CHAPTER SIXTEEN 1 page

1.

The snow came early that year. There were six inches on the ground by November 7, and Johnny had taken to lacing on a pair of old green gumrubber boots and wearing his old parka for the trek up to the mailbox. Two weeks before, Dave Pelsen had mailed down a package containing the texts he would be using in January, and Johnny had already begun making tentative lesson plans. He was looking forward to getting back. Dave had also found him an apartment on Howland Street in Cleaves. 24 Howland Street. Johnny kept that on a scrap of paper in his wallet, because the name and number had an irritating way of slipping his mind.

On this day the skies were slatey and lowering, the temperature hovering just below the twenty degree mark. As Johnny tramped up the driveway, the first spats of snow began to drift down. Because he was alone, he didn't feel too self conscious about running his tongue out and trying to catch a flake on it. He was hardly limping at all, and he felt good. There hadn't been a headache in two weeks or more.

The mail consisted of an advertising circular, a Newsweek, and a small manila envelope addressed to John Smith, no return address. Johnny opened it on the way back, the rest of the mail stuffed into his hip pocket. He pulled out a single page of newsprint, saw the words Inside View at the top, and came to a halt halfway back to the house.

It was page three of the previous week's issue. The headline story dealt with a reporter's “expose” on the handsome second banana of a TV crime show; the second banana had been suspended from high school twice (twelve years ago) and busted for possession of cocaine (six years ago). Hot news for the hausfraus of America. There was also an all-grain diet, a cute baby photo, and a story of a nine-year-old girl who had been miraculously cured of cerebral palsy at Lourdes (DOCTORS MYSTIFIED, the headline trumpeted gleefully). A story near the bottom of the page had been circled. MAINE “PSYCHIC” ADMITS HOAX, the headline read. The story was not by-lined.

IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE POLICY of Inside View not only to bring you the fullest coverage of the psychics which the so-called “National Press” ignores, but to expose the tricksters and charlatans who have held back true acceptance of legitimate psychic phenomena for so long.

One of these tricksters admitted his own hoax to an Inside View source recently. This so called “psychic”, John Smith of Pownal, Maine, admitted to our source that “it was all a gimmick to pay back my hospital bills. If there's a book in it, I might come out with enough to pay off what I owe and retire for a couple of years in the bargain,” Smith grinned. “These days, people will believe anything-why shouldn't I get on the gravy train?”

Thanks to Inside View, which has always cautioned readers that there are two phony psychics for each real one, John Smith's gravy train has just been derailed. And we reiterate our standing offer of $1000 to anyone who can prove that any nationally known psychic is a fraud.

Hoaxers and charlatans be warned!

Johnny read the article twice as the snow began to come down more heavily. A reluctant grin broke over his features. The ever-vigilant press apparently didn't enjoy being thrown off some bumpkin's front porch, he thought. He tucked the tear sheet back into its envelope and stuffed it into his back pocket with the rest of the mail.

“Dees,” he said aloud, “I hope you're still black and blue.

5.

His father was not so amused. Herb read the clipping and then slammed it down on the kitchen table in disgust. “You ought to sue that son of a whore. That's nothing but slander, Johnny. A deliberate hatchet job.”

“Agreed and agreed,” Johnny said. It was dark outside. This afternoon's silently falling snow had developed into tonight's early winter blizzard. The wind shrieked and howled around the eaves. The driveway had disappeared under a dunelike progression of drifts. “But there was no third party when we talked, and Dees damn well knows it. It's his word against mine.”

“He didn't even have the guts to put his own name to this lie,” Herb said. “Look at this “an Inside View source”. What's this source? Get him to name it, that's what I say.

