Dear Beth,
I received your letter today and am glad to hear that things are going so well for you. I am writing again, and doing rather well at it. I’m even toying with the idea of trying some fiction, or maybe something about what’s happened here in town. I’m starting to feel better about myself too, though not to the point where I’m ready to leave. That may take a while. But I have changed, and I have to tell you that the main reason for it is a woman I’ve met. I didn’t really try to meet her; it was one of those things that just happen. But she’s staying with me now, and we’re helping each other. I hope you’re not hurt by my telling you, but I’ve never had any secrets from you, and I wanted you to hear it from me before it got to you from any of your friends back here.
I really don’t have much more to tell you than that, and I hope it won’t upset you. What you mention about leaving things as they are is all right with me, unless you change your mind in light of what I’ve told you. I’ll understand.
Love, Jim
P.S. Money is holding out fine.
He decided not to show either letter to Alice, and put Beth’s in the back of the desk drawer, while he addressed his own to her. The next day when he took it out to his mailbox along with several bills to be paid, he saw a lonely figure across the street several houses down, just at the point where Sundale Road bent and became lost to sight. Even from a distance he recognized Brad Meyers, standing in the front yard of his ex-wife’s house. He had seen him there before, had figured out that he must have moved back in, although he didn’t know the circumstances, and felt strangely nonplussed at having the man he regarded as his nemesis living so close. It seemed to Jim that the two of them were still somehow linked, so why should they not be physically close as well?
Brad Meyers turned, saw Jim Callendar at his mailbox, and turned away, thinking that it was over between the two of them. They had had their confrontation, and it had left him empty, given him no satisfaction, only a soreness in his soul that still ached. Ironic that they now lived so close to each other, he thought, since what had bound them was severed that night, for him at least. He would, he had decided, have no more to do with Callendar. The score was settled, the transaction completed. Besides, there were other things to think about: the reasons for it all, for what had happened in Merridale.
Judgment, he had thought at first, some sort of judgment passed by the fates, by God, by whatever was up there, on him. But as the months had passed, he had come to think that it wasn’t on him alone, but on everyone, everyone in the town, and maybe in the world as well. Merridale was, as all small towns are, a microcosm of humanity, and he felt that it was not his destiny alone that was being affected, but multiple destinies in an intricate framework whose structure one could not hope to comprehend much less begin to actually work out. There are powers at work here, he thought. Oh, yes, powers.
“Uncle Brad!”
He looked up and saw Wally come around the back of the house, Fluffy hot on his trail. Brad had bought the puppy for the boy just a week before, despite Christine’s outspoken disapproval. “We don’t need a goddamn dog!” she’d said when he brought it home after Wally was in bed.
“A dog’s good for a kid,” he’d answered. “Besides, we can keep it outside when it’s bigger. We’re not in an apartment anymore.”
“It’ll howl. It’ll bark. Remember? Remember those things outside?”
“It didn’t when I brought it in. And it isn’t now.”
“It will!”
“No. It’s different. It’s young. It can get used to these things, adapt. It doesn’t know that they’re not natural.”
“Bullshit. How do you know?”
“We’re keeping it. If it howls, we’ll get rid of it. But I don’t think it will.”
Brad was right. The pup didn’t howl, not at all. Wally had named it, choosing the ill-fitting sobriquet of Fluffy. The dog did not look like a Fluffy. It was short-haired, a cross, Brad theorized, between a Weimaraner and a pointer, a little, unblessed doggy bastard some embarrassed purebred lover had probably been delighted to get rid of at the pet shop in Lansford where Brad had found it.
Bastard or not, it was one hell of a cute mutt, eyes button-black, tongue always lolling in the middle of a permanent, sappy grin. He guessed that it was two months old, just past the roly-poly stage, but retaining enough puppy cuteness to form an endearing link between boy and dog and man, all of whom now came together in a breathless blur, Brad grabbing the boy and whirling him into the cold air, the pup leaping at his ankles. Wally laughed at his sudden freedom from gravity, staggering as Brad lowered him to the ground. “What’s up, kiddo?” Brad asked.
