by Stephen King
TV bullshit. Still, as he crossed the street (drawn, it seemed, by a force outside himself), Junior kept expecting spotlights to go on, pinning him like a butterfly on a piece of cardboard; kept expecting someone to shout—probably through a bullhorn: “Stop where you are and get those hands in the air!”
Nothing happened.
When he reached the foot of the McCain driveway, heart skittering in his chest and blood thumping in his temples (still no headache, though, and that was good, a good sign), the house remained dark and silent. Not even a generator roaring, although there was one at the Grinnells’ next door.
Junior looked over his shoulder and saw a vast white bubble of light rising above the trees. Something at the south end of town, or perhaps over in Motton. The source of the accident that had killed the power? Probably.
He went to the back door. The front door would still be unlocked if no one had returned since Angie’s accident, but he didn’t want to go in the front. He would if he had to, but maybe he wouldn’t. He was, after all, on a roll.
The doorknob turned.
Junior stuck his head into the kitchen and smelled the blood at once—an odor a little like spray starch, only gone stale. He said, “Hi? Hello? Anybody home?” Almost positive there wasn’t, but if someone was, if by some crazy chance Henry or LaDonna had parked over by the common and returned on foot (somehow missing their daughter lying dead on the kitchen floor), he would scream. Yes! Scream and “discover the body.” That wouldn’t do anything about the dreaded forensics van, but it would buy him a little time.
“Hello? Mr. McCain? Mrs. McCain?” And then, in a flash of inspiration: “Angie? Are you home?”
Would he call her like that if he’d killed her? Of course not! But then a terrible thought lanced through him: What if she answered? Answered from where she was lying on the floor? Answered through a throatful of blood?
“Get a grip,” he muttered. Yes, he had to, but it was hard. Especially in the dark. Besides, in the Bible stuff like that happened all the time. In the Bible, people sometimes returned to life like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.
“Anybody home?”
Zip. Nada.
His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but not enough. He needed a light. He should’ve brought a flashlight from the house, but it was easy to forget stuff like that when you were used to just flipping a switch. Junior crossed the kitchen, stepping over Angie’s body, and opened the first of two doors on the far side. It was a pantry. He could just make out the shelves of bottled and canned goods. He tried the other door and had better luck. It was the laundry. And unless he was mistaken about the shape of the thing standing on the shelf just to his right, he was still on a roll.
He wasn’t mistaken. It was a flashlight, a nice bright one. He’d have to be careful about shining it around the kitchen—easing down the shades would be an excellent idea—but in the laundry room he could shine it around to his heart’s content. In here he was fine.
Soap powder. Bleach. Fabric softener. A bucket and a Swiffer. Good. With no generator there’d only be cold water, but there would probably be enough to fill one bucket from the taps, and then, of course, there were the various toilet tanks. And cold was what he wanted. Cold for blood.
He would clean like the demon housekeeper his mother had once been, mindful of her husband’s exhortation: “Clean house, clean hands, clean heart.” He would clean up the blood. Then he’d wipe everything he could remember touching and everything he might have touched without remembering. But first …
The body. He had to do something with the body.
Junior decided the pantry would do for the time being. He dragged her in by the arms, then let them go: flump. After that he set to work. He sang under his breath as he first replaced the fridge magnets, then drew the shades. He had filled the bucket almost to the top before the faucet started spitting. Another bonus.
He was still scrubbing, the work well begun but nowhere near done, when the knock came at the front door.
Junior looked up, eyes wide, lips drawn back in a humorless grin of horror.
“Angie?” It was a girl, and she was sobbing. “Angie, are you there?” More knocking, and then the door opened. His roll, it seemed, was over. “Angie, please be here. I saw your car in the garage …”
Shit. The garage! He never checked the fucking garage!
“Angie?” Sobbing again. Someone he knew. Oh God, was it that idiot Dodee Sanders? It was. “Angie, she said my mom’s dead! Mrs. Shumway said that she died !”
Junior hoped she’d go upstairs first, check Angie’s room. But she came down the hall toward the kitchen instead, moving slowly and tentatively in the dark.
