For just a moment he touched her breast, then—thankfully—took his hand away.
“Also, you turned my clock around so you wouldn’t have to look at the time. You’ve been upset, and I’m the cause. I’m sorry, Darce. From the bottom of my heart.”
“I ate something that disagreed with me.” It was all she could think of.
He smiled patiently. “You found my special hiding place in the garage.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you did a good job of putting things back where you found them, but I’m very careful about such things, and the strip of tape I put on above the pivot in the baseboard was broken. You didn’t notice that, did you? Why would you? It’s the kind of tape that’s almost invisible once it’s on. Also, the box inside was an inch or two to the left of where I put it—where I always put it.”
He reached to stroke her cheek some more, then withdrew his hand (seemingly without rancor) when she turned her face away.
“Bobby, I can see you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about something, but I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe you’ve been working too hard.”
His mouth turned down in a moue of sadness, and his eyes were moistening with tears. Incredible. She actually had to stop herself from feeling sorry for him. Emotions were only another human habit, it seemed, as conditioned as any other. “I guess I always knew this day would come.”
“I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
He sighed. “I had a long ride back to think about this, honey. And the longer I thought, the harder I thought, the more it seemed like there was really only one question that needed an answer: WWDD.”
“I don’t—”
“Hush,” he said, and put a gentle finger on her lips. She could smell soap. He must have showered before he left the motel, a very Bob—like thing to do. “I’ll tell you everything. I’ll make a clean breast. I think that, down deep, I’ve always wanted you to know.”
He’d always wanted her to know? Dear God. There might be worse things waiting, but this was easily the most terrible thing so far. “I don’t want to know. Whatever it is you’ve got stuck in your head, I don’t want to know.”
“I see something different in your eyes, honey, and I’ve gotten very good at reading women’s eyes. I’ve become something of an expert. WWDD stands for What Would Darcy Do. In this case, What Would Darcy Do if she found my special hiding place, and what’s inside my special box. I’ve always loved that box, by the way, because you gave it to me.”
He leaned forward and planted a quick kiss between her brows. His lips were moist. For the first time in her life, the touch of them on her skin revolted her, and it occurred to her that she might be dead before the sun came up. Because dead women told no tales. Although, she thought, he’d try to make sure I didn’t “suffer.”
“First, I asked myself if the name Marjorie Duvall would mean anything to you. I would have liked to answer that question with a big ole no, but sometimes a fellow has to be a realist. You’re not the world’s number one news junkie, but I’ve lived with you long enough to know that you follow the main stories on TV and in the newspaper. I thought you’d know the name, and even if you didn’t, I thought you’d recognize the picture on the driver’s license. Besides, I said to myself, won’t she be curious as to why I have those ID cards? Women are always curious. Look at Pandora.”
Or Bluebeard’s wife, she thought. The woman who peeked into the locked room and found the severed heads of all her predecessors in matrimony.
“Bob, I swear to you I don’t have any idea what you’re tal—”
“So the first thing I did when I came in was to boot up your computer, open Firefox—that’s the search engine you always use—and check the history.”
“The what?”
He chuckled as if she’d gotten off an exceptionally witty line. “You don’t even know. I didn’t think you did, because every time I check, everything’s there. You never clear it!” And he chuckled again, as a man will do when a wife exhibits a trait he finds particularly endearing.
Darcy felt the first thin stirrings of anger. Probably absurd, given the circumstances, but there it was.
“You check my computer? You sneak! You dirty sneak!”
“Of course I check. I have a very bad friend who does very bad things. A man in a situation like that has to keep current with those closest to him. Since the kids left home, that’s you and only you.”
Bad friend? A bad friend who does bad things? Her head was swimming, but one thing seemed all too clear: further denials would be useless. She knew, and he knew she did.
“You haven’t just been checking on Marjorie Duvall.” She heard no shame or defensiveness in his voice, only a hideous regret that it should have come to this. “You’ve been checking on all of them.” Then he laughed and said, “Whoops!”
She sat up against the headboard, which pulled her slightly away from him. That was good. Distance was good. All those years she’d lain with him hip to hip and thigh to thigh, and now distance was good.
“What bad friend? What are you talking about?”
He cocked his head to one side, Bob’s body language for I find you dense, but amusingly so. “Brian.”
At first she had no idea who he was talking about, and thought it must be someone from work. Possibly an accomplice? It didn’t seem likely on the face of it, she would have said Bob was as lousy at making friends as she was, but men who did such things sometimes did have accomplices. Wolves hunted in packs, after all.
“Brian Delahanty,” he said. “Don’t tell me you forgot Brian. I told you all about him after you told me about what happened to Brandolyn.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Your friend from junior high? Bob, he’s dead! He got hit by a truck while he was chasing down a baseball, and he’s dead.”
“Well…” Bob’s smile grew apologetic. “Yes… and no. I almost always called him Brian when I talked about him to you, but that’s not what I called him back in school, because he hated that name. I called him by his initials. I called him BD.”
She started to ask him what that had to do with the price of tea in China, but then she knew. Of course she knew. BD.
Beadie.
– 9 –
He talked for a long time, and the longer he talked, the more horrified she became. All these years she’d been living with a madman, but how could she have known? His insanity was like an underground sea. There was a layer of rock over it, and a layer of soil over the rock; flowers grew there. You could stroll through them and never know the madwater was there… but it was. It always had been. He blamed BD (who had become Beadie only years later, in his notes to the police) for everything, but Darcy suspected Bob knew better than that; blaming Brian Delahanty only made it easier to keep his two lives separate.
It had been BD’s idea to take guns to school and go on a rampage, for instance. According to Bob, this inspiration had occurred in the summer between their freshman and sophomore years at Castle Rock High School. “1971,” he said, shaking his head goodnaturedly, as a man might do when recalling some harmless childhood peccadillo. “Long before those Columbine oafs were even a twinkle in their daddies’ eyes. There were these girls that snooted us. Diane Ramadge, Laurie Swenson, Gloria Haggerty… there were a couple of others, too, but I forget their names. The plan was to get a bunch of guns—Brian’s dad had about twenty rifles and pistols in his basement, including a couple of German Lugers from World War II that we were just fascinated with—and take them to school. No searches or metal detectors back then, you know.
“We were going to barricade ourselves in the science wing. We’d chain the doors shut, kill some people—mostly teachers, but also some of the guys we didn’t like—and then stampede the rest of the kids outside through the fire door at the far end of the hall. Well… most of the kids. We were going to keep the girls who snooted us as hostages. We planned-BD planned—to do all of this before the cops could get there, right? He drew maps, and he kept a list of the steps we’d have to take in his geometry notebook. I think there were maybe twenty steps in all, starting with ‘Pull fire alarms to create confusion.’” He chuckled. “And after we had the place locked down…”