Текст книги "Full dark, no stars"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for calling, Donnie. It was a treat.”

“Same here. Say hello to the old feller when he calls back, and give him my love.”

“I will.”

“Upright and sniffin the air,” Donnie said, and snickered. “How many Cub Scout packs has he taught that one to?”

“All of them.” Darcy opened the refrigerator to see if there was perchance a Butterfinger in there, chilling and awaiting her amorous intentions. Nope. “It’s terrifying.”

“Love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too.”

She hung up, feeling good again. Smiling. But as she stood there, leaning against the counter, the smile faded.

A clunk.

There had been a clunk when she pushed the box of catalogues back under the workbench. Not a clatter, as if the box had struck a dropped tool, but a clunk. Sort of hollow-sounding.

I don’t care.

Unfortunately, this was not true. The clunk felt like unfinished business. The carton did, too. Were there other magazines like Bondage Bitches stashed in there?

I don’t want to know.

Right, right, but maybe she should find out, just the same. Because if there was just the one, she was right about its being sexual curiosity that had been fully satisfied by a single peek into an unsavory (and unbalanced, she added to herself) world. If there were more, that might still be all right-he was throwing them out, after all-but maybe she should know.

Mostly… that clunk. It lingered on her mind more than the question about the magazines.

She snagged a flashlight from the pantry and went back out to the garage. She pinched the lapels of her housecoat shut immediately and wished she’d put on her jacket. It was really getting cold. – 4 -

Darcy got down on her knees, pushed the box of catalogues to one side, and shone the light under the worktable. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing: two lines of darkness interrupting the smooth baseboard, one slightly fatter than the other. Then a thread of disquiet formed in her midsection, stretching from the middle of her breastbone down to the pit of her stomach. It was a hiding place.

Leave this alone, Darcy. It’s his business, and for your own peace of mind you should let it stay that way.

Good advice, but she had come too far to take it. She crawled under the worktable with the flashlight in her hand, steeling herself for the brush of cobwebs, but there were none. If she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl, then her balding, coin-collecting, Cub Scouting husband was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy.

Also, he’s crawled under here himself, so no cobwebs would have a chance to form.

Was that true? She didn’t actually know, did she?

But she thought she did.

The cracks were at either end of an eight-inch length of baseboard that appeared to have a dowel or something in the middle so it could pivot. She had struck it with the box just hard enough to jar it open, but that didn’t explain the clunk. She pushed one end of the board. It swung in on one end and out on the other, revealing a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep. She thought she might discover more magazines, possibly rolled up, but there were no magazines. There was a little wooden box, one she was pretty sure she recognized. It was the box that had made the clunking sound. It had been standing on end, and the pivoting baseboard had knocked it over.

She reached in, grasped it, and-with a sense of misgiving so strong it almost had a texture-brought it out. It was the little oak box she had given to him at Christmas five years ago, maybe more. Or had it been for his birthday? She didn’t remember, just that it had been a good buy at the craft shop in Castle Rock. Hand-carved on the top, in bas-relief, was a chain. Below the chain, also in bas-relief, was the box’s stated purpose: LINKS. Bob had a clutter of cufflinks, and although he favored button-style shirts for work, some of his wrist-jewelry was quite nice. She remembered thinking the box would help keep them organized. Darcy knew she’d seen it on top of the bureau on his side of the bedroom for awhile after the gift was unwrapped and exclaimed over, but couldn’t remember seeing it lately. Of course she hadn’t. It was out here, in the hidey-hole under his worktable, and she would have bet the house and lot (another of his sayings) that if she opened it, it wouldn’t be cufflinks she found inside.

Don’t look, then.

More good advice, but now she had come much too far to take it. Feeling like a woman who has wandered into a casino and for some mad reason staked her entire life’s savings on a single turn of a single card, she opened the box.

Let it be empty. Please God, if you love me let it be empty.

But it wasn’t. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers-as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may be germy as well as dirty. Darcy slipped off the elastic.

