The Dark Half (8 page)

It occurred to him to wonder just what he was going to do about all this, and Digger was gawdamned if he knew. He supposed that, technically, a crime had been committed, but you couldn't accuse the criminal of grave-robbing—not when the plot which had been dug over didn't contain a body. The worst you could call it was vandalism, and if there was more to be made of it than that, Digger Holt wasn't sure he was the one who wanted to do the making.

Best, maybe, to just fill the hole back in, replace what flaps of sod he could find whole, get enough fresh sod to finish the job, then forget the whole thing.

After all,
he told himself for the third time,
it ain't as if anyone was really buried there.

In the eye of his memory, that rainy spring day glimmered momentarily. My, that gravestone had looked real! When you saw that willowy assistant carrying it around, you knew it was make-believe, but when they had it set up, with those fake flowers in front of it and all, you'd have sworn it was real, and that there was really somebody—

His arms were crawling with hard little knots of flesh.

“You just quit on it, now,” he told himself harshly, and when the sparrow scolded again, Digger welcomed its unlovely but perfectly real and perfectly ordinary sound. “You go on and yell, Mother,” he said, and walked over to the last fragment of footprint.

Beyond it, as he had more or less suspected, he could see other prints smashed into the grass. They were widely spaced. Looking at them, Digger didn't think the fellow had been running, but he sure hadn't been wasting any time. Forty yards farther along, he found his eye could mark the fellow's progress in another way: a large basket of flowers had been kicked over. Although he couldn't see any prints that far away, the basket would have been right in the path of the prints he
could
see. Man could have gone around that basket, but he hadn't chosen to do so. Instead, he had simply kicked it aside and kept on going.

Men who did things like that were not, in Digger Holt's opinion, the sort of men you wanted to fuck around with unless you had a damned good reason.

Moving diagonally across the cemetery, he had been, as if on his way to the low wall between the boneyard and the main road. Moving like a man who had places to go and things to do.

Although Digger was not much better at imagining things than he was at fooling himself (the two things, after all, have a way of going hand in hand), Digger saw this man for a moment, literally saw him: a big fellow with big feet, striding through this silent suburb of the dead in the darkness, moving confidently and steadily on his big feet, booting the basket of flowers out of his way without even breaking stride when he came to it. He was not afraid, either—not
this
man. Because if there were things here which were still lively, as some people believed,
they
would be afraid of
him.
Moving, walking,
striding,
and God befriend the man or woman who got in his way.

The bird scolded.

Digger jumped.

“Forget it, Chummy,” he told himself once more. “Just fill the friggin thing in and never mind thinkin about it!”

Fill it in he did, and forget it he intended to, but late that afternoon Deke Bradford found him out at the Stackpole Road burying ground and told him the news about Homer Gamache, who had been found late that morning less than a mile up from Homeland on Route 35. The whole town had been agog with rumors and speculation most of the day.

Then, reluctantly, Digger Holt went to talk to Sheriff Pangborn. He didn't know if the hole and the tracks had anything to do with the murder of Homer Gamache, but he thought he'd best tell what he knew and let those who were paid for it do the sorting out.

Castle Rock has been, at least in recent years, an unlucky town.

As if to prove that old saw about lightning and how often it strikes in the same place isn't always right, a number of bad things had happened in Castle Rock over the last eight or ten years—things bad enough to make the national news. George Bannerman was the local Sheriff when those things occurred, but Big George, as he had been affectionately called, would not have to deal with Homer Gamache, because Big George was dead. He had survived the first bad thing, a series of rape-strangulations committed by one of his own officers, but two years later he had been killed by a rabid dog out on Town Road #3-not just killed, either, but almost literally torn apart. Both of these cases had been extremely strange, but the world was a strange place. And a hard one. And, sometimes, an unlucky one.

The new Sheriff (he had been in office going on eight years, but Alan Pangborn had decided he was going to be “the new Sheriff” at least until the year 2000—always assuming, he told his wife, that he went on running and being elected that long) hadn't been in Castle Rock then; until 1980 he had been in charge of highway enforcement in a small-going-on-medium-sized city in upstate New York, not far from Syracuse.

Looking at Homer Gamache's battered body, lying in a ditch beside Route 35, he wished he was still there. It looked like not all of the town's bad luck had died with Big George Bannerman after all.

Good advice. Your head, Pangborn had discovered, was
always
giving your nerves good advice they couldn't take. They said
Yessir
,
now that you mention it, that's just as true as it can be
. And then they went right on jumping and sizzling.

Still, he had been due for something like this, hadn't he? During his tour of duty as Sheriff he had scraped the remains of almost forty people off the town roads, broken up fights beyond counting, and been faced with maybe a hundred cases of spouse and child abuse—and those were just the ones reported. But things have a way of evening out; for a town that had sported its very own mass killer not so long ago, he had had an unusually sweet ride when it came to murder. Just four, and only one of the perps had run—Joe Rodway, after he blew his wife's brains out. Having had some acquaintance of the lady, Pangborn was almost sorry when he got a telex from the police in Kingston, Rhode Island, saying they had Rodway in custody.

One of the others had been vehicular manslaughter, the remaining two plain cases of second-degree, one with a knife and one with bare knuckles—the latter a case of spouse abuse that had simply gone too far, having only one odd wrinkle to distinguish it: the wife had beaten the husband to death while he was dead drunk, giving back one final apocalyptic tit for almost twenty years of tat. The woman's last set of bruises had still been a good, healthy yellow when she was booked. Pangborn hadn't been a bit sorry when the judge let her off with six months in Women's Correctional followed by six years' probation. Judge Pender had probably done that only because it would have been impolitic to give the lady what she really deserved, which was a medal.

