Insomnia (38 page)

‘I don’t exactly
know
what I think,’ Bill said at last. ‘Not yet, at least. What did they look like?’

‘Their faces were hard to make out, even with the binoculars,’ Ralph said. His voice was as steady as it had been yesterday, when he had denied making the 911 call.

‘You probably don’t have any idea of how old they were, either?’

‘No.’

‘Could either of them have been our old pal from up the street?’

‘Ed Deepneau?’ Ralph looked at McGovern in surprise. ‘No, neither one was Ed.’

‘What about Pickering?’

‘No. Not Ed, not Charlie Pickering. I would have known either of them. What are you driving at? That my mind just sort of buckled and put the two guys who’ve caused me the most stress in the last few months on May Locher’s front stoop?’

‘Of course not,’ McGovern replied, but the steady tap-tap-tap of the newspaper against his leg paused and his eyes flickered. Ralph felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. Yes; that was in fact
exactly
what McGovern had been driving at, and it wasn’t really so surprising, was it?

Maybe not, but it didn’t change that sinking feeling.

‘And Johnny said all the doors were locked.’

‘Yes.’

‘From the inside.’

‘Uh-huh, but—’

McGovern got up from his chair so suddenly that for one crazy moment Ralph had the idea that he was going to run away, perhaps screaming
Watch out for Roberts! He’s gone crazy!
as he went. But instead of bolting down the steps, he turned toward the door leading back into the house. In some ways Ralph found this even more alarming.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Call Larry Perrault,’ McGovern said. ‘May’s younger brother. He still lives out in Cardville. She’ll be buried in Cardville, I imagine.’ McGovern gave Ralph a strange, speculative look. ‘What did you
think
I was going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said uneasily. ‘For a second there I thought you were going to run away like the Gingerbread Man.’

‘Nope.’ McGovern reached out and patted him on the shoulder, but to Ralph the gesture felt cold and comfortless. Perfunctory.

‘What does Mrs Locher’s brother have to do with any of this?’

‘Johnny said they sent May’s body down to Augusta for a more comprehensive autopsy, right?’

‘Well, I think the word he actually used was postmortem—’

McGovern waved this away. ‘Same difference, believe me. If anything odd
does
crop up – anything suggesting that she was murdered – Larry would have to be informed. He’s her only close living relative.’

‘Yes, but won’t he wonder what your interest is?’

‘Oh, I don’t think we have to worry about that,’ McGovern said, speaking in a soothing tone Ralph didn’t care for at all. ‘I’ll say the police have sealed off the house and that the old Harris Avenue rumor mill is turning briskly. He knows May and I were school chums, and that I visited her regularly over the last couple of years. Larry and I aren’t crazy about each other, but we get along reasonably well. He’ll tell me what I want to know if for no other reason than that we’re both Cardville survivors. Get it?’

‘I guess so, but—’

‘I
hope
so,’ McGovern said, and suddenly he looked like a very old and very ugly reptile – a gila monster, or perhaps a basilisk lizard. He pointed a finger at Ralph. ‘I’m not a stupid man, and I
do
know how to respect a confidence. Your face just now said you weren’t sure about that, and I resent it. I resent the hell out of it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ralph said. He was stunned by McGovern’s outburst.

McGovern looked at him a moment longer with his leathery lips pulled back against his too-large dentures, then nodded. ‘Yeah, okay, apology accepted. You’ve been sleeping like shit, I have to factor that into the equation, and as for me, I can’t seem to get Bob Polhurst off my mind.’ He heaved one of his weightiest poor-old-Bill sighs. ‘Listen – if you’d prefer me not to try calling May’s brother—’

‘No, no,’ Ralph said, thinking that what he’d like to do was roll the clock back ten minutes or so and cancel this entire conversation. And then a sentiment he was sure Bill McGovern would appreciate floated into his mind, fully constructed and ready for use. ‘I’m sorry if I impugned your discretion.’

