When Karen put up a hand to keep from being splashed as her mother left the tub, she dropped the doll she had been bathing. When she bent to pick it up, her hair became caught in one of the hot tub’s powerful intakes. (It was reading of a fatal accident like this that had originally kicked the story off in my mind two or three years before.)
The yard-man, some no-name in a khaki shirt sent over by a day-labor outfit, saw what was happening. He raced across the lawn, dove headfirst into the tub, and yanked the child from the bottom, leaving hair and a good chunk of scalp clogging the jet when he did. He’d give her artificial respiration until she began to breathe again. (This would be a wonderful, suspenseful scene, and I couldn’t wait to write it.) He would refuse all of the hysterical, relieved mother’s offers of recompense, although he’d finally give her an address so that her husband could talk to him. Only both the address and his name, John Sanborn, would turn out to be a fake.
Two years later the ex-hooker with the respectable second life sees the man who saved her child on the front page of the Miami paper. His name is given as John Shackleford and he has been arrested for the rape-murder of a nine-year-old girl. And, the article goes on, he is suspected in over forty other murders, many of the victims children. ‘Have you caught Baseball Cap?’ one of the reporters would yell at the press conference. ‘Is John Shackleford Baseball Cap?’
‘Well,’ I said, going downstairs, ‘they sure think he is.’
I could hear too many boats out on the lake this afternoon to make nude bathing an option. I pulled on my suit, slung a towel over my shoulders, and started down the path — the one which had been lined with glowing paper lanterns in my dream — to wash off the sweat of my nightmares and my unexpected morning’s labors.
There are twenty-three railroad-tie steps between Sara and the lake. I had gone down only four or five before the enormity of what had just happened hit me. My mouth began to tremble. The colors of the trees and the sky mixed together as my eyes teared up. A sound began to come out of me —
a kind of muffled groaning. The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down hard on a railroad tie.
For a moment I thought it was over, mostly just a false alarm, and then I began to cry. I stuffed one end of the towel in my mouth during the worst of it, afraid that if the boaters on the lake heard the sounds coming out of me, they’d think someone up here was being murdered.
I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent without Jo, without friends, and without my work.
I cried in gratitude because those work-less years seemed to be over. It was too early to tell for sure
— one swallow doesn’t make a summer and eight pages of hard copy don’t make a career resuscitation — but I thought it really might be so.
And I cried out of fear, as well, as we do when some awful experience is finally over or when some terrible accident has been narrowly averted. I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harm’s way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right — it was a question that could wait for another day.
I cried it all out of me. Then I went on down to the lake and waded in. The cool water felt more than good on my overheated body; it felt like a resurrection.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
State your name for the record.’
‘Michael Noonan.’
‘Your address?’
‘Derry is my permanent address, 14 Benton Street, but I also maintain a home in TR-90, on Dark Score Lake. The mailing address is Box 832. The actual house is on Lane Forty-two, off Route 68.’
Elmer Durgin, Kyra Devore’s guardian ad litem, waved a pudgy hand in front of his face, either to shoo away some troublesome insect or to tell me that was enough. I agreed that it was. I felt rather like the little girl in Our Town, who gave her address as Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, America, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Mind of God. Mostly I was nervous. I’d reached the age of forty still a virgin in the area of court proceedings, and although we were in the conference room of Durgin, Peters, and Jarrette on Bridge Street in Castle Rock, this was still a court proceeding.
There was one mentionably odd detail to these festivities. The stenographer wasn’t using one of those keyboards-on-a-post that look like adding machines, but a Stenomask, a gadget which fit over the lower half of his face. I had seen them before, but only in old black-and-white crime movies, the ones where Dan Duryea or John Payne is always driving around in a Buick with portholes on the sides, looking grim and smoking a Camel. Glancing over into the corner and seeing a guy who looked like the world’s oldest fighter-pilot was weird enough, but hearing everything you said immediately repeated in a muffled monotone was even weirder.
‘Thank you, Mr. Noonan. My wife has read all your books and says you are her favorite author. I just wanted to get that on the record.’ Durgin chuckled fatly. Why not? He was a fat guy. Most fat people I like — they have expansive natures to go with their expansive waistlines. But there is a subgroup which I think of as the Evil Little Fat Folks. You don’t want to fuck with the ELFFS if you can help it; they will burn your house and rape your dog if you give them half an excuse and a quarter of an opportunity. Few of them stand over five-foot-two (Durgin’s height, I estimated), and many are under five feet. They smile a lot, but their eyes don’t smile. The Evil Little Fat Folks hate the whole world. Mostly they hate folks who can look down the length of their bodies and still see their own feet. This included me, although just barely.
‘Please thank your wife for me, Mr. Durgin. I’m sure she could recommend one for you to start on.’
Durgin chuckled. On his right, Durgin’s assistant — a pretty young woman who looked approximately seventeen minutes out of law school — chuckled. On my left, Romeo Bissonette chuckled. In the corner, the world’s oldest F- 111 pilot only went on muttering into his Stenomask.
‘I’ll wait for the big-screen version,’ he said. His eyes gave an ugly little gleam, as if he knew a feature film had never been made from one of my books — only a made-for-TV movie of Being Two that pulled ratings roughly equal to the National Sofa Refinishing Championships. I hoped that we’d completed this chubby little fuck’s idea of the pleasantries.
‘I am Kyra Devore’s guardian ad litem,’ he said. ‘Do you know what that means, Mr. Noonan?’
‘I believe I do.’
‘It means,’ Durgin rolled on, ‘that I’ve been appointed by Judge Rancourt to decide — if I can —
where Kyra Devore’s best interests lie, should a custody judgment become necessary. Judge Rancourt would not, in such an event, be required to base his decision on my conclusions, but in many cases that is what happens.’
He looked at me with his hands folded on a blank legal pad. The pretty assistant, on the other hand, was scribbling madly. Perhaps she didn’t trust the fighter-pilot. Durgin looked as if he expected a round of applause.
‘Was that a question, Mr. Durgin?’ I asked and Romeo Bissonette delivered a light, practiced chip to my ankle. I didn’t need to look at him to know it wasn’t an accident.
Durgin pursed lips so smooth and damp that he looked as if he were wearing a clear gloss on them. On his shining pate, roughly two dozen strands of hair were combed in smooth little arcs. He gave me a patient, measuring look. Behind it was all the intransigent ugliness of an Evil Little Fat Folk. The pleasantries were over, all right. I was sure of it.
‘No, Mr. Noonan, that was not a question. I simply thought you might like to know why we’ve had to ask you to come away from your lovely lake on such a pleasant morning. Perhaps I was wrong. Now, if — ‘
There was a peremptory knock on the door, followed by your friend and his, George Footman.
Today Cleveland Casual had been replaced by a khaki Deputy Sheriff’s uniform, complete with Sam Browne belt and sidearm. He helped himself to a good look at the assistant’s bustline, displayed in a blue silk blouse, then handed her a folder and a cassette tape recorder. He gave me one brief gander before leaving. I remember you, buddy, that glance said. The smartass writer, the cheap date.