If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  She could make an excuse to Pete, but the excuse would be a lie, and she doesn’t do that. Unless she absolutely has to, anyway. “I did forget. I’m sorry.”

  “Want me to go out there?”

  “No.” If the numbers support Toomey’s suspicions, Pete will have to go out later and confront Ellis. Being ex-police himself, he’s good at that. Holly, not so much. “Tell Mr. Toomey I’ll meet him for lunch, wherever he wants, and Finders will pick up the tab.”

  “Okay, but he’ll pick someplace expensive.” A pause. “Holly, are you chasing something?”

  Is she? And why did she think of Ralph Anderson so quickly? Is there something she’s not telling herself?

  “Holly? Still there?”

  “Yes,” she says, “I’m here. I just overslept.”

  So. Lying after all.

  2

  Holly takes a quick shower, then dresses in one of her fade-into-the-woodwork business suits. Chet Ondowsky stays on her mind all the while. It occurs to her that she might know a way to answer the major question that’s nagging at her, so she goes back to her computer and opens Facebook. No sign that Chet Ondowsky does that one, or Instagram, either. Unusual for a TV personality. They usually love social media.

  Holly tries Twitter, and bingo, there he is: Chet Ondowsky @condowsky1.

  The school explosion happened at 2:19. Ondowsky’s first tweet from the scene came over an hour later, and this doesn’t surprise Holly: busy-busy-busy was condowsky1. The tweet reads, Macready School. Horrible tragedy. 15 dead so far, maybe many more. Pray, Pittsburgh, pray. It’s heartrending, but Holly’s heart isn’t rent. She’s gotten very tired of all the “thoughts and prayers” bullpoop, maybe because it seems too pat, somehow, probably because she’s not interested in Ondowsky’s aftermath tweets. They are not what she’s looking for.

  She becomes a time traveler, scrolling back along Ondowsky’s feed to before the explosion happened, and at 1:46 P.M. she finds a photograph of a retro diner with a parking lot in the foreground. The neon sign in the window says WE’VE GOT HOME COOKIN’, GOOD LOOKIN’! Ondowsky’s tweet is below the picture. Just time for coffee and pie at Clauson’s before off to Eden. See my report on the World’s Largest Garage Sale on PEN tonight at 6!

  Holly googles Clauson’s Diner and finds it in Pierre Village, Pennsylvania. A further check on Google (what did we ever do without it, she wonders) shows her that Pierre Village is less than fifteen miles from Pineborough and the Macready School. Which explains how he and his cameraman got there first. He was on his way to cover the World’s Largest Garage Sale in a town called Eden. A further check shows her that Eden Township is ten miles north of Pierre Village, and about the same distance from Pineborough. He just happened to be in the right place—near it, anyway—at the right time.

  Besides, she’s pretty sure the local police (or maybe the investigators from ATF) have already asked both Ondowsky and Fred the cameraman about their fortuitous arrival, not because either is an actual suspect but because the authorities will be crossing every t and dotting every i in a bombing situation where there have been multiple fatalities and casualties.

  Her phone is now in her handbag. She takes it out, calls Tom Toomey, and asks if it’s too late for her to come by the dealership and look at some figures. Maybe have a peek at the suspected salesman’s computer?

  “Absolutely,” Toomey tells her. “But I had my face fixed for lunch at DeMasio’s. Their fettuccini alfredo’s amazing. Is that still part of the deal?”

  “Absolutely,” Holly says, inwardly wincing as she thinks of the expense slip she will be filling out later—DeMasio’s isn’t cheap. As she goes out, she tells herself to think of it as penance for lying to Pete. Lies are a slippery slope, each one usually leading to two more.

  3

  Tom Toomey devours his fettuccini alfredo with a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt, eating and slurping with abandon, and follows it up with a mixed-nut panna cotta. Holly has an antipasto and refuses dessert, settling for a cup of decaf (she eschews caffeine after 8 A.M.).

  “You really should have dessert,” Toomey says. “It’s a celebration. Looks like you saved me a bundle.”

  “We did,” Holly says. “The firm. Pete will get Ellis to own up and there’ll be at least some restitution. That should draw a line under it.”