Small-town murder in real life, he had found, rarely bore any likeness to the small-town murders in Agatha Christie novels, where seven people all took a turn at stabbing wicked old Colonel Storping-Goiter at his country house in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh during a moody winter storm. In real life, Pangborn knew, you almost always arrived to find the perp still standing there, looking down at the mess and wondering what the fuck he'd done; how it had all jittered out of control with such lethal speed. Even if the perp had strolled off, he usually hadn't gone far and there were two or three eyewitnesses who could tell you exactly what had happened, who had done it, and where he had gone. The answer to the last question was usually the nearest bar. As a rule, small-town murder in real life was simple, brutal, and stupid.

As a rule.

But rules are made to be broken. Lightning sometimes
does
strike twice in the same place, and from time to time murders that happen in small towns are not immediately solvable . . . murders like this one.

Pangborn could have waited.

Officer Norris Ridgewick came back from his cruiser, which was parked behind Pangborn's. Calls from the two police-band radios crackled out in the warm late-spring air.

“Is Ray coming?” Pangborn asked. Ray was Ray Van Allen, Castle County's medical examiner and coroner.

“Yep,” Norris said.

“What about Homer's wife? Anybody tell her about this yet?”

Pangborn waved flies away from Homer's upturned face as he spoke. There was not much left but the beaky, jutting nose. If not for the prosthetic left arm and the gold teeth which had once been in Gamache's mouth and now lay in splinters on his wattled neck and the front of his shirt, Pangborn doubted if his own mother would have known him.

Norris Ridgewick, who bore a passing resemblance to Deputy Barney Fife on the old
Andy Griffith Show,
scuffled his feet and looked down at his shoes as if they had suddenly become very interesting to him. “Well . . . John's on patrol up in the View, and Andy Clutterbuck's in Auburn, at district court—”

Pangborn sighed and stood up. Gamache was—had been—sixty-seven years old. He'd lived with his wife in a small, neat house by the old railroad depot less than two miles from here. Their children were grown and gone away. It was Mrs. Gamache who had called the Sheriff's office early this morning, not crying but close, saying she'd wakened at seven to find that Homer, who sometimes slept in one of the kids' old rooms because she snored, hadn't come home at all last night. He had left for his league bowling at seven the previous evening, just like always, and should have been home by midnight, twelve-thirty at the latest, but the beds were all empty and his truck wasn't in the dooryard or the garage.

Sheila Brigham, the day dispatcher, had relayed the initial call to Sheriff Pangborn, and he had used the pay phone at Sonny Jackett's Sunoco station, where he had been gassing up, to call Mrs. Gamache back.

She had given him what he needed on the truck—Chevrolet pick-up, 1971, white with maroon primer-paint on the rust-spots and a gun-rack in the cab, Maine license number 96529Q. He'd put it out on the radio to his officers in the field (only three of them, with Clut testifying up in Auburn) and told Mrs. Gamache he would get back to her just as soon as he had something. He hadn't been particularly worried. Gamache liked his beer, especially on his league bowling night, but he wasn't completely foolish. If he'd had too much to feel safe driving, he would have slept on the couch in one of his bowling buddies' living rooms.

There was one question, though. If Homer had decided to stay at the home of a teammate, why hadn't he called his wife and told her so? Didn't he know she'd worry? Well, it was late, and maybe he didn't want to disturb her. That was one possibility. A better one, Pangborn thought, was that he
had
called and she had been fast asleep in bed, a closed door between her and the one telephone in the house. And you had to add in the probability that she was snoring like a Jimmy-Pete doing seventy on the turnpike.

Pangborn had said goodbye to the distraught woman and hung up, thinking her husband would show by eleven o'clock this morning at the latest, shamefaced and more than a little hung-over. Ellen would give the old rip the sandpaper side of her tongue when he did. Pangborn would thus make it a point to commend Homer—quietly—for having the sense not to drive the thirty miles between South Paris and Castle Rock while under the influence.

About an hour after Ellen Gamache's call, it had occurred to him that something wasn't right about his first analysis of the situation. If Gamache had slept over at a bowling buddy's house, it seemed to Alan that it must have been the first time he ever did so. Otherwise, his wife would have thought of it herself and at least waited awhile longer before calling the Sheriff's office. And then it struck Alan that Homer Gamache was a little bit old to be changing his ways. If he had slept over someplace last night, he should have done it before, but his wife's call suggested he hadn't. If he had gotten shitfaced at the lanes before and then driven home that way, he probably would have done it again last night . . . but hadn't.

He had tried to forget Homer Gamache, at least for the time being. He had yea paperwork on his desk, and sitting there, rolling a pencil back and forth and thinking about that old
geezer
out someplace in his pick-up truck, that old geezer with white hair buzzed flat in a crewcut and a mechanical arm on account of he'd lost the real one at a place called Pusan in an undeclared war which had happened when most of the current crop of Viet Nam vets were still shitting yellow in their didies . . . well, none of that was moving the paper on his desk, and it wasn't finding Gamache, either.

All the same, he had been walking over to Sheila Brigham's little cubbyhole, meaning to ask her to raise Norris Ridgewick so he could find out if
Norris
had found anything out, when Norris himself had called in. What Norris had to report deepened Alan's trickle of unease to a cold and steady stream. It ran through his guts and made him feel lightly numb.

He scoffed at those people who talked about telepathy and precognition on the call-in radio programs, scoffed in the way people do when hint and hunch have become so much a part of their lives that they barely recognize them when they are using them. But if asked what he believed about Homer Gamache
at that moment,
Alan would have replied:
When Norris called in . . . well, that's when I started knowing the old man was hurt bad or dead. Probably choice number two.