“Angie? Are you in the kitchen? I thought I saw a light.”
Junior’s head was starting to ache again, and it was this interfering dope-smoking cunt’s fault. Whatever happened next … that would be her fault, too.
5
Dodee Sanders was still a little stoned and a little drunk; she was hungover; her mother was dead; she was fumbling up the hall of her best friend’s house in the dark; she stepped on something that slid away under her foot and almost went ass over teapot. She grabbed at the stair railing, bent two of her fingers painfully back, and cried out. She sort of understood all this was happening to her, but at the same time it was impossible to believe. She felt as if she’d wandered into some parallel dimension, like in a science fiction movie.
She bent to see what had nearly spilled her. It looked like a towel. Some fool had left a towel on the front hall floor. Then she thought she heard someone moving in the darkness up ahead. In the kitchen.
“Angie? Is that you?”
Nothing. She still felt someone was there, but maybe not.
“Angie?” She shuffled forward again, holding her throbbing right hand—her fingers were going to swell, she thought they were swelling already—against her side. She held her left hand out before her, feeling the dark air. “Angie, please be there! My mother’s dead, it’s not a joke, Mrs. Shumway told me and she doesn’t joke, I need you!”
The day had started so well. She’d been up early (well … ten; early for her) and she’d had no intention of blowing off work. Then Samantha Bushey had called to say she’d gotten some new Bratz on eBay and to ask if Dodee wanted to come over and help torture them. Bratz-torture was something they’d gotten into in high school—buy them at yard sales, then hang them, pound nails into their stupid little heads, douse them with lighter fluid and set them on fire—and Dodee knew they should have grown out of it, they were adults now, or almost. It was kid-stuff. Also a little creepy, when you really thought about it. But the thing was, Sammy had her own place out on the Motton Road—just a trailer, but all hers since her husband had taken off in the spring—and Little Walter slept practically all day. Plus Sammy usually had bitchin weed. Dodee guessed she got it from the guys she partied with. Her trailer was a popular place on the weekends. But the thing was, Dodee had sworn off weed. Never again, not since all that trouble with the cook. Never again had lasted over a week on the day Sammy called.
“You can have Jade and Yasmin,” Sammy coaxed. “Also, I’ve got some great you-know.” She always said that, as if someone listening in wouldn’t know what she was talking about. “Also, we can you-know.”
Dodee knew what that you-know was, too, and she felt a little tingle Down There (in her you-know), even though that was also kid-stuff, and they should have left it behind long ago.
“I don’t think so, Sam. I have to be at work at two, and—”
“Yasmin awaits,” Sammy said. “And you know you hate dat bitch.”
Well, that was true. Yasmin was the bitchiest of the Bratz, in Dodee’s opinion. And it was almost four hours until two o’clock. Further and, if she was a little late, so what? Was Rose going to fire her? Who else would work that shit job?
“Okay. But just for a little while. And only because I hate Yasmin.”
Sammy giggled.
“But I don’t you-know anymore. Either you-know.”
“Not a problem,” Sammy said. “Come quick.”
So Dodee had driven out, and of course she discovered Bratz-torture was no fun if you weren’t a little high, so she got a little high and so did Sammy. They collaborated on giving Yasmin some drain-cleaner plastic surgery, which was pretty hilarious. Then Sammy wanted to show her this sweet new camisole she’d gotten at Deb, and although Sam was getting a little bit of a potbelly, she still looked good to Dodee, perhaps because they were a little bit stoned—wrecked, in fact—and since Little Walter was still asleep (his father had insisted on naming the kid after some old bluesman, and all that sleeping, yow, Dodee had an idea Little Walter was retarded, which would be no surprise given the amount of rope Sam had smoked while carrying him), they ended up getting into Sammy’s bed and doing a little of the old you-know. Afterward they’d fallen asleep, and when Dodee woke up Little Walter was blatting—holy shit, call NewsCenter 6—and it was past five. Really too late to go in to work, and besides, Sam had produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and they had one-shot two-shot three-shot-four, and Sammy decided she wanted to see what happened to a Baby Bratz in the microwave, only the power was out.