  “There you go! So come on,” he coaxes. Selling seems to be his default position. “Have something sweet. Treat yourself.” As if she’s the one who just got the scoop on a cheating employee.

  Holly shakes her head and tells him she’s full. The fact is she wasn’t hungry when she sat down, although her oatmeal was hours ago. Her mind keeps returning to Chet Ondowsky. Her earworm.

  “Watching your figure, I guess, huh?”

  “Yes,” Holly says, which isn’t quite a lie; she watches her calorie intake, and her figure takes care of itself. Not that she has anyone to watch it for. Mr. Toomey should be watching his own figure, he’s digging his grave with his fork and spoon, but it isn’t her place to tell him that.

  “You should bring in your lawyer and a forensic accountant if you plan to prosecute Mr. Ellis,” she says. “My figures won’t be enough in court.”

  “You betcha.” Toomey concentrates on his panna cotta, demolishing what’s left, then looks up. “I don’t get it, Holly. I thought you’d be more pleased. You nailed a bad guy.”

  How bad the salesman is or isn’t would depend on why he’s been chipping away money on the side, but that isn’t Holly’s business. She only gives Toomey what Bill used to call her Mona Lisa smile.

  “Something else on your mind?” Toomey asks. “Another case?”

  “Not at all,” Holly replies, which is also not a lie, not really; the Macready School explosion is also none of her business. She has no skin in the game, Jerome would say. But that mole that wasn’t a mole stays on her mind. Everything about Chet Ondowsky seems legit except for the thing that got her wondering about him in the first place.

  There is a reasonable explanation, she thinks as she motions for the waiter to bring the check. You’re just not seeing it. Let it go.

  Just let it go.

  4

  The office is empty when she gets back. Pete has left a note on her computer that says Rattner spotted in a bar down by the lake. On my way. Call me if you need me. Herbert Rattner is a bail-jumper with a long history of not appearing when his cases (there have been many) are called in court. Holly mentally wishes Pete luck and goes to the files, which she—and Jerome, when he gets a chance—have been digitizing. It will keep her mind off Ondowsky, she thinks, but it doesn’t. After just fifteen minutes she gives up and goes to Twitter.

  Curiosity killed the cat, she thinks, but satisfaction brought him back. I’ll just check this one thing, then return to the scut work.

  She finds Ondowsky’s diner tweet. Before, she was concentrating on the words. Now it’s the photograph that she studies. Silver retro diner. Cute neon sign in the window. Parking in front. The lot is only half full, and nowhere does she see the WPEN newsvan.

  “They might have parked around back,” she says. Maybe true—she has no way of knowing if there are more spaces behind the diner—but why do that when there were so many available spaces in front, just a few steps from the door?

  She starts to exit the tweet, then stops and bends forward until her nose is almost touching the screen. Her eyes are wide. She feels the sense of satisfaction she gets when she finally thinks of the word that’s been giving her fits in a crossword, or when she finally sees where a troublesome piece goes into a jigsaw puzzle.

  She highlights Ondowsky’s diner photo and slides it to one side. Then she finds the video of the inept young reporter doing her stand-up beside the giant pine cone. The indie station’s van—older and humbler than those of the network affiliates—is parked in the turnout behind a forest green Subaru sedan. Which means the Subaru was almost certainly there first, or the positions would be reversed. Holly freezes t
he video and pulls the diner photo as close as she can, and yes, there’s a forest green Subaru sedan in the diner parking lot. It’s not conclusive, there are plenty of Subarus on the road, but Holly knows what she knows. It’s the same one. It’s Ondowsky’s. He parked in the turnout and then hustled to the scene.

  She’s so deep in the center of her head that when her phone rings, she gives a little scream. It’s Jerome. He wants to know if she has any lost dogs for him. Or lost kids—he says he feels ready to move up to the next rung on the ladder.

  “No,” she says, “but you could . . .”

  She stops short of asking him if he can track down any information about a WPEN cameraman named Fred, perhaps by posing as a blogger or a magazine writer. She should be able to track down Fred herself, using her trusty computer. And there’s something else. She doesn’t want Jerome involved in this. She won’t let herself think exactly why, but the feeling is strong.

  “Could what?” he asks.