“Will you push me and Fluffy on the swing?”
“Sure. C’mon.” The three of them jogged around the back of the house to the swing set, the ground yielding wetly under their feet. The snow had disappeared completely in the last week, melting away a day at a time until not a trace was left. Even the dirty piles mixed with cinders and ash had vanished, soaking into the ground or running down storm drains, dampening finished basements and flooding unfinished ones. It was as if the winter had spent all its fury in the incessant snows of December and was now attempting to make up for its cruelty with an early spring, knowing that the town had already endured more cruelty than it should rightly bear.
Brad slipped off his jacket and hung it over the monkey bar. It felt good to be outside in shirtsleeves. He could not remember it ever being this warm at the beginning of February. Wally climbed up on the wide swing, and the dog leaped into his lap, spotting his jeans with wet earth. Brad started to protest, but stopped, remembering his own dog as a boy, a big dopey foxhound against whom it was futile to struggle on a wet spring day. Jeans would wash. Dirt would not last. But boys and dogs and memories would.
He pushed them higher and higher, so that he had to step farther back with every sweep of the swing. “Keep your feet up,” he cautioned the boy. “Don’t let ’em drag or you’ll slow down.”
“Higher!” the boy yelled, and the man complied. He smiled and thought that for the first time in so long he was happy, nearly at peace with himself. It was not a feeling that would last, he knew, but while he possessed it, he intended to enjoy it and remember it, so that he might reclaim it more often. It stemmed in part, he thought, from being in the old house again, the house he had shared with Bonnie and Frank and Linda. When he closed his eyes and heard Wally laugh, he could pretend that time had moved backward, that it was Frankie he pushed on the swing, and that his mind had not yet started its inexorable breakdown into the rage that had held him for so many years. If only, he thought dreamily, time would move even further back—back to when he was still in school, to the day he was to report for his pre-induction physical, to the day he volunteered to work with Kriger.
But time didn’t turn back. Ever. And even if it had, would it have made any difference? What had happened was over and done with, and nothing could change it, could make it not have happened. “ ‘The moo-ving fing-er writes,’ ” he chanted softly to the rhythm of the swing, “ and hav-ing writ moves on.’ “
“Whazzat, Uncle Brad?” Wally asked between gulps of air, holding fast to the swing chain with one hand, to Fluffy with the other.
“Just a poem, kiddo. Just a little poem.”
“Like rhyming words … ‘silly’ … ‘billy’ …”
“Right,” Brad laughed. “ ‘Catty’…”
“ ‘Hatty’!”
“ ‘Fiddle’…”
“ ‘Diddle’!”
They played rhyming words and Brad pushed Wally on the swing and Christine watched them from inside the house, gazing hollow-eyed through the bedroom window. At that moment she hated them both, hated whatever it was inside them that let them forget what lay all around. “Bastards,” she whispered, turning from the window and lying down on the bed. She looked down the length of it at her body and marked how much weight she had lost the past few months. Her breasts were still large,
but her waist and hips had slimmed considerably. If she had intended it, she would have felt proud, but it had been an involuntary loss, stemming purely from her diminished appetite. She seemed to eat less each day, only pecking at her dinner while Brad and Wally wolfed down whatever was on their plates. Over and over again she wondered, How can they eat like that? when all around were those things, and then she wondered if she would ever change, ever grow used to them like so many of her friends at the plant did.
Friends? Only acquaintances now. She had lost her friends. They had slipped away, adapting, getting used to what had happened in the town: “There’s no point in staying upset. They’re here and that’s that. There’s no harm done.” They were right, she told herself, and then she’d ask, What is wrong with me?
No, not me. What is wrong with them? And she would know with certainty that she was the only sane one, the only one to react and keep reacting like a normal person would to something so hideous and so unnatural. It was the others who were crazy. The whole town was crazy.
