by Stephen King
“Until it was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Steffi said.
“You got it exactly. Also, he wa’ant hardly dressed for early mornin, with the thermometer readin maybe forty-two degrees and a fresh breeze off the water makin it feel more like thirty-two. He was wearin nice gray slacks and a white shirt. Loafers on his feet. No coat. No gloves.
“The youngsters didn’t even discuss it. They just ran over to see if he was okay, and right away they knew he wasn’t. Johnny said later that he knew the man was dead as soon as he saw his face and Nancy said the same thing, but of course they didn’t want to admit it—would you? Without making sure?”
“No,” Stephanie said.
“He was just sittin there (well…half-sprawlin there) with one hand in his lap and the other—the right one—lying on the sand. His face was waxy-white except for small purple patches on each cheek. His eyes were closed and Nancy said the lids were bluish. His lips also had a blue cast to them, and his neck, she said, had a kind of puffy look to it. His hair was sandy blond, cut short but not so short that a little of it couldn’t flutter on his forehead when the wind blew, which it did pretty much constant.
“Nancy says, ‘Mister, are you asleep? If you’re asleep, you better wake up.’
“Johnny Gravlin says, ‘He’s not asleep, Nancy, and he’s not unconscious, either. He’s not breathing.’
“She said later she knew that, she’d seen it, but she didn’t want to believe it. Accourse not, poor kid. So she says, ‘Maybe he is. Maybe he is asleep. You can’t always tell when a person’s breathing. Shake him, Johnny, see if he won’t wake up.’
“Johnny didn’t want to, but he also didn’t want to look like a chicken in front of his girlfriend, so he reached down—he had to steel himself to do it, he told me that years later after we’d had a couple of drinks down at the Breakers—and shook the guy’s shoulder. He said he knew for sure when he grabbed hold, because it didn’t feel like a real shoulder at all under there but like a carving of one. But he shook it all the same and said, ‘Wake up, mister, wake up and—’ He was gonna say die right but thought that wouldn’t sound so good under the circumstances (thinkin a little bit like a politician even back then, maybe) and changed it to ‘—and smell the coffee!’
“He shook twice. First time, nothing happened. Second time, the guy’s head fell over on his left shoulder—Johnny had been shakin the right one—and the guy slid off the litter basket that’d been holding him up and went down on his side. His head thumped on the sand. Nancy screamed and ran back to the road, fast as she could…which was fast, I can tell you. If she hadn’t’ve stopped there, Johnny probably would’ve had to chase her all the way down to the end of Bay Street, and, I dunno, maybe right out to the end of Dock A. But she did stop and he caught up to her and put his arm around her and said he was never so glad to feel live flesh underneath his arm. He told me he’s never forgotten how it felt to grip that dead man’s shoulder, and how it felt like wood under that white shirt.”
Dave stopped abruptly, and stood up. “I want a Coca-Cola out of the fridge,” he said. “My throat’s dry, and this is a long story. Anyone else want one?”
It turned out they all did, and since Stephanie was the one being entertained—if that was the word—she went after the drinks. When she came back, both of the old men were at the porch rail, looking out at the reach and the mainland on the far side. She joined them there, setting the old tin tray down on the wide rail and passing the drinks around.
“Where was I?” Dave asked, after he’d had a long sip of his.
“You know perfectly well where you were,” Vince said. “At the part where our future mayor and Nancy Arnault, who’s God knows where—probably California, the good ones always seem to finish up about as far from the Island as they can go without needing a passport—had found the Colorado Kid dead on Hammock Beach.”
“Ayuh. Well, John was for the two of em runnin right to the nearest phone, which would have been the one outside the Public Library, and callin George Wournos, who was the Moose-Look constable in those days (long since gone to his reward, dear—ticker). Nancy had no problem with that, but she wanted Johnny to set ‘the man’ up again first. That’s what she called him: ‘the man.’ Never ‘the dead man’ or ‘the body,’ always ‘the man.’
“Johnny says, ‘I don’t think the police like you to move them, Nan.’
“Nancy says, ‘You already moved him, I just want you to put him back where he was.’
“And he says, ‘I only did it because you told me to.’
“To which she answers, ‘Please, Johnny, I can’t bear to look at him that way and I can’t bear to think of him that way.’ Then she starts to cry, which of course seals the deal, and he goes back to where the body was, still bent at the waist like it was sitting but now with its left cheek lying on the sand.
“Johnny told me that night at the Breakers that he never could have done what she wanted if she hadn’t been right there watchin him and countin on him to do it, and you know, I believe that’s so. For a woman a man will do many things that he’d turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he’d back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk and with a bunch of his friends egging him on. Johnny said the closer he got to that man lying in the sand—only lying there with his knees up, like he was sitting in an invisible chair—the more sure he was that those closed eyes were going to open and the man was going to make a snatch at him. Knowing that the man was dead didn’t take that feeling away, Johnny said, but only made it worse. Still, in the end he got there, and he steeled himself, and he put his hands on those wooden shoulders, and he sat the man back up again with his back against that leaning litter basket. He said he got it in his mind that the litter basket was going to fall over and make a bang, and when it did he’d scream. But the basket didn’t fall and he didn’t scream. I am convinced in my heart, Steffi, that we poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does. Then what’s only lousy seems okay—almost good, in fact—and we can cope just fine.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Oh yes, ma’am! In any case, Johnny started away, then saw a pack of cigarettes that had fallen out on the sand. And because the worst was over and it was only lousy, he was able to pick em up—even reminding himself to tell George Wournos what he’d done in case the State Police checked for fingerprints and found his on the cellophane—and put em back in the breast pocket of the dead man’s white shirt. Then he went back to where Nancy was standing, hugging herself in her BCHS warmup jacket and dancing from foot to foot, probably cold in those skimpy shorts she was wearing. Although it was more than the cold she was feeling, accourse.
“In any case, she wasn’t cold for long, because they ran down to the Public Library then, and I’ll bet if anyone had had a stopwatch on em, it would have shown a record time for the half-mile, or close to it. Nancy had lots of quarters in the little change purse she carried in her warmup, and she was the one who called George Wournos, who was just then gettin dressed for work—he owned the Western Auto, which is now where the church ladies hold their bazaars.”
Stephanie, who had covered several for Arts ’N Things, nodded.
“George asked her if she was sure the man was dead, and Nancy said yes. Then he asked her to put Johnny on, and he asked Johnny the same question. Johnny also said yes. He said he’d shaken the man and that he was stiff as a board. He told George about how the man had fallen over, and the cigarettes falling out of his pocket, and how he’d put em back in, thinking George might give him hell for that, but he never did. Nobody ever did. Not much like a mystery show on TV, was it?”
“Not so far,” Stephanie said, thinking it did remind her just a teensy bit of a Murder, She Wrote episode she’d seen once. Only given the conversation which had prompted this story, she didn’t think any Angela Lansbury figures would be showing up to solve the mystery…although someone must have made some progress, Stephanie tho
ught. Enough, at least, to know where the dead man had come from.
“George told Johnny that he and Nancy should hurry on back to the beach and wait for him,” Dave said. “Told em to make sure no one else went close. Johnny said okay. George said, ‘If you miss the seven-thirty ferry, John, I’ll write you and your lady-friend an excuse-note.’ Johnny said that was the last thing in the world he was worried about. Then he and Nancy Arnault went back up there to Hammock Beach, only jogging instead of all-out runnin this time.”
Stephanie could understand that. From Hammock Beach to the edge of Moosie Village was downhill. Going the other way would have been a tougher run, especially when what you had to run on was mostly spent adrenaline.
“George Wournos, meanwhile,” Vince said, “called Doc Robinson, over on Beach Lane.” He paused, smiling remembrance. Or maybe just for effect. “Then he called me.”
6
“A murder victim shows up on the island’s only public beach and the local law calls the editor of the local newspaper?” Stephanie asked. “Boy, that really isn’t like Murder, She Wrote.”
“Life on the Maine coast is rarely like Murder, She Wrote,” Dave said in his driest tone, “and back then we were pretty much what we are now, Steffi, especially when the summer folk are gone and it’s just us chickens—all in it together. That doesn’t make it anything romantic, just a kind of…I dunno, call it a sunshine policy. If everyone knows what there is to know, it stops a lot of tongues from a lot of useless wagging. And murder! Law! You’re a little bit ahead of yourself there, ain’tcha?”
“Let her off the hook on that one,” Vince said. “We put the idea in her head ourselves, talkin about the coffee poisonins over in Tashmore. Steffi, Chris Robinson delivered two of my children. My second wife—Arlette, who I married six years after Joanne died—was good friends with the Robinson family, even dated Chris’s brother, Henry, when they were in school together. It was the way Dave says, but it was more than business.”
He put his glass of soda (which he called “dope”) on the railing and then spread his hands open to either side of his face in a gesture she found both charming and disarming. I will hide nothing, it said. “We’re a clubby bunch out here. It’s always been that way, and I think it always will be, because we’ll never grow much bigger than we are now.”
“Thank God,” Dave growled. “No friggin Wal-Mart. Excuse me, Steffi.”
She smiled and told him he was excused.
“In any case,” Vince said, “I want you to take that idea of murder and set it aside, Steffi. Will you do that?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’ll find that, in the end, you can’t take it off the table or put it all the way back on. That’s the way it is with so many things about the Colorado Kid, and what makes it wrong for the Boston Globe. Not to mention Yankee and Downeast and Coast. It wasn’t even right for The Weekly Islander, not really. We reported it, oh yes, because we’re a newspaper and reporting is our job—I’ve got Ellen Dunwoodie and the fire hydrant to worry about, not to mention the little Lester boy going to Boston for a kidney transplant—if he lasts long enough, that is—and of course you need to tell folks about the End-Of-Summer Hayride and Dance out at Gernerd Farms, don’tcha?”
“Don’t forget the picnic,” Stephanie murmured. “It’s all the pie you can eat, and folks will want to know that.”
The two men laughed. Dave actually patted his chest with his hands to show she had “gotten off a good one,” as island folk put it.
“Ayuh, dear!” Vince agreed, still smiling. “But sometimes a thing happens, like two high school kids on their mornin run finding a dead body on the town’s prettiest beach, and you say to yourself, ‘There must be a story in that.’ Not just reporting—what, why, when, where, and how, but a story—and then you discover there just isn’t. That it’s only a bunch of unconnected facts surrounding a true unexplained mystery. And that, dear, is what folks don’t want. It upsets em. It’s too many waves. It makes em seasick.”
“Amen,” Dave said. “Now why don’t you tell the rest of it, while we’ve still got some sunshine?”
And Vince Teague did.
7
“We were in on it almost from the beginning—and by we I mean Dave and me, The Weekly Islander—although I didn’t print what I was asked by George Wournos not to print. I had no problem with that, because there was nothing in that business that seemed to affect the island’s welfare in any way. That’s the sort of judgment call newspaper folk make all the time, Steffi—you’ll make it yourself—and in time you get used to it. You just want to make sure you never get comfortable with it.
“The kids went back and guarded the body, not that there was a lot of guardin to be done; before George and Doc Robinson pulled up, they didn’t see but four cars, all headed for town, and none of em slowed down when they saw a couple of teenagers joggin in place or doin stretchin exercises there by the little Hammock Beach parkin lot.
“When George and the Doc got there, they sent Johnny and Nancy on their way, and that’s where they leave the story. Still curious, the way people are, but on the whole glad to go, I have no doubt. George parked his Ford in the lot, Doc grabbed his bag, and they walked out to where the man was sitting against that litter barrel. He had slumped a little to one side again, and the first thing the Doc did was to haul him up nice and straight.
“ ‘Is he dead, Doc?’ George said.
“ ‘Oh gorry, he’s been dead at least four hours and probably six or more,’ Doc says. (It was right about then that I came pulling in and parked my Chevy beside George’s Ford.) ‘He’s as stiff as a board. Rigor mortis.’
“ ‘So you think he’s been here since…what? Midnight?’ George asks.
“ ‘He coulda been here since last Labor Day, for all I know,’ Doc says, ‘but the only thing I’m absolutely sure of is that he’s been dead since two this morning. Because of the rigor. Probably he’s been dead since midnight, but I’m no expert in stuff like that. If the wind was coming in stiff from offshore, that could have changed when the rigor set in—’
“ ‘No wind at all last night,’ I says, joining them. ‘Calm as the inside of a churchbell.’
“ ‘Well lookit here, another damn country heard from,’ says Doc Robinson. ‘Maybe you’d like to pronounce the time of death yourself, Jimmy Olson.’
“ ‘No,’ I says, ‘I’ll leave that to you.’
“ ‘I think I’ll leave it to the County Medical Examiner,’ he says. ‘Cathcart, over in Tinnock. The state pays him an extra eleven grand a year for educated gut-tossin. Not enough, in my humble opinion, but each to his own. I’m just a GP. But…ayuh, this fella was dead by two, I’ll say that much. Dead by the time the moon went down.’
“Then for maybe a minute the three of us just stood there, looking down on him like mourners. A minute can be an awful short space of time under some circumstances, but it can be an awful long one at a time like that. I remember the sound of the wind—still light, but starting to build in a little from the east. When it comes that way and you’re on the mainland side of the island, it makes such a lonely sound—”
“I know,�� Stephanie said quietly. “It kind of hoots.”
They nodded. That in the winter it was sometimes a terrible sound, almost the cry of a bereft woman, was a thing she did not know, and there was no reason to tell her.
“At last—I think it was just for something to say—George asked Doc to take a guess as to how old the fella might be.
“ ‘I’d put him right around forty, give or take five years,’ he says. ‘Do you think so, Vincent?’ And I nodded. Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.
“Then the Doc seen something that interested him. He went down on one knee (which wasn’t easy for a man of his size, he had to’ve gone two-eighty and didn’t stand but five-foot-ten or so) and picked up the dead man’s right hand,
the one that’d been lying on the beach. The fingers were curled a little, as if he’d died trying to make them into a tube he could look through. When Doc held the hand up, we could see some grit stuck to the insides of the fingers and a little more dusted on the palm.
“ ‘What do you see?’ George asks. ‘Doesn’t look like anything but beach-sand to me.’
“ ‘That’s all it is, but why’s it sticking?’ Doc Robinson asks back. ‘This litter basket and all the others are planted well above the high-tide line, as anyone with half a brain would know, and there was no rain last night. Sand’s dry as a bone. Also, look.’
“He picked up the dead man’s left hand. We all observed that he was wearing a wedding ring, and also that there was no sand on his fingers or palm. Doc put that hand back down and picked up the other one again. He tipped it a little so the light shone better on the inside. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Do you see?’
“ ‘What is that?’ I ask. ‘Grease? A little bit of grease?’
“He smiled and said, ‘I think you win the teddy bear, Vincent. And see how his hand is curled?’
“ ‘Yuh—like he was playin spyglass,’ George says. By then we was all three on our knees, as if that litter basket was an altar and we were tryin to pray the dead guy back to life.
“ ‘No, I don’t think he was playing spyglass,’ Doc says, and I realized somethin, Steffi—he was excited in the way people only are when they’ve figured something out they know the likes of them have no business figuring out in the ordinary course of things. He looked into the dead man’s face (at least I thought it was his face Doc was lookin at, but it turned out to be a little lower than that), then back at the curled right hand. ‘I don’t think so at all,’ he says.