditch one final time, to where Norris Ridgewick squatted by the bloody piece of meat that had been a man, patiently waving the flies away from what had been Homer's face with his citation clipboard, and felt his stomach turn over again.

He was just an old man, you son of a whore — an old man who was half in the bag and only had one honest arm to boot, an old man whose one little pleasure left was his bowling league night. So why didn't you just clip him that one good one in the cab of his truck and then leave him be? It was a warm night, and even if it'd been a little chilly, he most likely would have been okay. I'd bet my watch we're going to find a whole lot of antifreeze in his system. And the truck's license plate number goes out on the wire either way. So why this? Man, I hope I get a chance to ask you.

But did the reason matter? It sure didn't to Homer Gamache. Not anymore. Nothing was ever going to matter to Homer again. Because after clipping him that first one, the hitchhiker had pulled him out of the cab and dragged him into the ditch, probably hauling him by the armpits. Alan didn't need the boys from Capital Crimes to read the marks left by the heels of Gamache's shoes. Along the way, the hitcher had discovered Homer's disability. And at The bottom of the trench, he had wrenched the old man's prosthetic arm from his body and bludgeoned him to death with it.

Five

96529Q

'Hold it, hold it,' Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.

He was in the lot of the Westport I-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this. Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.

'What have we got here?' he murmured this time, and reversed the cruiser. Past a Camaro. Past a Toyota which looked like a slowly aging horseturd in the beaten copper glare of the arc-sodium lights. And . . . ta-DA! An old GMC pick-up truck that looked orange in the glare, which meant it was — or had been — white or light gray.

He popped his spotlight and trained it on the license plate. License plates, in Trooper Hamilton's humble opinion, were getting better. One by one, the states were putting little pictures on them. This made them easier to identify at night, when varying light conditions transformed actual colors into all sorts of fictional hues. And the worst light of all for plate ID were these goddam orange hiintensity lamps. He didn't know if they foiled rapes and muggings as they were designed to do, but he was positive they had caused hard-working cops such as himself to bugger plate IDs on stolen cars and fugitive vehicles without number.

The little pictures went a long way toward fixing that. A Statue of Liberty was a Statue of Liberty in both bright sunlight and the steady glare of these copper-orange bastards. And no matter what the color, Lady Liberty meant New York.

Same as that fucked-up crawdaddy he had the spot trained on right now meant Maine. You didn't have to strain your eyes for VACATIONLAND anymore, or try to figure out if what looked pink or orange or electric blue was really white. You just looked for the fucked-up crawdaddy. It was really a lobster, Hamilton knew that, but a fucked-up crawdaddy by any other name was still a fucked-up crawdaddy, and he would have gobbled shit right out of a pig's ass before he put one of those fucking crawdads in his mouth, but he was mighty glad they were there, all the same.

Especially when he had a want on a crawdaddy license plate, as he did tonight.

'Ask Mamma if she believes this,' he murmured, and put the cruiser in Park. He took his clipboard from the magnetized strip which held it to the center of the dash just above the driveshaft hump, flipped past the blank citation form all cops kept as a shield over the hot-sheet (no need for the general public to be gawking at the license plate numbers the cops were particularly interested in while the cop to whom the sheet belonged was grabbing a hamburger or taking an express dump at a handy filling station), and ran his thumbnail down the fist.

And here it was. 96529Q; State of Maine; home of the fucked-up crawdaddies.

Trooper Hamilton's initial pass had shown him no one was in the cab of the truck. There was a rifle-rack, but it was empty. It was possible — not likely, but possible — that there might be someone in the bed of the truck. It was even possible that the someone in the bed of the truck might have the rifle which belonged in the rack. More likely, the driver was either long gone or grabbing a burger inside. All the same . . .

'Old cops, bold cops, but no old bold cops,' Trooper Hamilton said in a low voice. He snapped off the spot and slowly cruised on down the line of cars. He paused twice more, snapping the spot on both times, although he didn't even bother to look at the cars he was fighting up. There was always the possibility that Mr 96529Q had seen Hamilton spotlighting the stolen truck while on his way back from the restaurant cum dumpatorium, and if he saw the trooper car had passed on up the line and was checking other cars, he might not take off.

'Safe is safe, sorry is sorry, and that's all I know, by the great by-Gorry!' Trooper Hamilton exclaimed. This was another of his favorites, not quite up there with asking Mamma if she believed this, but close.

He pulled into a slot where he could observe the pick-up. He called his base, which was less than four miles up the road, and told them he had found the GMC pick-up Maine wanted in a murder case. He requested back-up units and was told they would arrive shortly.

Hamilton observed no one approaching the pick-up, and decided it would not be over-bold to approach the vehicle with caution. In fact, he would look like a wimp if he was still sitting here in the dark, one row over, when the other units arrived.

He got out of his cruiser, thumbing the strap off his gun but not unholstering it. He had unholstered his piece only twice while on duty, and fired it not at all. Nor did he want to do either one now. He approached the pick-up at an angle that allowed him to observe both the truck — especially the bed of the truck — and the approach from Mickey D's. He paused as a man and woman walked from the restaurant to a Ford sedan three rows closer to the restaurant, then moved on when they got in their car and headed for the exit.

Keeping his right hand on the butt of his service revolver, Hamilton dropped his left hand to his hip. Service belts, in Hamilton's humble opinion, were also getting better. He had, both as man and boy, been a huge fan of Batman, aka the Caped Crusader he suspected, in fact, that the Batman was one of the reasons he had become a cop (this was a little factoid he hadn't bothered to put on his application). His favorite Batman accessory had not been the Batpole or the Batarang, not even the Batmobile itself, but the Caped Crusader's utility belt. That wonderful item of apparel was like a good gift shop: It had a little something for all occasions, be it a rope, a pair of nightvision goggles, or a few capsules of stun-gas. His service belt was nowhere near as good, but on the left side there were three loops holding three very useful items. One was a battery-powered cylinder marketed under the name Down, Hound! When you pressed the red button on top, Down, Hound! emitted an ultrasonic whistle that turned even raging pit-bulls into bowls of limp spaghetti. Next to it was a pressure-can of Mace (the Connecticut state police version of Batman's stun-gas), and next to the Mace was a four-cell flashlight.

Hamilton pulled the flashlight from its loop, turned it on, then slid his left hand up to partially hood the beam. He did this without once removing his right hand from the butt of his revolver. Old cops; bold cops; no old bold cops.

He ran the beam along the bed of the pick-up truck. There was a scrap of tarpaulin in there, but nothing else. The truck-bed was as empty as the cab.

Hamilton had remained a prudent distance away from the GMC with the crawdaddy plates all the while — this was so ingrained he hadn't even thought about it. Now he bent and shone the flashlight beneath the truck, the last place where someone who meant him harm might be lurking. Unlikely, but when he finally kicked off, he didn't want the minister to begin his eulogy by saying, 'Dear friends, we are here today to mourn the unlikely passing of Trooper Warren Hamilton.' That would be très tacky.

He swept the beam quickly left to right under the truck and observed nothing but a rusty muffler which was going to drop off in the near future — not, from the look of the holes in it, that the driver would notice much difference when it did.

'I think we're alone, dear,' Trooper Hamilton said. He examined the area surrounding, the truck one final time, paying particular attention to the approach from the restaurant. He observed no one observing him, and so stepped up to the passenger window of the cab and shone his light inside.

'Holy shit,' Hamilton murmured. 'Ask Mamma if she believes this happy crappy. ' He was suddenly very glad for the orange lamps which sent their glare across the parking—lot and into the cab, because they turned what he knew was maroon to a color which was almost black, making the blood look more like ink. 'He drove it like that? Jesus Christ, all the way from Maine he drove it like that? Ask Mamma — '

He tipped his flashlight downward. The seat and the floor of the GMC was a sty. He saw beer cans, soft drink cans, empty or near—empty potato chip and pork rind bags, boxes which had contained Big Macs and Whoppers. A wad of what looked like bubble-gum was squashed onto the metal dashboard above the hole where there had once been a radio. There were a number of unfiltered cigarette butts in the ashtray.

Most of all, there was blood.

There were streaks and blotches of blood on the seat. Blood was grimed into the steering wheel. There was a dried splatter of blood on the horn-ring, almost entirely obscuring the Chevrolet symbol embossed there. There was blood on the driver's inside doorhandle and blood on the mirror — that spot was a small circle that wanted to be an oval, and Hamilton thought that Mr 96529Q might have left an almost perfect thumbprint in his victim's blood when he adjusted his rearview. There was also a large splatter of gore on one of the Big Mac boxes. That one looked like there might be some hair stuck in it.

'What did he tell the drive-up girl?' Hamilton muttered. 'He cut himself shaving?'

There was a scraping noise behind him. Hamilton whirled, feeling too slow, feeling all too sure that he had, despite his routine precautions, been too bold to ever get old, because there was nothing routine about this, no sir, the guy had gotten behind him and soon there would be more blood in the cab of the old Chevrolet pick-up, his blood, because a guy who would drive a portable abattoir like this from Maine almost to the New York State line was a psycho, the sort of guy who would kill a state trooper with no more thought than he'd take to buy a quart of milk.

Hamilton drew his revolver for the third time in his career, thumbed the hammer back, and almost triggered a shot (or two, or three) into nothing but darkness; he was wired to the max. But there was no one there.

He lowered the gun by slow degrees, blood thumping in his temples.

A little gust of wind puffed the night. The scraping noise came again. On the pavement he saw a Filet-O-Fish box — from this very McDonald's, no doubt, how clever you are, Holmes, do not mention it, Watson, it was really elementary — skitter five or six feet at the whim of the breeze and then come to rest again.

Hamilton let out a long, shaky breath and carefully dropped the hammer on his revolver. 'Almost embarrassed yourself, there, Holmes,' he said in a voice that was not at all steady. 'Almost stuck yourself with a CR-I4.' A CR-I4 was a 'shot(s) fired' form.

He thought about bolstering his gun again, now that it was clear there was nothing to shoot but an empty fish sandwich box, and then decided he would just hold onto it until he saw the other units arriving. It felt good in his hand. Comforting. Because it wasn't just the blood, or the fact that the man some Maine cop wanted for murder had calmly driven four hundred miles or so in that mess. There was a stench around the truck which was in a way like the stench around the spot in some country road where a car has hit and crushed a skunk. He didn't know if the arriving officers would pick it up or if it was just for him, and he didn't much care. It wasn't a smell of blood, or rotten food, or BO. It was, he thought, just the smell of bad. Something very bad, very bad. Bad enough so that he didn't want to holster his revolver even though he was almost positive that the owner of that smell was gone, probably hours ago — he heard none of the ticking noises which came from an engine that was still warm. It didn't matter. It didn't change what he knew: for awhile the truck had been the den of some terrible animal, and he wasn't going to take the slightest risk that the animal might return and find him unprepared. And Mm=a could make book on that.

He stood there, gun in hand, hairs on the back of his neck prickling, and it seemed a very long time before the back-up units finally came.

