by Stephen King
"Wasn't he the guy who believed in fairies?" Ralph asked.
She sighed. "Come upstairs and let's get funky. Then maybe we'll both sleep."
Ralph went willingly enough, but even while they were making love (except at the moment of climax, when all thought was obliterated), he found himself remembering Doyle's dictum. It was smart. Logical. But could you amend it to Once you eliminate the natural, whatever remains must be supernatural? No. He could not believe in any explanation that transgressed the rules of the natural world, not just as a police detective but as a man. A real person had killed Frank Peterson, not a spook from a comic book. So what remained, no matter how improbable? Only one thing. Frank Peterson's killer had been Terry Maitland, now deceased.
5
On that Wednesday night, the July moon had risen as bloated and orange as a gigantic tropical fruit. By early Thursday morning, as Fred Peterson stood in his backyard, on the footstool where he had rested his feet during many a Sunday afternoon football game, it had shrunk to a cold silver coin riding high overhead.
He slipped the noose around his neck and yanked it until the knot rested against the angle of his jaw, as the Wikipedia entry had specified (complete with helpful illustration). The other end was attached to the branch of a hackberry tree like the one beyond Ralph Anderson's fence, although this one was a rather more elderly representative of Flint City's flora, having sprouted around the time an American bomber was dropping its payload on Hiroshima (surely a supernatural event to the Japanese who witnessed it at a distance great enough to save them from being vaporized).
The footstool rocked back and forth unsteadily beneath his feet. He listened to the crickets and felt the night breeze--cool and soothing after one hot day and before another he did not expect to see--on his sweaty cheeks. Part of his decision to draw a line under the Flint City Petersons and call the equation complete was a hope that Frank, Arlene, and Ollie had not gone far, at least not yet. It might still be possible to catch up. More of it was the unbearable prospect of attending a double funeral in the morning at the same mortuary--Donelli Brothers--that would bury the man responsible for their deaths in the afternoon. He couldn't do it.
He looked around one final time, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. The answer was yes, and so he kicked the footstool away, expecting to hear the crack of his neck breaking deep in his head before the tunnel of light opened before him--the tunnel with his family standing at the far end, beckoning him to a second and better life where harmless boys were not raped and murdered.
There was no crack. He had missed or ignored the part in the Wikipedia entry about how a certain drop was necessary to break the neck of a man weighing two hundred and five pounds. Instead of dying, he began to strangle. As his windpipe closed and his eyes bulged in their sockets, his previously drowsing survival instinct awakened in a clangor of alarm bells and a glare of interior security lights. In a space of three seconds his body overrode his brain and the desire to die became the brute will to live.
Fred raised his hands, groped, and found the rope. He pulled with all his strength. The rope slackened, and he was able to draw a breath--necessarily shallow, because the noose was still tight, the knot digging into the side of his throat like a swollen gland. Holding on with one hand, he groped for the branch to which he had tied the rope. His fingers brushed its underside, and loosed a few flakes of bark that fluttered down onto his hair, but that was all.
He was not a fit man in his middle age, most of his exercise consisting of trips to the fridge for another beer during one of his beloved Dallas Cowboys football games, but even as a high school kid in phys ed, five pull-ups had been the best he could do. He could feel his one-handed grip slipping, and grabbed the rope with his other hand again, holding it slack long enough to pull in another half-breath, but unable to yank himself any higher. His feet swung back and forth eight inches above the lawn. One of his slippers came off, then the other. He tried to call for help, but all he could manage was a rusty wheeze . . . and who would possibly be awake to hear him at this hour of the morning? Nosy old Mrs. Gibson next door? She would be asleep in her bed with her rosary in her hand, dreaming of Father Brixton.
His hands slipped. The branch creaked. His breath stopped. He could feel the blood trapped in his head pulsing, getting ready to burst his brains. He heard a rasping sound and thought, It wasn't supposed to be like this.
He flailed for the rope, a drowning man reaching for the surface of the lake into which he has fallen. Large black spores appeared in front of his eyes. They burst into extravagant black toadstools. But before they overwhelmed his sight, he saw a man standing on the patio in the moonlight, one hand resting possessively on the barbecue where Fred would never grill another steak. Or maybe it wasn't a man at all. The features were crude, as if punched into being by a blind sculptor. And the eyes were straws.
6
June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack, and she wasn't asleep. Nor was she thinking about Father Brixton. She was suffering herself, and plenty. It had been three years since her last attack of sciatica, and she had dared to hope it was gone for good, but here it was again, a nasty uninvited visitor who just barged in and took up residence. Only a telltale stiffness behind her left knee after the post-funeral gathering at the Petersons' next door, but she knew the signs and begged Dr. Richland for an oxycodone prescription, which he had reluctantly written. The pills only helped a little. The pain ran down her left side from the small of her back to her ankle, where it cinched her with a thorny manacle. One of the cruelest attributes of sciatica--hers, anyway--was that lying down intensified the pain instead of easing it. So she sat here in her living room, dressed in her robe and pajamas, alternately watching an infomercial for sexy abs on TV and playing solitaire on the iPhone her son had given her for Mother's Day.
