The Dark Half (9 page)

Norris had happened to stop at the Arsenault place on Route 35 about a mile south of Homeland Cemetery. He hadn't even been thinking about Homer Gamache, although the Arsenault farm and Homer's place were less than three miles apart, and if Homer had taken the logical route home from South Paris the night before, he would have passed the Arsenaults'. It didn't seem likely to Norris that any of the Arsenaults would have seen Homer the night before, because if they had, Homer would have arrived home safe and sound ten minutes or so later.

Norris had only stopped at the Arsenault farm because they kept the best roadside produce stand in the three towns. He was one of those rare bachelors who like to cook, and he had developed a terrific hankering for fresh sugarpeas. He had wanted to find out when the Arsenaults would have some for sale. As an afterthought, he'd asked Dolly Arsenault if she had happened to see Homer Gamache's truck the night before.

“Now you know,” Mrs. Arsenault had said, “it's funny you should mention that, because I
did
. Late last night. No . . . now that I think about it, it was early this morning, because Johnny Carson was still on, but getting toward the end. I was going to have another bowl of ice cream and watch a little of that David Letterman show and then go to bed. I don't sleep so well these days, and that man on the other side of the road put my nerves up. ”

“What man was that, Mrs. Arsenault?” Norris asked, suddenly interested:

“I don't know—just some man. I didn't like his looks. Couldn't even hardly see him and I didn't like his looks, how's that? Sounds bad, I know, but that Juniper Hill mental asylum isn't all that far away, and when you see a man alone on a country road at almost one in the morning, it's enough to make anyone nervous, even if he
is
wearing a suit. ”

“What kind of suit was he wear—” Norris began, but it was useless. Mrs. Arsenault was a fine old country talker, and she simply rolled over Norris Ridgewick with a kind of relentless grandiosity. He decided to wait her out and glean what he could along the way. He took his notebook out of his pocket.

“In a way,” she went on, “the suit almost made me
more
nervous. It didn't seem
right
for a man to be wearing a suit at that hour, if you see what I mean. Probably you don't, probably you think I'm just a silly old woman, and probably I
am
just a silly old woman, but for a minute or two before Homer come along, I had an idea that man was maybe going to come to the house, and I got up to make sure the door was locked. He looked over this way, you know, I saw him do that. I imagine he looked because he could probably see the window was still lighted even though it was late. Probably could see
me,
too, because the curtains are only sheers. I couldn't really see his face—no moon out last night and I don't believe they'll
ever
get streetlights out this far, let alone cable TV, like they have in town—but I could see him turn his head. Then he
did
start to cross the road—at least I
think
that was what he was doing, or was thinking about doing, if you see what I mean—and I thought he would come and knock on the door and say his car was broke down and could he use the phone, and I was wondering what I should say if he did
that,
or even if I should answer the door. I suppose I am a silly old woman, because I got thinking about that
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
show where there was a crazyman who could just about charm the birdies down from the trees, only he'd used an axe to chop somebody all up, you know, and he put the pieces in the trunk of his car, and they only caught him because one of his taillights was out, or something like that—but the other side of it was—”

“Mrs. Arsenault, I wonder if I could ask—”

“—was that I didn't want to be like the Philistine or Saracen or Gomorran or whoever it was that passed by on the other side of the road,” Mrs. Arsenault continued. “You know, in the story of the Good Samaritan. So I was in a little bit of a tither about it. But I said to myself—”

By then Norris had forgotten all about sugarpeas. He was finally able to bring Mrs. Arsenault to a stop by telling her that the man she had seen might figure in what he called “an ongoing investigation.” He got her to back up to the beginning and tell him everything she had seen, leaving out
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and the story of the Good Samaritan as well, if possible.

The story as he related it over the radio to Sheriff Alan Pangborn was this: She had been watching
The Tonight Show
alone, her husband and the boys asleep in bed. Her chair was by the window which looked out on Route 35. The shade was up. Around twelve-thirty or twelve-forty, she had looked up and had seen a man standing on the far side of the road . . . which was to say, the Homeland Cemetery side.

Had the man walked from that direction, or the other?

Mrs. Arsenault couldn't say for sure. She had an idea he
might
have come from the direction of Homeland, which would have meant he was heading away from town, but she couldn't say for sure what gave her that impression, because she had looked out the window once and only seen the road, then looked out again before getting up to get her ice cream and he was there. Just standing there and looking toward the lighted window—toward
her
, presumably. She thought he was going to cross the road or had started to cross the road (probably just stood there, Alan thought; the rest was nothing but the woman's nerves talking), when lights showed on the crest of the hill. When the man in the suit saw the approaching lights, he had cocked his thumb in the timeless, stateless gesture of the hitchhiker.

“It was Homer's truck, all right, and Homer at the wheel,” Mrs. Arsenault told Norris Ridgewick. “At first I thought he'd just go on by, like any normal person who sees a hitchhiker in the middle of the night, but then his taillights flashed on and that man ran up to the passenger side of the cab and got in. ”

Mrs. Arsenault, who was forty-six and looked twenty years older, shook her white head.

“Homer must have been lit to pick up a hitchhiker that late,” she told Norris. “Lit or simple-minded, and I've known Homer almost thirty-five years. He ain't simple. ”

She paused for thought.

