Leandro said nothing, but some of the other testimony he had gathered over the last couple of weeks made him think that Bill Spruce might find a trip like that hazardous to his health.
“Felt like I was dine,” Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident.
“What exactly do you mean?” Leandro asked.
Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly. “Another beer'd go down good just about now,” he said. They were sitting in Nan's Tavern in Bangor. “Talkin's amazin” dusty work, chummy.”
“Isn't it,” Leandro said, and told the waitress to draw two.
Rutledge took a deep swallow when it came, wiped foam from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, and said: “Heart beatin” too fast. Headache. Felt like I was gonna puke my guts out. I did puke, as a matter of fact. Just “fore I turned around. Rolled down the window and just let her fly into the slipstream, I did.”
“Wow,” Leandro said, since some remark seemed called for. The image of Rutledge “letting her fly into the slipstream” flapped briefly in his mind. He dismissed it. At least, he tried.
“And looka here.”
He rolled back his upper lip, revealing the remains of his teeth.
“Ooo see a ho in funt?” Rutledge asked. Leandro saw a good many holes in front, but thought it might not be politic to say so. He simply agreed. Rutledge nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.
“Teeth never have been much good,” Rutledge said indifferently. “When I get workin” again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of “em jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even loose.”
“They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?”
“Didn't fall out,” Rutledge finished his beer. “I puked “em out.”
“Oh,” Leandro had replied faintly.
“You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's
“Thirsty work, I know,” Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.
Alvin Rutledge wasn't the only person who had tried to visit a friend or relative in Haven during July, nor the only one to become ill and turn back. Using the voting lists and area phone books as a starting point, Leandro turned up three people who told stories similar to Rutledge's. He uncovered a fourth incident through pure coincidence-or almost pure. His mother knew he was “following up” some aspect of his “big story,” and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven.
Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro's mother, which put her close to seventy. Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard.
Mrs Pulsifer's friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments. This summer she hadn't seen Mary at all. Not even once. She'd spoken to her on the phone, and she seemed fine; her excuses always sounded believable… but all the same, something about them-a bad headache, too much baking to do, the family had decided on the spur of the moment to go down to Kennebunk and visit the Trolley Museum-wasn't quite right.
“They were fine by the one-by-one, but they seemed odd to me in the whole bunch, if you see what I mean.” She offered the cookies. “More “snaps?”
“No thank you,” Leandro said.
“Oh, go ahead! I know you boys! Your mother taught you to be polite, but no boy ever born could turn down a gingersnap! Now you just go on and take what you hanker for!”
Smiling dutifully, Leandro took another gingersnap.
Settling back and folding her hands on her tight round belly, Mrs Pulsifer went on: “I begun to think something might be wrong… I still think that maybe something's wrong, truth to tell. First thing to cross my mind was that maybe Mary didn't want to be my friend anymore… that maybe I did or said something to offend her. But no, says I to myself, if I'd done something “ I guess she'd tell me. After forty years of friendship I guess she would. Besides, she didn't really sound cool to me, you know
“But she did sound different.”
Eileen Pulsifer nodded decisively. “Ayuh. And that got me thinking that maybe she was sick, that maybe, God save us, her doctor had found a cancer or something inside her, and she didn't want any of her old friends to know. So I called up Vera and I said, “We're going to go down to Haven, Vera, and see Mary. We ain't going to tell her we're coming, and that way she can't call us off. You get ready, Vera,” I says, “because I'm coming by your house at ten o'clock, and if you ain't ready, I'm going to go without you. -
“Vera is-”
“Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, Visiting her sister that week.”
Leandro remembered it well: a week of such peace and quiet was a week to be treasured.
“So the two of you headed down.”
“Ayuh.”
“And you got sick.”
“Sick! I thought I was dying. My heart!” She clapped a hand dramatically over one breast. “It was beating so fast! My head started to ache, and I got a nosebleed, and Vera got scared. She says, “Turn around, Eileen, right now, you got to get to the hospital right away!”
“Well, I turned around somehow-I don't hardly remember how, the world was spinning so-and by then my mouth was bleeding, and two of my teeth fell out. Right out of my head! Did you ever hear the beat of it?”
“No,” he lied, thinking of Alvin Rutledge. “Where did it happen?”
“Why, I told you-we were going to see Mary Jacklin-”
“Yes, but were you actually in Haven when you got sick? And which way did you come in?”
“Oh, I see! No, we weren't. We were on the Old Derry Road. In Troy.”
“Close to Haven, then.”
“Oh, “bout a mile from the town line. I'd been feeling sick for a little time -whoopsy, you know-but I didn't want to say so to Vera. I kept hoping that I would feel better.”
Vera Anderson hadn't gotten sick, and this troubled Leandro. It didn't fit. Vera hadn't gotten a bloody nose, nor lost any teeth.
“No, she didn't get sick at all,” Mrs Pulsifer said. “Except with terror. I guess she was sick with that. For me… and for herself too, I imagine.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, that road's awful empty. She thought I was going to pass out. I almost did. It might have been fifteen, twenty minutes before someone came along.”
“She couldn't have driven you?”
“God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs-cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see on a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her.”
At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and-let's face it, folks-a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.
I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?
I got it, boss, he answered himself. I got it, I got it.
You may lose some teeth, too, he cautioned himself, but the loss of -a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize… and, just as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.
He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine… if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one… no, two… no “ three… other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM band in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call “the skip.”