They weren’t credit cards, which had been her first idea. The top one was a Red Cross blood donor’s card belonging to someone named Marjorie Duvall. Her type was A-positive, her region New England. Darcy turned the card over and saw that Marjoriewhoever she was-had last given blood on August sixteenth of 2010. Three months ago.

Who the hell was Marjorie Duvall? How did Bob know her? And why did the name ring a faint but very clear bell?

The next one was Marjorie Duvall’s North Conway Library card, and it had an address: 17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire.

The last piece of plastic was Marjorie Duvall’s New Hampshire driver’s license. She looked like a perfectly ordinary American woman in her mid-thirties, not very pretty (although nobody looked their best in driver’s license photographs), but presentable. Darkish blond hair pulled back from her face, either bunned or ponytailed; in the picture you couldn’t tell. DOB, January 6, 1974. The address was the same as the one on the library card.

Darcy realized that she was making a desolate mewing sound. It was horrible to hear a sound like that coming from her own throat, but she couldn’t stop. And her stomach had been replaced by a ball of lead. It was pulling all of her insides down, stretching them into new and unpleasant shapes. She had seen Marjorie Duvall’s face in the newspaper. Also on the six o’clock news.

With hands that had absolutely no feeling, she put the rubber band back around the ID cards, put them back in the box, then put the box back in his hidey-hole. She was getting ready to close it up again when she heard herself saying, “No, no, no, that isn’t right. It can’t be.”

Was that the voice of Smart Darcy or Stupid Darcy? It was hard to tell. All she knew for sure was that Stupid Darcy had been the one to open the box. And thanks to Stupid Darcy, she was falling.

Taking the box back out. Thinking, It’s a mistake, it has to be, we’ve been married over half our lives, I’d know, I would know. Opening the box. Thinking, Does anybody really know anybody?

Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.

Marjorie Duvall’s driver’s license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library card? It was simple, it had to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she’d seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.

She put it there, and as she was putting the elastic back around the little collection of plastic, the phone in the house started to ring again. It was him. It was Bob, calling from Vermont, and were she in the kitchen to take the call, she’d hear his cheery voice (a voice she knew as well as her own) asking, Hey, honey, how are you?

Her fingers jerked and the rubber band snapped. It flew away, and she cried out, whether in frustration or fear she didn’t know. But really, why would she be afraid? Twenty-seven years of marriage and he had never laid a hand on her, except to caress. On only a few occasions had he raised his voice to her.

The phone rang again… again… and then cut off in mid-ring. Now he would be leaving a message. Missed you again! Damn! Give me a call so I won’t worry, okay? The number is…

He’d add the number of his room, too. He left nothing to chance, took nothing for granted.

What she was thinking absolutely couldn’t be true. It was like one of those monster delusions that sometimes reared up from the mud at the bottom of a person’s mind, sparkling with hideous plausibility: that the acid indigestion was the onset of a heart attack, the headache a brain tumor, and Petra’s failure to call on Sunday night meant she had been in a car accident and was lying comatose in some hospital. But those delusions usually came at four in the morning, when the insomnia was in charge. Not at eight o’clock in the evening… and where was that damned rubber band?

She found it at last, lying behind the carton of catalogues she never wanted to look in again. She put it in her pocket, started to get up to look for another one without remembering where she was, and thumped her head on the bottom of the table. Darcy began to cry.

There were no rubber bands in any of the worktable’s drawers, and that made her cry even harder. She went back through the breezeway, the terrible, inexplicable identity cards in her housecoat pocket, and got an elastic out of the kitchen drawer where she kept all sorts of semi-useful crap: paper clips, bread ties, fridge magnets that had lost most of their pull. One of these latter said DARCY RULES, and had been a stocking-stuffer present from Bob.

On the counter, the light on top of the phone blinked steadily, saying message, message, message.

She hurried back to the garage without holding the lapels of her housecoat. She no longer felt the outer chill, because the one inside was greater. And then there was the lead ball pulling down her guts. Elongating them. She was vaguely aware that she needed to move her bowels, and badly.