And Brad was crazy too. He was the craziest one of all, and he was making Wally crazy too. Still, she couldn’t leave him. She had nowhere to go outside Merridale, and living with him was better than living alone. She didn’t know what she would do if she had to live alone. She thought maybe she really would go crazy then. In fact, she was afraid of his leaving her, so much so that she had stopped her prowling for men, her trading of sex for a night away from Merridale. Being on Sundale Road rather than downtown was definitely an improvement, and she slept better at night knowing that there was no blue phantom inside the house itself, no Old Black Joe in the living room.
But still, all she had to do to start the nightmare was to look out a front window at the dead man in the yard, or peer out back across the narrow patch of field toward the older section of town to see the glow, shining solidly in the distance.
The back door slammed and her body jerked in sudden shock. Damn!
“Chris?” It was Brad’s voice. “Where are you?” He stood framed in the doorway, half smiling. “We’re going to a movie. Bambi’s around again. You want to come?”
“Where?”
“Lansford. Not here.” His lip curled as if in disgust at her cowardice.
“All right. I’ll come.”
“I don’t want you to come just to get out of the house for a few hours,” Brad said, his face grim. “I want you to come because you want to see Bambi with your kid.”
“All right!” she said. “I want to see the fucking movie, okay?”
Brad gave her a long look. “Then you’d better get ready.”
They went to the movie. Brad and Wally laughed at Thumper. Christine didn’t. When Bambi’s mother was shot, Wally leaned over to his mother. “Where’s his mommy?” he whispered.
“She’s dead,” she replied, not in a whisper, but in a low voice that was audible several rows away. Somewhere a little girl started to cry.
That night, as on all the others she’d spent in Merridale since the phenomenon had begun, she remained awake until exhaustion finally drew her down to sleep. Just before she drifted off, she felt a touch of exasperation at a noise that barely parted her consciousness. It was the sound of a car coming closer and then idling for some time before it stopped. It was a sound she had heard before, late, on other nights, and she thought dimly that it must be a neighbor.
It wasn’t. The car belonged to Carl Bailey, and Dave Boyer was behind the wheel, Mr. Bailey’s daughter, Kim, next to him, her hand riding high on his thigh. “Here? Again?” she whispered.
“Why not? It was fine last week.”
“I don’t know. I’d feel better out farther.”
“Honey, this is the suburbs. There are cars all over, and nobody’s walking. It’s perfect.”
“But what if somebody sees us?”
“Nobody’ll see us. We’ll be in the backseat with our heads down … won’t we?” He let his finger trail the curve of her ear.
“What’s wrong with farther out?” she pressed. “What about Schwanger Road? There are those dirt roads off of it.”
“Uh-uh. Cops could see us from the road. And what if some creeps pull up behind us—we’d be stuck. This is fine. Safest of all.”
“Well, turn on the heater, then.”
“Who needs a heater?” He chuckled, but he started the ignition and let hot air flow into the Pontiac until they were uncomfortable in their jackets. “Enough?”
She nodded, and they crawled over to the backseat, fearing to open the doors because of the courtesy light. For a few minutes, as on the previous Saturday night, she was nervous and apprehensive, tensing at every infrequent sweep of early-morning headlights. But slowly Dave made her relax, and when she finally came she had nearly driven from her mind the image of Police Chief Kaylor’s stern, puritanical face gazing through the back window.
She needn’t have worried. Frank Kaylor’s mind was as far from the thought of two teenagers making love in a car on Sundale Road as it was from the Charlie Chan movie he was supposedly watching on television. Barry, his thirteen-year-old, was lying on the floor in front of the set, entranced by each pseudo-Oriental bon mot that dripped so easily from Warner Oland’s smiling mouth. Everything dripped easily for Charlie Chan. Kaylor wondered how the hell easily Chan would solve the Marie Snyder killing. Get everybody in town together in a big room, maybe.
