“I think she was murdered,” Bent said. His voice sounded like breaking sticks in his ears. “Did it look like an accident to you?”

“No. That wasn't no furnace explosion. And the fumes that kept us from going down in the basement-that smell like oil to you?”

Bent shook his head. Whatever it was, he'd never before smelled anything like it in his life. Maybe the only thing that nit Berringer had been right about was his opinion that breathing those fumes could be dangerous and it might be best to stay upstairs until the air in the town-hall basement cleared. Now he had to wonder if they'd been kept away on purpose-maybe so they wouldn't see a furnace that was completely unwounded.

“After we file our reports on this fucker,” Jingles said, “ the local yokels are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Allison, Berringer, those guys. And they may have to do some of it to Dugan.”

Bent nodded thoughtfully. “Whole fucking thing was crazy. The place felt crazy. I mean, I actually started to get dizzy. Did you?”

“The fumes-” Jingles began doubtfully.

“Fuck the fumes. I was dizzy in the street.”

“Her dolls, Bent. What were her dolls doing there?”

“I don't know.”

“Me either. But it's another thing that doesn't fit for shit. Try this on: if somebody hated her enough to murder her, maybe they hated her enough to blow her dolls up with her. You think?”

“Not really,” Benton Rhodes said.

“But it could be,” Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.

Their reception was a little better but still nothing to write home about. Bent couldn't remember ever getting deep interference from the Troy microwave dish this close to Derry before.

According to the witnesses they spoke to, the explosion had occurred at 3:05 P. m., give or take half a minute. The town-hall clock struck three as it always did. Five minutes later, KA-BAM! And now, riding back to Derry in the dark, an oddly persuasive picture occurred to Benton Rhodes, one that brought gooseflesh to attention all over his body. He saw the clock in the town-hall tower standing at four minutes past three on that hot and windless late-July afternoon. And suddenly, a look passes among those in the Haven Lunch; those in Cooder's market; those in Haven Hardware; the ladies in the Junque-A-Torium; the children on the swings or hanging listlessly in the summer heat from the bars of the jungle gym in the play-yard beside the school; it goes from the eyes of one of the overweight ladies playing doubles on the town tennis courts behind the town hall to her partner, and then to their overweight opponents on the other side of the net. The game-ball goes rolling slowly into a far corner of the court as they lie down and put their hands over their ears… and wait. As they wait for the explosion.

Everyone in town, lying down and waiting for that KA-BLAM to drill into the day like the stroke of a sledgehammer on thick wood.

Bent suddenly shuddered behind the wheel of the cruiser.

The checkout girls at Cooder's. The customers in the aisles. The people in the Haven Lunch by the stools or behind the counter. At 3:04 p. m. they laid down, the whole fucking bunch of them. And at 3:06 they got up and went about their business. All of'em except for the Designated Gawkers. Also Allison and Berringer, who told everybody it was a furnace explosion, which it wasn't, and that they didn't know who the victim was, which they fucking well did.

You don't really believe they all knew it was going to happen, do you?

A part of him believed just that. Because if the good folks of Haven hadn't known, how come the only casualties had been Ruth McCausland and her dolls? How come there hadn't been so much as a single cut arm when a shower of glass had flown across Main Street at a speed of roughly one hundred and ten miles an hour?

“I think we ought to be clear of that fucking dish by now,” Bent said. “Try it again.”

Jingles took the mike. “I still don't understand where the goddam backups are.”

“Maybe something happened somewhere else. It never rains

“Yeah, it pours. Dolly arms and legs, among other things.” As Jingles depressed the mike button, Bent piloted the cruiser around a curve. The headlights and flashers splashed over a pickup truck that was slewed around diagonally in the middle of the road.

“Jesus Chr-”

Then reflexes took over and he hit the brakes. Firestone rubber screamed and smoked, and for a moment Bent thought he was going to lose it. Then the cruiser came to a halt with its nose three yards from the body of the mongrel truck sitting silent in the road.

“Please pass the toilet paper,” Jingles said in a low, trembling voice.

They got out, both unsnapping the handles of their guns without thinking. The smell of cooked rubber hung in the summer air.

“What's this shit?” Jingles cried, and Bent thought, He feels it too. This isn't right, this is part of what was going on back in that creepy little town, and he feels it too.

The breeze stirred, and Bent heard canvas flap stiffly for a moment, and a tarp slid off something in the bed of the pickup with a dry rattlesnake sound. Bent felt his balls climb north in a hurry. It looked like the barrel of a bazooka. He started to crouch, then realized with bewilderment that the bazooka was only a length of corrugated culvert-pipe in some sort of wooden cradle. Nothing to be afraid of. But he was afraid. He was terrified.

“I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent. Parked in front of the restaurant.”

“Who's there?” Bent shouted.

No answer.

He looked at Jingles. Jingles, eyes wide and dark in his white face, looked back at him.

Bent thought suddenly: Microwave interference? Was that really what was keeping us from getting through?

“If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!” Bent called. “You-” A shrill, crazed titter came from the truck-bed, then drifted into silence. “Oh Christ, I don't like this,” Jingles Gabbons moaned. Bent started forward, raising his gun, and then the world was filled with green light.

Chapter 5

Ruth McCausland

Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger-fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had. It was because her husband had been a state trooper, some said. Others said it was simply because Ruth was Ruth. Either way, they agreed Haven was lucky to have her. She was firm but fair. She was able to keep her wits in an emergency. Haven folk said these things about her, and more besides. In a small Maine town run by the men since there had been a town to run, such testimonials were of some note. That was fair enough; she was a noteworthy woman.

She was born and raised in Haven; she was, in fact, the great-niece of the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley, who had been so cruelly surprised by the town's vote to change its name back in “01. In 1955 she had been granted early admittance to the University of Maine-only the third female student in the history of the university to be granted full-time student status at the tender age of seventeen. She enrolled in the college's pre-law program.

The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also a pre-law. He was tall; at six-five he was still three inches shorter than his friend Anthony Dugan (known as Butch by his friends, as Monster only by his two or three close friends), but he towered a full foot over Ruth. He was oddly-almost absurdly -graceful for such a big man, and good-natured. He wanted to be a state trooper. When Ruth asked him why, he said it was because his father had been one. He didn't need a law degree to join the fuzz, he explained to her; to become a state trooper he needed only a highschool education, good eyes, good reflexes, and a clean record. But Ralph McCausland had wanted something more than to do his father the honor of following in his footsteps. “Any man who gets into a job and doesn't plan a way to get ahead is either lazy or crazy,” he told Ruth one night over Cokes in the Bear's Den. What he didn't tell her, because he was shy about his ambition, was that he hoped to be Maine's top cop someday. Ruth knew anyway, of course.