Never mind. Hold it. Pretend you’re on the turnpike and the next rest area’s twenty miles ahead. Get this done. Put everything back the way it was. Then you can-

Then she could what? Forget it?

Fat chance of that.

She bound the ID cards with the elastic, realized the driver’s license had somehow gotten back on top, and called herself a stupid bitch… a pejorative for which she would have slapped Bob’s face, had he ever tried to hang it on her. Not that he ever had.

“A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch,” she muttered, and a cramp knifed her belly. She dropped to her knees and froze that way, waiting for it to pass. If there had been a bathroom out here she would have dashed for it, but there wasn’t. When the cramp let go-reluctantly-she rearranged the cards in what she was pretty sure was the right order (blood donor, library, driver’s license), then put them back in the LINKS box. Box back in hole. Pivoting piece of baseboard closed up tight. Carton of catalogues back where it had been when she tripped on it: sticking out slightly. He would never know the difference.

But was she sure of that? If he was what she was thinkingmonstrous that such a thing should even be in her mind, when all she’d wanted just a half an hour ago was fresh batteries for the goddarn remote control-if he was, then he’d been careful for a long time. And he was careful, he was neat, he was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy, but if he was what those goddarn (no, goddamned) plastic cards seemed to suggest he was, then he must be supernaturally careful. Supernaturally watchful. Sly.

It was a word she had never thought of in connection to Bob until tonight.

“No,” she told the garage. She was sweating, her hair was stuck to her face in unlovely spikelets, she was crampy and her hands were trembling like those of a person with Parkinson’s, but her voice was weirdly calm, strangely serene. “No, he’s not. It’s a mistake. My husband is not Beadie.”

She went back into the house. – 5 -

She decided to make tea. Tea was calming. She was filling the kettle when the phone began to ring again. She dropped the kettle into the sink-the bong sound made her utter a small scream-then went to the phone, wiping her wet hands on her housecoat.

Calm, calm, she told herself. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Remember that there’s a reasonable explanation for all this Oh, really?

– and I just don’t know what it is. I need time to think about it, that’s all. So: calm.

She picked up the phone and said brightly, “If that’s you, handsome, come right over. My husband’s out of town.”

Bob laughed. “Hey, honey, how are you?”

“Upright and sniffin the air. You?”

There was a long silence. It felt long, anyway, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. In it she heard the somehow terrible whine of the refrigerator, and water dripping from the faucet onto the teakettle she’d dropped in the sink, the beating of her own heart-that last sound seeming to come from her throat and ears rather than her chest. They had been married so long that they had become almost exquisitely attuned to each other. Did that happen in every marriage? She didn’t know. She only knew her own. Except now she had to wonder if she even knew that one.

“You sound funny,” he said. “All thick in the voice. Is everything okay, sweetie?”

She should have been touched. Instead she was terrified. Marjorie Duvall: the name did not just hang in front of her eyes; it seemed to blink on and off, like a neon bar sign. For a moment she was speechless, and to her horror, the kitchen she knew so well was wavering in front of her as more tears rose in her eyes. That crampy heaviness was back in her bowels, too. Marjorie Duvall. A-positive. 17 Honey Lane. As in hey, hon, how’s life been treatin you, are you upright and sniffin the air?

“I was thinking about Brandolyn,” she heard herself say.

“Oh, baby,” he said, and the sympathy in his voice was all Bob. She knew it well. Hadn’t she leaned on it time after time since 1984? Even before, when they’d still been courting and she came to understand that he was the one? Sure she had. As he had leaned on her. The idea that such sympathy could be nothing but sweet icing on a poison cake was insane. The fact that she was at this moment lying to him was even more insane. If, that was, there were degrees of insanity. Or maybe insane was like unique, and there was no comparative or superlative form. And what was she thinking? In God’s name, what?

But he was talking, and she had no idea what he’d just said.

