Dreamcatcher (69 page)

Mr. Gray had discovered murder.

3

Beyond the showers was a locker room. Beyond the lockers was a hallway leading to the truckers' dorm. The hall was deserted. On the far side of it was a door which opened on the rear of the building, where there
was a snow-swirling cul-de-sac, now deeply drifted. Two large green Dumpsters emerged from the drifts. One hooded light cast a pallid glow and tall, lunging shadows. Mr. Gray, who learned fast, searched the Trooper's body for his car keys and found them. He also took the Trooper's gun and put it in one of the zippered pockets of Jonesy's parka. Mr. Gray used the bloodstained towel to keep the door to the cul-de-sac from latching shut, then dragged the body behind one of the Dumpsters.

All of it, from the Trooper's gruesome induced suicide to Jonesy's re-entry to the back hall, took less than ten minutes. Jonesy's body felt light and agile, all weariness gone, at least for the time being: he and Mr. Gray were enjoying another burst of endorphin euphoria. And at least some of this wetwork was the responsibility of Gary Ambrose Jones. Not just the body-disposal knowledge, but the bloodthirsty urges of the id under the thin candy frosting of “it's just make-believe.” Mr. Gray was in the driver's seat—Jonesy was at least not burdened with the idea that he was the primary murderer—but he was the engine.

Maybe we
deserve
to be erased,
Jonesy thought as Mr. Gray walked back through the shower-room (looking for blood-splatters with Jonesy's eyes and bouncing the Trooper's keys in one of Jonesy's palms as he went).
Maybe we deserve to be turned into nothing but a bunch of red spores blowing in the wind. That might be the best thing, God help us.

4

The tired-looking woman working the cash-register asked him if he'd seen the Trooper.

“Sure did,” Jonesy said. “Showed him my driver's license and registration, as a matter of fact.”

“Been a bunch of mounties in ever since late afternoon,” the cashier said. “Storm or no storm. They're all nervous as hell. So's everyone else. If I wanted to see folks from some other planet, I'd rent me a video. You heard anything new?”

“On the radio they're saying it's all a false alarm,” he replied, zipping his jacket. He looked at the windows between the restaurant and the parking lot, verifying what he had already seen: with the combination of frost on the glass and the snow outside, the view was nil. No one in here was going to see what he drove away in.

“Yeah? Really?” Relief made her look less tired. Younger.

“Yeah. Don't be looking for your friend too soon, darlin. He said he had to lay a serious loaf.”

A frown creased the skin between her eyebrows. “He said that?”

“Goodnight. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.”

Some of that, Jonesy hoped, was him. Trying to get through. To be noticed.

Before he could see if it
was
noticed, the view before his office window revolved as Mr. Gray turned him
away from the cash-register. Five minutes later he was heading south on the turnpike again, the chains on the Trooper's cruiser thrupping and zinging, allowing him to maintain a steady forty miles an hour.

Jonesy felt Mr. Gray reaching out, reaching back. Mr. Gray could touch Henry's mind but not get inside it—like Jonesy, Henry was to some degree different. No matter; there was the man with Henry, Overhill or Underhill. From him, Mr. Gray was able to get a good fix. They were seventy miles behind, maybe more . . . and pulling off the turnpike? Yes, pulling off in Derry.

Mr. Gray cast back farther yet, and discovered more pursuers. Three of them . . . but Jonesy felt this group's main focus was not Mr. Gray, but Overhill/Underhill. He found that both incredible and inexplicable, but it seemed to be true. And Mr. Gray liked that just fine. He didn't even bother to look for the reason why Overhill/Underhill and Henry might be stopping.

Mr. Gray's main concern was switching to another vehicle, a snowplow, if Jonesy's driving skills would allow him to operate it. It would mean another murder, but that was all right with the increasingly human Mr. Gray.

Mr. Gray was just getting warmed up.

5

Owen Underhill is standing on the slope very near to the pipe which juts out of the foliage, and he sees
them help the muddy, wild-eyed girl—Josie—out of the pipe. He sees Duddits (a large young man with shoulders like a football player's and the improbable blond hair of a movie idol) sweep her into a hug, kissing her dirty face in big smacks. He hears her first words: “I want to see my mommy.”

It's good enough for the boys; there's no call to the police, no call for an ambulance. They simply help her up the slope, through the break in the board fence, across Strawford Park (the girls in yellow have been replaced by girls in green; neither they nor their coach pay any attention to the boys or their filthy, dragglehaired prize), and then down Kansas Street to Maple Lane. They know where Josie's mommy is. Her Daddy, too.

Not just the Rinkenhauers, either. When the boys get back, there are cars parked the length of the block on both sides of the Cavell house. Roberta was the one who proposed calling the parents of Josie's friends and classmates. They will search on their own, and they will paper the town with the
MISSING
posters, she says. Not in shadowy, out-of-the-way places (which is where missing-children posters in Derry tend to wind up) either, but where people
must
see them. Roberta's enthusiasm is enough to light some faint hope in the eyes of Ellen and Hector Rinkenhauer.