  “I was going to say that if you wanted to go bar-hopping down by the lake, you could look for—”

  “Love bar-hopping,” Jerome says. “Love it.”

  “I’m sure you do, but you’d be looking for Pete, not drinking beer. See if he needs any help with a bail-jumper named Herbert Rattner. Rattner’s white, about fifty . . .”

  “Neck tattoo of a hawk or something,” Jerome says. “Saw the photo on the bulletin board, Hollyberry.”

  “He’s a non-violent offender, but be careful, just the same. If you see him, don’t approach him without Pete.”

  “Got it, got it.” Jerome sounds excited. His first real crook.

  “Be careful, Jerome.” She can’t help reiterating this. If anything happened to Jerome, it would wreck her. “And please don’t call me Hollyberry. It’s worn very thin.”

  He promises, but she doubts if he means it.

  Holly returns her attention to her computer, eyes ticking back and forth between the two forest green Subarus. It means nothing, she tells herself. You’re only thinking what you’re thinking because of what happened in Texas. Bill would call it Blue Ford Syndrome. If you bought a blue Ford, he said, you suddenly saw blue Fords everywhere. But this wasn’t a blue Ford, it was a green Subaru. And she can’t help what she is thinking.

  There is no John Law for Holly that afternoon. By the time she leaves the office, she has more information, and she’s troubled.

  5

  At home, Holly makes herself a little meal and fifteen minutes later has forgotten what it was. She calls her mother to ask if she’s been to see Uncle Henry. Yes, Charlotte says. Holly asks how he’s doing. He’s confused, Charlotte says, but he seems to be adjusting. Holly has no idea if this is true, because her mother has a way of jiggering her view of the world until she’s seeing it the way she wants to see it.

  “He’d like to see you,” Charlotte says, and Holly promises she’ll go as soon as she can—maybe this weekend. Knowing he’ll call her Janey, because Janey is the one he wants. The one he loves best and always will, even though Janey has been dead for six years. This isn’t self-pity, just the truth. You have to accept the truth.

  “Have to accept the truth,” she says. “Have to, like it or not.”

  With this in mind she picks up her phone, almost calls Ralph, and again keeps herself from doing it. Why spoil his time off just because the two of them bought a blue Ford down in Texas and now she’s seeing them everywhere?

  Then she realizes she doesn’t have to talk to him, at least not in person. She gets her phone and a bottle of ginger ale and goes into the TV room. Here the walls are lined with books on one side and DVDs on the other, everything arranged in alphabetical order. She sits in her comfortable viewing chair, but instead of powering up the big-screen Samsung, she opens her phone’s recording app. She just looks at it for a few moments, then pushes the big red button.

  “Hello, Ralph, it’s me. I’m recording this on December fourteenth. I don’t know if you’ll ever hear it, because if what I’m thinking turns out to be nothing, and it probably will, I’ll just delete it, but saying it out loud might, um, clarify my thoughts.”

  She pauses the recording, thinking about how she should start.

  “I know you remember what happened in that cave when we finally met the outsider face to face. He wasn’t used to being found out, was he? He asked what made me able to believe. It was Brady that made me able to do that, Brady Hartsfield, but the outsider didn’t know about Brady. He asked if it was because I’d seen another like him somewhere. Do you remember how he looked and sounded when he asked that? I do. Not just eager, greedy. He thought he was the only one. I thought so, too, I think we both did. But Ralph, I’m starting to wonder if there might be another one, after all. Not quite the same, but similar—the way dogs and wolves are similar, say. It might only be what my old friend Bill Hodges used to call Blue Ford Syndrome, but if I’m right, I need to do something about it. Don’t I?”

  The question sounds plaintive, lost. She pauses the recording again, thinks about deleting that last, and decides not to. Plaintive and lost is exactly how she feels right now, and besides—Ralph will probably never hear this.

  She goes again.

  “Our outsider needed time to transform. There was a period of hibernation, weeks or months, while he changed from looking like one person to looking like another. He wore a chain of faces going back years, maybe even centuries. This guy, though . . . if what I’m thinking is true, he can change much faster, and I’m having trouble believing that. Which is kind of ironic. Do you remember what I said to you the night before we went after our perp? That you had to set your lifelong concept of reality aside? It was okay for the others not to believe, but you had to. I said if you didn’t believe we were probably going to die, and that would allow the outsider to keep moving along, wearing the faces of other men and leaving them to take the blame when more children died.”

