… great, the Rev. Lowe will read the account of the murder in the newspaper and
think piously: He was not a good man. All things serve the Lord.
And following this, he will think: Who is the kid sending the notes? Who was it in
July? It’s time to find out. It’s time to listen to some gossip.
The Rev. Lester Lowe readjusts his eyepatch, shakes out a new section of the
newspaper and thinks: All things serve the Lord, if it’s the Lord’s will, I’ll find
him. And silence him. Forever.
DECEMBER
It is fifteen minutes of midnight on New Year’s Eve. In Tarker’s Mills, as in the
rest of the world, the year is drawing to its close, and in Tarker’s Mills as in
the rest of the world, the year has brought changes.
Milt Sturmfuller is dead and his wife Donna Lee, at last free of her bondage, has
moved out of town. Gone to Boston, some say; gone to Los Angeles, other say.
Another woman has tried to make a go of the Corner Bookshop and failed, but the
barber shop, The Market Basket, and The Pub are doing business at the same old
places, thank you very much. Clyde Corliss is dead, but his two goodfornothing
brothers, Alden and Errol, are still alive and well and cashing in their foodstamps
at the A&P two towns over-they don’t quite have the nerve to do it right here in
the Mills. Gramma Hague, who used to make the best pies in Tarker’s Mills, has died
of a heart attack, Willie Harrington, who is ninety-two, slipped on the ice in
front of his little house on Ball Street late in November and broke his hip, but
the library has received a nice bequest in the will of a wealthy summer resident,
and next year construction will begin on the children’s wing that has been talked
about in town meeting since time out of mind. Ollie Parker, the school principal,
had a nosebleed that just wouldn’t quit in October and is diagnosed as an acute
hypertensive. Lucky you didn’t blow your brains out, the doctor grunted, unwrapping
the bloodpressure cuff, and told Ollie to lose forty pounds. For a wonder, Ollie
loses twenty of those pounds by Christmas. He looks and feels like a new man. “Acts
like a new man, too,” his wife tells her close friend Delia Burney, with a
lecherous little grin. Brady Kincaid, killed by the Beast in kite-flying season, is
still dead. And Marty Coslaw, who used to sit right behind Brady in school, is
still a cripple.
Things change, things don’t change, and, in Tarker’s Mills, the year is ending as
the year came in – a howling blizzard is roaring outside, and the Beast is around.
Somewhere.
Sitting in the living room of the Coslaw home and watching Dick Clark’s Rockin New
Year’s Eve are Marty Coslaw and his
Uncle Al. Uncle Al is on the couch. Marty is sitting in his wheelchair in front of
the TV. There is a gun in Marty’s lap, a .38 Colt Woodsman. Two bullets are
chambered in the
-gun, and both of them are pure silver. Uncle Al has gotten a
friend of his from Hampden, Mac McCutcheon, to make them in a bullet-loader. This
Mac McCutcheon, after some protests, has melted Marty’s silver confirmation spoon
down with a propane torch, and calibrated the weight of powder needed to propel the
bullets without sending them into a wild spin. “I don’t guarantee they’ll work,”
this Mac McCutcheon has told Uncle Al, “but they probably will. What you gonna
kill, Al? A werewolf or a vampire?”
“One of each,” Uncle Al says, giving him his grin right back. “That’s why I got you
to make two. There was a banshee hanging around as well, but his father died in
North Dakota and he had to catch a plane to Fargo.” They have a laugh over that,
and then Al says: “They’re for a nephew of mine. He’s crazy over movie monsters,
and I thought they’d make an interesting Christmas present for him.”
“Well, if he fires one into a batten, bring it back to the shop,” Mac tells him.