Six

Death in the Big City

Dodie Eberhart was pissed off, and when Dodie Eberhart was pissed off, there was one broad in the nation's capital you didn't want to fuck with. She climbed the stairs of the L Street apartment building with the stolidity (and nearly the bulk) of a rhino crossing an open stretch of grassland. Her navy-blue dress stretched and relaxed over a bosom which was rather too large to simply be called ample. Her meaty arms swung like pendulums.

A good many years ago, this woman had been one of Washington's most stunning call-girls. In those days her height — six-foot-three — as well as her good looks had made her more than just a naughty bit of fluff; she was so sought after that a night with her was almost as good as a trophy in a sporting gentleman's den, and if one were to carefully review the photographs of various Washington fêtes and soiriés taken during the second Johnson administration and the first Nixon administration, one might spot Dodie Eberhart in many of them, usually on the arm of a man whose name appeared frequently in weighty political articles and essays. Her height alone made her hard to miss.

Dodie was a whore with the heart of a bank-teller and the soul of an acquisitive cockroach. Two of her regular johns, one a Democratic senator and the other a Republican Representative with a good deal of seniority, had provided her with enough cash to retire from the business. They had not exactly done this of their own volition. Dodie was aware that the risk of disease was not exactly decreasing (and highly placed government officials are as vulnerable to AIDS and various lesser — but still troubling — venereal diseases as the commoners). Her age wasn't decreasing, either. Nor did she completely trust these gentlemen to leave her something in their wills, as both had promised to do. I'm sorry, she'd told them, but I don't believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy anymore either, you see. Little Dodie is all on her own.

Little Dodie purchased three apartment houses with the money. Years passed. The one hundred and seventy pounds which had brought strong men to their knees (usually in front of her as she stood nude before them) had now become two hundred and eighty. Investments which had done well in the mid-seventies had soured in the eighties, when it seemed everyone else in the country with money in the stock market was getting well. She'd had two excellent brokers on her short list right up until the end of the active phase of her career; there were times she wished she'd held onto them when she retired.

One apartment house had gone in '84; the second in '86, following a disastrous IRS audit. She had held onto this one on L Street as grimly as a losing player in a cutthroat game of Monopoly, convinced that it was in a neighborhood which was about to Happen. But it hadn't Happened yet, and she didn't think it would Happen for another year or two . . . if then. When it did, she meant to pack her bags and move to Aruba. In the meantime, the landlady who had once been the capital city's most sought-after fuck would just have to hang on.

Which she always did.

Which she intended to keep on doing.

And God help anyone who got in her way.

Like Frederick 'Mr Bigshot' Clawson, for instance.

She reached the second-floor landing. Guns n' Roses was bellowing out of the Shulmans' apartment.

'TURN THAT FUCKING RECORD-PLAYER DOWN!' she yelled at the top of her lungs . . . and when Dodie Eberhart raised her voice to its maximum decibel level, windows cracked, the eardrums of small children ruptured, and dogs fell dead.

The music went from a scream to a whisper at once. She could sense the Shulmans quivering against each other like a pair of scared puppies in a thunderstorm and praying it was not them the Wicked Witch of L Street had come to see. They were afraid of her. That was not an unwise way to feel. Shulman was a corporate lawyer with a high-powered firm, but he was still two ulcers away from being high-powered enough to give Dodie pause. If he should cross her at this stage of his young life, she would wear his guts for garters, and he knew it, and that was very satisfactory.

When the bottom dropped out of both your bank accounts and your investment portfolio, you had to take your satisfactions where you found them.

Dodie turned the corner without breaking stride and started up the stairs to the third floor, where Frederick 'Mr Bigshot' Clawson lived in solitary splendor. She walked with that same even rhinocrossing-the-veldt stride, head up, not in the least out of breath in spite of her poundage, the staircase shaking the tiniest bit in spite of its solidity.

She was looking forward to this.

Clawson wasn't even on a low rung of a corporate—law ladder. As of now, he wasn't on the ladder at all. Like all the law students she had ever met (mostly as tenants; she had certainly never fucked any in what she now thought of as her 'other life'), he was composed chiefly of high aspirations and low funds, both of them floating on a generous cushion of bullshit. Dodie did not, as a rule, confuse any of these elements. Failing for a law student's line of bull was, in her mind, as bad as turning a trick for free. Once you started in with behavior like that, you might as well hang up your jock.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Yet Frederick 'Mr Bigshot' Clawson had partially breached her defenses. He had been late with the rent four times in a row and she had allowed this because he had convinced her that in his case the tired old scripture was really the truth (or might come to be): he did have money coming in.

He could not have done this to her if he had claimed Sidney Sheldon was really Robert Ludlum, or Victoria Holt was really Rosemary Rogers, because she didn't give a shit about those people or their — billions of write-alikes. She was into crime novels, and if they were real gutbucket crime novels, so much the better. She supposed there were plenty of people out there who went for the romantic slop and the spy shit, if the Post Sunday best-seller list was any indication, but she had been reading Elmore Leonard for years before he hit the lists, and she had also formed strong attachments for Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford, and the rest of those guys. If you wanted it short and sweet, Dodie Eberhart liked novels where men robbed banks, shot each other, and demonstrated how much they loved their women mostly by beating the shit out of them.

George Stark, in her opinion, was — or had been — the best of them. She had been a dedicated fan from Machine's Way and Oxford Blues right up to Riding to Babylon, which looked to be the last of them.

The bigshot in the third-floor apartment had been surrounded by notes and Stark novels the first time she came to dun him about the rent (only three days overdue that time, but of course if you gave them an inch they took a mile), and after she had taken care of her business and he had promised to deliver a check to her by noon the following day, she asked him if the collected works of George Stark were now required reading for a career before the bar.

'No,' Clawson had said with a bright, cheerful, and utterly predatory smile, 'but they might just finance one.'

It was the smile more than anything else which had hooked her and caused her to pay out line in his case where she had snubbed it brutally tight in all others. She had seen that smile many times before in her own mirror. She had believed then that such a smile could not be faked, and, just for the record, she still believed it. Clawson really had had the goods on Thaddeus Beaumont; his mistake had been believing so confidently that Beaumont would go along with the plans of a Mr Bigshot like Frederick Clawson. And it had been her mistake, too.

She had read one of the two Beaumont novels — Purple Haze — following Clawson's explanation of what he had discovered, and thought it an exquisitely stupid book. In spite of the correspondence and photocopies Mr Bigshot had shown her, she would have found it difficult or impossible to believe both writers were the same man. Except . . . about three-quarters of the way through it, at a point where she had been about ready to throw the boring piece of shit across the room and forget the whole thing, there was a scene in which a farmer shot a horse. The horse had two broken legs and needed to be shot, but the thing was, old Farmer John had enjoyed it. Had, in fact, put the barrel of the gun against the horse's head and then jerked himself off, squeezing the trigger at the moment of climax.

It was, she thought, as if Beaumont had stepped out to get a cup of coffee when he got to that part . . . and George Stark had stepped in and written the scene, like a literary Rumpelstiltskin. Certainly it was the only gold in that particular pile of hay.

Well, none of it mattered now. All it proved was that no one was immune to bullshit forever. The bigshot had taken her for a ride, but at least it had been a short ride. And it was now over.

Dodie Eberhart reached the third-floor landing, her hand already curling into the sort of tight fist she made when the time had come not for polite knocking but hammering, and then she saw hammering would not be necessary. The bigshot's door was standing ajar.

'Jesus wept!' Dodie muttered, her lip curling. This wasn't a junkie neighborhood, but when it came to ripping off some idiot's apartment, the junkies were more than willing to cross boundary lines. The guy was even stupider than she had thought.

She rapped on the door with her knuckles and it swung open. 'Clawson!' she called in a voice which promised doom and damnation.

There was no answer. Looking up the short corridor, she could see the shades in the living room were drawn and the overhead light was burning. A radio was playing softly.

'Clawson, I want to talk to you!'

She started up the short corridor . . . and stopped.

One of the sofa cushions was on the floor.

That was all. No sign that the place had been trashed by a hungry junkie, but her instincts were still sharp, and her wind was up 'm a moment. She smelled something. It was very faint, but it was there. A little like food which had spoiled but not yet rotted. That wasn't it, but it was as close as she could come. Had she smelled it before? She thought she had.

And there was another smell, although she didn't think it was her nose which was making her aware of it. She knew that one right away. She and Trooper Hamilton from Connecticut would have agreed at once on what it was: the smell of bad.

She stood just outside the living room, looking at the tumbled cushion, listening to the radio. What the climb up three flights of stairs hadn't been able to do that one innocent cushion had — her heart was beating rapidly under her massive left breast, and her breath was coming shallowly through her mouth. Something was not right here. Very much not right. The question was whether or not she would become a part of it if she hung around.

Common sense told her to go, go while she still had a chance, and common sense was very strong. Curiosity told her to stay and peck . . . and it was stronger.

She edged her head around the entrance to the living room and looked first to her right, where there was a fake fireplace, two windows giving a view on L Street, and not much else. She looked to the left and her head suddenly stopped moving. It actually seemed to lock in position. Her eyes widened.

That locked stare lasted no more than three seconds, but it seemed much longer to her. And she saw everything, down to the smallest detail; her mind made its own photograph of what it was seeing, as clear and sharp as those the crime photographer would soon take.

She saw the two bottles of Amstel beer on the coffee table, one empty and the other half-full, with a collar of foam still inside the bottle-neck. She saw the ashtray with CHICAGOLAND! written on its curving surface. She saw two cigarette butts, unfiltered, squashed into the center of the tray's pristine whiteness although the bigshot didn't smoke — not cigarettes, at least. She saw the small plastic box which had once been full of pushpins lying on its side between the bottles and the ashtray. Most of the pushpins, which the bigshot used to tack things to his kitchen bulletin board, were scattered across the glass surface of the coffee table. She saw a few had come to rest on an open copy of People magazine, the one featuring the Thad Beaumont/George Stark story. She could see Mr and Mrs Beaumont shaking hands across Stark's gravestone, although from here they were upside down. It was the story that, according to Frederick Clawson, would never be printed. It was going to make him a moderately wealthy man instead. He had been wrong about that. In fact, it seemed he had been wrong about everything.

She could see Frederick Clawson, who had gone from Mr Bigshot to no shot at all, sitting in one of his two living-room chairs. He had been tied in. He was naked, his clothes thrown into a snarly ball under the coffee table. She saw the bloody hole at his groin. His testicles were still where they belonged; his penis had been stuffed into his mouth. There was plenty of room, because the murderer had also cut out Mr Bigshot's tongue. It was tacked to the wall. The pushpin had been driven into its pink meat so deeply that she could only see a grinning crescent of bright yellow which was the pushpin's top, and her mind relentlessly photographed this, too. Blood had drizzled down the wallpaper below it, making a wavery fan-shape.