McGovern smiled, reluctantly at first and then with his whole face. ‘Now I know what keeps you awake – thinking up crap like that. Sit still, Ralph, and think good thoughts about a hippopotamus, as my mother used to say. I’ll be right back. Probably won’t even catch him in, you know; funeral arrangements and all that. Want to look at the paper while you wait?’

‘Sure. Thanks.’

McGovern handed him the paper, which still retained the tube shape into which it had been rolled, then went inside. Ralph glanced at the front page. The headline read
PRO-CHOICE, PRO-LIFE ADVOCATES READY FOR ACTIVIST
’
S ARRIVAL
. The story was flanked by two news photographs. One showed half a dozen young women making signs which said things like
OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE
and
IT
’
S A BRAND-NEW DAY IN DERRY
! The other showed picketers marching in front of WomanCare. They carried no signs and needed none; the hooded black robes they wore and the scythes they carried said it all.

Ralph heaved a sigh of his own, dropped the paper onto the seat of the rocking chair beside him, and watched Tuesday morning unfold along Harris Avenue. It occurred to him that McGovern might well be on the phone with John Leydecker rather than Larry Perrault, and that the two of them might at this very moment be having a little student-teacher conference about that nutty old insomniac Ralph Roberts.

Ralph pushed away his speculations about who Bill might or might not be calling. It was easier just to sit here and not think at all, not even good thoughts about a hippopotamus. Easier to watch the Budweiser truck lumber into the Red Apple parking lot, pausing to give courtesy to the Magazines Incorporated van which had dropped off this week’s ration of tabloids, magazines, and paperbacks and was now leaving. Easier to watch old Harriet Bennigan, who made Mrs Perrine look like a spring chicken, bent over her walker in her bright red fall coat, out for her morning lurch. Easier to watch the young girl, who was wearing jeans, an oversized white tee-shirt, and a man’s hat about four sizes too big for her, jumping rope in the weedy vacant lot between Frank’s Bakery and Vicky Moon’s Tanning Saloon (Body Wraps Our Specialty). Easier to watch the girl’s small hands penduluming up and down. Easier to listen as she chanted her endless, shuttling rhyme.

Some distant part of Ralph’s mind realized, with great astonishment, that he was on the verge of going to sleep as he sat here on the porch steps. At the same time this was happening, the auras were creeping into the world again, filling it with fabulous colors and motions. It was wonderful, but . . .

. . . but something was wrong with it.
Something
. What?

The girl jumping rope in the vacant lot.
She
was wrong. Her denim-clad legs pumped up and down like the bobbin of a sewing machine. Her shadow jumped next to her on the jumbled pavement of an ancient alley overgrown with weeds and sunflowers. The rope whirled up and down . . . all around . . . up and down and all around . . .

Not an oversized tee-shirt, though, he’d been wrong about that. The figure was wearing a smock. A white smock, like the kind worn by actors in the old TV doc-operas.

A cloud blocked the sun and a grim green light sailed across the day, driving it underwater. Ralph’s skin first chilled, then broke out in goosebumps. The girl’s pumping shadow disappeared. She looked up at Ralph and he saw she wasn’t a little girl at all. The creature looking at him was a man about four feet tall. Ralph had first taken the hat-shadowed face for that of a child because it was utterly smooth, unmarked by so much as a single line. And yet despite that, it conveyed a clear feeling to Ralph – a sense of evil, of malignity beyond the comprehension of a sane mind.

That’s it,
Ralph thought numbly, staring at the skipping creature.
That’s exactly it. Whatever the thing over there is, it’s insane. Totally gone
.

The creature might have read Ralph’s thought, for at that moment its lips skinned back in a grin that was both coy and nasty, as if the two of them shared some unpleasant secret. And he was sure – yes, quite sure, almost positive – that it was somehow chanting through its grin, doing it without moving its lips in the slightest:

[
The line
BROKE
! The monkey got
CHOKED
! And they all died together in a little row-
BOAT
!
]

It was neither of the two little bald doctors Ralph had seen coming out of Mrs Locher’s, he was almost positive of that.
Related
to them, maybe, but not the same. It was—

The creature threw its jump-rope away. The rope turned first yellow and then red, seeming to give off sparks as it flew through the air. The small figure – Doc #3 – stared at Ralph, grinning, and Ralph suddenly realized something else, something which filled him with horror. He finally recognized the hat the creature was wearing.

