If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  “Yes,” Uncle Henry says. “Yes indeed.” But he’s losing it again. “Where are we? Where are we really?”

  The place where you’re probably going to die, Holly thinks. Unless they take you to the hospital to do it. Outside, she sees Jerome unloading a couple of tartan suitcases. Also a suit bag. Will her uncle ever wear a suit again? Yes, probably . . . but only once.

  “Let’s look at your room,” Mrs. Braddock says. “You’re going to like it, Henry!”

  She takes his arm, but Henry resists. He looks at his sister. “What’s going on here, Charlie?”

  Don’t cry now, Holly thinks, hold it in, don’t you dare. But oh poop, here come the waterworks, and in full flow.

  “Why are you crying, Charlie?” Then: “I don’t want to be here!” It’s not his stentorian “Mister Tibbs” bellow, more of a whine. Like a kid realizing he’s about to get a shot. He turns from Charlotte’s tears to see Jerome coming in with his luggage. “Here! Here! What are you doing with those traps? They’re mine!”

  “Well,” Jerome says, but doesn’t seem to know how to go on.

  The oldies are filing in from their trip to the bowling alley, where Holly is sure a great many gutter balls were rolled. The employee who raised his hands to stop traffic joins a nurse who seems to have appeared from nowhere. She is broad of beam and thick of bicep.

  These two close in on Henry and take him gently by the arms. “Let’s go this way,” says the bowling alley guy. “Have a look at the new crib, brother. See what you think.”

  “Think of what?” Henry asks, but he begins to walk.

  “You know something?” the nurse says. “The game’s on in the common room, and we’ve got the biggest TV you’ve ever seen. You’ll feel like you’re on the fifty-yard line. We’ll take a quick gander at your room, then you can watch it.”

  “Plenty of cookies, too,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Fresh baked.”

  “Is it the Browns?” Henry asks. They are approaching double doors. He will soon disappear behind them. Where, Holly thinks, he’ll begin living the dimmed-out remainder of his life.

  The nurse laughs. “No, no, not the Browns, they’re out of it. The Ravens. Peck ’em and deck ’em!”

  “Good,” Henry says, then adds something he never on God’s earth would have said before his neural relays began to rust out. “Those Browns are all a bunch of cunts.”

  Then he is gone.

  Mrs. Braddock reaches into the pocket of her dress and hands Charlotte a tissue. “It’s perfectly natural for them to be upset on moving-in day. He’ll settle down. I have some more paperwork for you if you feel up to it, Mrs. Gibney.”

  Charlotte nods. Over the sodden bouquet of the tissue, her eyes are red and streaming. This is the woman who scolded me for crying in public, Holly marvels. The one who told me to stop trying to be the center of attention. This is payback, and I could have done without it.

  Another orderly (the woods are full of them, Holly thinks) has materialized and is loading Uncle Henry’s faded tartan bags and his Brooks Brothers suiter onto a trolley, as if this place were just another Holiday Inn or Motel 6. Holly is staring at this and holding back her own tears when Jerome takes her gently by the arm and leads her outside.

  They sit on a bench in the cold. “I want a cigarette,” Holly says. “First time in a long while.”

  “Pretend,” he says, and exhales a plume of frosty air.

  She inhales and blows out her own cloud of vapor. She pretends.

  7

  They don’t stay overnight, although Charlotte assures them there’s plenty of room. Holly doesn’t like to think of her mother spending this first night alone, but she can’t bear to stay. It isn’t the house where Holly grew up, but the woman who lives here is the woman she grew up with. Holly is very different from the pale, chain-smoking, poetry-writing (bad poetry) girl who grew up in Charlotte Gibney’s shadow, but that’s hard to remember in her presence, because her mother still sees her as the damaged child who went everywhere with her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down.

  It’s Holly driving the first leg this time, and Jerome does the rest. It’s long after dark when they see the lights of the city. Holly has been dozing in and out, thinking in a disconnected way about how Uncle Henry mistook her for Janey, the woman who was blown up in Bill Hodges’s car. That leads her wandering mind back to the explosion at Macready Middle School, and the correspondent with the torn pocket and the brick dust on his hands. She remembers thinking that there was something different about him that night.