  She shakes her head, even laughs a little.

  “I was like one of those revival preachers exhorting unbelievers to come to Jesus, wasn’t I? Only now I’m the one trying not to believe. Trying to tell myself it’s just paranoid Holly Gibney, jumping at shadows the way I used to before Bill came along and taught me to be brave.”

  Holly takes a deep breath.

  “The man I’m worried about is named Charles Ondowsky, although he goes by Chet. He’s a TV reporter, and his beat is what he calls the three Cs: crime, community, and consumer fraud. He does cover community affairs, stuff like groundbreaking ceremonies and the World’s Largest Garage Sale, and he covers consumer fraud—there’s even a segment on his station’s nightly news called Chet on Guard—but what he covers mostly is crime and disaster. Tragedy. Death. Pain. And if all that doesn’t remind you of the outsider who killed the boy in Flint City and the two little girls in Ohio, I’d be very surprised. Shocked, in fact.”

  She pauses the recording long enough to take a big drink of her ginger ale—her throat is as dry as the desert—and lets out a resounding belch that makes her giggle. Feeling a little better, Holly pushes the record button and makes her report, just as she would when investigating any case—repo, lost dog, car salesman chipping six hundred dollars here, eight hundred there. Doing that is good. It’s like disinfecting a wound that has begun to show some minor but still troubling redness.

  December 15, 2020

  When she wakes up the next morning, Holly feels brand new, ready to work and also ready to put Chet Ondowsky and her paranoid suspicions about him behind her. Was it Freud or Dorothy Parker who once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Whichever one it was, sometimes a dark spot beside a reporter’s mouth is just hair or dirt that looks like hair. Ralph would tell her that if he ever heard her audio recording, which he almost certainly won’t. But it did the job; talking it out cleared her head. In that way it was like her therapy sessions with Allie. Because if Ondowsky could somehow morph into George the Bomber, then morph back into himself again, why would he leave a little
piece of George’s mustache behind? The idea is ridiculous.

  Or take the green Subaru. Yes, it belongs to Chet Ondowsky, she’s sure of that. She took it for granted that he and his cameraman (Fred Finkel is his name, finding that was a snap, no Jerome necessary) were traveling together in the station’s newsvan, but that was an assumption rather than a deduction, and Holly believes the path to hell is paved with faulty assumptions.

  Now that her mind is rested, she can see that Ondowsky’s decision to travel alone is perfectly reasonable and perfectly innocent. He’s a star reporter at a big metro TV station. He’s Chet on Guard, for heaven’s sake, and as such he can get up a little later than the hoi polloi, maybe drop by the station, and later enjoy coffee and pie at his favorite diner while Fred the faithful cameraman goes to Eden to do B-roll (as a film buff, Holly knows that’s what they call it) and maybe even—if Fred has aspirations of rising in the news department hierarchy—pre-interview the people Ondowsky should talk to when he does his World’s Largest Garage Sale stand-up for the six o’clock news.

  Only Ondowsky gets the news flash, maybe on a police scanner, about the school explosion and beats feet to the location. Fred Finkel does the same, driving the newsvan. Ondowsky parks beside that ridiculous pine cone and that’s where he and Finkel go to work. All perfectly explicable, no supernatural elements need apply. This is just a case of a private investigator hundreds of miles away who happens to be suffering from Blue Ford Syndrome.

  Voilà.

  Holly has a good day at the office. Rattner, that master criminal, has been spotted by Jerome in a bar with the amazing (to Holly, at least) name of the Edmund Fitzgerald Taproom, and escorted to county lockup by Pete Huntley. Pete is currently at the Toomey dealership where he will confront Richard Ellis.

  Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s sister, drops by, telling Holly (rather smugly) that she has been excused from afternoon classes because she’s doing a report called Private Investigation: Fact vs. Fiction. She asks Holly a few questions (recording the answers on her own phone), then helps Holly with the files. At three o’clock, they settle down to watch John Law.