“Oh, you can't do that,” Johnny said, grinning. “That's like walking up to the meanest street-fighter on the block with a KICK ME HARD sign taped to your crotch. Then they turn it into a holy war, page one and all. No thanks. As far as I'm concerned, they did me a favor. I don't want to make a career out of telling people where gramps hid his stock certificates or who's going to win the fourth at Scarborough Downs. Or take this lottery. “One of the things that had most surprised Johnny on coming out of his coma was to discover that Maine and about a dozen other states had instituted a legal numbers game. “In the last month I've gotten sixteen letters from people who want me to tell them what the number's going to be. It's insane. Even if I could tell them, which I couldn't, what good would it do them? You can't pick your own number in the Maine lottery, you get what they give you. But still I get the letters.”

“I don't see what that has to do with this crappy article.

“If people think I'm a phony, maybe they'll leave me alone.”

“Oh,” Herb said. “Yeah, I see what you mean. “He lit his pipe. “You've never really been comfortable with it, have you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “We never talk much about it, either, which is something of a relief. It seems like the only thing other people do want to talk about. “And it wasn't just that they wanted to talk; that wouldn't have bothered him so much. But when he was in Slocum's Store for a sixpack or a loaf of bread, the girl would try to take his money without touching his hand, and the frightened, skittish look in her eyes was unmistakable. His father's friends would give him a little wave instead of a handshake. In October Herb had hired a local high school girl to come in once a week to do some dusting and vacuum the floors. After three weeks she had quit for no stated reason at all probably someone at her high school had told her who she was cleaning for. It seemed that for everyone who was anxious to be touched, to be informed, to be in contact with Johnny's peculiar talent, there was another who regarded him as a kind of leper. At times like these, Johnny would think of the nurses staring at him the day he had told Eileen Magown that her house was on fire, staring at him like magpies on a telephone wire. He would think of the way the TV reporter had drawn back from him after the press conference's unexpected conclusion, agreeing with everything he said but not wanting to be touched. Unhealthy either way.

“No, we don't talk about it,” Herb agreed. “It makes me think of your mother, I suppose. She was so sure you'd been given the… the whatever-it-is for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't right.”

Johnny shrugged. “All I want is a normal life. I want to bury the whole damn thing. And if this little squib helps me do it, so much the better.”

“But you still can do it, can't you?” Herb asked. He was looking closely at his son.

Johnny thought about a night not quite a week ago. They had gone out to dinner, a rare happening on their strapped budget. They had gone to Cole's Farm in Gray, probably the best restaurant in the area, a place that was always packed. The night had been cold, the dining room cheery and warm. Johnny had taken his father's coat and his own into the cloakroom, and as he thumbed through the racked coats, looking for empty hangers, a whole series of clear impressions had cascaded through his mind. It was like that sometimes, and on another occasion he could have handled every coat for twenty minutes and gotten nothing at all. Here was a lady's coat with a fur collar. She was having an affair with one of her husband's poker buddies, was scared sick about it, but didn't know how to close it off. A man's denim jacket, sheepskin-lined. This guy was also worried-about his brother, who had been badly hurt on a construction project the week before. A small boy's parka-his grandmother in Durham had given him a Snoopy transistor radio just today and he was mad because his father hadn't let him bring it into the dining room with him. And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances-not even his wife suspected-but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that

Coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.

“Yes, I can still do it,” Johnny said briefly. “I wish to hell I couldn't.”

“You really mean that?”

Johnny thought of the plain, black topcoat. He had only picked at his meal, looking this way and that, trying to single the man out of the crowd, unable to do so.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Best forgotten then,” Herb said, and clapped his son on the shoulder.

3.

And for the next month or so it seemed that it would be forgotten. Johnny drove north to attend a meeting at the high school for midyear teachers and to take a load of his personal things up to his new apartment, which he found small but liveable.

He went in his father's car, and as he was getting ready to leave Herb asked him, “You're not nervous? About driving?”

Johnny shook his head. Thoughts of the accident itself troubled him very little now. If something was going to happen to him, it would. And deep down he felt confident that lightning would not strike in the same place again-when he died, he didn't believe it would be in a car accident.

In fact, the long trip was quiet and soothing, the meeting a little bit like Old Home Week. All of his old colleagues who were still teaching at CMHS dropped by to wish him the best. But he couldn't help noticing how few of them actually shook hands with him, and he seemed to sense a certain reserve, a wariness in their eyes. Drivmg home, he convinced himself it was probably imagination. And if not, well-even that had its amusing side. If they had read their Inside View, they would know he was a hoax and nothing to worry about.

