by Stephen King
“In the car or on the plane.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said.
“The cigarettes?”
“Don’t know for sure, but if I had to bet, I’d bet he already had em on him,” Dave said. “He knew this was comin along…whatever this was. He’d’ve had em in his pants pocket, I think.”
“Then, later, on the beach…” She saw Cogan, her mind’s-eye version of the Colorado Kid, lighting his life’s first cigarette—first and last—and then strolling down to the water’s edge with it, there on Hammock Beach, alone in the moonlight. The midnight moonlight. He takes one puff of the harsh, unfamiliar smoke. Maybe two. Then he throws the cigarette into the sea. Then…what?
What?
“The plane dropped him off in Bangor,” she heard herself saying in a voice that sounded harsh and unfamiliar to herself.
“Ayuh,” Dave agreed.
“And his ride from Bangor dropped him off in Tinnock.”
“Ayuh.” That was Vince.
“He ate a fish-and-chips basket.”
“So he did,” Vince agreed. “Autopsy proves it. So did my nose. I smelled the vinegar.”
“Was his wallet gone by then?”
“We don’t know,” Dave said. “We’ll never know. But I think so. I think he gave it up with his topcoat, his suit-coat, and his normal life. I think what he got in return was a green jacket, which he also gave up later on.”
“Or had taken from his dead body,” Vince said.
Stephanie shivered. She couldn’t help it. “He rides across to Moose-Lookit Island on the six o’clock ferry, bringing Gard Edwick a paper cup of coffee on the way—what could be construed as tea for the tillerman, or the ferryman.”
“Yuh,” Dave said. He looked very solemn.
“By then he has no wallet, no ID, just seventeen dollars and some change that maybe includes a Russian ten-ruble coin. Do you think that coin might have been…oh, I don’t know…some sort of identification-thingy, like in a spy novel? I mean, the cold war between Russia and the United States would have still been going on then, right?”
“Full blast,” Vince said. “But Steffi—if you were going to dicker with a Russian secret agent, would you use a ruble to introduce yourself?”
“No,” she admitted. “But why else would he have it? To show it to someone, that’s all I can think of.”
“I’ve always had the intuition that someone gave it to him,” Dave said. “Maybe along with a piece of cold sirloin steak, wrapped up in a piece of tinfoil.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why would they?”
Dave shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Was there tinfoil found at the scene? Maybe thrown into that sea-grass along the far edge of the beach?”
“O’Shanny and Morrison sure didn’t look,” Dave said. “Me n Vince had a hunt all around Hammock Beach after that yella tape was taken down—not specifically for tinfoil, you understand, but for anything that looked like it might bear on the dead man, anything at all. We found nothing but the usual litter—candy-wrappers and such.”
“If the meat was in foil or a Baggie, the Kid might very well have tossed it into the water, along with his one cigarette,” Vince said.
“About that piece of meat in his throat…”
Vince was smiling a little. “I had several long conversations about that piece of steak with both Doc Robinson and Dr. Cathcart. Dave was in on a couple of em. I remember Cathcart saying to me once, this had to’ve been not more than a month before the heart attack that took his life six or seven years ago, ‘You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.’ And I thought to myself, yep, that’s exactly right, exactly what it’s like. It’s like a hole I can’t stop poking at and licking into, trying to find the bottom of.
“First thing I wanted to know was if that piece of meat could have been jammed down Cogan’s throat, either with fingers or some sort of instrument like a lobster-pick, after he was dead. And that’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it?”
Stephanie nodded.
“He said it was possible but unlikely, because that piece of steak had not only been chewed, but chewed enough to be swallowed. It wasn’t really meat at all anymore, but rather what Cathcart called ‘organic pulp-mass.’ Someone else could have chewed it that much, but would have been unlikely to have planted it after doing so, for fear it would have looked insufficient to cause death. Are you with me?”
She nodded again.