  Well sure, she thinks as she drifts toward another doze. In between the first bulletin that afternoon and the special report that night, Ondowsky helped search the rubble, thus transitioning from reporting the story to becoming a part of it. That would change anyb—

  Suddenly her eyes snap open and she sits bolt upright, startling Jerome. “What? Are you all ri—”

  “The mole!”

  He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and Holly doesn’t care. It probably doesn’t mean anything, anyway, but she knows Bill Hodges would have congratulated her on her observation. And on her memory, the thing Uncle Henry is now losing.

  “Chet Ondowsky,” she said. “The news correspondent who was first on the scene after the school blew up. In the afternoon he had a mole beside his mouth, but when the special report came on that night at ten, it was gone.”

  “Thank God for Max Factor, huh?” Jerome says as he leaves the expressway.

  He’s right, of course, it even occurred to her when the news bulletin came on: crooked tie, no time to cover the mole with makeup. Later on, when Ondowsky’s support crew arrived, they took care of that. Still, it’s a little strange. Holly is sure a makeup person would have left the scratches—they were good TV, made the correspondent look heroic—but wouldn’t the makeup guy or gal have cleaned some of the brick dust from around Ondowsky’s mouth in the process of covering the mole?

  “Holly?” Jerome asks. “Are you overcranking again?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Too much stress, not enough rest.”

  “Let it go.”

  “Yes,” she says. It’s good advice. She intends to follow it.

  December 14, 2020

  1

  Holly expected another night of tossing and turning, but she sleeps right through until her phone alarm (“Orinoco Flow”) gently wakes her. She feels rested, fully herself again. She slips to her knees, does her few morning meditations, then settles into her tiny breakfast nook for a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of yogurt, and a big mug of Constant Comment.

  As she enjoys her little repast, she reads the local paper on her iPad. News of the Macready School bombing has slipped from the front page (dominated, as usual, by the president’s idiotic shenanigans) to the National News section. This is because there have been no fresh developments. More victims have been released from the hospital; two kids, one of them a talented basketball player, remain in critical condition; the police claim to be following a number of leads. Holly doubts it. There is nothing about Chet Ondowsky, and he’s the first person she thought of when Enya’s high notes urged her back to wakefulness. Not her mother, not her uncle. Was she dreaming about Ondowsky? If she was, she can’t remember.

  She exits the newspaper, opens Safari, and types in Ondowsky’s name. The first thing she learns is that his real first name is Charles, not Chester, and he’s been with Pittsburgh’s NBC affiliate for the last two years. His stated beat is charmingly alliterative: crime, community, and consumer fraud.

  There are any number of videos. Holly clicks on the most recent, titled “WPEN Welcomes Chet and Fred Home.” Ondowsky enters the newsroom (wearing a new suit), followed by a young man wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants with big pockets on the sides. They are greeted by a wave of applause from the station’s staff, both the on-air people and the studio crew. Looks like forty or fifty in all. The young man—Fred—grins. Ondowsky reacts with surprise, then pleasure of an appropriately modest sort. H
e even applauds them in return. A woman dressed to the nines, probably a news anchor, comes forward. “Chet, you’re our hero,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek. “You too, Freddy.” No kiss for the young man though, just a quick pat on the shoulder.

  “I’ll rescue you anytime, Peggy,” Ondowsky says, drawing laughter and more applause. That’s where the clip ends.

  Holly watches some more clips, choosing at random. In one, Chet stands outside a burning apartment building. In another, he’s at the site of a multiple vehicle pileup on a bridge. In the third, he’s reporting on the groundbreaking of a new YMCA, complete with ceremonial silver spade and a soundtrack featuring the Village People. A fourth, from just before Thanksgiving, shows him knocking repeatedly on the door of a so-called “pain clinic” in Sewickley, and getting nothing for his pains but a muffled “No questions, go away!”