The meeting over, there was nothing to do but go back to Pownal and wait for the Christmas holidays to come and go. The packages containing personal objects stopped coming, almost as if a switch had been thrown-the power of the press, Johnny told his father. They were replaced by a brief spate of angry-and mostly anonymous-letters and cards from people who seemed to feel personally cheated.

“You ort to burn in H! E! L! L! for your slimey skeems to bilk this American Republic,” a typical one read. It had been written on a crumpled sheet of Ramada Inn stationery and was postmarked York, Pennsylvania. “You are nothing but a Con Artist and a dirty rotten cheet. I bless God for that paper that saw thru you. You Ort to be ashamed of yourself Sir. The Bible says an ordinery sinner will be cast into the Lake of F!I!R!E! and be consomed but a F!A!L!S!E P!R!O!F!I!T! shall burn forever and EVER! That's you a False Profit who sold your Immortal Soul for a few cheep bucks. So thats the end of my letter and I hope for your sake I never catch you ut on the Streets of your Home Town. Signed, A FRIEND (of God not you Sir)!”

Over two dozen letters in this approximate vein came in during the course of about twenty days following the appearance of the inside View story. Several enterprising souls expressed an interest in joining in with Johnny as partners. “I used to be a magician's assistant,” one of these latter missives bragged, “and I could trick an old whore out of her g-string. If you're planning a mentalist gig, you need me in!”

Then the letters dried up, as had the earlier influx of boxes and packages. On a day in late November when he had checked the mailbox and found it empty for the third afternoon in a row, Johnny walked back to the house remembering that Andy Warhol had predicted that a day would come when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. Apparently his fifteen minutes had come and gone, and no one was any more pleased about it than he was.

But as things turned out, it wasn't over yet.

4.

“Smith?” The telephone voice asked. “John Smith?”

“Yes. “It wasn't a voice he knew, or a wrong number. That made it something of a puzzle since his father had had the phone unlisted about three months ago. This was December 17, and their tree stood in the corner of the living room, its base firmly wedged into the old tree stand Herb had made when Johnny was just a kid. Outside it was snowing.

“My name is Bannerman. Sheriff George Bannerman, from Castle Rock. “He cleared his throat. “I've got a well, I suppose you'd say I've got a proposal for you.

“How did you get this number?”

Bannerman cleared his throat again. “Well, I could have gotten it from the phone company, I suppose, it being police business. But actually I got it from a friend of yours. Doctor by the name of Weizak.”

“Sam Weizak gave you my number?”

“That's right.”

Johnny sat down in the phone nook, utterly perplexed. Now the name Bannerman meant something to him. He had come across the name in a Sunday supplement article only recently. He was the sheriff of Castle County, which was considerably west of Pownal, in the Lakes region. Castle Rock was the county seat, about thirty miles from Norway and twenty from Bridgton.

“Police business?” he repeated.

“Well, I guess you'd say so, ayuh. I was wondering if maybe the two of us could get together for a cup of coffee

“It involves Sam?”

“No. Dr. Weizak has nothing to do with it,” Banner-man said. “He gave me a call and mentioned your name. That was,… oh, a month ago, at least. To be frank, I thought he was nuts. But now we're just about at our wits” end.”

“About what? Mr. -Sheriff-Bannerman, I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“It'd really be a lot better if we could get together for coffee,” Bannerman said. “Maybe this evening? There's a place called Jon's on the main drag in Bridgton. Sort of halfway between your town and mine.”

“No, I'm sorry,” Johnny said. “I'd have to know what it was about. And how come Sam never called me?”

Bannerman sighed. I guess you're a man who doesn't read the papers,” he said.