The killer had employed another pushpin, this one with a bright green head, to nail the second page of the People magazine article to the ex-bigshot's bare chest. She could not see Liz Beaumont's face — it was obscured by Clawson's blood — but she could see the woman's hand, holding out the pan of brownies for Thad's smiling inspection. She remembered that picture in particular had irked Clawson. What a put-up job! he had exclaimed. She hates to cook she said so in an interview just after Beaumont published his first novel.

Finger-written in blood above the severed tongue tacked to the wall were these five words:

THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN.

Jesus Christ, some distant part of her mind thought. It's just like a George Stark novel . . . like something Alexis Machine would do.

From behind her came a soft bumping sound.

Dodie Eberhart screamed and whirled. Machine came at her with his terrible straight-razor, its steely glitter now sleeved with Frederick Clawson's blood. His face was the twisted mask of scars which was all Nonie Griffiths had left after she carved him up at the end of Machine's Way, and —

And there was no one there at all.

The door had swung shut, that was all, the way doors sometimes do.

Is that so? the distant part of her mind asked . . . except it was closer now, raising its voice, urgent with fright. It was standing partway open with no problem at all when you came up the stairs. Not wide open, but enough so you could tell it wasn't shut.

Now her eyes went back to the beer bottles on the coffee table. One empty. One half-full, with a ring of foam still on the inside of the neck.

The killer had been behind the door when she came in. If she had turned her head she would almost surely have seen him . . . and now she would be dead, too.

And while she had been standing here, mesmerized by the colorful remains of Frederick 'Mr Bigshot' Clawson, he had simply gone out, closing the door behind him.

The strength flowed out of her legs and she slipped to her knees with a weird kind of grace, looking like a girl about to take communion. Her mind ran frantically over the same thought, like a gerbil on an exercise wheel: Oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed —

And then she heard him, the measured thud of his big feet on the hall carpet. Later she became convinced that the goddam Shulmans had turned up their stereo again, and she had mistaken the steady thump of the bass for footsteps, but at that moment she was convinced it was Alexis Machine and he was returning . . . a man so dedicated and so murderous that not even death would stop him.

For the first time in her life, Dodie Eberhart fainted.

She came to less than three minutes later. Her legs would still not support her, so she crawled back down the short apartment hallway to the door with her hair hanging in her face. She thought of opening the door and looking out, but could not bring herself to do it. She turned the thumblock instead, then shot the bolt and clicked the police—bar into its steel foot. Those things done, she sat against the door, gasping, the world a gray blur. She was vaguely aware that she had locked herself in with a mutilated corpse, but that wasn't so bad. It wasn't bad at all, when you considered the alternatives.

Little by little her strength came back and she was able to get to her feet. She slipped around the corner at the end of the hall and then into the kitchen, where the phone was. She kept her eyes averted from what remained of Mr Bigshot, although it was an empty exercise; she would see that mind-photograph in all its hideous clarity for a long time to come.

She called the police and when they came she wouldn't let them in until one of them slid his ID under the door.

'What's your wife's name?' she asked the cop whose laminated badge identified him as Charles F. Toomey, Jr. Her voice was high and quivery, utterly unlike her usual one. Close friends (had she had any) would not have recognized it.

'Stephanie, ma'am,' the voice on the other side of the door replied patiently.

'I can call your station-house and check that, you know!' she nearly shrieked.

'I know you can, Mrs Eberhart,' the voice responded, 'but you'd feel safer quicker if you just let us in, don't you think?'

And because she still recognized the Voice of Cop as easily as she had recognized the Smell of Bad, she unlocked the door and let Toomey and his partner in. Once they were, Dodie did something else she had never done before: she went into hysterics.

Seven

Police Business

1

Thad was upstairs in his study, writing, when the police came.

Liz was reading a book in the living room while William and Wendy goofed with each other in the oversized playpen they shared. She went to the door, looking out through one of the narrow ornamental windows which flanked it before opening it. This was a habit she had gotten into since what was jokingly called Thad's 'debut' in People magazine. Visitors — vague acquaintances for the most part, with a generous mixture of curious town residents and even a few total strangers (these latter unanimously Stark fans) thrown in for good measure — had taken to dropping by. Thad called it the 'see the living-crocodiles syndrome' and said it would peter out in another week or two. Liz hoped he was right. In the meantime, she worried that one of the new callers might be a mad crocodile-hunter of the sort who had killed John Lennon, and peeked through the side window first. She didn't know if she would recognize a bona fide madman if she saw one, but she could at least keep Thad's train of thought from derailing during the two hours each morning he spent writing. After that he went to the door himself, usually throwing her a guilty little-boy look to which she didn't know how to respond.

The three men on the front doorstep this Saturday morning were not fans of either Beaumont or Stark, she guessed, and not madmen either . . . unless some of the current crop had taken to driving state police cruisers. She opened the door, feeling the uneasy twinge even the most blameless people must feel when the police show up without being called. She supposed if she'd had children old enough to be out whooping and hollering this rainy Saturday morning, she would already be wondering if they were okay.

'Yes?'

'Are you Mrs Elizabeth Beaumont?' one of them asked.

'Yes, I am. May I help you?'

'Is your husband home, Mrs Beaumont?' a second asked. These two were wearing identical gray rain-slickers and state police hats.

No, that's the ghost of Ernest Hemingway you hear clacking away upstairs, she thought of saying, and of course didn't. First came the has-anybody-had-an-accident fright, then the phantom guilt which made you want to come out with something harsh or sarcastic, something which said, no matter what the actual words: Go away. You are not wanted here. We have done nothing wrong. Go and find someone who has.

'May I ask why you'd like to see him?'

The third policeman was Alan Pangborn. 'Police business, Mrs Beaumont,' he said. 'May we speak with him, please?'

2

Thad Beaumont did not keep anything resembling an organized journal, but he did sometimes write about the events in his own life which interested, amused, or frightened him. He kept these accounts in a bound ledger, and his wife did not care much for them. They gave her the creeps, in fact, although she had never told Thad so. Most were strangely passionless, almost as if a part of him was standing aside and reporting on his life with its own divorced and almost disinterested eye. Following the visit of the police on the morning of June 4th, he wrote a long entry with a strong and unusual subcurrent of emotion running through it.

I understand Kafka's The Trial and Orwell's 1984 a little better now [Thad wrote]. To read them as political novels and no more is a serious mistake. I suppose the depression I went through after finishing Dancers and discovering there was nothing waiting behind it — except for Liz's miscarriage, that is — still counts as the most wrenching emotional experience of our married life, but what happened today seems worse. I tell myself it's because the experience is still fresh, but I suspect it's a lot more than that. I suppose if my time in the darkness and the loss of those first twins are wounds which have healed, leaving only scars to mark the places where they were, then this new wound will also heal . . . but I don't believe time will ever gloss it over completely. It will also leave its scar, one which is shorter but deeper — like the fading tattoo of a sudden knife-slash.

I'm sure the police behaved according to their oaths (if they still take them, and I guess they do). Yet there was then and still is now a feeling that I was in danger of being pulled into some faceless bureaucratic machine, not men but a machine which would go methodically on about its business until it had chewed me to rags . . . because chewing people to rags is the machine's business. The sound of my screams would neither hurry nor delay that machine's chewing action.

I could tell Liz was nervous when she came upstairs and told me the police wanted to see me about something but wouldn't tell her what it was. She said one of them was Alan Pangborn, the Castle County sheriff. I may have met him once or twice before, but I only really recognized him because his picture is in the Castle Rock Call from time to time.

I was curious, and grateful for a break from the typewriter, where my people have been insisting on doing things I don't want them to do for the last week. If I thought anything, I suppose I thought it might have something to do with Frederick Clawson, or some bit of fallout from the People article. And so it did, although not in the way I thought.

I don't know if I can get the tone of the meeting which followed right or not. I don't know if it even matters, only that it seems important to try. They were standing in the hall near the foot of the stairs, three large men (it's no wonder people call them bulls) dripping a little water onto the carpet.

'Are you Thaddeus Beaumont?' one of them — it was Sheriff Pangborn — asked, and that's when the emotional change I want to describe (or at least indicate) began to happen. Puzzlement Joined the curiosity and pleasure at being released, however briefly, from the typewriter. And a little worry. My full name, but no 'Mister.' Like a judge addressing a defendant upon whom he is about to pass sentence.

'Yes, that's right,' I said, 'and you're Sheriff Pangborn. I know, because we've got a place on Castle Lake.' Then I put out my hand, that old automatic gesture of the welltrained American male.

He just looked at it, and an expression came over his face — it was as if he'd opened the door of his refrigerator and discovered the fish he'd bought for supper had spoiled. 'I have no intention of shaking your hand,' he said, 'so you might as well put it back down again and save us both some embarrassment.' It was a hell of a strange thing to say, a downright rude thing to say, but that didn't bother me as much as the way he said it. It was as if he thought I was out of my mind.

And just like that, I was terrified. Even now I find it difficult to believe how rapidly, how goddam rapidly, my emotions lensed through the spectrum from ordinary curiosity and some pleasure at the break in an accustomed routine to naked fear. In that instant I knew they weren't here just to talk to me about something but because they believed I had done something, and in that first moment of horror 'I have no intention of shaking your hand' — I was sure that I had.

That's what I need to express. In the moment of dead silence that followed Pangbom's refusal to shake my hand, I thought, in fact, that I had done everything . . . and would be powerless not to confess my guilt.

3

Thad lowered his hand slowly. From the corner of his eye he could see Liz with her hands clasped into a tight white ball between her breasts, and suddenly he wanted to be furious at this cop, who had been invited freely into his home and then refused to shake his hand. This cop whose salary was paid, at least in some small part, by the taxes the Beaumonts paid on their house in Castle Rock. This cop who had frightened Liz. This cop who had frightened him.

'Very well,' Thad said evenly. 'If you won't shake hands with me, then perhaps you'll tell me why you're here.'

Unlike the state cops, Alan Pangborn was wearing not a rainslicker but a waterproof jacket which came only to his waist. He reached into his back pocket, brought out a card, and began to read from it. It took Thad a moment to realize he was hearing a variation of the Miranda warning.

'As you said, my name is Alan Pangborn, Mr Beaumont. I am the sheriff of Castle County, Maine. I'm here because I have to question you in connection with a capital crime. I will ask you these questions at the Orono state police barracks. You have the right to remain silent — '

'Oh dear Jesus, please, what is this?' Liz asked, and layered on top of that Thad heard himself saying, 'Wait a minute, wait just a damn minute.' He intended to roar this, but even with his brain telling his lungs to turn the volume up to a full lecture-hall-quieting bellow, the best he could manage was a mild objection that Pangborn overrode easily.

' — and you have the right to legal counsel. If you cannot afford legal counsel, such will be provided for you.'

He replaced the card in his back pocket.

'Thad?' Liz was crowding against him like a small child frightened by thunder. Her huge puzzled eyes stared at Pangborn. Every so often they flicked to the state troopers, who looked big enough to play defense on a pro football team, but mostly they remained on Pangborn.