  Busy guy, busy guy, Holly thinks. And in none of these clips does Charles “Chet” Ondowsky have a mole. Because it’s always covered with makeup, she tells herself as she rinses her few dishes in the sink. It was just that once, when he had to get on the air in a hurry, that it showed. And why are you worrying about this, anyway? It’s like when some annoying pop song turns into an earworm.

  Because she’s up early, she has time for an episode of The Good Place before leaving for work. She goes into her television room, picks up the remote, then just holds it, staring at the blank screen. After a bit, she puts the remote down and goes back into the kitchen. She powers up her iPad and finds the clip of Chet Ondowsky doing his investigative song and dance about the Sewickley pain clinic.

  After the guy inside tells Chet to get lost, the story goes to Ondowsky in a medium close-up, holding the mike (WPEN logo prominently displayed) to his mouth and smiling grimly. “You heard it, self-identified ‘pain doctor’ Stefan Muller refusing to answer questions and telling us to go away. We did, but we’ll keep coming back and asking questions until we get some answers. This is Chet Ondowsky, in Sewickley. Back to you, David.”

  Holly watches it again. On this run-through she freezes the picture just as Ondowsky is saying we’ll keep coming back. The mike dips a bit at that point, giving her a good view of his mouth. She spreads her fingers to zoom the image until his mouth fills the screen. There is no mole there, she’s sure of it. She’d see its ghost even if it was covered with foundation and powder.

  Thoughts of The Good Place have left her mind.

  Ondowsky’s initial report from the scene of the explosion isn’t on the WPEN site, but it is on the NBC News site. She goes to it and once more spreads her fingers, enlarging the image until the screen is filled with Chet Ondowsky’s mouth. And guess what, that isn’t a mole at all. Is it dirt? She doesn’t think so. She thinks it’s hair. A spot he missed shaving, maybe.

  Or maybe something else.

  Maybe the remains of a fake mustache.

  Now thoughts of getting in to the office early so she can check the answering machine and do some peaceful paperwork before Pete comes in have also left her mind. She gets up and walks twice around the kitchen, her heart beating hard in her chest. What she’s thinking can’t be true, it’s totally stupid, but what if it is true?

  She googles Macready Middle School Explosion and finds the still of the delivery guy/bomber. She uses her fingers to enlarge the picture, focusing on the guy’s mustache. She’s thinking about those cases you read about from time to time where some serial arsonist turns out to be a fireman, either from the responding department or from a volunteer crew. There was even a true crime book about that, Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh. She read it when she was in high school. It’s like some fracked-up Munchausen by proxy.

  Too monstrous. Can’t be.

  But Holly finds herself wondering for the first time how Chet Ondowsky got to the scene of the explosion so fast, beating all the other reporters by . . . well, she doesn’t know just how long, but he was there first. She knows that.

  But wait, does she? She didn’t see any other reporters doing stand-ups during that first bulletin, but can she be sure?

  She rummages in her bag and finds her phone. Since the case she and Ralph Anderson shared—the one that ended in gunfire at the Marysville Hole—she and Ralph often talk, and it’s usually early in the morning. Sometimes he calls her; sometimes she’s the one who reaches out. Her finger hovers over his number but doesn’t descend. Ralph is on an unexpected (and well deserved) vacation with his wife and son, and even if he’s not still sleeping at seven in the morning, it’s his family time. Bonus family time. Does she want to bother him with this on so little?

  Maybe she can use her computer and figure it out for herself. Set her mind at rest. She learned from the best, after all.

  Holly goes to her desktop, calls up the picture of the delivery guy/bomber, and prints it out. Then she selects several headshots of Chet Ondowsky—he’s a news guy, so there are plenty—and prints them, as well. She takes all of them out to the kitchen, where the morning light is strongest. She arranges them in a square, the bomber’s picture in the middle, the Ondowsky shots all around it. She studies them carefully for a full minute. Then she closes her eyes, counts to thirty, and studies them again. She lets out a sigh that’s a little disappointed and exasperated, but mostly relieved.