Shit, it could be that easy. After all, Merridale was still a town in self-imposed quarantine, so you didn’t have drifters. Great. So that left, what, only 8,000 suspects? And the way Marie Snyder gossiped, there were any number of people with possible motives. The venomous old bitch had spread rumors true or false about half the people in town over the years. Maybe, he’d supposed at first, somebody finally had had enough. It was one way to close that thin-lipped, hard-lined mouth.
But the killer hadn’t closed it, had he (or she)? That mouth was opened for good now, hanging over the edge of the counter where she’d counted what must have been millions of coins in change over the decades. He confessed to himself that he wasn’t sorry to see her go, but he was damned if that was going to let him turn a blind eye toward this investigation. This was his town, and he loved it, and he owed it something, just like it owed him his fifteen hundred a month.
So he sat and watched Charlie Chan bump into his Number One Son in the shadows and thought some more about that day when Fred Hibbs had nearly battered down the door of the police station.
Kaylor hadn’t arrived yet, and Del Franklin, who’d been stuck with night duty that week, had called him. When Kaylor arrived at the newsstand, Fred Hibbs was standing outside on the sidewalk, afraid to go back in. Kaylor left him there and went in to talk to Del, who, to Kaylor’s indignation, hadn’t searched the place. They went through it together, hands on holstered guns, but found no one. Del proudly pointed out that it looked as if someone had gone through the apartment opening and closing drawers, a situation Kaylor had noticed right away. While they waited for the state police to arrive, Del mentioned how cold the shop was. “Go down and put some coal on,” Kaylor said. “I don’t think she’ll care one way or the other.”
Del Franklin made his way to the cellar, grabbed the coal shovel, and began to toss the coal into the wheezy old furnace. When the coals were burning well, Del continued to add more. Gonna be here a long time, he thought. The coal bin was dark, so he didn’t see the envelope, now blackened with coal dust, until he flung the shovelful of coal that held it into the furnace’s mouth.
He heard it hit before he saw it, then watched as it ignited far more quickly than the coal, burning with a bright, yellow flame in brilliant contrast to the tamely glowing red lumps. What the hell? Del thought. What was that? Something, apparently, that didn’t belong in a coal bin. He frowned, wondering if he should say anything to Chief Kaylor, but decided not to. Just piss him off that I wasn’t more careful, he told himself. Besides, what’s done’s done. He couldn’t reach in and snatch out whatever it was, and who
could tell now what it ever had been? Probably, he thought, just some paper the old lady kept handy to start the fire when it died out.
So he shut the furnace door, and left Marie Snyder’s perfect hiding place, going upstairs to share in the warmth of ten thousand burning dollars.
The investigation proved to be a dead end. There were no Charlie Chan-type clues, no telltale cigarette butts, or buttons torn off the killer’s coat by the victim, or crumpled slips of paper with the murderer’s handwriting. Even the forensic specialists found nothing. Hairs, pieces of thread, tiny bits of flesh under the victim’s nails—all were absent. “I thought you guys were supposed to be able to tell something about the killer,” Kaylor told a forensics man later over the phone. “After all, they got that guy in Atlanta with pieces of fiber, didn’t they?”
“It wasn’t just that,” the man, a clerkish type named Rogers, replied. “They couldn’t have got him on that alone. Besides, they had all the money and equipment they needed. We don’t.”
“So it’s what? A question of economics?”
“All the money in the world won’t buy clues that aren’t there, Chief.” The “chief” was slurred deprecatingly. “So you got nothing.”
“That’s the size of it.”
“Where the hell’s Craig Kennedy when you need him?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Thinking out loud.”
Kaylor began to think silently as well. He questioned dozens of people who had known Marie Snyder, and those who only frequented her store. “Did you notice anything different about her lately?”
“Had she mentioned anything or anybody in a peculiar manner?”
“Did she do anything peculiar?” He’d spent over an hour talking with John Grubb, the tight-fisted pensioner who occasionally tended the newsstand and helped Marie with the heavy work. He denied noticing any recent changes in her, except for one small thing.
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