The sidebar is your basic recap of the first two murders (Gruesome and Gruesomer is how Fred thinks of them), and as he reads, Fred bends first his left leg up behind him and then his right, stretching those all-important thigh muscles and preparing for his morning run. What could be more antislippage than a morning run? What could be nicer? What could possibly spoil such a lovely start to such a beautiful Wisconsin day?
Well, how about this:
Johnny Irkenham’s dreams were simple enough, according to his grief-stricken father. [Grief-stricken father, Fred thinks, stretching and imagining his son asleep upstairs. Dear God, save me from ever being a grief-stricken father. Not knowing, of course, how soon he must assume this role.] “Johnny wanted to be an astronaut,” George Irkenham said, a smile briefly lighting his exhausted face. “When he wasn’t putting out fires for the French Landing F.D. or fighting crime with the Justice League of America, that is.”
These innocent dreams ended in a nightmare we cannot imagine. [But I’m sure you’ll try, Fred thinks, now beginning his toe raises.] Earlier this week, his dismembered body was discovered by Spencer Hovdahl of Centralia. Hovdahl, a First Farmer State Bank loan officer, was inspecting an abandoned French Landing farm owned by John Ellison, who lives in a neighboring county, with an eye to initiating repossession proceedings. “I didn’t want to be there in the first place,” Hovdahl told this reporter. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the repo stuff. [Knowing Spence Hovdahl as he does, Fred very much doubts if “stuff” was the word he used.] I wanted to be there even less after I went into the henhouse. It’s all rickety and falling down, and I would have stayed out except for the sound of the bees. I thought there might be a hive in there. Bees are an interest of mine, and I was curious. God help me, I was curious. I hope I’ll never be curious again.”
What he found in the henhouse was the body of seven-year-old John Wesley Irkenham. The corpse had been dismembered, the pieces hung from the henhouse’s decaying rafters by chains. Although Police Chief Dale Gilbertson would neither confirm nor deny it, reliable police sources in La Riviere say that the thighs, torso, and buttocks had been bitten—
Okay, that’s enough for Fred, everybody out of the pool. He sweeps the newspaper closed and shoves it all the way down the counter to the Mr. Coffee. By God, they never put stuff like that in the paper when he was a kid. And why the Fisherman, for heaven’s sake? Why did they have to tag every monster with a catchy nickname, turn a guy like whoever did this into the Celebrity Sicko of the Month?
Of course, nothing like this had ever happened when he was Tyler’s age, but the principle . . . the goddamned principle of the matter . . .
Fred finishes his toe raises, reminding himself to have a talk with Tyler. It will be harder than their little talk about why his thing sometimes gets hard, but it absolutely must be done. Buddy system, Fred will say. You’ve got to stick with your buddies now, Ty. No more rambling around on your own for a while, okay?
Yet the idea of Ty actually being murdered seems remote to Fred; it is the stuff of TV docudramas or maybe a Wes Craven movie. Call it Scream 4: The Fisherman. In fact, wasn’t there a movie sort of like that? A guy in a fisherman’s slicker wandering around and killing teenagers with a hook? Maybe, but not little kids, not babies like Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham. Jesus, the world was disintegrating right in front of him.
Body parts hanging from chains in a crumbling henhouse, that is the part which haunts him. Can that really be? Can it be here, right here and now in Tom Sawyer–Becky Thatcher country?
Well, let it go. It’s time to run.
But maybe the paper kind of got lost this morning, Fred thinks, picking it up from the counter and folding it until it looks like a thick paperback book (but part of the headline accuses him even so: FISHERMAN STILL AT L). Maybe the paper just kind of, I don’t know, migrated straight to the old garbage can beside the house.