'I'm not going anywhere with you,' Thad said. His voice was shaking, jigging up and down, changing registers like the voice of a young adolescent. He was still trying to be furious. 'I don't believe you can compel me to do that.'

One of the troopers cleared his throat. 'The alternative,' he said, 'is for us to go back and get a warrant for your arrest, Mr Beaumont. On the basis of information in our possession, that would be very easy.'

The trooper glanced at Pangborn.

'It might be fair to add that Sheriff Pangborn wanted us to bring one with us. He argued very strongly for it, and I guess he would have gotten his way if you weren't . . . something of a public figure.'

Pangborn looked disgusted, possibly by this fact, possibly because the trooper was informing Thad of the fact, most likely both.

The trooper saw the look, shuffled his wet shoes as if a trifle embarrassed, but pushed on anyway. 'With the situation being what it is, I have no problem with you knowing that.' He looked questioningly at his partner, who nodded. Pangborn just went on looking disgusted. And angry. He looks, Thad thought, as if he'd like to rip me open with his fingernails and wrap my guts around my head.

'That sounds very professional,' Thad said. He was relieved to find he was getting at least some of his wind back and his voice was settling down. He wanted to be angry because anger would allay the fear, but he could still manage no more than bewilderment. He felt sucker-punched. 'What it ignores is the fact that I don't have the slightest idea what this goddam situation is.'

'If we believed that to be the case, we wouldn't be here, Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said. The expression of loathing on his face finally turned the trick: Thad was suddenly infuriated.

'I don't care what you think!' Thad said. 'I told you that I know who you are, Sheriff Pangborn. My wife and I have owned a summer house in Castle Rock since I973 — long before you ever heard of the place. I don't know what you're doing here, a hundred and sixty-odd miles from your territory, or why you're looking at me like I was a splat of birdshit on a new car, but I can tell you I'm not going anywhere with you until I find out. If it's going to take an arrest warrant, you go on and get one. But I want you to know that if you do, you're going to be up to your neck in a kettle of boiling shit and I'll be the one underneath stoking the fire. Because I haven't done anything. This is fucking outrageous. Just . . . fucking . . . outrageous!

Now his voice had reached full volume, and both the troopers looked a little abashed. Pangborn did not. He went on staring at Thad in that unsettling way.

In the other room, one of the twins began to cry.

'Oh Jesus,' Liz moaned, 'what is this? Tell us!'

'Go take care of the kids, babe,' Thad said, not unlocking his gaze from Pangborn's.

'But — '

'Please,' he said, and then both babies were crying. 'This will be all right.'

She gave him a final trembling look, her eyes saying Do you promise? and then went into the living room.

'We want to question you in connection with the murder of Homer Gamache,' the second trooper said.

Thad broke his hard stare at Pangborn and turned to the trooper.

'Who?'

'Homer Gamache,' Pangborn repeated. 'Are you going to tell us the name means nothing to you, Mr Beaumont?'

'Of course I'm not,' Thad said, astonished. 'Homer takes our trash to the dump when we're in town. Makes some small repairs around the house. He lost an arm in Korea. They gave him the Silver Star — '

'Bronze,' Pangborn said stonily.

'Homer's dead? Who killed him?'

The troopers now looked at each other, surprised. After grief, astonishment may be the most difficult human emotion to fake effectively.

The first trooper replied in a curiously gentle voice: 'We have every reason to believe you did, Mr Beaumont. That's why we're here.'

4

Thad looked at him with utter blankness for a moment and then laughed. 'Jesus. Jesus Christ. This is crazy.'

'Do you want to get a coat, Mr Beaumont?' the other trooper asked. 'Raining pretty hard out there.'

'I'm not going anywhere with you,' he repeated absently, entirely missing Pangborn's sudden expression of exasperation. Thad was thinking.

'I'm afraid you are,' Pangborn said, 'one way or the other.'

'It'll have to be the other, then,' he said, and then came out of himself. 'When did this happen?'

'Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said, speaking slowly and enunciating carefully — it was as if he was speaking to a four-year-old, and not a terribly bright one at that. 'We're not here to give you information.'

Liz came back into the doorway with the babies. All color had drained from her face; her forehead shone like a lamp. 'This is crazy,' she said, looking from Pangborn to the troopers and then back to Pangborn again. 'Crazy. Don't you know that?'

'Listen,' Thad said, walking over to Liz and putting an arm around her, 'I didn't kill Homer, Sheriff Pangborn, but I understand now why you're so pissed. Come on upstairs to my office. Let's sit down and see if we can't figure this out — '

'I want you to get your coat,' Pangborn said. He glanced at Liz. 'Forgive my French, but I've had about all the bullshit I can put up with for a rainy Saturday morning. We have you cold.'

Thad looked at the older of the two state troopers. 'Can you talk some sense to this man? Tell him that he can avoid a whole lot of embarrassment and trouble just by telling me when Homer was killed?' And, as an afterthought: 'And where. If it was in the Rock, and I can't imagine what Homer would be doing up here . . . well, I haven't been out of Ludlow, except to go to the University, in the last two and a half months.' He looked at Liz, who nodded.

The trooper thought it over, and then said: 'Excuse us a moment.'

The three of them went back down the hallway, the troopers almost appearing to lead Pangborn. They went out the front door. As soon as it was shut, Liz burst into a spate of confused questions. Thad knew her well enough to suspect her terror would have come out as anger — fury, even — at the cops, if not for the news of Homer Gamache's death. As things were, she was on the edge of tears.

'It's going to be all right,' he said, and kissed her on the check. As an afterthought, he also bussed William and Wendy, who were beginning to look decidedly troubled. 'I think the state troopers already know I'm telling the truth. Pangborn . . . well, he knew Homer. You did, too. He's just pissed as hell.' And from the look and sound of him, he must have what seems like unshakable evidence tying me to the murder, he thought but did not add.

He walked down the hall and peered out the narrow side window as Liz had done. If not for the situation, what he saw would have been funny. The three of them were standing on the stoop, almost but not quite out of the rain, having a conference. Thad could get the sound of their voices, but not the sense. He thought they looked like ballplayers conferring on the mound during a lateinning rally by the other team. Both state cops were talking to Pangborn, who was shaking his head and replying heatedly.

Thad went back down the hall.

'What are they doing?' Liz asked.

'I don't know,' Thad said, 'but I think the state cops are trying to talk Pangborn into telling me why he's so sure I killed Homer Gamache. Or at least some of the why.'

'Poor Homer,' she muttered. 'This is like a bad dream.' He took William from her and told her again not to worry.

5

The policemen came in about two minutes later. Pangborn's face was a thundercloud. Thad surmised the two state cops had told him what Pangborn himself already knew but didn't want to admit: the writer was exhibiting none of the tics and twitches they associated with guilt.

'All right,' Pangborn said. He was trying to avoid surliness, Thad thought, and doing a pretty good job. Not quite succeeding, but doing a pretty good job all the same, considering he was in the presence of his number-one suspect in the murder of a one-armed old man. 'These gentlemen would like me to ask you at least one question here, Mr Beaumont, and so I will. Can you account for your whereabouts during the time period from eleven p.m. on May thirty-first of this year until four a.m. on June first?'

The Beaumonts exchanged a glance. Thad felt a great weight around his heart loosen. It did not quite fall off, not yet, but he felt as if all the catches holding that weight had been unbuckled. Now all it would take was one good push.

'Was it?' he murmured to his wife. He thought it was, but it seemed just a little too good to be true.

'I'm sure it was,' Liz responded. 'The thirty-first, did you say?' She was looking at Pangborn with radiant hope.

Pangborn looked back suspiciously. 'Yes, ma'am. But I'm afraid your unsubstantiated word won't be — '

She was ignoring him, counting backward on her fingers. Suddenly she grinned like a schoolgirl. 'Tuesday! Tuesday was the thirty-first!' she cried to her husband. 'It was! Thank God!'

Pangborn looked puzzled and more suspicious than ever. The troopers looked at each other and then looked back at Liz. 'You want to let us in on it, Mrs Beaumont?' one asked.

'We had a party here the night of Tuesday the thirty-first!' she replied, and flashed Pangborn a look of triumph and vicious dislike. 'We had a houseful! Didn't we, Thad?'

'We sure did.'

'In a case like this, a good alibi itself is cause for suspicion,' Pangborn said, but he looked offbalance.

'Oh, you silly, arrogant man!' Liz exclaimed. Bright color now flamed in her cheeks. Fear was passing; fury was arriving. She looked at the troopers. 'If my husband doesn't have an alibi for this murder you say he committed, you take him to the police station! If he does, this man says it probably means he did it anyway! What are you, afraid of a little honest work? Why are you here?'

'Quit, now, Liz,' Thad said quietly. 'They've got good reasons for being here. If Sheriff Pangborn was on a wild-goose chase or running on hunch, I believe he would come alone.'

Pangborn gave him a sour look, then sighed. 'Tell us about this party, Mr Beaumont.'

'It was for Tom Carroll,' Thad said. 'Tom has been in the University English Department for nineteen years, and he's been chairman for the last five. He retired on May twenty-seventh, when the academic year officially ended. He's always been a great favorite in the department, known to most of us old war-horses as Gonzo Tom because of his great liking for Hunter Thompson's essays. So we decided to throw a retirement party for him and his wife.'

'What time did this party end?'

Thad grinned. 'Well, it was over before four in the morning, but it ran late. When you put a bunch of English teachers together with an almost unlimited supply of booze, you could burn down a weekend. Guests started arriving around eight, and who was last, honey?'

'Rawlie DeLesseps and that awful woman from the History Department he's been going out with since Jesus was a baby,' she said. 'The one who goes around blaring: 'Just call me Billie, everyone does.''

'Right,' Thad said. He was grinning now. 'The Wicked Witch of the East.'

Pangborn's eyes were sending a clear you're-lying-and-we-both-know-it message. 'And what time did these friends leave?'

Thad shuddered a little. 'Friends? Rawlie, yes. That woman, most definitely not.'

'Two o'clock,' Liz said.

Thad nodded. 'It had to have been at least two when we saw them out. Damn near poured them out. As I indicated, it will be a snowy day in hell before I'm inducted into the Wilhelmina Burks Fan Club, but I would have insisted they stay over if he'd had more than three miles to drive, or if it had been earlier. No one on the roads at that hour on a Tuesday night — Wednesday morning, sorry — anyhow. Except maybe a few deer raiding the gardens.' He shut his mouth abruptly. In his relief he was close to babbling.

There was a moment's silence. The two troopers were now looking at the floor. Pangborn had an expression on his face Thad could not read — he didn't believe he had ever seen it before. Not chagrin, although chagrin was a part of it.

What in the fuck is going on here?

'Well, that's very convenient, Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said at last, 'but it's a long way from rock-solid. We've got the word of you and your wife — or guesstimate — as to when you saw this last couple out. If they were as blasted as you seem to think, they'll hardly be able to corroborate what you've said. And if this DeLesseps fellow really is a friend, he might say . . . well, who knows?'