Her back was bad and her eyes were failing, but she had muted the sound on the infomercial and there was nothing wrong with her ears. She heard a gunshot next door clearly, and leaped to her feet with no thought for the bolt of pain that pistoned down the entire left side of her body.
Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.
She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.
Dropping her cane--it would only slow her down--Mrs. Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.
She knelt beside Mr. Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs. Gibson didn't see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr. Peterson to gasp in air.
He did not.
During the first phase of her working life, Mrs. Gibson had been a teller at Flint City First National. When she retired from that position at the mandatory age of sixty-two, she had taken the classes necessary to become a qualified Home Helper, a job she had done to supplement her retirement checks until the age of seventy-four. One of those classes had necessarily dealt with resuscitation. She now knelt beside Mr. Peterson's considerable bulk, tilted his head up, pinched his nostrils shut, yanked his mouth open, and pressed her lips to his.
She was on her tenth breath, and feeling decidedly woozy, when Mr. Jagger from across the street joined her and tapped her on one bony shoul
der. "Is he dead?"
"Not if I can help it," said Mrs. Gibson. She clutched the pocket of her housecoat and felt the rectangle of her cell phone. She took it out and tossed it blindly behind her. "Call 911. And if I pass out, you'll have to take over."
But she didn't pass out. On her fifteenth breath--and just as she really was about to--Fred Peterson took a big, slobbery breath on his own. Then another. Mrs. Gibson waited for his eyes to open, and when they did not, she rolled up one lid. Beneath was nothing but the sclera, not white but red with burst blood vessels.
Fred Peterson took a third breath, then stopped again. Mrs. Gibson began the best chest compressions she could manage, not sure they would help but feeling they could not hurt. She was aware that the pain in her back and down her leg had lessened. Was it possible that sciatica could be shocked out of one's body? Of course not. The idea was ridiculous. It was adrenalin, and once the supply was exhausted, she would feel worse than ever.
A siren floated over the early morning darkness, approaching.
Mrs. Gibson returned to forcing her breath down Fred Peterson's throat (her most intimate contact with a man since her husband had died in 2004), stopping each time she felt on the verge of toppling into a gray faint. Mr. Jagger did not offer to take over, and she didn't ask him to. Until the ambulance came, this was between her and Peterson.
Sometimes when she stopped, Mr. Peterson would take one of those great slobbering breaths. Sometimes he would not. She was barely cognizant of the pulsing red ambulance lights when they began to zap the two adjacent yards, strobing across the jagged stub of branch on the hackberry tree where Mr. Peterson had tried to hang himself. One of the EMTs eased her to her feet, and she was able to stand on them almost without pain. It was amazing. No matter how temporary the miracle was, she'd accept it with thanks.
"We'll take over now, missus," the EMT said. "You did a hell of a job."
"You surely did," Mr. Jagger said. "You saved him, June! You saved that poor bugger's life!"
Wiping warm spittle from her chin--a mixture of hers and Peterson's--Mrs. Gibson said, "Maybe so. And maybe it would have been better if I hadn't."
7
At eight o'clock on Thursday morning, Ralph was cutting the grass in his backyard. With a day devoid of tasks stretching ahead of him, mowing was all he could think of to do with his time . . . although not with his mind, which ran on its own endless gerbil wheel: the mutilated body of Frank Peterson, the witnesses, the taped footage, the DNA, the crowd at the courthouse. Mostly that. It was the girl's dangling bra strap he kept fixing on for some reason--a bright yellow ribbon that jiggled up and down as she sat on her boyfriend's shoulders and pumped her fists.
He barely heard the xylophone rattle of his cell phone. He turned off the mower and took the call, standing there with his sneakers and bare ankles dusted with grass. "Anderson."
"Troy Ramage here, boss."
One of the two officers who had actually arrested Terry. That seemed a long time ago. In another life, as they said.
"What's up, Troy?"
"I'm at the hospital with Betsy Riggins."
Ralph smiled, an expression so lately unused that it felt foreign on his face. "She's having the baby."
"No, not yet. The chief asked her to come down because you're on leave and Jack Hoskins is still fishing on Lake Ocoma. Sent me along to keep her company."
"What's the deal?"
"EMTs brought in Fred Peterson a few hours ago. He tried to hang himself in his backyard, but the branch he tied his rope to broke. The lady next door, a Mrs. Gibson, gave him mouth-to-mouth and pulled him through. She came in to see how he was doing, and the chief wants a statement from her, which I guess is protocol, but this seems like a done deal to me. God knows the poor guy had plenty of reasons to pull the pin."
