The Dark Half

  'No. It won't.'

  'Is she all right?' Liz was asking, and Thad covered the phone mouthpiece long enough to tell her that Pangborn didn't know yet. Liz nodded and settled back, still too white but seeming calmer and more in control than before. At least people were doing things now, and it wasn't solely their responsibility anymore.

'They also got Mr Cowley's address from the telephone company — '

'Hey! They won't — '

  'Thad, they won't do anything until they know what the Cowley woman's condition is. I told them we had a situation where a mentally unbalanced man might be after a person or persons named in the People magazine article about the Stark pen name, and explained the connection the Cowleys had to you. I hope I got it right. I don't know much about writers and even less about their agents. But they do understand it would be wrong for the lady's ex-husband to go rushing over there before they arrive.'

  'Thank you. Thank you for everything, Alan.'

    'Thad, N.Y.P.D. is too busy moving on this to want or need further explanations right now, but they will want them. I do, too. Who do you think this guy is?'

   'That's something I don't want to tell you over the telephone. I'd come to you, Alan, but I don't want to leave my wife and children right now. I think you can understand. You'll have to come here.'

  'I can't do that,' Alan said patiently. 'I have a job of my own, and — '

  'Is your wife ill, Alan?'

  'Tonight she seems quite well. But one of my deputies called in sick, and I've got the duty. Standard procedure in small towns. I was just getting ready to leave. What I'm saying is that this is a very bad time for you to be coy, Thad. Tell me.'

  He thought about it. He felt strangely confident that Pangborn would buy it when he heard it. But maybe not over the telephone.

  'Could you get up here tomorrow?'

    'We'll have to get together tomorrow, certainly,' Alan said. His voice was both even and utterly insistent. 'But I need whatever you know tonight. The fact that the fuzz in New York are going to want an explanation is secondary, as far as I'm concerned. I have my own garden to tend. There are a lot of people here in town who want Homer Gamache's murderer collared, pronto. I happen to be one of them. So don't make me ask you again. It's not so late that I can't get the Penobscot County D.A. on the phone and ask him to collar you as a material witness in a Castle County murder case. He knows already from the state police that you're a suspect, alibi or no alibi.'

  'Would you do that?' Thad asked, bemused and fascinated.

  'I would if you made me, but I don't think you will.'

  Thad's head seemed clearer now; his thoughts actually seemed to be going somewhere. It wouldn't really matter, either to Pangborn or to the N.Y.P.D., if the man they were looking for was a psycho who thought he was Stark, or Stark himself . . . would it? He didn't think so, any more than he thought they were going to catch him either way.

    'I'm pretty sure it's a psychotic, as my wife said,' he told Alan finally. He locked eyes with Liz, tried to send her a message. And he must have succeeded in sending her something, because she nodded slightly. 'It makes a weird kind of sense. Do you remember mentioning footprints to me?'

  'Yes.'

  'They were in Homeland, weren't they?' Across the room, Liz's eyes widened.

  'How did you know that?' Alan sounded off-balance for the first time. 'I didn't tell you that.'

  'Have you read the article yet? The one in People?'

  'Yes.

  'That's where the woman set up the fake tombstone. That's where George Stark was buried.'

  Silence from the other end. Then: 'Oh shit.'

  'You get it?'

   'I think so,' Alan said. 'If this guy thinks he's Stark, and if he's crazy, the idea of him starting at Stark's grave makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it? Is this photographer in New York?'

Thad started. 'Yes.'

'Then she might also be in danger?'

'Yes, I . . . well, I never thought of that, but I suppose she might.'

'Name? Address?'

  'I don't have her address.' She had given him her business card, he remembered — probably thinking about the book on which she hoped he would collaborate with her — but he had thrown it away. Shit. All he could give Alan was the name. 'Phyllis Myers.'

  'And the guy who actually wrote the story?'

  'Mike Donaldson.'

  'Also in New York?'

    Thad suddenly realized he didn't know that, not for sure, and backtracked a little. 'Well, I guess I just assumed both of them were — '

  'It's a reasonable enough assumption. If the magazine's offices are in New York, they'd stick close, wouldn't they?'

  'Maybe, but if one or both of them is freelance — '

   'Let's go back to this trick photo. The cemetery wasn't specifically identified, either in the photo caption or in the body of the story, as Homeland. I'm sure of that. I should have recognized it from the background, but I was concentrating on the details.'

'No,' Thad said. 'I guess it wasn't.'

    'The First Selectman, Dan Keeton, would have insisted that Homeland not be identified — that would have been a brass-bound condition. He's a very cautious type of guy. Sort of a pill, actually. I can see him giving permission to do the photos, but I think he would have nixed an ID of the specific cemetery in case of vandalism . . . people looking for the headstone and all of that.'

  Thad was nodding. It made sense.

  'So your psycho either knows you or comes from here,' Alan was going on.

   Thad had made an assumption of which he was now heartily ashamed: that the sheriff of a small Maine county where there were more trees than people must be a jerk. This was no jerk; he was certainly running rings around the world champeen novelist Thaddeus Beaumont.

'We have to assume that, at least for the time being, since it seems he had inside information.'

'Then the tracks you mentioned were in Homeland.'

'Sure they were,' Pangborn said almost absently. 'What are you holding back, Thad?'

'What do you mean?' he asked warily.

   'Let's not dance, okay? I've got to call New York with these other two names, and you've got to put on your thinking cap and see if there are any more names I should have. Publishers . . . editors . . . I don't know. Meantime, you tell me the guy we want actually thinks he is George Stark. We were theorizing about it Saturday night, blue-skying it, and tonight you tell me it's a stone fact. Then, to back it up, you throw the footprints at me. Either you've made some dizzying leap of deduction based on the facts we have in common, or you know something I don't. Naturally, I like the second alternative better. So give.'

  But what did he have? Blackout trances which were announced by thousands of sparrows crying in unison? Words that he might have written on a manuscript after Alan Pangborn had told him those same words were written on the living-room wall of Frederick Clawson's apartment? More words written on a paper which had been torn to shreds and then fed into the English-Math Building's incinerator? Dreams in which a terrible unseen man led him through his house in Castle Rock and everything he touched, including his own wife, self-destructed? I could call what I believe a known fact of the heart instead of an intuition of the mind, he thought, but there's still no proof, is there? The fingerprints and saliva suggested something was very odd — sure! — but that odd?