“Run that past me again. I was reaching for the tea.” Another lie, her hands were shaking too badly to reach for anything, but a small plausible one. And her voice wasn’t shaking. At least she didn’t think it was.

“I said, what got that going?”

“Donnie called and asked after his sister. It got me thinking about mine. I went out and walked around for awhile. I got sniffling, although some of that was just the cold. You probably heard it in my voice.”

“Yep, right away,” he said. “Listen, I should skip Burlington tomorrow and come back home.”

She almost cried out No!, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do. That might get him on the road at first light, all solicitude.

“You do and I’ll punch you in the eye,” she said, and was relieved when he laughed. “Charlie Frady told you that estate sale in Burlington was worth going to, and his contacts are good. His instincts are, too. You’ve always said so.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like to hear you sounding so low.”

That he had known (and at once! at once!) that something was wrong with her was bad. That she needed to lie about what the trouble was-ah, that was worse. She closed her eyes, saw Bad Bitch Brenda screaming inside the black hood, and opened them again.

“I was low, but I’m not now,” she said. “It was just a momentary fugue. She was my sister, and I saw my father bring her home. Sometimes I think about it, that’s all.”

“I know,” he said. He did, too. Her sister’s death wasn’t the reason she’d fallen in love with Bob Anderson, but his understanding of her grief had tightened the connection.

Brandolyn Madsen had been struck and killed by a drunk snowmobiler while she was out cross-country skiing. He fled, leaving her body in the woods half a mile from the Madsen house. When Brandi wasn’t back by eight o’clock, a pair of Freeport policemen and the local Neighborhood Watch had mounted a search party. It was Darcy’s father who found her body and carried it home through half a mile of pine woods. Darcy-stationed in the living room, monitoring the phone and trying to keep her mother calm-had been the first to see him. He came walking up the lawn under the harsh glare of a full winter moon with his breath puffing out in white clouds. Darcy’s initial thought (this was still terrible to her) had been of those corny old black-and-white love-movies they sometimes showed on TCM, the ones where some guy carries his new bride across the threshold of their happy honeymoon cottage while fifty violins pour syrup onto the soundtrack.

Bob Anderson, Darcy had discovered, could relate in a way many people could not. He hadn’t lost a brother or sister; he had lost his best friend. The boy had darted out into the road to grab an errant throw during a game of pickup baseball (not Bob’s throw, at least; no baseball player, he’d been swimming that day), had been struck by a delivery truck, and died in the hospital shortly afterward. This coincidence of old sorrows wasn’t the only thing that made their pairing seem special to her, but it was the one that made it feel somehow mystical-not a coincidence but a planned thing.

“Stay in Vermont, Bobby. Go to the estate sale. I love you for being concerned, but if you come running home, I’ll feel like a kid. Then I’ll be mad.”

“Okay. But I’m going to call you tomorrow at seven-thirty. Fair warning.”

She laughed, and was relieved to hear it was a real one… or so close as to make no difference. And why shouldn’t she be allowed a real laugh? Just why the heck not? She loved him, and would give him the benefit of the doubt. Of every doubt. Nor was this a choice. You could not turn off love-even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love of twenty-seven years-the way you’d turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart, and the heart had its own imperatives.

“Bobby, you always call at seven-thirty.”

“Guilty as charged. Call tonight if you-”

“-need anything, no matter what the hour,” she finished for him. Now she almost felt like herself again. It was really amazing, the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover. “I will.”

“Love you, honey.” The coda of so many conversations over the years.

“Love you, too,” she said, smiling. Then she hung up, put her forehead against the wall, closed her eyes, and began weeping before the smile could leave her face. – 6 -

Her computer, an iMac now old enough to look fashionably retro, was in her sewing room. She rarely used it for anything but email and eBay, but now she opened Google and typed in Marjorie Duvall’s name. She hesitated before adding Beadie to the search, but not long. Why prolong the agony? It would come up anyway, she was sure of it. She hit Enter, and as she watched the little wait-circle go around and around at the top of the screen, those cramps struck again. She hurried to the bathroom, sat down on the commode, and took care of her business with her face in her hands. There was a mirror on the back of the door, and she didn’t want to see herself in it. Why was it there, anyway? Why had she allowed it to be there? Who wanted to watch themselves sitting on the pot? Even at the best of times, which this most certainly wasn’t?