“Well. . . not
very. ”

Norris tried to get a few more details from Mrs. Arsenault on the suit the man had been wearing, but had no luck. He thought it really was sort of a pity that the streetlamps ended at the Homeland Cemetery grounds, but small towns like The Rock had only so much money to do with.

It had been a suit, she was sure of that, not a sport-coat or a man's jacket, and it hadn't been black, but that left quite a spectrum of colors to choose from. Mrs. Arsenault didn't think the hitchhiker's suit had been pure white, but all she was willing to swear to was that it hadn't been black.

“I'm not actually asking you to
swear,
Mrs. A.,” Norris said.

“When a body's speaking with an officer of the law on official business,” Mrs. A. replied, folding her hands primly into the arms of her sweater, “it comes to the same thing. ”

So what she knew boiled down to this: she had seen Homer Gamache pick up a hitchhiker at about quarter to one in the morning. Nothing to call in the FBI about, you would have said. It only got ominous when you added in the fact that Homer had picked up his passenger three miles or less from his own dooryard . . . but hadn't arrived home.

Mrs. Arsenault was right about the suit, too. Seeing a hitchhiker this far out in the boonies in the middle of the night was odd enough—by quarter of one, any ordinary drifter would have laid up in a deserted barn or some farmer's shed—but when you added in the fact that be had also been wearing a suit and a tie (“Some dark color,” Mrs. A. said, “just don't ask me to swear
what
dark color, because I can't, and I won't”), it got less comfortable all the time.

“What do you want me to do next?” Norris had asked over the radio once his report was complete.

“Stay where you are,” Alan said. “Swap
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
stories with Mrs. A. until I get there. I always used to like those myself. ”

But before he had gone half a mile, the location of the meeting between himself and his officer had been changed from the Arsenault place to a spot about a mile west of there. A boy named Frank Gavineaux, walking home from a little early fishing down at Strimmer's Brook, had seen a pair of legs protruding from the high weeds on the south side of Route 35. He ran home and told his mother. She had called the Sheriff's Office. Sheila Brigham relayed the message to Alan Pangborn and Norris Ridgewick. Sheila maintained protocol and mentioned no names on the air—too many little pitchers with big Cobras and Bearcats were always listening in on the police bands—but Alan could tell by the upset tone of Sheila's voice that even she had a good idea who those legs belonged to.

About the only good thing which had happened all morning was that Norris had finished emptying his stomach before Alan got there, and had maintained enough wit to throw up on the north side of the road, away from the body and any evidence there might be around it.

“What now?” Norris asked, interrupting the run of his thoughts.

Alan sighed heavily and quit waving the flies away from Homer's remains. It was a losing battle. “Now I get to go down the road and tell Ellen Gamache the widow-maker paid a visit early this morning. You stay here with the body. Try to keep the flies off him. ”

“Gee, Sheriff, why? There's an awful lot of em. And he's—”

“Dead, yeah, I can see that. I don't
know
why. Because it just seems like the right thing to do, I guess. We can't put his fucking arm back on, but at least we can keep the flies from shitting on what's left of his nose. ”

“Okay,” Norris said humbly. “Okay, Sheriff. ”

“Norris, do you think you could call me ‘Alan' if you really worked on it? If you practiced?”

“Sure. Sheriff, I guess so. ”

Alan grunted and turned for one last look at the area of the ditch that would, in all probability, be cordoned off with bright yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tapes attached to surveyor's poles when he got back. The county coroner would be here. Henry Payton from the Oxford State Police Barracks would be here. The photographer and the technicians from the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Division probably wouldn't be—unless there happened to be a couple of them in the area already on another case—but they would arrive shortly after. By one in the afternoon, the State Police's rolling lab would be here, too, complete with hot and cold running forensics experts and a guy whose job it was to mix up plaster and take moulage casts of the tire-prints Norris had either been smart enough or lucky enough not to run over with the wheels of his own cruiser (Alan opted, rather reluctantly, for lucky).

And what would it all come to? Why, just this. A half-drunk old man had stopped to do a favor for a stranger.
(Hop on up here, boy,
Alan could hear him saying,
I ain't going only a couple of miles, but I'll get you a little further on your way),
and the stranger had responded by beating the old man to death and then stealing his truck.

He guessed the man in the business suit had asked Homer to pull over—the most likely pretext would have been to say he needed to take a leak—and once the truck was stopped, he'd clipped the old man, dragged him out, and—

Ah, but that was when it got bad. So very goddam bad.

Alan looked down into the ditch one final time, to where Norris Ridgewick squatted by the bloody piece of meat that had been a man, patiently waving the flies away from what had been Homer's face with his citation clipboard, and felt his stomach turn over again.

But did the reason matter? It sure didn't to Homer Gamache. Not anymore. Nothing was ever going to matter to Homer again. Because after clipping him that first one, the hitchhiker had pulled him out of the cab and dragged him into the ditch, probably hauling him by the armpits. Alan didn't need the boys from Capital Crimes to read the marks left by the heels of Gamache's shoes. Along the way, the hitcher had discovered Homer's disability. And at the bottom of the trench, he had wrenched the old man's prosthetic arm from his body and bludgeoned him to death with it.

“Hold it, hold it,” Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.

He was in the lot of the Westport 1-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with
Hold it, hold it,
then progressed to something like
Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this
. Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.