Good Marriage

by Stephen King

  Nice try, but the IDs she’d found squirreled away in the garage made the idea of coincidence seem a lot less likely.

  Beadie’s seventh victim, the first of what the paper called “the new cycle,” had been a woman from Waterville, Maine, named Stacey Moore. Her husband found her in the cellar upon returning from Boston, where he and two friends had taken in a couple of Red Sox games. August of 1997, this had been. Her head had been stuffed into a bin of the sweet corn the Moores sold at their roadside Route 106 farmstand. She was naked, her hands bound behind her back, her buttocks and thighs bitten in a dozen places.

  Two days later, Stacey Moore’s driver’s license and Blue Cross card, bound with a rubber band, had arrived in Augusta, addressed in block printing to BOOB ATTORNEY JENRAL DEPT. OF CRINIMAL INVESTIGATION. There was also a note: HELLO! I’M BACK! BEADIE!

  This was a packet the detectives in charge of the Moore murder recognized at once. Similar selected bits of ID—and similar cheerful notes—had been delivered following each of the previous killings. He knew when they were alone. He tortured them, principally with his teeth; he raped or sexually molested them; he killed them; he sent their identification to some branch of the police weeks or months later. Taunting them with it.

  To make sure he gets the credit, Darcy thought dismally.

  There had been another Beadie murder in 2004, the ninth and tenth in 2007. Those two were the worst, because one of the victims had been a child. The woman’s ten-year-old son had been excused from school after complaining of a stomachache, and had apparently walked in on Beadie while he was at work. The boy’s body had been found with his mother’s, in a nearby creek. When the woman’s ID—two credit cards and a driver’s license—arrived at Massachusetts State Police Barracks #7, the attached card read: HELLO! THE BOY WAS AN ACCIDENT! SORRY! BUT IT WAS QUICK, HE DID NOT “SUFFER!” BEADIE!

  There were many other articles she could have accessed (o omnipotent Google), but to what end? The sweet dream of one more ordinary evening in an ordinary life had been swallowed by a nightmare. Would reading more about Beadie dispel the nightmare? The answer to that was obvious.

  Her belly clenched. She ran for the bathroom—still smelly in spite of the fan, usually you could ignore what a smelly business life was, but not always—and fell on her knees in front of the toilet, staring into the blue water with her mouth open. For a moment she thought the need to vomit was going to pass, then she thought of Stacey Moore with her black strangled face shoved into the corn and her buttocks covered with blood dried to the color of chocolate milk. That tipped her over and she vomited twice, hard enough to splash her face with Ty-D-Bol and a few flecks of her own effluvium.

  Crying and gasping, she flushed the toilet. The porcelain would have to be cleaned, but for now she only lowered the lid and laid her flushed cheek on its cool beige plastic.

  What am I going to do?

  The obvious step was to call the police, but what if she did that and it all turned out to be a mistake? Bob had always been the most generous and forgiving of men—when she’d run the front of their old van into a tree at the edge of the post office parking lot and shattered the windshield, his only concern had been if she had cut her face—but would he forgive her if she mistakenly fingered him for eleven torture-killings he hadn’t committed? And the world would know. Guilty or innocent, his picture would be in the paper. On the front page. Hers, too.

  Darcy dragged herself to her feet, got the toilet-scrubbing brush from the bathroom closet, and cleaned up her mess. She did it slowly. Her back hurt. She supposed she had thrown up hard enough to pull a muscle.

  Halfway through the job, the next realization thudded down. It wouldn’t be just the two of them dragged into newspaper speculation and the filthy rinse-cycle of twenty-four-hour cable news; there were the kids to think about. Donnie and Ken had just landed their first two clients, but the bank and the car dealership looking for a fresh approach would be gone three hours after this shit-bomb exploded. Anderson & Hayward, which had taken its first real breath today, would be dead tomorrow. Darcy didn’t know how much Ken Hayward had invested, but Donnie was all in the pot. That didn’t amount to such of a much in cash, but there were other things you invested when you were starting out on your own voyage. Your heart, your brains, your sense of self-worth.