Yes, good idea. Because Judy has been strange lately, and Wendell Green’s pulsating stories about the Fisherman are not helping (Thighs and torso bitten, Fred thinks as he glides through the early-morning-quiet house toward the door, and while you’re at it, waiter, have them cut me a nice rare chunk of butt). She reads the press accounts obsessively, making no comment, but Fred doesn’t like the way her eyes jump around, or some of the other tics she’s picked up: the obsessive touching of her tongue to her upper lip, for instance . . . and sometimes, this in the last two or three days, he has seen her tongue reach all the way up and pet at her philtrum just below her nose, a feat he would have thought impossible if he had not seen it again last night, during the local news. She goes to bed earlier and earlier, and sometimes she talks in her sleep—strange, slurry words that don’t sound like English. Sometimes when Fred speaks to her, she doesn’t respond, simply stares off into space, eyes wide, lips moving slightly, hands kneading together (cuts and scratches have begun to show up on the backs of them, even though she keeps her nails cropped sensibly short).
Ty has noticed his mother’s encroaching oddities, too. On Saturday, while father and son were having lunch together—Judy was upstairs taking one of her long naps, another new wrinkle—the boy suddenly asked, right out of a blue clear sky, “What’s wrong with Mom?”
“Ty, nothing’s wrong with—”
“There is! Tommy Erbter says she’s a Coke short of a Happy Meal these days.”
And had he almost reached across the tomato soup and toasted-cheese sandwiches and clouted his son? His only child? Good old Ty, who was nothing but concerned? God help him, he had.
Outside the door, at the head of the concrete path leading down to the street, Fred begins to jog slowly in place, taking deep breath after deep breath, depositing the oxygen he will soon withdraw. It is usually the best part of his day (assuming he and Judy don’t make love, that is, and lately there has been precious little of that). He likes the feeling—the knowledge—that his path might be the beginning of the road to anywhere, that he could start out here in the Libertyville section of French Landing and wind up in New York . . . San Francisco . . . Bombay . . . the mountain passes of Nepal. Every step outside one’s own door invites the world (perhaps even the universe), and this is something Fred Marshall intuitively understands. He sells John Deere tractors and Case cultivators, yes, all right, already, but he is not devoid of imagination. When he and Judy were students at UW-Madison, their first dates were at the coffeehouse just off campus, an espresso-jazz-and-poetry haven called the Chocolate Watchband. It would not be entirely unfair to say that they had fallen in love to the sound of angry drunks declaiming the works of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder into the Chocolate Watchband’s cheap but exquisitely loud sound system.
Fred draws one more deep breath and begins to run. Down Robin Hood Lane to Maid Marian Way, where he gives Deke Purvis a wave. Deke, in his robe and slippers, is just picking Wendell Green’s daily dose of doom up off his own stoop. Then he wheels onto Avalon Street, picking it up a little now, showing his heels to the morning.
He cannot outrun his worries, however.
Judy, Judy, Judy, he thinks in the voice of Cary Grant (a little joke that has long since worn thin with the love of his life).
There is the gibberish when she sleeps. There’s the way her eyes dart hither and yon. And let’s not forget the time (just three days ago) when he followed her into the kitchen and she wasn’t there—she’d turned out to be behind him, coming down the stairs, and how she had done that seems less important to him than why she had done it, gone sneaking up the back stairs and then come tromping down the front ones (because that is what she must have done; it’s the only solution he can think of). There’s the constant tapping and petting she does with her tongue. Fred knows what it all adds up to: Judy has been acting like a woman in terror. This has been going on since before the murder of Amy St. Pierre, so it can’t be the Fisherman, or not entirely the Fisherman.
And there is a larger issue. Before the last couple of weeks, Fred would have told you that his wife doesn’t have a fearful bone in her body. She might be just five foot two (“Why, you’re no bigger than a minute” was his grandmother’s comment when she first met Fred’s intended), but Judy has the heart of a lion, of a Viking warrior. This isn’t bullshit, or hype, or poetic license; it is the simple truth as Fred sees it, and it is the contrast between what he has always known and what he sees now that scares him the most.