"What's his condition?"
"The docs say he's got minimal brain function. Chances of him ever coming back are like one in a hundred. Betsy said you'd want to know."
For a moment Ralph thought the bowl of cereal he'd eaten for breakfast was going to come back up, and he right-faced away from his Lawnboy to keep from spewing all over it.
"Boss? You there?"
Ralph swallowed back a sour mash of milk and Rice Chex. "I'm here. Where's Betsy now?"
"In Peterson's room with the Gibson woman. Detective Riggins sent me to call because ICU's a no-cell zone. The docs offered them a room where they could talk, but Gibson said she wanted to answer Detective Riggins's questions with Peterson. Almost like she thinks he could hear her. Nice old lady, but her back's killing her, you can see it by the way she walks. So why's she even here? This ain't The Good Doctor, and there ain't gonna be any miracle recovery."
Ralph could guess the reason. This Mrs. Gibson would have exchanged recipes with Arlene Peterson, and watched Ollie and Frankie grow up. Maybe Fred Peterson had shoveled out her driveway after one of Flint City's infrequent snowstorms. She was there out of sorrow and respect, perhaps even out of guilt that she hadn't just let Peterson go instead of condemning him to an indefinite stay in a hospital room where machines would do his breathing for him.
The full horror of the last eight days broke over Ralph in a wave. The killer hadn't been contented with taking just the boy; he'd taken the whole Peterson family. A clean sweep, as they said.
Not "the killer," no need to be so anonymous. Terry. The killer was Terry. There's no one else on the radar.
"Thought you'd want to know," Ramage repeated. "And hey, look on the bright side. Maybe Betsy'll go into labor while she's here. Save her husband from making a special trip."
"Tell her to go home," Ralph said.
"Roger that. And . . . Ralph? Sorry about the way things went down at the courthouse. It was a shit-show."
"That pretty well sums it up," Ralph said. "Thanks for calling."
He went back to the lawn, walking slowly behind the rackety old Lawnboy (he really ought to go down to Home Depot and buy a new one; it was a chore he no longer had an excuse to put off, with all this time on his hands), and was just finishing the last bit when his phone started playing its xylophone boogie again. He thought it would be Betsy. It wasn't, although this call had also originated at Flint City General.
"Still don't have all the DNA back," said Dr. Edward Bogan, "but we've got results from the branch used to sodomize the boy. The blood, plus skin fragments the perp's hand left behind when he . . . you know, grasped the branch and--"
"I know," Ralph said. "Don't keep me in suspense."
"No suspense about this, Detective. The samples from the branch match the Maitland cheek swabs."
"All right, Dr. Bogan, thank you for that. You need to pass it on to Chief Geller and Lieutenant Sablo at SP. I'm on administrative leave, and probably will be for the rest of the summer."
"Ridiculous."
"Regulations. I don't know who Geller will assign to work with Yune--Jack Hoskins is on vacation and Betsy Riggins is about to pop out her first kid at any minute--but he'll find somebody. And when you think of it, with Maitland dead there's no case to work. We're just filling in the blanks."
"The blanks are important," Bogan said. "Maitland's wife may decide to lodge a civil suit. This DNA evidence could get her lawyer to change her mind about that. Such a suit would be an obscenity, in my opinion. Her husband murdered that boy in the cruelest way imaginable, and if she didn't know about his . . . his proclivities . . . she wasn't paying attention. There are always warning signs with sexual sadists. Always. In my opinion, you should have gotten a medal instead of being put on leave."
"Thank you for saying that."
"Only speaking my mind. There are more samples pending. Many. Would you like me to keep you informed as they come in?"
"I would." Chief Geller might bring Hoskins back early, but the man was a waste of space even when he was sober, which wasn't often these days.
Ralph ended the call and sheared off the last stripe of lawn. Then he trundled the Lawnboy into the garage. H
e was thinking of another Poe story as he wiped down the housing, a tale about a man being bricked up in a wine cellar. He hadn't read it, but he'd seen the movie.
For the love of God, Montresor! the man being bricked up had screamed, and the man doing the interment had agreed: For the love of God.
In this case it was Terry Maitland who was being bricked up, only the bricks were DNA and he was already dead. There was conflicting evidence, yes, and that was troubling, but they now had DNA from Flint City and none from Cap City. There were the fingerprints on the book from the newsstand, true, but fingerprints could be planted. It wasn't as easy as the detective shows made it look, but it could be done.
What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.
Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.
In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer's own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry's dying eyes, or Terry's dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.
Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who'd done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied--probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl's yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.
"And a man can't be two places at the same time," he muttered.
"Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?"
He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.