  Then there were Petra and Michael, probably at this very moment with their heads together making more wedding plans, unaware that a two-ton safe was dangling above them on a badly frayed cord. Pets had always idolized her father. What would it do to her if she found out the hands which had once pushed her on the backyard swing were the same hands that had strangled the life out of eleven women? That the lips which had kissed her goodnight were hiding teeth that had bitten eleven women, in some cases all the way down to the bone?

  Sitting at her computer again, a terrible newspaper headline rose in Darcy’s mind. It was accompanied by a photograph of Bob in his neckerchief, absurd khaki shorts, and long socks. It was so clear it could already have been printed:

  MASS MURDERER “BEADIE”

  LED CUB SCOUTS FOR 17 YEARS

  Darcy clapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel her eyes pulsing in their sockets. The notion of suicide occurred to her, and for a few moments (long ones) the idea seemed completely rational, the only reasonable solution. She could leave a note saying she’d done it because she was afraid she had cancer. Or early-onset Alzheimer’s, that was even better. But suicide cast a deep shadow over families, too, and what if she was wrong? What if Bob had just found that ID packet by the side of the road, or something?

  Do you know how unlikely that is? Smart Darcy sneered.

  Okay, yes, but unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible, was it? There was something else, too, something that made the cage she was in escape-proof: what if she was right? Wouldn’t her death free Bob to kill more, because he no longer had to lead so deep a double life? Darcy wasn’t sure she believed in a conscious existence after death, but what if there was one? And what if she were confronted there not by Edenic green fields and rivers of plenty but by a ghastly receiving line of strangled women branded by her husband’s teeth, all accusing her of causing their deaths by taking the easy way out herself? And by ignoring what she had found (if such a thing were even possible, which she didn’t believe for a minute), wouldn’t the accusation be true? Did she really think she could condemn more women to horrible deaths just so her daughter could have a nice June wedding?

  She thought: I wish I was dead.

  But she wasn’t.

  For the first time in years, Darcy Madsen Anderson slipped from her chair onto her knees and began to pray. It did no good. The house was empty except for her.

  - 7 -

  She had never kept a diary, but she had ten years’ worth of appointment books stored in the bottom of her capacious sewing chest. And decades’ worth of Bob’s travel records stuffed in one of the file drawers of the cabinet he kept in his home office. As a tax accountant (and one with his own duly incorporated side-business to boot), he was meticulous when it came to record-keeping, taking every deduction, tax credit, and cent of automotive depreciation he could.

  She stacked his files beside her computer along with her appointment books. She opened Google and forced herself to do the research she needed, noting the names and dates of death (some of these were necessarily approximate) of Beadie’s victims. Then, as the digital clock on her computer’s control strip marched soundlessly past ten PM, she began the laborious work of cross-checking.

  She would have given a dozen years of her life to find something that would have indisputably eliminated him from even one of the murders, but her appointment books only made things worse. Kellie Gervais, of Keene, New Hampshire, had been discovered in the woods behind the local landfill on March fifteenth of 2004. According to the medical examiner, she had been dead three to five days. Scrawled across March tenth to twelfth in Darcy’s appointment book for 2004 was Bob to Fitzwilliam, Brat. Geor
ge Fitzwilliam was a well-heeled client of Benson, Bacon & Anderson. Brat was her abbreviation for Brattleboro, where Fitzwilliam lived. An easy drive from Keene, New Hampshire.

  Helen Shaverstone and her son Robert had been discovered in Newrie Creek, in the town of Amesbury, on November eleventh of 2007. They had lived in Tassel Village, some twelve miles away. On the November page of her 2007 address book, she had drawn a line across the eighth to the tenth, scrawling Bob in Saugus, 2 estate sales plus Boston coin auc. And did she remember calling his Saugus motel on one of those nights and not getting him? Assuming he was out late with some coin salesman, sniffing for leads, or maybe in the shower? She seemed to remember that. If so, had he actually been on the road that night? Perhaps coming back from doing an errand (a little drop-off) in the town of Amesbury? Or, if he had been in the shower, what in God’s name had he been washing off?