But that wasn't true. He had read the papers compulsively since he had regained consciousness, trying to pick up on the things he had missed. And he had seen Bannerman's name just recently. Sure. Because Bannerman was on a pretty hot seat. He was the man in charge of-Johnny held the phone away from his ear and looked at it with sudden understanding. He looked at it the way a man might look at a snake he has just realized is poisonous.

“Mr. Smith?” It squawked tinnily. “Hello, Mr. Smith?”

“I'm here,” Johnny said putting the phone back to his ear. He was conscious of a dull anger at Sam Weizak, Sam who had told him to keep his head down only this summer, and then had turned around and given this local-yokel sheriff an earful-behind Johnny's back.

“It's that strangling business, isn't it?”

Bannerman hesitated a long time. Then he said, “Could we talk, Mr. Smith?”

“No. Absolutely not. “The dull anger had ignited into sudden fury. Fury and something else. He was scared.

“Mr. Smith, it's important. Today…”

“No. I want to be left alone. Besides, don't you read the goddam inside View? I'm a fake anyway.”

“Dr. Weizak said…”

“He had no business saying anything! “Johnny shouted. He was shaking all over. “Good-bye!” He slammed the phone into its cradle and got out of the phone nook quickly, as if that would prevent it from ringing again. He could feel a headache beginning in his temples. Dull drill-bits. Maybe I should call his mother out there in California, he thought. Tell her where her little sonny-buns is. Tell her to get in touch. Tit for tat.

Instead he hunted in the address book in the phone-table drawer, found Sam's office number in Bangor, and called it. As soon as it rang once on the other end he hung up, scared again. Why had Sam done that to him? Goddammit, why?

He found himself looking at the Christmas tree.

Same old decorations. They had dragged them down from the attic again and taken them out of their tissue-paper cradles again and hung them up again, just two evenings ago. It was a funny thing about Christmas decorations. There weren't many things that remained intact year after year as a person grew up. Not many lines of continuity, not many physical objects that could easily serve both the states of childhood and adulthood. Your kid clothes were handed down or packed off to the Salvation Army; your Donald Duck watch sprung its mainspring; your Red Ryder cowboy boots wore out. The wallet you made in your first camp handicrafts class got replaced by a Lord Buxton, and you traded your red wagon and your bike for more adult toys-a car, a tennis racket, maybe one of those new TV hockey games. There were only a few things you could hang onto. A few books, maybe, or a lucky coin, or a stamp collection that had been preserved and improved upon.

Add to that the Christmas tree ornaments in your parents” house.

The same chipped angels year after year, and the same tinsel star on top; the tough surviving platoon of what had once been an entire battalion of glass balls (and we never forget the honored dead, he thought-this one died as a result of a baby's clutching hand, this one slipped as dad was putting it on and crashed to the floor, the red one with the Star of Bethlehem painted on it was simply and mysteriously broken one year when we took them down from the attic, and I cried); the tree stand itself. But sometimes, Johnny thought, absently massaging his temples, it seemed it would be better, more merciful, if you lost touch with even these last vestiges of childhood. You could never discover the books that had first turned you on in quite the same way. The lucky coin had not protected you from any of the ordinary whips and scorns and scrapes of an ordinary life. And when you looked at the ornaments you remembered that there had once been a mother in the place to direct the tree-trimming operation, always ready and willing to piss you off by saying “a little higher” or “a little lower” or “I think you've got too much tinsel on that left side, dear. “You looked at the ornaments and remembered that just the two of you had been around to put them up this year, just the two of you because your mother went crazy and then she died, but the fragile Christmas tree ornaments were still here, still hanging around to decorate another tree taken from the small back woodlot and didn't they say more people committed suicide around Christmas than at any other time of the year? By God, it was no wonder.

What a power God has given you, Johnny.

Sure, that's right, God's a real prince. He knocked me through the windshield of a cab and I broke my legs and spent five years or so in a coma and three people died. The girl I loved got married. She had the son who should have been mine by a lawyer who's breaking his ass to get to Washington so he can help run the big electric train set. If I'm on my feet for more than a couple of hours at a time it feels like somebody took a long splinter and rammed it straight up my leg to my balls. God's a real sport. He's such a sport that he fixed up a funny comic-opera world where a bunch of glass Christmas tree globes could outlive you. Neat world, and a really first-class God in charge of it. He must have been on our side during Vietnam, because that's the way he's been running things ever since time began.