It was Bill McGovern’s missing Panama.

Again it was as if the creature had read his mind. It dragged the hat from its head, revealing the round, hairless skull beneath, and waved McGovern’s Panama in the air as if it were a cowpoke astride a bucking bronco. It continued to grin its unspeakable grin as it waved the hat.

Suddenly it pointed at Ralph, as if marking him. Then it clapped the hat back on its head and darted into the narrow, weed-choked opening between the tanning salon and the bakery. The sun sailed free of the cloud which had covered it, and the shifting brightness of the auras began to fade once more. A moment or two after the creature had disappeared it was just Harris Avenue in front of him again – boring old Harris Avenue, the same as always.

Ralph pulled a shuddering breath, remembering the madness in that small, grinning face. Remembering the way it had pointed

(
the monkey got
CHOKED
)

at him, as if

(
they all died together in a little row-
BOAT
!
)

marking him.

‘Tell me I fell asleep,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Tell me I fell asleep and dreamed that little bugger.’

The door opened behind him. ‘Oh my, talking to yourself,’ McGovern said. ‘Must have money in the bank, Ralphie.’

‘Yeah, about enough to cover my burial expenses,’ Ralph said. To himself he sounded like a man who has just suffered a terrible shock and is still trying to cope with the residual fright; he half expected Bill to dart forward, face filling with concern (or maybe just suspicion), to ask what was wrong.

McGovern did nothing of the sort. He plumped into the rocking chair, crossed his arms over his narrow chest in a brooding X, and looked out at Harris Avenue, the stage upon which he and Ralph and Lois and Dorrance Marstellar and so many other old folks – we golden-agers, in McGovern-ese – were destined to play out their often boring and sometimes painful last acts.

Suppose I told him about his hat?
Ralph thought.
Suppose I just opened the conversation by saying, ‘Bill, I also know what happened to your Panama. Some badass relation to the guys I saw last night has got it. He wears it when he jumps rope between the bakery and the tanning salon
.’

If Bill had any lingering doubts about his sanity,
that
little newsflash would certainly set them to rest. Yep.

Ralph kept his mouth shut.

‘Sorry I was gone so long,’ McGovern said. ‘Larry claimed I just caught him going out the door to the funeral parlor, but before I could ask my questions and get away he’d rehashed half of May’s life and damned near all of his own. Talked nonstop for forty-five minutes.’

Positive this was an exaggeration – McGovern had surely been gone five minutes, tops – Ralph glanced at his watch and was astounded to see it was eleven-fifteen. He looked up the street and saw that Mrs Bennigan had disappeared. So had the Budweiser truck.
Had
he been asleep? It seemed that he must have been . . . but he could not for the life of him find the break in his conscious perceptions.

Oh, come on, don’t be dense. You were sleeping when you saw the little bald guy
. Dreamed
the little bald guy.

That made perfect sense. Even the fact that it had been wearing Bill’s Panama made sense. The same hat had shown up in his nightmare about Carolyn. It had been between Rosalie’s paws in that one.

Except this time he hadn’t been dreaming. He was sure of it.

Well . . .
almost
sure.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what May’s brother said?’ McGovern sounded slightly piqued.

‘Sorry,’ Ralph said. ‘I was woolgathering, I guess.’

‘Forgiven, my son . . . provided you listen closely from here on out, that is. The detective in charge of the case, Funderburke—’

‘I’m pretty sure it’s Utterback. Steve Utterback.’

McGovern waved his hand airily, his most common response to being corrected on some point. ‘Whatever. Anyway, he called Larry and said the autopsy showed nothing but natural causes. The thing they were most concerned about, in light of your call, was that May had been scared into a heart attack – literally frightened to death – by housebreakers. The doors being locked from the inside and the lack of missing valuables militated against that, of course, but they took your call seriously enough to investigate the possibility.’