Three men, their white hospital pants looking orange in the glare of the hi-intensity streetlamps, got out of the ambulance. One of them opened the rear doors and then all three of them simply stood there, hands in jacket pockets, waiting to see if they would be needed. The two cops who had carried the jaws of Life halfway across Mrs. Locher’s lawn looked at each other, shrugged, picked it up, and began carrying it back toward their cruiser again. There were several large divots in the lawn where they had dropped it. just let her be okay, that’s all, Ralph thought. just let her-and anyone who was in the house with her-be okay.
The detective appeared in the doorway again, and Ralph’s heart sank as he motioned to the men standing at the rear of the ambulance.
Two of them removed a stretcher with a collapsible undercarriage; the third remained where he was. The men with the stretcher went up the walk and into the house at a smart pace, but they did not run, and when the orderly who had remained behind produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, Ralph knew-suddenly, completely, and with no doubts-that May Locher was dead.
Stan and Georgina Eberly walked to the low line of hedge which separated their front yard from Mrs. Locher’s. They had put their arms around each other’s waist, and to Ralph they looked like the Bobbsey Twins grown old and fat and frightened.
Other neighbors were also coming out, either awakened by the silent convergence of emergency lights or because the telephone net work along this little stretch of Harris Avenue was already beginning to operate. Most of the people Ralph saw were old (“We. goldenagers,” Bill McGovern liked to call them… always with that small satirical lift of the eyebrow, of course), men and women whose rest was fragile and easily broken at the best of times. He suddenly realized that Ed, Helen, and Baby Natalie had been the youngest people between here and the Extension… and now the Deepneaus were gone.
I could go down there, he thought. I’dfit right in. Just another one of Bill’s golden-agers.
Except he couldn’t. His legs felt like bunches of teabags held together by weak twists of string, and he was quite sure that if he tried to get up, he would go flopping bonelessly to the floor. So he sat and watched from his window, watched the play develop below him on the stage which had always been empty at this hour before… except for the occasional walk-through by Rosalie, that was. It was a play he had produced himself, with a single anonymous telephone call. He watched the orderlies re-emerge with the stretcher, this time moving more slowly because of the sheeted figure which had been strapped to it. Warring streaks of blue and red light flickered over that sheet, and the shapes of legs, hips, arms, neck, and head beneath it.
Ralph was suddenly plunged back into his dream. He saw his wife under the sheet-not May Locher but Carolyn Roberts, and at any moment her head would split open and the black bugs, the ones which had grown fat on the meat of her diseased brain, would begin to boil out.
Ralph raised the heels of his palms to his eyes. Some soundsome inarticulate sound of grief and rage, horror and weariness escaped him.
He sat that way for a long time, wishing he had never seen any of this and hoping blindly that if there really as a tunnel, he would not be required to enter it after all. The auras were strange and beautiful, but there was not enough beauty in all of them to ’able dream in which he had make up for one moment of that tern discovered his wife buried below the high-tide line, not enough beauty to make up for the dreary horror of his lost, wakeful nights, or the sight of that sheeted figure being rolled out of the house across the street.
It was a lot more than just wishing that the play was over; as he sat there with the heels of his palms pressing against the lids of his closed eyes, he wanted all of it to be over-all of it. For the first time in his twenty-five thousand days of life, Ralph Roberts found himself wishing he were dead.
CHAPTER 9
There was a movie poster, probably picked up at one of the local video stores for a buck or three, on the wall of the cubbyhole which served Detective John Leydecker as an office. It showed Dumbo the elephant cruising along with his magical ears outstretched. A headshot of Susan Day had been pasted over Dumbo’s face, carefully cut to allow for the trunk. On the cartoon landscape below, someone had drawn a signpost which read DERRY 250.
“Oh, charming,” Ralph said.
Leydecker laughed. “Not very politically correct, is it?”
“I think that’s an understatement,” Ralph said, wondering what Carolyn would have made of the poster-wondering what Helen would make of it, for that matter. It was quarter of two on an overcast, chilly Monday afternoon, and he and Leydecker had just come across from the Derry County Courthouse, where Ralph had given his statement about his encounter with Charlie Pickering the div before. He had been questioned by an assistant district attorney who looked to Ralph as if he might be ready to start shaving in another year or two.
Leydecker had accompanied him as promised, sitting in the corner of the assistant d.a."s office and saying nothing. His promise to buy Ralph a cup of coffee turned out to be mostly a figure of speechthe evil-looking brew had come from the Silex in the corner of the cluttered second-floor Police Headquarters dayroom, Ralph sipped cautiously at his and was relieved to find it tasted a little better than it looked.
“Sugar? Cream?” Leydecker asked. “Gun to shoot it with?”
Ralph smiled and shook his head. “Tastes fine… although it’d probably be a mistake to trust my judgement. I cut back to two cups a day last summer, and now it all tastes pretty good to me,”
“Like me with cigarettes-the less I smoke, the better they taste.
Sin’s a bitch.” Leydecker took out his little tube of toothpicks, shook one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Then he put his own cup on top of his computer terminal, went over to the Dumbo poster, and began to lever out the thumbtacks which held the corners.
“Don’t do it on my account,” Ralph said. “It’s your office.”
“Wrong.” Leydecker pulled the carefully scissored photo of Susan Day off the poster, balled it up, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he began to roll the poster itself into a tight little cylinder.
“Oh? Then how come your name’s on the door?”
“It’s my name, but the office belongs to you and your fellow taxpayers, Ralph. Also to any news vidiot with a Minicam who happens to wander in here, and if this poster happened to show up on News at Noon, I’d be in a world of hurt. I forgot to take it down when I left Friday night, and I had most of the weekend off-a rare occurrence around here, let me tell you.”
“You didn’t put it up, I take it.” Ralph moved some papers off the tiny office’s one extra chair and sat down.
“Nope. Some of the fellows had a party for me Friday afternoon.
Complete with cake, ice cream, and presents.” Leydecker rummaged in his desk and came up with a rubber band. He slipped it around the poster so it wouldn’t spring open again, peeked one amused eve through it at Ralph, then tossed it into the wastebasket. “I got a set of those days-of-the-week panties with the crotches snipped out, a can of strawberry-scented vaginal douche, a packet of Friends of Life anti-abortion literature-said literature including a comic-book called Denise’s Unwanted Pregnancy-and that poster.”
“I guess it wasn’t a birthday party, huh?”
“Nope.” Leydecker cracked his knuckles and sighed at the ceiling.
“The boys were celebrating my appointment to a special detail.”
Ralph could see faint flickers of blue aura around Leydecker’s face and shoulders, but in this case he didn’t have to try and read them.