  She remembers a conversation she had with Bill once, a month or two before the pancreatic cancer finished her ex-cop partner off. She asked if he read detective novels, and Bill said only Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch stories and the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. He said those books were based on actual police work. Most of the others were “Agatha Christie bullshit.”

  He told her one thing about the 87th Precinct books that had stuck with her. “McBain said there are only two types of human faces, pig faces and fox faces. I’d add that sometimes you see a man or woman with a horse face, but they’re rare. Mostly yeah, it’s pigs and foxes.”

  Holly finds this a useful yardstick as she studies the headshots on her kitchen table. Both men are okay looking (wouldn’t crack a mirror, her mother might have said), but in different ways. The delivery guy/bomber—Holly decides to call him George, just for the sake of convenience—has a fox face: rather narrow, the lips thin, the chin small and tight. The narrowness of the face is accentuated by the way George’s black hair starts high on the temples, and how it’s short and combed tight to the skull. Ondowsky, on the other hand, has a pig face. Not in any gross way, but it’s round rather than narrow. His hair is light brown. His nose is broader, his lips fuller. Chet Ondowsky’s eyes are round, and if he’s wearing corrective lenses, they are contacts. George’s eyes (what she can see of them behind his glasses) look like they might be tilted at the corners. The skin tones are different, too. Ondowsky is your textbook white guy, with ancestors probably hailing from Poland or Hungary or someplace like that. George the Bomber has a slight olive blush to his skin. To top it off, Ondowsky has a cleft chin, like Kirk Douglas. George does not.

  They probably aren’t even the same height, Holly thinks, although of course it’s impossible to tell for sure.

  Nevertheless, she grabs a Magic Marker from the mug on the kitchen counter and doodles a mustache on one of the Ondowsky headshots. She puts this one next to the security camera still of George. It doesn’t change anything. These two can’t possibly be the same guy.

  Still . . . as long as she’s here . . .

  She returns again to her office computer (still in her pajamas) and begins searching for other early coverage that would have been fed from the affiliates to the networks—ABC, FOX, CBS. In two of them she can see the WPEN newsvan in the background. In the third, she sees Ondowsky’s cameraman winding up electrical cable, getting ready to move to a new location. His head is bent but Holly recognizes him anyway, by the baggy khakis with the side pockets. It’s Fred from the welcome home video. Ondowsky isn’t in that one, so he’s probably already helping in the rescue efforts.

  She goes back to Google and finds another station, an independent,
that was probably on the scene. She plugs WPIT Breaking News Macready School into her search engine and finds a video of a young woman who looks barely old enough to be out of high school. She’s doing her stand-up beside the giant metal pine cone with its blinking Christmas lights. Her station’s newsvan is there, parked in the turnout behind a Subaru sedan.

  The young reporter is clearly horrified, stumbling over her words, doing a clumsy job of reporting that will never get her hired (or even noticed) by one of the bigger stations. Holly doesn’t care. When the young woman’s cameraman zooms in on the school’s broken-out side, focusing on EMTs, police, and plain old civilians digging in the wreckage and carrying stretchers, she gleeps (Bill’s word) Chet Ondowsky. He’s digging like a dog, bent over and tossing bricks and broken boards between his spread legs. He came by those cuts on his hands honestly.

  “He was there first,” Holly says. “Maybe not before the first first responders, but before any of the other TV—”

  Her phone rings. It’s still in the bedroom, so she answers on her desktop, a little fillip Jerome added on one of his visits.

  “Are you on your way?” Pete asks.

  “To where?” Holly is honestly bewildered. She feels like she’s been yanked out of a dream.

  “Toomey Ford,” he says. “Did you really forget? That’s not like you, Holly.”

  It’s not, but she has. Tom Toomey, who owns the dealership, is pretty sure one of his salesmen—Dick Ellis, a star performer—has been under-reporting his accounts, possibly to provide for a little dolly he’s seeing on the side, possibly to support a drug habit. (“He sniffs a lot,” Toomey said. “Claims it’s the air conditioning. In December? Give me a break.”) This is Ellis’s day off, which means it’s a perfect opportunity for Holly to run some numbers, do some comparisons, and see if something’s wrong.