The Dark Half (12 page)

She came to less than three minutes later. Her legs would still not support her, so she crawled back down the short apartment hallway to the door with her hair hanging in her face. She thought of opening the door and looking out, but could not bring herself to do it. She turned the thumblock instead, then shot the bolt and clicked the police-bar into its steel foot. Those things done, she sat against the door, gasping, the world a gray blur. She was vaguely aware that she had locked herself in with a mutilated corpse, but that wasn't so bad. It wasn't bad at all, when you considered the alternatives.

Little by little her strength came back and she was able to get to her feet. She slipped around the corner at the end of the hall and then into the kitchen, where the phone was. She kept her eyes averted from what remained of Mr. Bigshot, although it was an empty exercise; she would see that mind-photograph in all its hideous clarity for a long time to come.

She called the police and when they came she wouldn't let them in until one of them slid his ID under the door.

“What's your wife's name?” she asked the cop whose laminated badge identified him as Charles F. Toomey, Jr. Her voice was high and quivery, utterly unlike her usual one. Close friends (had she had any) would not have recognized it.

“Stephanie, ma'am,” the voice on the other side of the door replied patiently.

“I can call your station-house and check that, you know!” she nearly shrieked.

“I know you can, Mrs. Eberhart,” the voice responded, “but you'd feel safer quicker if you just let us in, don't you think?”

And because she still recognized the Voice of Cop as easily as she had recognized the Smell of Bad, she unlocked the door and let Toomey and his partner in. Once they were, Dodie did something else she had never done before: she went into hysterics.

Thad was upstairs in his study, writing, when the police came.

Liz was reading a book in the living room while William and Wendy goofed with each other in the oversized playpen they shared. She went to the door, looking out through one of the narrow ornamental windows which flanked it before opening it. This was a habit she had gotten into since what was jokingly called Thad's “debut” in
People
magazine. Visitors—vague acquaintances for the most part, with a generous mixture of curious town residents and even a few total strangers (these latter unanimously Stark fans) thrown in for good measure—had taken to dropping by. Thad called it the “see-the-living-crocodiles syndrome” and said it would peter out in another week or two. Liz hoped he was right. In the meantime, she worried that one of the new callers might be a mad crocodile-hunter of the sort who had killed John Lennon, and peeked through the side window first. She didn't know if she would recognize a
bona fide
madman if she saw one, but she could at least keep Thad's train of thought from derailing during the two hours each morning he spent writing. After that he went to the door himself, usually throwing her a guilty little-boy look to which she didn't know bow to respond.

The three men on the front doorstep this Saturday morning were not fans of either Beaumont or Stark, she guessed, and not madmen either . . . unless some of the current crop had taken to driving State Police cruisers. She opened the door, feeling the uneasy twinge even the most blameless people must feel when the police show up without being called. She supposed if she'd had children old enough to be out whooping and hollering this rainy Saturday morning, she would already be wondering if they were okay.

“Yes?”

“Are you Mrs. Elizabeth Beaumont?” one of them asked.

“Yes, I am. May I help you?”

“Is your husband home, Mrs. Beaumont?” a second asked. These two were wearing identical gray rain-stickers and State Police hats.

No, that's the ghost of Ernest Hemingway you hear clacking away upstairs,
she thought of saying, and of course didn't. First came the has-anybody-had-an-accident fright, then the phantom guilt which made you want to come out with something harsh or sarcastic, something which said, no matter what the actual words:
Go away.
You are not wanted here. We have done nothing wrong. Go and find someone who has.

“May I ask why you'd like to see him?”

The third policeman was Alan Pangborn. “Police business, Mrs. Beaumont,” he said. “May we speak with him, please?”

Thad Beaumont did not keep anything resembling an organized journal, but he did sometimes write about the events in his own life which interested, amused, or frightened him. He kept these accounts in a bound ledger, and his wife did not care much for them. They gave her the creeps, in fact, although she had never told Thad so. Most were strangely passionless, almost as if a part of him was standing aside and reporting on his life with its own divorced and almost disinterested eye. Following the visit of the police on the morning of June 4th, he wrote a long entry with a strong and unusual subcurrent of emotion running through it.

“I understand Kafka's
The Trial
and Orwell's
1984
a little better now [Thad wrote]. To read them as political novels and no more is a serious mistake. I suppose the depression I went through after finishing
Dancers
and discovering there was nothing waiting behind it—except for Liz's miscarriage, that is—still counts as the most wrenching emotional experience of our married life, but what happened today
seems
worse. I tell myself it's because the experience is still fresh, but I suspect it's a lot more than that. I suppose if my time in the darkness and the loss of those first twins are wounds which have healed, leaving only scars to mark the places where they were, then this new wound will also heal . . . but I don't believe time will ever gloss it over completely. It will also leave its scar, one which is shorter but deeper—like the fading tattoo of a sudden knife-slash.

“I'm sure the police behaved according to their oaths (if they still take them, and I guess they do). Yet there was then and still is now a feeling that I was in danger of being pulled into some faceless bureaucratic machine, not men but a
machine
which would go methodically on about its business until it had chewed me to rags . . . because chewing people to rags is the machine's business. The sound of my screams would neither hurry nor delay that machine's chewing action.

“I could tell Liz was nervous when she came upstairs and told me the police wanted to see me about something but wouldn't tell her what it was. She said one of them was Alan Pangborn, the Castle County Sheriff. I may have met him once or twice before, but I only really recognized him because his picture is in the Castle Rock
Call
from time to time.

“I was curious, and grateful for a break from the typewriter, where my people have been insisting on doing things I don't want them to do for the last week. If I thought anything, I suppose I thought it might have something to do with Frederick Clawson, or some bit of fallout from the
People
article.