He has a job for you, Johnny.

Bailing some half-assed country cop out of a jam so he can get re-elected next year.

Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave.

He rubbed his temples. Outside, the wind was rising. He hoped dad would be careful coming home from work.

Johnny got up and pulled on a heavy sweatshirt. He went out into the shed, watching his breath frost the air ahead of him. To the left was a large pile of wood he had split in the autumn just past, all of it cut into neat Stove lengths. Next to it was a box of kindling, and be-side that was a stack of old newspapers. He squatted down and began to thumb through them. His hands went numb quickly but he kept going, and eventually he came to the one he was looking for. The Sunday paper from three weeks ago.

He took it into the house, slapped it down on the kitchen table, and began to root through it. He found the article he was looking for in the features section and sat down to reread it.

The article was accompanied by several photos, one of them showing an old woman locking a door, another showing a police car cruising a nearly deserted street, two others showing a couple of businesses that were nearly deserted. The headline read: THE HUNT FOR THE CASTLE ROCK STRANGLER GOES ON… AND ON.

Five years ago, according to the story, a young woman named Alma Frechette who worked at a local restaurant had been raped and strangled on her way home from work. A joint investigation of the crime had been conducted by the state attorney general's office and the Castle County sheriff's department. The result had been a total zero. A year later an elderly woman, also raped and strangled, had been discovered in her tiny third-floor apartment on Carbine Street in Castle Rock. A month later the killer had struck again; this time the victim had been a bright young junior high school girl.

There had been a more intensive investigation. The investigative facilities of the FBI had been utilized, all to no result. The following November Sheriff Carl M. Kelso, who had been the county's chief law officer since approximately the days of the Civil War, had been voted out and George Bannerman had been voted in, largely on an aggressive campaign to catch the “Castle Rock Strangler”.

Two years passed. The strangler had not been apprehended, but no further murders occurred, either. Then, last January, the body of seventeen-year-old Carol Dunbarger had been found by two small boys. The Dunbarger girl had been reported as a missing person by her parents. She had been in and out of trouble at Castle Rock High School where she had a record of chronic tardiness and truancy, she had been busted twice for shop-lifting, and had run away once before, getting as far as Boston. Both Bannerman and the state police assumed she had been thumbing a ride-and the killer had picked her up. A midwinter thaw had uncovered her body near Strimmer's Brook, where two small boys had found it. The state medical examiner said she had been dead about two months.

Then, this November 2, there had been yet another murder. The victim was a well-liked Castle Rock grammar school teacher named Etta Ringgold. She was a lifetime member of the local Methodist church, holder of an M. B. S. in elementary education, and prominent in local charities. She had been fond of the works of Robert Browning, and her body had been found stuffed into a culvert that ran beneath an unpaved secondary road. The uproar over the murder of Miss Ringgold had rumbled over all of northern New England. Comparisons to Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, were made -comparisons that did nothing to pour oil on the troubled waters. William Loeb's Union-Leader in not-so distant Manchester, New Hampshire, had published a helpful editorial titled THE DO-NOTHING COPS IN OUR SISTER STATE.

This Sunday supplement article, now nearly six weeks old and smelling pungently of shed and woodbox, quoted two local psychiatrists who had been perfectly happy to blue-sky the situation as long as their names weren't printed. One of them mentioned a particular sexual aberration-the urge to commit some violent act at the moment of orgasm. Nice, Johnny thought, grimacing. He strangled them to death as he came. His headache was getting worse all the time.

The other shrink pointed out the fact that all five murders had been committed in late fall or early winter. And while the manic-depressive personality didn't con-form to any one set pattern, it was fairly common for such a person to have mood-swings closely paralleling the change of the seasons. He might have a “low” lasting from mid-April until about the end of August and then begin to climb, “peaking” at around the time of the murders.