“He also said that meat chewed to a pulp-mass would be hard to manipulate with an instrument. It would tend to break up when pushed from the back of the mouth into the throat. Fingers could do it, but Cathcart said he believed he would have seen signs of that, most likely straining of the jaw ligatures.” He paused, thinking, then shook his head. “There’s a technical term for that kind of jaw-poppin, but I don’t remember it.”
“Tell her what Robinson told you,” Dave said. His eyes were sparkling. “It didn’t come to nummore’n the rest in the end, but I always thought it was wicked int’restin.”
“He said there were certain muscle relaxants, some of em exotic, and Cogan’s midnight snack might have been treated with one of those,” Vince said. “He might get the first few bites down all right, accounting for what was found in his stomach, and then find himself all at once with a bite he wasn’t able to swallow once it was chewed.”
“That must have been it!” Stephanie cried. “Whoever dosed the meat sat there and just watched him choke! Then, when Cogan was dead, the murderer propped him up against the litter basket and took away the rest of the steak so it could never be tested! It was never a gull at all! It…” She stopped, looking at them. “Why are you shaking your heads?”
“The autopsy, dear,” Vince said. “Nothing like that showed up on the blood-gas chromatograph tests.”
“But if it was something exotic enough…”
“Like in an Agatha Christie yarn?” Vince asked, with a wink and a little smile. “Well, maybe…but there was also the piece of meat in his throat, don’t you know.”
“Oh. Right. Dr. Cathcart had that to test, didn’t he?” She slumped a little.
“Ayuh,” Vince agreed, “and did. We may be country mice, but we do have the occasional dark thought. And the closest thing to poison on that chunk of chewed-up meat was a little salt.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said (in a very low voice): “Maybe it was the kind of stuff that disappears.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said, and his tongue rounded the inside of one cheek. “Like the Coast Lights after an hour or two.”
“Or the rest of the Lisa Cabot’s crew,” Vince added.
“And once he got off the ferry, you don’t know where he went.”
“No, ma’am,” Vince said. “We’ve looked off n on for over twenty-five years and never found a soul who claims to have seen him before Johnny and Nancy did around quarter past six on the morning of April 24th. And for the record—not that anyone’s keepin one—I don’t believe that anyone took what remained of that steak from his hand after he choked on his last bite. I believe a seagull stole the last of it from his dead hand, just as we always surmised. And gorry, I really do have to get a move on.”
“And I have to get with those invoices,” Dave said. “But first, I think another little rest-stop might be in order.” That said, he lumbered toward the bathroom.
“I suppose I better get with this column,” Stephanie said. Then she burst out, half-laughing and half-serious: “But I almost wish you hadn’t told me, if you were going to leave me hanging! It’ll be weeks before I get this out of my mind!”
“It’s been twenty-five years, and it’s still not out of ours,” Vince said. “And at least you know why we didn’t tell that guy from the Globe.”
“Yes. I do.”
He smiled and nodded. “You’ll do all right, Stephanie. You’ll do fine.” He gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze, then started for the d
oor, grabbing his narrow reporter’s notebook from his littered desk on his way by and stuffing it into his back pocket. He was ninety but still walked easy, his back only slightly bent with age. He wore a gentleman’s white shirt, its back crisscrossed with a gentleman’s suspenders. Halfway across the room he stopped and turned to her again. A shaft of late sunlight caught his baby-fine white hair and turned it into a halo.
“You’ve been a pleasure to have around,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“Thank you.” She hoped she didn’t sound as close to tears as she suddenly felt. “It’s been wonderful. I was a little dubious at first, but…but now I guess it goes right back at you. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
“Have you thought about staying? I think you have.”
“Yes. You bet I have.”
He nodded gravely. “Dave and I have spoken about that. It’d be good to have some new blood on the staff. Some young blood.”
“You guys’ll go on for years,” she said.