All the same, Alan Pangborn was losing steam. Thad saw it and believed — no, knew — the state troopers did, too. Yet the man wasn't ready to let it go. The fear Thad had felt initially and the anger which had followed it were changing to fascination and curiosity. He thought he had never seen puzzlement and certainty so equally at war. The fact of the party — and he must accept as fact something which could so easily be checked — had shaken him . . . but not convinced him. Nor, he saw, were the troopers entirely convinced. The only difference was that the troopers weren't so hot under the collar. They hadn't known Homer Gamache personally, and so they

didn't have any personal stake in this. Alan Pangborn had, and did.

I knew him, too, Thad thought. So maybe I have a stake in it, too. Apart from my hide, that is.

'Look,' he said patiently, keeping his gaze locked with Pangborn's and trying not to return hostility in kind, 'let's get real, as my students like to say. You asked if we could effectively prove our whereabouts — '

'Your whereabouts, Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said.

'Okay, my whereabouts. Five pretty difficult hours. Hours when most people are in bed. Thanks to nothing more than blind luck, we — I, if you prefer — can cover at least three of those five hours. Maybe Rawlie and his odious lady friend left at two, maybe they left at one-thirty or twofifteen. Whenever it was, it was late. They'll corroborate that, and the Burks woman wouldn't lie me an alibi even if Rawlie would. I think if Billie Burks saw me washed up drowning on the beach, she'd throw a bucket of water on me.'

Liz gave him an odd, grimacing little smile as she took William, who was beginning to squirm, from him. At first he didn't understand that smile, and then it came to him. It was that phrase, of course — lie me an alibi. It was a phrase which Alexis Machine, arch-villain of the George Stark novels, sometimes used. It was odd, in a way; he could not remember ever using a Stark-ism in conversation before. On the other hand, he had never been accused of murder before, either, and murder was a George Stark kind of situation.

'Even supposing we're off by an hour and the last guests left at one,' he continued, 'and further supposing I jumped into my car the minute — the second — they were gone over the hill, and then drove like a mad bastard for Castle Rock, it would be four-thirty or five o'clock in the morning before I could possibly get there. No turnpike going west, you know.'

One of the troopers began: 'And the Arsenault woman said it was about quarter of one when she saw — '

'We don't need to go into that right now,' Alan interrupted quickly.

Liz made a rude, exasperated sound, and Wendy goggled at her comically. In the crook of her other arm, William stopped squirming, suddenly engrossed in the wonderfulness of his own twiddling fingers. To Thad she said, 'There were still lots of people here at one, Thad. Lots of them.'

Then she rounded on Alan Pangborn — really rounded on him this time.

'What is wrong with you, Sheriff? Why are you so bullheadedly determined to lay this off on my husband? Are you a stupid man? A lazy man? A bad man? You don't look like any of those things, but your behavior makes me wonder. It makes me wonder very much. Perhaps it was a lottery. Was that it? Did you draw his name out of a fucking hat?'

Alan recoiled slightly, clearly surprised — and discomfited — by her ferocity. 'Mrs Beaumont — '

'I have the advantage, I'm afraid, Sheriff,' Thad said. 'You think I killed Homer Gamache —'

'Mr Beaumont, you have not been charged with — '

'No. But you think it, don't you?'

Color, solid and bricklike, not embarrassment, Thad thought, but frustration, had beef slowly climbing into Pangborn's cheeks like color in a thermometer. 'Yes, sir,' he said. 'I do think it. In spite of the things you and your wife have said.'

This reply filled Thad with wonder. What, in God's name, could have happened to make this man (who, as Liz had said, did not look at all stupid) so sure? So goddamned sure?

Thad felt a shiver go up his spine . . . and then a peculiar thing happened. A phantom sound filled his mind — not his head but his mind — for a moment. It was a sound which imparted an aching sense of déjà vu for it had been almost thirty years since he had last heard it. It was the ghostly sound of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small birds.

He put a hand up to his head and touched the small scar there, and the shiver came again, stronger this time, twisting through his flesh like wire. Lie me an alibi, George, he thought. I'm in a bit of a tight here, so lie me an alibi.

'Thad?' Liz asked. 'Are you all right?'

'Hmmm?' He looked around at her.

'You're pale.'

'I'm fine,' he said, and he was. The sound was gone. If it had really been there at all.

He turned back to Pangborn.

'As I said, Sheriff, I have a certain advantage in this matter. You think I killed Homer. I, however, know I didn't. Except in books, I've never killed anyone.'

'Mr Beaumont — '

'I understand your outrage. He was a nice old man with an overbearing wife, a funky sense of humor, and only one arm. I'm outraged, too. I'll do anything I can to help, but you'll have to drop this secret police stuff and tell me why you're here — what in the world led you to me in the first place. I'm bewildered.'

Alan looked at him for a very long time and then said: 'Every instinct in my body says you are telling the truth.'

'Thank God,' Liz said. 'The man sees sense.'

'If it turns out you are,' Alan said, looking only at Thad, 'I will personally find the person in A.S. R. and I. who screwed up this ID and pull his skin off.'

'What's A.S. and whatever?' Liz asked.

'Armed Services Records and Identification,' one of the troopers said, 'Washington.'

'I've never known them to screw up before,' Alan went on in the same slow tone. 'They say there's a first time for everything, but . . . if they haven't screwed up and if this party of yours checks out, I'm going to be pretty damned bewildered myself.'

'Can't you tell us what this is all about?' Thad asked.

Alan sighed. 'We've come this far; why not? In all truth, the last guests to leave your party don't matter that much anyway. If you were here at midnight, if there are witnesses who can swear you were — '

'Twenty-five at least,' Liz said.

' — then you're off the hook. Putting together the eyewitness account of the lady the trooper mentioned and the medical examiner's postmortem, we can be almost positive Homer was killed between one and three a.m. on June first. He was bludgeoned to death with his own prosthetic arm.'

'Dear Jesus,' Liz muttered. 'And you thought Thad — '

'Homer's truck was found two nights ago in the parking lot of a rest stop on I-95 in Connecticut, close to the New York border' ' Alan paused. 'There were fingerprints all over it, Mr Beaumont. Most were Homer's, but a good many belonged to the perpetrator. Several of the perp's were excellent. One was almost moulage-cast in a wad of gum the guy took out of his mouth and then stuck on the dashboard with his thumb. It hardened there. The best one of all, though, was on the rear view mirror. It was every bit as good as a print made in a police station. Only the one on the mirror was rolled in blood instead of ink.'

'Then why Thad?' Liz was demanding indignantly. 'Party or no party, how could you think that Thad — ?'

Alan looked at her and said, 'When the people at A.S. R. and I. fed the prints into their graphics computer, your husband's service record came back. Your husband's prints came back, to be exact.'

For a moment Thad and Liz could only look at each other, stunned to silence. Then Liz said: 'It was a mistake, then. Surely the people who check these things do make mistakes from time to time.' 'Yes, but they're rarely mistakes of this magnitude. There are gray areas in print identification, sure. Laymen who grow up watching shows like Kojak and Barnaby Jones get the idea that fingerprinting is an exact science, and it isn't. But computerization has taken a lot of the grays out of print comparisons, and this case yielded prints which were extraordinarily good. When I say they were your husband's prints, Mrs Beaumont, I mean what I say. I've seen the computer sheets, and I've seen the overlays. The match is not just close.'

Now he turned back to Thad and stared at him with his flinty blue eyes.

'The match is exact.'

Liz stared at him with her mouth open, and in her arms first William and then Wendy began to cry.

Eight

Pangborn Pays a Visit

1

When the doorbell rang again at quarter past seven that evening, it was Liz again who went to answer it, because she was done getting William ready for bed and Thad was still hard at work on Wendy. The books all said parenting was a learned skill which had nothing to do with the sex of the parent, but Liz had her doubts. Thad pulled his weight, was in fact scrupulous about doing his share, but he was slow. He could whip out to the store and back on a Sunday afternoon in the time it took her to work her way over to the last aisle, but when it came to getting the twins ready for bed, well . . .

William was bathed, freshly diapered, zippered into his green sleep-suit, and sitting in the playpen while Thad was still laboring over Wendy's diapers (and he hadn't gotten all the soap out of her hair, she saw, but considering the day they'd put in, she believed she'd get it herself with a washcloth later on and say nothing).

Liz walked through the living room to the front door and looked out the side window. She saw Sheriff Pangborn standing outside. He was alone this time, but that didn't do much to alleviate her distress.

She turned her head and called across the living room and into the downstairs bathroom cum baby service station, 'He's back!' Her voice carried a clearly discernible note of alarm.

There was a long pause and then Thad came into the doorway on the far side of the parlor. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. 'Who?' he said in an odd, slow voice.

'Pangborn,' she said. 'Thad, are you okay?' Wendy was in his arms, wearing her diaper but nothing else, and she had her hands all over his face . . . but the little Liz could see of him just didn't took right.

'I'm fine. Let him in. I'll get this one in her suit.' And before Liz could say anything else, he was abruptly gone.

Alan Pangborn, meanwhile, was still standing patiently on the stoop. He had seen Liz look out and hadn't rung again. He had the air of a man who wished he had worn a hat so he could hold it in his hands, and perhaps even wring it a little.

Slowly, and with no welcoming smile at all, she took the chain off and let him in.

2

Wendy was wiggly and full of fun, which made her hard to handle. Thad managed to get her feet into the sleep—suit, then her arms, and was finally able to pop her hands out of the cuffs. She immediately reached up with one of them and honked his nose briskly. He recoiled instead of laughing as he usually did, and Wendy looked up at him from the changing table in mild puzzlement. He reached for the zipper which ran up the suit from the left leg to the throat, then stopped and held his hands out in front of him. They were shaking. It was a tiny tremble, but it was there.

What the hell are you scared about? Or do you have the guilts again?

No; not the guilts. He almost wished it was. The fact was, he'd just had another scare in a day which had been too full of them.

First had come the police, with their odd accusation and their even odder certainty. Then that strange, haunted, cheeping sound. He hadn't known what it was, not for sure, although it had been familiar.

After supper it had come again.

He had gone up to his study to proof what he had done on the new book, The Golden Dog, that day. And suddenly, as he was bending over the sheaf of manuscript to make a minor correction, the sound filled his head. Thousands of birds, all cheeping and twittering at once, and this time an image came with the sound.

Sparrows.

Thousands and thousands of them, lined up along roofpeaks and jostling for place along the telephone wires, the way they did in the early spring, while the last snows of March were still lying on the ground in dirty little granulated piles.

Oh the headache is coming, he thought with dismay, and the voice in which that thought spoke — the voice of a frightened boy — was what tipped familiarity over into memory. Terror leaped up his throat then and seemed to clutch at the sides of his head with freezing hands.

Is it the tumor? Has it come back? Is it malignant this time?

The phantom sound — the voices of the birds — grew suddenly louder, almost deafening. It was joined by a thin, tenebrous flutter of wings. Now he could see them taking off, all of them at once; thousands of small birds darkening a white spring sky.

'Gonna hook back north, hoss,' he heard himself say in a low, guttural voice, a voice which was not his own.

Then, suddenly, the sight and sound of the birds was gone. It was 1988, not 1960, and he was in his study. He was a grown man with a wife, two kids, and a Remington typewriter.

He had drawn a long, gasping breath. There had been no ensuing headache. Not then, not now. He felt fine. Except . . .

Except when he looked down at the sheaf of manuscript again, he saw that he had written something there. It was slashed across the lines of neat type in large capital letters.

THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, he had written.

He had discarded the Scripto pen and used one of the Berol Black Beauties to write it, although he had no memory of trading one for the other. He didn't even use the pencils anymore. The Berols belonged to a dead age . . . a dark age. He had tossed the pencil he had used back into the jar and then bundled the whole thing into one of the drawers. The hand he used to do this was not quite steady.

Then Liz had called him to help get the twins ready for bed, and he had gone down to help her. He had wanted to tell her what had happened, but found that simple terror — terror that the childhood tumor had recurred, terror that this time it would be malignant had sealed his lips. He might have told her just the same . . . but then the doorbell had rung, Liz had gone to answer it, and she had said exactly the wrong thing in exactly the wrong tone.

He's back! Liz had cried in perfectly understandable irritation and dismay, and terror had swept through him like a cold, clear gust of wind. Terror, and one word: Stark. In the one second before reality reasserted itself, he was positive that was who she meant. George Stark. The sparrows were flying and Stark had returned. He was dead, dead and publicly buried, he had never really existed in the first place, but that didn't matter; real or not, he was back just the same.

Quit it, he told himself. You're not a jumpy man, and there's no need to let this bizarre situation make you into one. The sound you heard — the sound of the birds — is a simple psychological phenomenon called 'persistence of memory'. It's brought on by stress and pressure. So just get yourself under control.

But some of the terror lingered. The sound of the birds had caused not only déjà vu, that sense of having experienced something before, but presque vu as well.

Presque vu: a sense of experiencing something which has not happened yet but will. Not precognition, exactly, but misplaced memory.

Misplaced bullshit, that's what you mean.

He held his hands out and looked fixedly at them. The trembling became infinitesimal, then stopped altogether. When he was sure he wasn't going to pinch Wendy's bath-pink skin into the zipper of her sleep-suit, he pulled it up, carried her into the living room, popped her into the playpen with her brother, then went out to the hall, where Liz was standing with Alan Pangborn. Except for the fact that Pangborn was alone this time, it could have been this morning all over again.

Now this is a legitimate time and place for a little vu of one kind or another, he thought, but there was nothing funny in it. That other feeling was still too much with him . . . and the sound of the sparrows. 'What can I do for you, Sheriff?' he asked, not smiling.

Ah! Something else that wasn't the same. Pangborn had a six-pack in one hand. Now he held it up. 'I wondered if we could all have a cold one,' he said, 'and talk this over.'

3

Liz and Alan Pangborn both had a beer; Thad drank a Pepsi from the fridge. As they talked, they watched the twins play with each other in their oddly solemn way.

'I have no business being here,' Alan said. 'I'm socializing with a man who is now a suspect in not just one murder but two.'

'Two!' Liz cried.

'I'll get to it. In fact, I'll get to everything. I guess I'm going to spiu it all. For one thing, I'm sure your husband has an alibi for this second murder, as well. The state cops are, too. They're quietly running around in circles.'

'Who's been killed?' Thad asked.

'A young man named Frederick Clawson, in Washington, D.C.'

He watched as Liz jerked in her chair, spilling a little beer over the back of her hand. 'I see you know the name, Mrs Beaumont,' he added without noticeable irony.

'What's going on?' she asked in a strengthless whisper.

'I don't have the slightest idea what's going on. I'm going crazy trying to figure it out. I'm not here to arrest you or even to hassle you, Mr Beaumont, although I'll be goddamned if I can understand how someone else can have committed these two crimes. I'm here to ask for your help.' 'Why don't you call me Thad?'

Alan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. 'I think I'd be more comfortable with Mr Beaumont, for the time being.'

Thad nodded. 'Just as you like. So Clawson's dead.' He looked down meditatively for a moment, then up at Alan again. 'Were my fingerprints all over the scene of this crime, as well?'

'Yes — and in more ways than one. People magazine did a write-up on you recently, didn't they, Mr Beaumont?'

'Two weeks ago,' Thad agreed.

'The article was found in Clawson's apartment. One page appears to have been used as a symbol in what looks like a highly ritualized murder.'

'Christ,' Liz said. She sounded both tired and horrified. 'Are you willing to tell me who he is to you?' Alan asked. Thad nodded. 'There's no reason not to. Did you happen to read that article, Sheriff'

'My wife brings the magazine home from the supermarket,' he said, 'but I better tell you the truth — I only looked at the pictures. I intend to go back and read the text as soon as I can.'

'You didn't miss much — but Frederick Clawson is the reason that article happened. You see — '

Alan held up a hand. 'We'll get to him, but let's go back to Homer Gamache first. We've rechecked with A.S.R. and 1. The prints on Gamache's truck — and in Clawson's apartment, too, although none of them are as perfect as the bubble-gum print and the mirror print — do seem to match yours exactly. Which means if you didn't do it, we have two people with exactly the same prints, and that one belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records.'

He looked at William and Wendy, who were trying to play pat-a-cake in their playpen. They seemed to be mostly endangering each other's eyesight. 'Are they identical?' he asked.

'No,' Liz said. 'They do look alike, but they're brother and sister, and brother-sister twins are never identical.'

Alan nodded. 'Not even identical twins have identical prints,' he said. He paused for a moment and then added in a casual voice which Thad believed was completely counterfeit: 'You don't happen to have a twin brother, do you, Mr Beaumont?'

Thad shook his head slowly. 'No,' he said. 'I don't have any siblings at all, and my folks are dead. William and Wendy are my only living blood relatives.' He smiled at the children, then looked back at Pangborn. 'Liz had a miscarriage back in 1974,' he said. 'Those . . . those first ones . . . were also twins, I understand, although I don't suppose there's any way of telling if they would have been identical — not when the miscarriage comes in the second month. And if there is, who would want to know?'

Alan shrugged, looking a little embarrased.

'She was shopping at Filene's. In Boston. Someone pushed her. She fell all the way down an escalator, cut one arm pretty badly — if a security cop hadn't been there to put a tourniquet right on it, it would have been touch and go for her, too — and she lost the twins.'

'Is this in the People article?' Alan asked.

Liz smiled humorlessly and shook her head. 'We reserved the right to edit our lives when we agreed to do the story, Sheriff Pangborn. We didn't tell Mike Donaldson, the man who came to do the interview, of course, but that's what we did.'

'Was the push deliberate?'

'No way to tell,' Liz said. Her eyes settled on William and Wendy . . . brooded upon them. 'If it was an accidental bump, it was a damned hard one, though. I went flying — didn't touch the escalator at all until I was almost halfway down. All the same, I've tried to convince myself that's what it was. It's easier to get along with. The idea that someone would push a woman down a steep escalator just to see what happened . . . that's an idea guaranteed to keep you awake nights.'

Alan nodded.

'The doctors we saw told us Liz would probably never have another child,' Thad said. 'When she got pregnant with William and Wendy, they told us she'd probably never carry them all the way to term. But she sailed through it. And, after over ten years, I've finally gotten to work on a new book under my own name. It'll be my third. So you see, it's been good for both of us.'

'The other name you wrote under was George Stark.'

Thad nodded. 'But that's over now. It started being over when Liz got into her eighth month, still safe and sound. I decided if I was going to be a father again, I ought to start being myself again, as well.'

4

There was a kind of beat in the conversation then — not quite a pause. Then Thad said, 'Confess, Sheriff Pangborn.

Alan raised his eyebrows. 'Beg your pardon?'

A smile touched the corners of Thad's mouth. 'I won't say you had the scenario all worked out, but I bet you at least had the broad strokes. If I had an identical twin brother, maybe he hosted our party. That way I could have been in Castle Rock, murdering Homer Gamache and putting my fingerprints all over his truck. But it couldn't stop there, could it? My twin sleeps with my wife and keeps my appointments while I drive Homer's truck to that rest stop in Connecticut, steal another car there, drive to New York, ditch the hot car, then take a train or a plane to Washington, D.C. Once I'm there, I waste Clawson and hurry back to Ludlow, pack my twin off to wherever he was, and he and I both take up the threads of our lives again. Or all three of us, if you assume Liz here was part of the deception.'

Liz stared at him for a moment, and then began to laugh. She did not laugh long, but she laughed hard while she did. There was nothing forced about it, but it was grudging laughter, all the same — an expression of humor from a woman who has been surprised into it.

Alan was looking at Thad with frank and open surprise. The twins laughed at their mother for a moment — or perhaps with her — and then resumed rolling a large yellow ball slowly back and forth in the playpen.

'Thad, that's horrible,' Liz said when she had gained control of herself.

'Maybe it is,' he said. 'If so, I'm sorry.'

'It's . . . pretty involved,' Alan said.

Thad grinned at him. 'You're not a fan of the late George Stark, I take it.'

'Frankly, no. But I have a deputy, Norris Ridgewick, who is. He had to explain to me what all the hoop-de-doo was about.'

'Well, Stark messed with some of the conventions of the mystery story. Never anything so Agatha Christie as the scenario I just suggested, but that doesn't mean I can't think that way if I put my mind to it. Come on, Sheriff — had the thought crossed your mind, or not? If not, I really do owe my wife an apology.'

Alan was silent for a moment, smiling a little and clearly thinking a lot. At last he said, 'Maybe I was thinking along those lines. Not seriously, and not just that way, but you don't have to apologize to your good lady. Since this morning I've found myself willing to consider even the most outrageous possibilities.'

'Given the situation.'

'Given the situation, yes.'

Smiting himself, Thad said: 'I was born in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Sheriff. There's no need to take my word when you can check the records for any twin brothers I may have, you know, forgotten.'

Alan shook his head and drank some more of his beer. 'It was a wild idea, and I feel a little like a horse's ass, but that's not completely new. I've felt that way since this morning, when you sprang that party on us. We ran down the names, by the way. They check out.'

'Of course they do,' Liz said with a touch of asperity.

'And since you don't have a twin brother anyway, it pretty well closes the subject.'

'Suppose for a second,' Thad said, 'just for the sake of argument, that it did happen the way I suggested. It would make a hell of a yarn . . . up to a point.'

'What point is that?' Alan asked.

'The fingerprints. Why would I go to all the trouble of setting up an alibi here with a fellow who looked just like me . . . then bugger it all by leaving fingerprints at the scenes of the murders?'

Liz said, 'I bet you really will check the birth records, won't you, Sheriff'

Alan said stolidly: 'The basis of police procedure is beat it until it's dead. But I already know what I'll find if I do.' He hesitated, then added, 'It wasn't just the party. You came across as a man who was speaking the truth, Mr Beaumont. I've had some experience telling the difference. So far as I've been able to tell in my time as a police officer, there are very few good liars in the world. They may show up from time to time in those mystery novels you were talking about, but in real life they're pretty rare.'

'So why the fingerprints at all?' Thad asked. 'That's what interests me. Is it just an amateur with my prints you're looking for? I doubt it. Has it crossed your mind that the very quality of the prints is suspect? You spoke of gray areas. I know a little bit about prints as a result of the research I did for the Stark novels, but I'm really quite lazy when it comes to that end of the job — it's so much easier just to sit there in front of the typewriter and make up lies. But don't there have to be a certain number of points of comparison before fingerprints can even be entered into evidence?'

'In Maine it's six,' Alan said. 'Six perfect compares have to be present for a fingerprint to be admitted as evidence.'

'And isn't it true that in most cases fingerprints are only half-prints, or quarter-prints, or just smudgy blurs with a few loops and whorls in them?'

'Yeah. In real life, criminals hardly ever go to WI on the basis of fingerprint evidence.'

'Yet here you have one on the rear-view mirror which you described as being as good as any print rolled in a police station, and another all but molded in a wad of gum. Somehow that's the one that really gets me. It's as if the fingerprints were put there for you to find.'

'It's crossed our minds.' In fact, it had done a good deal more. It was one of the most aggravating aspects of the case. The Clawson murder looked like a classic gangland hit on a blabbermouth: tongue cut out, penis in the victim's mouth, lots of blood, lots of pain, yet no one in the building had heard a goddamn thing. But if it had been a professional job, how come Beaumont's prints were all over the place? Could anything which looked so much like a frame not be a frame? Not unless someone had come up with a brand-new gimmick. In the meantime, the old maxim still held good with Alan Pangborn: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck.

'Can fingerprints be planted?' Thad asked.

'Do you read minds as well as write books, Mr Beaumont?'

'Read minds, write books, but honey, I don't do windows.'

Alan had a mouthful of beer, and laughter so surprised him that he almost sprayed it over the carpet. He managed to swallow, although some went down his windpipe and he began to cough. Liz got up and whammed him briskly on the back several times. It was perhaps an odd thing to do, but it did not strike her as odd; life with two small babies had conditioned her. William and Wendy stared from the playpen, the yellow ball stopped dead and forgotten between them. William began to laugh. Wendy took her cue from him.

For some reason, this made Alan laugh harder.

Thad joined in. And, still pounding on his back, Liz also began to laugh.

'I'm okay,' Alan said, still coughing and laughing. 'Really.'

Liz whacked him one final time. Beer splurted up the neck of Alan's bottle like a geyser letting off steam and splatted onto the crotch of his pants.

' S' okay,' Thad said. 'Diapers we got.'

Then they were laughing all over again, and at some time between the moment when Alan Pangborn started coughing and the one when he finally managed to stop laughing, the three of them had become at least temporary friends.

5

'So far as I know or have been able to find out, fingerprints can't be planted,' Alan said, picking up the thread of conversation some time later — by now they were on their second round, and the embarrassing stain on the crotch of his pants was beginning to dry. The twins had fallen asleep in the playpen, and Liz had left the room to go to the bathroom. 'Of course, we're still checking, because up until this morning we had no reason to suspect anything like that might even have been tried in this case. I know it has been tried; a few years ago a kidnapper took imprints of his prisoner's fingerpads before killing him, turned them into . . . dies, I suppose you'd call them . . . and stamped them into very thin plastic. He put the plastic fingertips over the pads of his own fingers, and attempted to leave the prints all over his victim's mountain cabin, so the police would think the whole kidnapping was a hoax, and the guy was free.'

'It didn't work?'

'The cops got some lovely prints,' Alan said. 'The perp's. The natural oils on the guy's fingers flattened the counterfeit fingerprints, and because the plastic was thin and naturally receptive to even the most delicate shapes, it rose up again in the guy's own prints.' 'Maybe a different material — '

'Sure, maybe. This happened in the mid-fifties, and I imagine a hundred new kinds of polymer plastic have been invented since then. It could be. All we can say for now is that no one in forensics or criminology has ever heard of it being done, and I think that's the way it'll stay.'

Liz came back into the room and sat down, curling her feet under her like a cat and pulling her skirt over her calves. Thad admired the gesture, which seemed to him somehow timeless and eternally graceful.

'Meantime, there are other considerations here, Thad.'

Thad and Liz exchanged a flicker of a glance at Alan's use of the first name, so swift Alan missed it. He had drawn a battered notebook from his hip pocket and was looking at one of the pages.

'Do you smoke?' he asked, looking up.

'No.

'He quit seven years ago,' Liz said. 'It was very hard for him, but he stuck with it.'

'There are critics who say the world would be a better place if I'd just pick a spot and die in it, but I choose to spite them,' Thad said. 'Why?'

'You did smoke, though.'

'Yes.'

'Pall Malls?'

Thad had been raising his can of soda. It stopped six inches shy of his mouth. 'How did you know that?'

'Your blood-type is A-negative?'

'I'm beginning to understand why you came primed to arrest me this morning,' Thad said. 'If I hadn't been so well alibied, I'd be in jail right now, wouldn't I?'

'Good guess.'

'You could have gotten his blood-type from his R.O.T.C. records,' Liz said. 'I assume that's where his fingerprints came from in the first place.'

'But not that I smoked Pall Mall cigarettes for fifteen years,' Thad said. 'So far as I know, stuff like that's not part of the records the army keeps.'

'This is stuff that's come in since this morning,' Alan told them. 'The ashtray in Homer Gamache's pick-up was full of Pall Mall cigarette butts. The old man only smoked an occasional pipe. There were a couple of Pall Mall butts in an ashtray in Frederick Clawson's apartment, as well. He didn't smoke at all, except maybe for a joint now and then. That's according to his landlady. We got our perp's blood-type from the spittle on the butts. The serologist's report also gave us a lot of other information. Better than fingerprints.'

Thad was no longer smiling. 'I don't understand this. I don't understand this at all.'

'There's one thing which doesn't match,' Pangborn said. 'Blonde hairs. We found half a dozen in Homer's truck, and we found another on the back of the chair the killer used in Clawson's living room. Your hair is black. Somehow I don't think you're wearing a rug.'

'No — Thad's not, but maybe the killer was,' Liz said bleakly.

'Maybe,' Alan agreed. 'If so, it was made of human hair. And why bother changing the color of your hair, if you're going to leave fingerprints and cigarette butts everywhere? Either the guy is very dumb or he was deliberately trying to implicate you. The blonde hair doesn't fit either way.'

'Maybe he just didn't want to be recognized,' Liz said. 'Remember, Thad was in People magazine barely two weeks ago. Coast to coast.'

'Yeah, that's a possibility. Although if this guy also looks like your husband, Mrs Beaumont — '

'Liz.'

'Okay, Liz. If he looks like your husband, he'd look like Thad Beaumont with blonde hair, wouldn't he?'

Liz looked fixedly at Thad for a moment and then began to giggle.

'What's so funny?' Thad asked.

'I'm trying to imagine you blonde,' she said, still giggling. 'I think you'd look like a very depraved David Bowie.'

'Is that funny?' Thad asked Alan. 'I don't think that's funny.'

'Well . . .' Alan said, smiling.

'Never mind. The guy could have been wearing sunglasses and deelie-boppers as well as a blonde wig, for all we know.'

'Not if the killer was the same guy Mrs Arsenault saw getting into Homer's truck at quarter of one in the morning of June first,' Alan said.

Thad leaned forward. 'Did he look like me?' he asked.

'She couldn't tell much except that he was wearing a suit. For what it's worth, I had one of my men, Norris Ridgewick, show her your picture today. She said she didn't think it was you, although she couldn't say for sure. She said she thought the man who got into Homer's truck was bigger.' He added dryly: 'That's one lady who believes in erring on the side of caution.'

'She could tell a size difference from a picture?' Liz asked doubtfully.

'She's seen Thad around town, summers,' Alan said. 'And she did say she couldn't be sure.'

Liz nodded. 'Of course she knows him. Both of us, for that matter. We buy fresh stuff at their vegetable stand all the time. Dumb. Sorry.'

'Nothing to apologize for,' Alan said. He finished his beer and checked his crotch. Dry. Good. There was a light stain there, probably not anything anyone but his wife would notice. 'Anyhow, that brings me to the last point . . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it. I doubt if it's even a part of this, but it never hurts to check. What's your shoe-size, Mr Beaumont?'

Thad glanced at Liz, who shrugged. 'I've got pretty small paws for a guy who goes six-one, I guess. I take a size ten, although half a size either way is — '

'The prints reported to us were probably bigger than that,' Alan said. 'I don't think the prints are a part of it, anyway, and even if they are, footprints can be faked. Stick some newspaper in the toes of shoes two or even three sizes too big for you and you're set.'

'What footprints are these?' Thad asked.

'Doesn't matter,' Alan said, shaking his head. 'We don't even have photos. I think we've got almost everything on the table that belongs there, Thad. Your fingerprints, your blood-type, your brand of cigarettes — '

'He doesn't — ' Liz began.

Alan held up a placatory hand. 'Old brand of cigarettes. I suppose I could be crazy for letting you in on all this — there's a part of me that says I am, anyway — but as long as we've gone this far, there's no sense ignoring the forest while we look at a few trees. You're tied in other ways, as well. Castle Rock is your legal residence as well as Ludlow, being as how you pay taxes in both places. Homer Gamache was more than just an acquaintance; he did . . . would odd jobs be correct?'

'Yes,' Liz said. 'He retired from full-time caretaking the year we bought the house — Dave Phillips and Charlie Fortin take turns doing that now — but he liked to keep his hand in.'

'If we assume that the hitchhiker Mrs Arsenault observed killed Homer — and that's the assumption we're going on — a question arises. Did the hitchhiker kill him because Homer was the first person to come along who was stupid enough — or drunk enough to pick him up, or did he kill him because he was Homer Gamache, acquaintance of Thad Beaumont?'

'How could he know Homer would come along?' Liz asked.

'Because it was Homer's bowling night, and Homer is — was — a creature of habit. He was like an old horse, Liz; he always went back to the barn by the same route.'

'Your first assumption, ' Thad said, 'was that Homer didn't stop because he was drunk but because he recognized the hitchhiker. A stranger who wanted to kill Homer wouldn't have tried the hitchhiking ploy at all. He would have figured it for a long shot, if not a totally lost cause.'

'Yes.'

'Thad,' Liz said in a voice which would not quite remain steady. 'The police thought he stopped because he saw it was Thad . . . didn't they?'