Dodee had crept back to town at roughly sixteen miles an hour, still high and paranoid as hell, constantly checking the rearview mirror for cops, knowing if she did get stopped it would be by that redhaired bitch Jackie Wettington. Or her father would be taking a break from the store and he’d smell the booze on her breath. Or her mother would be home, so tired out from her stupid flying lesson that she had decided to stay home from the Eastern Star Bingo.
Please, God, she prayed. Please get me through this and I’ll never you-know again. Either you-know. Never in this life.
God heard her prayer. Nobody was home. The power was out here too, but in her altered state, Dodee hardly noticed. She crept upstairs to her room, shucked out of her pants and shirt, and laid down on her bed. Just for a few minutes, she told herself. Then she’d put her clothes, which smelled of ganja, in the washer, and put herself in the shower. She smelled of Sammy’s perfume, which she must buy a gallon at a time down at Burpee’s.
Only she couldn’t set the alarm with the power out and when the knocking at the door woke her up it was dark. She grabbed her robe and went downstairs, suddenly sure that it would be the redheaded cop with the big boobs, ready to put her under arrest for driving under the influence. Maybe for crack-snacking, too. Dodee didn’t think that particular you-know was against the law, but she wasn’t entirely sure.
It wasn’t Jackie Wettington. It was Julia Shumway, the editor-publisher of the Democrat. She had a flashlight in one hand. She shined it in Dodee’s face—which was probably puffed with sleep, her eyes surely still red and her hair a haystack—and then lowered it again. Enough light kicked up to show Julia’s own face, and Dodee saw a sympathy there that made her feel confused and afraid.
“Poor kid,” Julia said. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what?” Dodee had asked. It was around then that the parallel universe feeling had started. “Don’t know what ?”
And Julia Shumway had told her.
6
“Angie? Angie, please !”
Fumbling her way up the hall. Hand throbbing. Head throbbing. She could have looked for her father—Mrs. Shumway had offered to take her, starting at Bowie Funeral Home—but her blood ran cold at the thought of that place. Besides, it was Angie that she wanted. Angie who would hug her tight with no interest in the you-know. Angie who was her best friend.
A shadow came out of the kitchen and moved swiftly toward her.
“There you are, thank God!” She began to sob harder, and hurried toward the figure with her arms outstretched. “Oh, it’s awful! I’m being punished for being a bad girl, I know I am!”
The dark figure stretched out its own arms, but they did not enfold Dodee in a hug. Instead, the hands at the end of those arms closed around her throat.
THE GOOD OF THE TOWN, THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE
1
Andy Sanders was indeed at the Bowie Funeral Home. He had walked there, toting a heavy load: bewilderment, grief, a broken heart.
He was sitting in Remembrance Parlor I, his only company in the coffin at the front of the room. Gertrude Evans, eighty-seven (or maybe eighty-eight), had died of congestive heart failure two days before. Andy had sent a condolence note, although God knew who’d eventually receive it; Gert’s husband had died a decade ago. It didn’t matter. He always sent condolences when one of his constituents died, handwritten on a sheet of cream stationery reading FROM THE DESK OF THE FIRST SELECTMAN. He felt it was part of his duty.
Big Jim couldn’t be bothered with such things. Big Jim was too busy running what he called “our business,” by which he meant Chester’s Mill. Ran it like his own private railroad, in point of fact, but Andy had never resented this; he understood that Big Jim was smart. Andy understood something else, as well: without Andrew DeLois Sanders, Big Jim probably couldn’t have been elected dog-catcher. Big Jim could sell used cars by promising eye-watering deals, low-low financing, and premiums like cheap Korean vacuum cleaners, but when he’d tried to get the Toyota dealership that time, the company had settled on Will Freeman instead. Given his sales figures and location out on 119, Big Jim hadn’t been able to understand how Toyota could be so stupid.