She went back to the computer slowly, dragging her feet like a child who knows she is about to be punished for the kind of thing Darcy’s mother had called a Big Bad. She saw that Google had provided her with over five million results for her search: o omnipotent Google, so generous and so terrible. But the first one actually made her laugh; it invited her to follow Marjorie Duvall Beadie on Twitter. Darcy felt she could ignore that one. Unless she was wrong (and how wildly grateful that would make her), the Marjorie she was looking for had Twittered her last tweet some time ago.

The second result was from the Portland Press Herald, and when Darcy clicked on it, the photograph that greeted her (it felt like a slap, that greeting) was the one she remembered from TV, and probably in this very article, since the Press Herald was their paper. The article had been published ten days before, and was the lead story. NEW HAMPSHIRE WOMAN MAY HAVE BEEN “BEADIE’S” 11th VICTIM, the headline screamed. And the subhead: Police Source: “We’re Ninety Per Cent Sure”

Marjorie Duvall looked a lot prettier in the newspaper picture, a studio shot that showed her posed in classic fashion, wearing a swirly black dress. Her hair was down, and looked a much lighter blond in this photo. Darcy wondered if her husband had provided the picture. She supposed he had. She supposed it had been on their mantel at 17 Honey Lane, or perhaps mounted in the hall. The pretty hostess of the house greeting guests with her eternal smile.

Gentlemen prefer blondes because they get tired of squeezin them blackheads.

One of Bob’s sayings. She had never much liked that one, and hated having it in her head now.

Marjorie Duvall had been found in a ravine six miles from her house in South Gansett, just over the North Conway town line. The County Sheriff speculated that the death had probably resulted from strangulation, but he couldn’t say for sure; that was up to the County Medical Examiner. He refused to speculate further, or answer any other questions, but the reporter’s unnamed source (whose information was at least semi-validated by being “close to the investigation”) said that Duvall had been bitten and sexually molested “in a manner consistent with the other Beadie killings.”

Which was a natural transition to a complete recap of the previous murders. The first had occurred in 1977. There had been two in 1978, another in 1980, and then two more in 1981. Two of the murders had occurred in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, the fifth and sixth in Vermont. After that, there had been a hiatus of sixteen years. The police assumed that one of three things had happened: Beadie had moved to another part of the country and was pursuing his hobby there, Beadie had been arrested for some other, unrelated crime and was in prison, or Beadie had killed himself. The one thing that wasn’t likely, according to a psychiatrist the reporter had consulted for his story, was that Beadie had just gotten tired of it. “These guys don’t get bored,” the psychiatrist said. “It’s their sport, their compulsion. More than that, it’s their secret life.”

Secret life. What a poison bonbon that phrase was.

Beadie’s sixth victim had been a woman from Barre, uncovered in a snowdrift by a passing plow just a week before Christmas. Such a holiday that must have been for her relatives, Darcy thought. Not that she’d had much of a Christmas herself that year. Lonely away from home (a fact wild horses wouldn’t have dragged from her mouth when talking to her mother), working at a job she wasn’t sure she was qualified for even after eighteen months and one merit raise, she had felt absolutely no spirit of the season. She had acquaintances (the Margarita Girls), but no real friends. She wasn’t good when it came to making friends, never had been. Shy was the kind word for her personality, introverted probably a more accurate one.

Then Bob Anderson had walked into her life with a smile on his face-Bob who had asked her out and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not three months after the plow had uncovered the body of Beadie’s last “early cycle” victim, that must have been. They fell in love. And Beadie stopped for sixteen years.

Because of her? Because he loved her? Because he wanted to stop doing Big Bads?

Or just a coincidence. It could be that.

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 farm-stand. 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 amp; 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: