by Stephen King
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 off-balance.
"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 were on a wild-goose chase or running on hunch, I believe he would come alone. "
Pangborn gave him a sour took, 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'relying-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 bell before I'm inducted into the Wilhemina 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 two-fifteen. 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 been 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 deja 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, twi
sting 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 post-mortem, 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 1-95 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 rearview 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 look 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, 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 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.