“I don't know if I can get the tone of the meeting which followed right or not. I don't know if it even matters, only that it seems important to try. They were standing in the hall near the foot of the stairs, three large men (it's no wonder people call them bulls) dripping a little water onto the carpet.

“ ‘Are you Thaddeus Beaumont?' one of them—it was Sheriff Pangborn—asked, and that's when the emotional change I want to describe (or at least indicate) began to happen. Puzzlement joined the curiosity and pleasure at being released, however briefly, from the typewriter. And a little worry. My full name, but no ‘Mister. ' Like a judge addressing a defendant upon whom he is about to pass sentence.

“ ‘Yes, that's right, ' I said, ‘and you're Sheriff Pangborn. I know, because we've got a place on Castle Lake. ' Then I put out my hand, that old automatic gesture of the well-trained American male.

“He just looked at it, and an expression came over his face—it was as if he'd opened the door of his refrigerator and discovered the fish he'd bought for supper had spoiled. ‘I have no intention of shaking your hand, ' he said, ‘so you might as well put it back down again and save us both some embarrassment. ' It was a hell of a strange thing to say, a. downright
rude
thing to say, but that didn't bother me as much as the way he said it. It was as if he thought I was out of my mind.

“And just like that, I was terrified. Even now I find it difficult to believe how rapidly, how goddam
rapidly,
my emotions lensed through the spectrum from ordinary curiosity and some pleasure at the break in an accustomed routine to naked fear. In that instant I knew they weren't here just to talk to me about something but because they believed I had
done
something, and in that first moment of horror—‘I have no intention of shaking your hand'—I was sure that I
had.

“That's
what I need to express. In the moment of dead silence that followed Pangborn's refusal to shake my hand, I thought, in fact, that I had done
everything
. . . and would be powerless not to confess my guilt. ”

Thad lowered his hand slowly. From the corner of his eye he could see Liz with her hands clasped into a tight white ball between her breasts, and suddenly he wanted to be furious at this cop, who had been invited freely into his home and had then refused to shake his hand. This cop whose salary was paid, at least in some small part, by the taxes the Beaumonts paid on their house in Castle Rock. This cop who had frightened Liz. This cop who had frightened
him.

“Very well,” Thad said evenly. “If you won't shake hands with me, then perhaps you'll tell me why you're here. ”

Unlike the State cops, Alan Pangborn was wearing not a rainslicker but a waterproof jacket which came only to his waist. He reached into his back pocket, brought out a card, and began to read from it. It took Thad a moment to realize he was hearing a variation of the
Miranda
warning.

“As you said, my name is Alan Pangborn, Mr. Beaumont. I am the Sheriff of Castle County, Maine. I'm here because I have to question you in connection with a capital crime. I will ask you these questions at the Orono State Police Barracks. You have the right to remain silent—”

“Oh dear Jesus, please, what is this?” Liz asked, and layered on top of that Thad heard himself saying, “Wait a minute, wait just a damn minute.” He intended to roar this, but even with his brain telling his lungs to turn the volume up to a full lecture-hall-quieting bellow, the best he could manage was a mild objection that Pangborn overrode easily.

“—and you have the right to legal counsel. If you cannot afford legal counsel, such will be provided for you. ”

He replaced the card in his back pocket.

“Thad?” Liz was crowding against him like a small child frightened by thunder. Her huge puzzled eyes stared at Pangborn. Every so often they flicked to the State Troopers, who looked big enough to play defense on a pro football team, but mostly they remained on Pangborn.

“I'm not going anywhere with you,” Thad said. His voice was shaking, jigging up and down, changing registers like the voice of a young adolescent. He was still trying to be furious. “I don't believe you can compel me to do that. ”

One of the Troopers cleared his throat. “The alternative,” he said, “is for us to go back and get a warrant for your arrest, Mr. Beaumont. On the basis of information in our possession, that would be very easy. ”

The Trooper glanced at Pangborn.

“It might be fair to add that Sheriff Pangborn wanted us to bring one with us. He argued very strongly for it, and I guess he would have gotten his way if you weren't . . . something of a public figure. ”

Pangborn looked disgusted, possibly by this fact, possibly because the Trooper was informing Thad of the fact, most likely both.

The Trooper saw the look, shuffled his wet shoes as if a trifle embarrassed, but pushed on anyway. “With the situation being what it is, I have no problem with you knowing that.” He looked questioningly at his partner, who nodded. Pangborn just went on looking disgusted. And angry.
He looks, Thad thought, as if he'd like to rip me open with his fingernails and wrap my guts around my head.

“That
sounds
very professional,” Thad said. He was relieved to find he was getting at least some of his wind back and his voice was settling down. He wanted to be angry because anger would allay the fear, but he could still manage no more than bewilderment. He felt sucker-punched. “What it ignores is the fact that I don't have the slightest idea what this goddam situation is. ”

“If we believed that to be the case, we wouldn't be here, Mr. Beaumont,” Pangborn said. The expression of loathing on his face finally turned the trick: Thad was suddenly infuriated.

“I don't care what you think!” Thad said. “I told you that I know who you are, Sheriff Pangborn. My wife and I have owned a summer house in Castle Rock since 1973—long before you ever heard of the place. I don't know what you're doing here, a hundred and sixty-odd miles from your territory, or why you're looking at me like I was a splat of birdshit on a new car, but I can tell you I'm not going anywhere with you until I find out. If it's going to take an arrest warrant, you go on and get one. But I want you to know that if you do, you're going to be up to your neck in a kettle of boiling shit and I'll be the one underneath stoking the fire. Because I haven't done anything. This is fucking outrageous. Just . . . fucking . . .
outrageous!”