“Oh yes,” he said, off-handedly, as if that were a given, and when he died six months later, Stephanie would sit in a cold church, taking notes on the service in her own narrow reporter’s book, and think: He knew it was coming. “I’ll be around for years yet. Still, if you wanted to stay, we’d like to have you. You don’t have to answer one way or another now, but consider it an offer.”
“All right, I will. And I think we both know what the answer will be.”
“That’s fine, then.” He started to turn, then turned back one last time. “School’s almost out for the day, but I could tell you one more thing about our business. May I?”
“Of course.”
“There are thousands of papers and tens of thousands of people writing stories for em, but there are only two types of stories. There are news stories, which usually aren’t stories at all, but only accounts of unfolding events. Things like that don’t have to be stories. People pick up a newspaper to read about the blood and the tears the way they slow down to look at a wreck on the highway, and then they move on. But what do they find inside of their newspaper?”
“Feature stories,” Stephanie said, thinking of Hanratty and his unexplained mysteries.
“Ayuh. And those are stories. Every one of em has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That makes em happy news, Steffi, always happy news. Even if the story is about a church secretary who probably killed half the congregation at the church picnic because her lover jilted her, that is happy news, and why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You better,” Dave said, emerging from the bathroom and still wiping his hands on a paper towel. “You better know if you want to be in this business, and understand what it is you’re doin.” He cast the paper towel into his wastebasket on his way by.
She thought about it. “Feature stories are happy stories because they’re over.”
“That’s right!” Vince cried, beaming. He threw his hands in the air like a revival preacher. “They have resolution! They have closure! But do things have a beginning, a middle, and an end in real life, Stephanie? What does your experience tell you?”
“When it comes to newspaper work, I don’t have much,” she said. “Just the campus paper and, you know, Arts ’N Things here.”
Vince waved this away. “Your heart n mind, what do they tell you?”
“That life usually doesn’t work that way.” She was thinking of a certain young man who would have to be dealt with if she decided to stay here beyond her four months…and that dealing might be messy. Probably would be messy. Rick would not take the news well, because in Rick’s mind, that wasn’t how the story was supposed to go.
“I never read a feature story that wasn’t a lie,” Vince said mildly, “but usually you can make a lie fit on the page. This one would never fit. Unless…” He gave a little shrug.
For a moment she didn’t know what that shrug meant. Then she remembered something Dave had said not long after they’d gone out to sit on the deck to sit in the late August sunshine. It’s ours, he’d said, sounding almost angry. A guy from the Globe , a guy from away—he’d only muck it up.
“If you’d given this to Hanratty, he would’ve used it, wouldn’t he?” she asked them.
“Wasn’t ours to give, because we don’t own it,” Vince said. “It belongs to whoever tracks it down.”
Smiling a little, Stephanie shook her head. “I think that’s disingenuous. I think you and Dave are the last two people alive who know the whole thing.”
“We were,” Dave said. “Now there’s you, Steffi.”
She nodded to him, acknowledging the implicit compliment, then turned her attention back to Vince Teague, eyebrows raised. After a second or two, he chuckled.
“We didn’t tell him about the Colorado Kid because he would have taken a true unexplained mystery and made it into just another feature story,” Vince said. “Not by changin any of the facts, but by emphasizing one thing—the concept of muscle-relaxants making it hard or impossible to swallow, let’s say—and leavin something else out.”
“That there was absolutely no sign of anything like that in this case, for instance,” Stephanie said.
“Ayuh, maybe that, maybe something else. And maybe he would have written it that way on his own, simply because making a story out of things that ain’t quite a story on their own gets to be a habit after a certain number of years in this business, or maybe his editor would have sent it back to him to do on a rewrite.”
“Or the editor might’ve done it himself, if time was tight,” Dave put in.
“Yep, editors have been known to do that, as well,” Vince agreed. “In any case, the Colorado Kid would most likely have ended up bein installment number seven or eight in Hanratty’s Unexplained Mysteries of New England series, something for people to marvel over for fifteen minutes or so on Sunday and line their kitty-litter boxes with on Monday.”
“And it wouldn’t be yours anymore,” Stephanie said.
Dave nodded, but Vince waved his hand as if to say Oh, pish-tush. “That I could put up with, but it would’ve hung a lie around the neck of a man who ain’t alive to refute it, and that I won’t put up with. Because I don’t have to.” He glanced at his watch. “In any case, I’m on my horse. Whichever one of you’s last out the door, be sure to lock it behind you, all right?”
Vince left. They watched him go, then Dave turned back to her. “Any more questions?”
She laughed. “A hundred, but none you or Vince could answer, I guess.”
“Just as long as you don’t get tired of askin em, that’s fine.” He wandered off to his desk, sat down, and pulled a stack of papers toward him with a sigh. Stephanie started back toward her own desk, then something caught her eye on the wall-length bulletin board at the far end of the room, opposite Vince’s cluttered desk. She walked over for a closer look.
The left half of the bulletin board was layered with old front pages of the Islander, most yellowed and curling. High in the corner, all by itself, was the front page from the week of July 9th, 1952. The headline read MYSTERY LIGHTS OVER HANCOCK FASCINATE THOUSANDS. Below was a photograph credited to one Vincent Teague—who would have been just thirty-seven back then, if she had her math right. The crisp black-and-white showed a Little League field with a billboard in deep center reading HANCOCK LUMBER ALWAYS KNOWS THE SCORE! To Stephanie the photo looked as if it had been snapped at twilight. The few adults in the single set of sagging bleachers were standing and looking up into the sky. So was the ump, who stood straddling home plate with his mask in his right hand. One set of players—the visiting team, she assumed—was bunched tightly together around third base, as if for comfort. The other kids, wearing jeans and jerseys with the words HANCOCK LUMBER printed on the back, stood in a rough line across the infield, all staring upward. And on the mound the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds, as if to touch that mystery, and bring it close, and open i
ts heart, and know its story.
Afterword
Depending on whether you liked or hated The Colorado Kid (I think for many people there’ll be no middle ground on this one, and that’s fine with me), you have my friend Scott to thank or blame. He brought me the news clipping that got it going.
Every writer of fiction has had somebody bring him or her a clipping from time to time, sure that the subject will make a wonderful story. “You’ll only have to change it around a little,” the clipping-bearer says with an optimistic smile. I don’t know how this works with other writers, but it had never worked with me, and when Scott handed me an envelope with a cutting from a Maine newspaper inside, I expected more of the same. But my mother raised no ingrates, so I thanked him, took it home, and tossed it on my desk. A day or two later I tore the envelope open, read the feature story inside, and was immediately galvanized.
I have lost the clipping since, and for once Google, that twenty-first century idiot savant, has been of no help, so all I can do is summarize from memory, a notoriously unreliable reference source. Yet in this case that hardly matters, since the feature story was only the spark that lit the little fire that burns through these pages, and not the fire itself.
What caught my eye immediately upon unfolding the clipping was a drawing of a bright red purse. The story was of the young woman who had owned it. She was seen one day walking the main street of a small island community off the coast of Maine with that red purse over her arm. The next day she was found dead on one of the island beaches, sans purse or identification of any kind. Even the cause of her death was a mystery, and although it was eventually put down to drowning, with alcohol perhaps a contributing factor, that diagnosis remains tentative to this day.
The young woman was eventually identified, but not until her remains had spent a long, lonely time in a mainland crypt. And I was left again with a smack of that mystery the Maine islands like Cranberry and Monhegan have always held for me—their contrasting yet oddly complimentary atmospheres of community and solitariness. There are few places in America where the line between the little world Inside and all the great world Outside is so firmly and deeply drawn. Islanders are full of warmth for those who belong, but they keep their secrets well from those who do not. And—as Agatha Christie shows so memorably in Ten Little Indians—there is no locked room so grand as an island, even one where the mainland looks just a long step away on a clear summer afternoon; no place so perfectly made for a mystery.