  She turned to his travel records and vouchers as the clock on the control strip passed eleven and started climbing toward midnight, the witching hour when graveyards reputedly yawned. She worked carefully and stopped often to double-check. The stuff from the late seventies was spotty and not much help—he hadn’t been much more than your basic office drone in those days—but everything from the eighties was there, and the correlations she found for the Beadie murders in 1980 and 1981 were clear and undeniable. He had been traveling at the right times and in the right areas. And, Smart Darcy insisted, if you found enough cat hairs in a person’s house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere.

  So what do I do now?

  The answer seemed to be, carry her confused and frightened head upstairs. She doubted if she could sleep, but at least she could take a hot shower and then lie down. She was exhausted, her back ached from throwing up, and she stank of her own sweat.

  She shut off her computer and climbed to the second floor at a slow trudge. The shower eased her back and a couple of Tylenol would probably ease it more by two AM or so; she was sure she’d be awake to find out. When she put the Tylenol back in the medicine cabinet, she took the Ambien bottle out, held it in her hand for almost a full minute, then replaced that, too. It wouldn’t put her to sleep, only make her muzzy and—perhaps—more paranoid than she was already.

  She lay down and looked at the night table on the other side of the bed. Bob’s clock. Bob’s spare set of reading glasses. A copy of a book called The Shack. You ought to read this, Darce, it’s a life-changer, he’d said two or three nights before this latest trip.

  She turned off her lamp, saw Stacey Moore stuffed into the cornbin, and turned the lamp back on again. On most nights, the dark was her friend—sleep’s kindly harbinger—but not tonight. Tonight the dark was populated by Bob’s harem.

  You don’t know that. Remember that you don’t absolutely know that.

  But if you find enough cat hairs …

  Enough with the cat hairs, too.

  She lay there, even more wide awake than she’d feared she’d be, her mind going around and around, now thinking of the victims, now thinking of her children, now thinking of herself, even thinking of some long-forgotten Bible story about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. She glanced at Bob’s clock after what felt like an hour of going around that wretched worry-circle and saw that only twelve minutes had passed. She got up on one elbow and turned the clock’s face to the window.

  He won’t be home until six tomorrow night, she thought … although, since it was now quarter past midnight, she supposed it was technically tonight that he’d be home. Still, that gave her eighteen hours. Surely enough time to make some sort of decision. It would help if she could sleep, even a little—sleep had a way of resetting the mind—but it was out of the question. She would drift a little, then think Marjorie Duvall or Stacey Moore or (this was the worst) Robert Shaverstone, ten years old. HE DID NOT “SUFFER!” And then any possibility of sleep would again be gone. The idea that she might never sleep again came to her. That was impossible, of course, but lying here with the taste of puke still in her mouth in spite of the Scope she had rinsed with, it seemed completely plausible.

  At some point she found herself remembering the year in early childhood when she had gone around the house looking in mirrors. She would stand in front of them with her hands cupped to the sides of her face and her nose touching the glass, but holding her breath so she wouldn’t fog the surface.

  If her mother caught her, she’d swat her away. That leaves a smudge, and I have to clean it off. Why are you so interested in yourself, anyway? You’ll never be hung for your beauty. And why stand so close? You can’t see anything worth looking at that way.

  How old had she been? Four? Five? Too young to explain that it wasn’t her reflection she was interested in, anyway—or not primarily. She had been convinced that mirrors were doorways to another world, and what she saw reflected in the glass wasn’t their living room or bathroom, but the living room or bathroom of some other family. The Matsons instead of the Madsens, perhaps. Because it was similar on the other side of the glass, but not the same, and if you looked long enough, you could begin to pick up on some of the differences: a rug that appeared to be oval over there instead of round like over here, a door that seemed to have a turn-latch instead of a bolt, a light-switch that was on the wrong side of the door. The little girl wasn’t the same, either. Darcy was sure they were related—sisters of the mirror?—but no, not the same. Instead of Darcellen Madsen that little girl might be named Jane or Sandra or even Eleanor Rigby, who for some reason (some scary reason) picked up the rice at churches where a wedding had been.