'Yes,' Thad said. He reached across and took her hand. 'They thought only someone like me — someone who knew him — would even try it that way. I suppose even the business suit fits in. What else does the well—dressed writer wear when he's planning on doing murder in the country at one o'clock in the morning? The good tweed, of course . . . the one with the brown suede patches on the elbows of the jacket. All the British mysteries insist it's absolutely de rigueur.'

He looked at Alan.

'It's pretty goddamned odd, isn't it? The whole thing.'

Alan nodded. 'It's as odd as a cod. Mrs Arsenault thought he'd started to cross the road or was at least on the verge of it when Homer came poking along in his pick-up. But the fact that you also knew this Clawson fellow in D.C. makes it seem more and more likely that Homer was killed because of who he was, not just because he was drunk enough to stop. So let's talk about Frederick Clawson, Thad. Tell me about him.'

Thad and Liz exchanged a glance.

'I think,' Thad said, 'that my wife might do the job more quickly and concisely than I could. She'll also swear less, I think.'

'Are you sure you want me to do it?' Liz asked him.

Thad nodded. Liz began to speak, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Thad interrupted once or twice near the start, then settled back, content to listen. For the next half-hour, he hardly spoke. Alan Pangborn took out his notebook and jotted in it, but after a few initial questions, he did not interrupt much, either.

Nine

The Invasion of the Creepazoid

1

'I call him a Creepazoid,' Liz began. 'I'm sorry that he's dead . . . but that's what he was, just the same. I don't know if genuine Creepazoids are born or made, but they rise to their own slimy station in life either way, so I guess it doesn't matter. Frederick Clawson's happened to be Washington, D.C. He went to the biggest legal snake-pit on earth to study for the bar.

'Thad, the kiddos are stirring — will you give them their night-bottles? And I'd like another beer, please.'

He got her the beer and then went out into the kitchen to warm the bottles. He wedged the kitchen door open so he could hear better . . . and slammed his kneecap in the process. This was something he had done so many times before that he barely noticed it.

The sparrows are flying again, he thought, and rubbed at the scar on his forehead as he first filled a saucepan with warm water, then put it on the stove. Now if I only knew what the fuck that means.

'We eventually got most of this story from Clawson himself,' Liz went on, 'but his perspective was naturally a little skewed Thad likes to say all of us are the heroes of our own lives, and according to Clawson he was more of a Boswell than a Creepazoid . . . but we were able to put together a more balanced version by adding stuff we got from the people at Darwin Press, which published the novels Thad wrote under Stark's name, and the stuff Rick Cowley passed along.'

'Who is Rick Cowley?' Alan asked.

'The literary agent who handled Thad under both names.'

'And what did Clawson — your Creepazoid — want?'

'Money,' Liz said dryly.

In the kitchen, Thad took the two night-bottles (only half fun to help cut down on those inconvenient changes in the middle of the night) from the fridge and popped them in the pan of water. What Liz had said was right . . . but it was also wrong. Clawson had wanted a great deal more than money.

Liz might have read his mind.

'Not that money was all he wanted. I'm not even sure that was the main thing. He also wanted to be known as the man who exposed George Stark's real identity,'

'Sort of like being the one who finally manages to unmask The Incredible Spider-Man?'

'Exactly.'

Thad put a finger in the saucepan to test the water, then leaned back against the stove with his arms crossed, listening. He realized that he wanted a cigarette — for the first time in years he wanted a cigarette again.

Thad shivered.

2

'Clawson was in too many right places at too many right times,' Liz said. 'Not only was he a law student, he was a part-time bookstore clerk. Not only was he a bookstore clerk, he was an avid fan of George Stark's. And he may have been the only George Stark fan in the country who had also read Thad Beaumont's two novels.'

In the kitchen, Thad grinned — not without some sourness — and tested the water in the saucepan again.

'I think he wanted to create some sort of grand drama out of his suspicions,' Liz went on. 'As things turned out, he had to work his fanny off to rise above the pedestrian. Once he had decided Stark was really Beaumont and vice versa, he called Darwin Press.'

'Stark's book publisher.'

'Right. He got to Ellie Golden, the woman who edited the Stark novels. He asked the question straight out — please tell me if George Stark is really Thaddeus Beaumont. Ellie said the idea was ridiculous. Clawson then asked about the author photo on the back of the Stark novels. He said he wanted the address of the man in the picture. Ellie told him she couldn't give out the addresses of the publishing company's authors.

'Clawson said, 'I don't want Stark's address, I want the address of the man in the picture. The man posing as Stark.' Ellie told him he was being ridiculous — that the man in the author photo was George Stark.

'Previous to this, the publisher never came out and said it was just a pen name?' Alan asked. He sounded genuinely curious. 'They took the position that he was a real man all along?'

'Oh yes — Thad insisted.'

Yes, he thought, taking the bottles out of the saucepan and testing the milk against the inside of his wrist. Thad insisted. In retrospect, Thad doesn't know just why he insisted, does not in fact have the slightest idea, but Thad did indeed insist.

He took the bottles back into the living room, avoiding a collision with the kitchen table on the way. He gave a bottle to each twin. They hoisted them solemnly, sleepily, and began to suck. Thad sat down again. He listened to Liz and told himself that the thought of a cigarette was the furthest thing from his mind.

'Anyway,' Liz said, 'Clawson wanted to ask more questions he had a whole truckload of them, I guess — but Ellie wouldn't play. She told him to call Rick Cowley and then hung up on him. Clawson then called Rick's office and got Miriam. She's Rick's ex-wife. Also his partner in the agency. The arrangement's a little odd, but they get along very well.

'Clawson asked her the same thing — if George Stark was really Thad Beaumont. According to Miriam, she told him yes. Also that she was Dolley Madison. 'I've divorced James,' she said, 'Thad is divorcing Liz, and we two shall marry in the spring!' And hung up. She then rushed into Rick's office and told him some guy in Washington, D.C., was prying around the edges of Thad's secret identity. After that, Clawson's calls to Cowley Associates netted him nothing but quick hang-ups.'

Liz took a long swallow of her beer.

'He didn't give up, though. I've decided that real Creepazoids never do. He just decided that pretty-please wasn't going to work.'

'And he didn't call Thad?' Alan asked.

'No, not once.'

'You have an unlisted number, I suppose.'

Thad made one of his few direct contributions to the story. 'We're not listed in the public directories, Alan, but the phone here in Ludlow is listed in the faculty directory. It has to be. I'm a teacher, and I have advisees.'

'But the guy never went directly to the horse's mouth,' Alan marvelled.

'He got in touch later on . . . by letter,' Liz said. 'But that's getting ahead of things. Should I go on?'

'Please,' Alan said. 'It's a fascinating story in its own right.'

'Well,' Liz said, 'it took our Creepazoid just three weeks and probably less than five hundred dollars to ferret out what he was positive about all along — that Thad and George Stark were the same man.

'He started with Literary Market Place, which publishing types just call LMP. It's a digest of names, addresses, and business phone numbers for just about everyone in the field — writers, editors, publishers, agents. Using that and the 'People' column in Publishers Weekly, he managed to isolate half a dozen Darwin Press employees who left the company between the summer of

1986 and the summer of 1987.

'One of them had the information and was willing to spill it. Ellie Golden's pretty sure the culprit was the girl who was the chief comptroller's secretary for eight months in '85 and '86. Ellie called her a slut from Vassar with bad nasal habits.'

Alan laughed.

'Thad believes that's who it was, too,' Liz went on, 'because the smoking gun turned out to be photostats of royalty statements for George Stark. They came from the office of Roland Burrets.'

'The Darwin Press chief comptroller,' Thad said. He was watching the twins while he listened. They were lying on their backs now, sleep-suited feet pressed chummily together, bottles pointed toward the ceiling. Their eyes were glassy and distant. Soon, he knew, they would fall asleep for the night . . . and when they did, they would do it together. They do everything together, Thad thought. The babies are sleepy and the sparrows are flying —

He touched the scar again.

'Thad's name wasn't on the photostats,' Liz said. 'Royalty statements sometimes lead to checks, but they're not checks themselves, so it didn't have to appear there. You follow that, don't you?'

Alan nodded.

'But the address still told him most of what he needed to know. It was Mr George Stark, P.O. Box 1642, Brewer, Maine 04412. That's a long way from Mississippi, where Stark was supposed to live. A look at a Maine map would have told him that the town immediately south of Brewer is Ludlow, and he knew what well regarded if not exactly famous writer lived there. Thaddeus Beaumont. What a coincidence.

'Neither Thad nor I ever saw him in person, but he saw Thad. He knew when Darwin Press mailed out its quarterly royalty checks from the photostats he had already received. Most royalty checks go to the author's agent first. Then the agent issues a new one, which reflects the original amount minus his commission. But in Stark's case, the comptroller mailed the checks directly to the Brewer post office box.'

'What about the agent's commission?' Alan asked.

'Clipped off the total amount at Darwin Press and sent to Rick by separate check,' Liz said. 'That would have been another clear signal to Clawson that George Stark wasn't what he claimed to be . . . only by then, Clawson didn't need any more clues. He wanted hard proof. And set out to get it.

'When it was time for the royalty check to be issued, Clawson flew up here. He stayed at the Holiday Inn nights; he spent his days 'staking out' the Brewer post office. That's exactly how he put it in the letter Thad got later on. It was a stakeout. All very film noir. It was a pretty cut-rate investigation, though. If 'Stark' hadn't shown up to collect his check on the fourth day of his stay, Clawson would have had to fold his tent and steal back into the night. But I don't think it would have ended there. When a genuine Creepazoid gets his teeth in you, he doesn't let go until he's bitten out a big chunk.'

'Or until you knock his teeth out,' Thad grunted. He saw Alan turn in his direction, eyebrows raised, and grimaced. Bad choice of words. Someone had apparently done just that to Liz's Creepazoid . . . or something even worse.

'It's a moot question, anyway,' Liz resumed, and Alan turned back to her. 'It didn't take that long. On the third day, while he was sitting on a park bench across from the post office, he saw Thad's Suburban pull into one of the ten-minute parking slots near the post office.'

Liz took another swallow of beer and wiped foam off her upper lip. When her hand came away, she was smiling.

'Now here's the part I like,' she said. 'It's just d-d-delicious, as the gay fellow in Brideshead Revisited used to say. Clawson had a camera. This little tiny camera, the sort you can cup in the palm of your hand. When you're ready to take your shot, you just spread your fingers a little to let the lens peek through, and bingo! There you are.'

She giggled a little, shaking her head at the image.

'He said in his letter he got it from some catalogue that sells spy gear — telephone bugs, goo you swab on envelopes to turn them transparent for ten or fifteen minutes, self-destructing briefcases, stuff like that. Secret Agent X-9 Clawson, reporting for duty. I bet he would have gotten a hollow tooth filled with cyanide, if it was legal to sell them. He was heavily into the image.

'Anyhow, he got half a dozen fairly passable photos. Not arty stuff, but you could see who the subject was and what he was doing. There was a shot of Thad approaching the post office boxes in the lobby, a shot of Thad putting his key into box 1642, and one of him removing an envelope.'