During the manic or “up” state, the person in question was apt to be highly sexed, active, daring, and optimistic. “He would be likely to believe the police unable to catch him,” the unnamed psychiatrist had finished. The article concluded by saying that, so far, the person in question had been right.

Johnny put the paper down, glanced at the clock, and saw his father should be home almost anytime, unless the snow was holding him up. He took the old newspaper over to the wood stove and poked it into the firebox.

Not my business. Goddam Sam Weizak anyway.

Don't hide away in a cave, Johnny.

He wasn't hiding away in a cave, that wasn't it at all. It just so happened that he'd had a fairly tough break. Losing a big chunk of your life, that qualified you for tough-break status, didn't it?

And all the self-pity you can guzzle?

“Fuck you,” he muttered to himself. He went to the window and looked out. Nothing to see but snow falling in heavy, wind-driven lines. He hoped dad was being careful, but he also hoped his father would show up soon and put an end to this useless rat-run of introspection. He went over to the telephone again and stood there, undecided.

Self-pity or not, he had lost a goodish chunk of his life. His prime, if you wanted to put it that way. He had worked hard to get back. Didn't he deserve some ordinary privacy? Didn't he have a right to what he had just been thinking of a few minutes ago-an ordinary life?

There is no such thing, my man.

Maybe not, but there was such a thing as an abnormal life. That thing at Cole's Farm. Feeling people's clothes and suddenly knowing their little dreads, small secrets, petty triumphs-that was abnormal. It wasn't a talent, it was a curse.

Suppose he did meet this sheriff? There was no guarantee he could tell him a thing. And suppose he could? Just suppose he could hand him his killer on a silver platter? It would be the hospital press conference all over again, a three-ring circus raised to the grisly nth power.

A little song began to run maddeningly through his aching head, little more than a jingle, really. A Sunday. school song from his early childhood: This little light of mine… I'm gonna let it shine… this little light of mine… I'm gonna let it shine… let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine…

He picked up the phone and dialed Weizak's office number. Safe enough now, after five. Weizak would have gone home, and big-deal neurologists don't list their home phones. The phone rang six or seven times and Johnny was going to put it down when it was answered and Sam himself said, “Hi? Hello?”

“Sam?”

“John Smith?” The pleasure in Sam's voice was Unmistakable-but was there also an undercurrent of unease in it.

“Yeah, it's me.”

“How do you like this snow?” Weizak said, maybe a little heartily. “Is it snowing where you are?”

“It's snowing.”

“Just started here about an hour ago. They say John? Is it the sheriff? Is that why you sound so cold?”

“Well, he called me,” Johnny said, “and I've been sort of wondering what happened. Why you gave him my name?

Why you didn't call me and say you had… and why you didn't call me first and ask if you could.”

Weizak sighed. “Johnny, I could maybe give you a lie, but that would be no good. I didn't ask you first because I was afraid you would say no. And I didn't tell you I'd done it afterward because the sheriff laughed at me. When someone laughs at one of my suggestions, I assume, nub, that the suggestion is not going to be taken.”

Johnny rubbed at one aching temple with his free hand and closed his eyes. “But why, Sam? You know how I feel about that. You were the one who told me to keep my head down and let it blow over. You told me that yourself.”

“It was the piece in the paper,” Sam said. “I said to myself, Johnny lives down that way. And I said to myself, five dead women. Five. “His voice was slow, halting, and embarrassed. It made Johnny feel much worse to hear Sam sounding like this. He wished he hadn't called.

“Two of them teenage girls. A young mother. A teacher of young children who loved Browning. All of it so corny, nuh? So corny I suppose they would never make a movie or a TV show out of it. But nonetheless true. It was the teacher I thought about most. Stuffed into a culvert like a bag of garbage…

“You had no damn right to bring me into your guilt fantasies,” Johnny said thickly.

“No, perhaps not.”

“No perhaps about it!”

“Johnny, are you all right? You sound…”

“I'm fine! “Johnny shouted.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 562