  Lying in the circle of her bedside lamp, drowsing without realizing it, Darcy supposed that if she had been able to tell her mother what she was looking for, if she had explained about the Darker Girl who wasn’t quite her, she might have passed some time with a child psychiatrist. But it wasn’t the girl who interested her, it had never been the girl. What interested her was the idea that there was a whole other world behind the mirrors, and if you could walk through that other house (the Darker House) and out the door, the rest of that world would be waiting.

  Of course this idea had passed and, aided by a new doll (which she had named Mrs. Butter-worth after the pancake syrup she loved) and a new dollhouse, she had moved on to more acceptable little-girl fantasies: cooking, cleaning, shopping, Scolding The Baby, Changing For Dinner. Now, all these years later, she had found her way through the mirror after all. Only there was no little girl waiting in the Darker House; instead there was a Darker Husband, one who had been living behind the mirror all the time, and doing terrible things there.

  A good one at a fair price, Bob liked to say—an accountant’s credo if ever there was one.

  Upright and sniffin the air—an answer to how you doin that every kid in every Cub Scout pack he’d ever taken down Dead Man’s Trail knew well. A response some of those boys no doubt still repeated as grown men.

  Gentlemen prefer blondes, don’t forget that one. Because they get tired of squeezin …

  But then sleep took Darcy, and although that soft nurse could not carry her far, the lines on her forehead and at the corners of her reddened, puffy eyes softened a bit. She was close enough to consciousness to stir when her husband pulled into the driveway, but not close enough to come around. She might have if the Suburban’s headlights had splashed across the ceiling, but Bob had doused them halfway down the block so as not to wake her.

  - 8 -

  A cat was stroking her cheek with a velvet paw. Very lightly but very insistently.

  Darcy tried to brush it away, but her hand seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. And it was a dream, anyway—surely had to be. They had no cat. Although if there are enough cat hairs in a house, there must be one around somewhere, her struggling-to-wake mind told her, quite reasonably.

  Now the paw was stroking her bangs and the forehead beneath, and it couldn’t be a cat because cats don’t talk.

  “Wake up, Darce. Wake up, hon. We have to
talk.”

  The voice, as soft and soothing as the touch. Bob’s voice. And not a cat’s paw but a hand. Bob’s hand. Only it couldn’t be him, because he was in Montp—

  Her eyes flew open and he was there, all right, sitting beside her on the bed, stroking her face and hair as he sometimes did when she was feeling under the weather. He was wearing a three-piece Jos. A. Bank suit (he bought all his suits there, calling it—another of his semi-amusing sayings—“Joss-Bank”), but the vest was unbuttoned and his collar undone. She could see the end of his tie poking out of his coat pocket like a red tongue. His midsection bulged over his belt and her first coherent thought was You really have to do something about your weight, Bobby, that isn’t good for your heart.

  “Wha—” It came out an almost incomprehensible crow-croak.

  He smiled and kept stroking her hair, her cheek, the nape of her neck. She cleared her throat and tried again.

  “What are you doing here, Bobby? It must be—” She raised her head to look at his clock, which of course did no good. She had turned its face to the wall.

  He glanced down at his watch. He had been smiling as he stroked her awake, and was smiling now. “Quarter to three. I sat in my stupid old motel room for almost two hours after we talked, trying to convince myself that what I was thinking couldn’t be true. Only I didn’t get to where I am by dodging the truth. So I jumped in the ’Burban and hit the road. No traffic whatsoever. I don’t know why I don’t do more traveling late at night. Maybe I will. If I’m not in Shawshank, that is. Or New Hampshire State Prison in Concord. But that’s kind of up to you. Isn’t it?”

  His hand, stroking her face. The feel of it was familiar, even the smell of it was familiar, and she had always loved it. Now she didn’t, and it wasn’t just the night’s wretched discoveries. How could she have never noticed how complacently possessive that stroking touch was? You’re an old bitch, but you’re my old bitch, that touch now seemed to say. Only this time you piddled on the floor while I was gone, and that’s bad. In fact, it’s a Big Bad.