Andy could. He maybe wasn’t the brightest bear in the woods, but he knew Big Jim had no warmth. He was a hard man (some—those who’d come a cropper on all that low-low financing, for instance—would have said hardhearted), and he was persuasive, but he was also chilly. Andy, on the other hand, had warmth to spare. When he went around town at election time, Andy told folks that he and Big Jim were like the Doublemint Twins, or Click and Clack, or peanut butter and jelly, and Chester’s Mill wouldn’t be the same without both of them in harness (along with whichever third happened to be currently along for the ride—right now Rose Twitchell’s sister, Andrea Grinnell). Andy had always enjoyed his partnership with Big Jim. Financially, yes, especially during the last two or three years, but also in his heart. Big Jim knew how to get things done, and why they should be done. We’re in this for the long haul, he’d say. We’re doing it for the town. For the people. For their own good. And that was good. Doing good was good.
But now … tonight …
“I hated those flying lessons from the first,” he said, and began to cry again. Soon he was sobbing noisily, but that was all right, because Brenda Perkins had left in silent tears after viewing the remains of her husband and the Bowie brothers were downstairs. They had a lot of work to do (Andy understood, in a vague way, that something very bad had happened). Fern Bowie had gone out for a bite at Sweetbriar Rose, and when he came back, Andy was sure Fern would kick him out, but Fern passed down the hall without even looking in at where Andy sat with his hands between his knees and his tie loosened and his hair in disarray.
Fern had descended to what he and his brother Stewart called “the workroom.” (Horrible; horrible!) Duke Perkins was down there. Also that damned old Chuck Thompson, who maybe hadn’t talked his wife into those flying lessons but sure hadn’t talked her out of them, either. Maybe others were down there, too.
Claudette for sure.
Andy voiced a watery groan and clasped his hands together more tightly. He couldn’t live without her; no way could he live without her. And not just because he’d loved her more than his own life. It was Claudette (along with regular, unreported, and ever larger cash infusions from Jim Rennie) who kept the drugstore going; on his own, Andy would have run it into bankruptcy before the turn of the century. His specialty was people, not accounts and ledgers. His wife was the numbers specialist. Or had been.
As the past perfect clanged in his mind, Andy groaned again.
Claudette and Big Jim had even collaborated on fixing up the town’s books that time when the state audited them. It was supposed to be a
surprise audit, but Big Jim had gotten advance word. Not much; just enough for them to go to work with the computer program Claudette called MR. CLEAN. They called it that because it always produced clean numbers. They’d come out of that audit shiny side up instead of going to jail (which wouldn’t have been fair, since most of what they were doing—almost all, in fact—was for the town’s own good).
The truth about Claudette Sanders was this: she’d been a prettier Jim Rennie, a kinder Jim Rennie, one he could sleep with and tell his secrets to, and life without her was unthinkable.
Andy started to tear up again, and that was when Big Jim himself put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Andy hadn’t heard him come in, but he didn’t jump. He had almost expected the hand, because its owner always seemed to turn up when Andy needed him the most.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Big Jim said. “Andy—pal—I’m just so, so sorry.”
Andy lurched to his feet, groped his arms around Big Jim’s bulk, and began to sob against Big Jim’s jacket. “I told her those lessons were dangerous! I told her Chuck Thompson was a jackass, just like his father!”
Big Jim rubbed his back with a soothing palm. “I know. But she’s in a better place now, Andy—she had dinner with Jesus Christ tonight—roast beef, fresh peas, mashed with gravy! How’s that for an awesome thought? You hang onto that. Think we should pray?”
“Yes!” Andy sobbed. “Yes, Big Jim! Pray with me!”
They got on their knees and Big Jim prayed long and hard for the soul of Claudette Sanders. (Below them, in the workroom, Stewart Bowie heard, looked up at the ceiling, and observed: “That man shits from both ends.”)
After four or five minutes of we see through a glass darkly and when I was a child I spake as a child (Andy didn’t quite see the relevance of that one, but didn’t care; it was comforting just to be kneebound with Big Jim), Rennie finished up—“ForJesussakeamen”—and helped Andy to his feet.