The other parents respond, too—it is as if they have just been waiting to be asked. The calls started shortly after Duddits and his friends trooped out the door (to play, Roberta assumed, and someplace close by, because Henry's old jalopy is still parked in the
driveway), and by the time the boys return, there are almost two dozen people crammed into the Cavells' living room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The man currently addressing them is a guy Henry has seen before, a lawyer named Dave Bocklin. His son, Kendall, sometimes plays with Duddits. Ken Bocklin also has Down's, and he's a good enough guy, but he's not like Duds. Get serious, though—who is?

The boys stand at the entrance to the living room, Josie among them. She is once more carrying her great big purse, with BarbieKen tucked away inside. Even her face is almost clean, because Beaver, seeing all the cars, has done a little work on it with his handkerchief out in the driveway. (“Tell you what, it made me feel funny,” the Beav confides later, after all the hoopdedoo and fuckaree has died down. “Here I'm cleanin up this girl, she's got the bod of a Playboy Bunny and the brain, roughly speaking, of a lawn-sprinkler.”) At first no one sees them but Mr. Bocklin, and Mr. Bocklin doesn't seem to realize what he's looking at, because he goes right on talking.

“So what we need to do, folks, is divide up into a number of teams, let's say three couples to each . . . each team . . . and we'll . . . we . . . we.” Mr. Bocklin slows like one of those toys you need to wind up and then just stands there in front of the Cavells' TV, staring. There's a nervous rustle among the hastily assembled parents, who don't understand what can be wrong with him—he was going along so confidently.

“Josie,” he says in a flat, uninflected voice utterly unlike his usual confident courthouse boom.

“Yes,” says Hector Rinkenhauer, “that's her name. What's up, Dave? Are you all r—”

“Josie,” Dave says again, and raises a trembling hand. To Henry (and hence to Owen, who is seeing this through Henry's eyes) he looks like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Ebeneezer Scrooge's grave.

One face turns . . . two . . . four . . . Alfie Cavell's eyes, huge and unbelieving behind his specs . . . and finally, Mrs. Rinkenhauer's.

“Hi, Mom,” Josie says nonchalantly. She holds up her purse. “Duddie found my BarbieKen. I was stuck in a—”

The rest is blotted out by the woman's shriek of joy. Henry has never heard such a cry in his life, and although it is wonderful, it is also somehow terrible.

“Fuck me Freddy,” Beaver says . . . low, under his breath.

Jonesy is holding Duddits, who has been frightened by the scream.

Pete looks at Henry and gives a little nod:
We did okay.

And Henry nods back.
Yeah, we did.

It may not have been their finest hour, but surely it is a close second. And as Mrs. Rinkenhauer sweeps her daughter into her arms, now sobbing, Henry taps Duddits on the arm. When Duddits turns to look at him, Henry kisses him softly on the cheek.
Good old Duddits,
Henry thinks.
Good old
—

6

“This is it, Owen,” Henry said quietly. “Exit 27.”

Owen's vision of the Cavell living room popped like a soap bubble and he looked at the looming sign:
KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 27—KANSAS STREET.
He could still hear the woman's happy, unbelieving cries echoing in his ears.

“You okay?” Henry asked.

“Yeah. At least I guess so.” He turned up the exit ramp, the Humvee shouldering its way through the snow. The clock built into the dashboard had gone as dead as Henry's wristwatch, but he thought he could see the faintest lightening in the air. “Right or left at the top of the ramp? Tell me now, because I don't want to risk stopping.”

“Left, left.”

Owen swung the Hummer left under a dancing blinker-light, rode it through another skid, and then moved south on Kansas Street. It had been plowed, and not that long ago, but it was drifting in again already.

“Snow's letting up,” Henry said.

“Yeah, but the wind's a bitch. You're looking forward to seeing him, aren't you? Duddits.”

Henry grinned. “A little nervous about it, but yeah.” He shook his head. “Duddits, man . . . Duddits just makes you feel good. He's a tribble. You'll see for yourself. I just wish we weren't busting in like this at the crack of dawn.”

Owen shrugged.
Can't do anything about it,
the gesture said.

“They've been over here on the west side for four years, I guess, and I've never even been to the new place.” And, without even realizing, went on in mind-speak:
They moved after Alfie died.

Did you
—And then, instead of words, a picture: people in black under black umbrellas. A graveyard in the rain. A coffin on trestles with
R.I.P. ALFIE
carved on top.

No,
Henry said, feeling ashamed.
None of us did.?

But Henry didn't know why they hadn't gone, although a phrase occurred to him:
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.
Duddits had been an important (he guessed the word he actually wanted was
vital
) part of their childhood. And once that link was broken, going back would have been painful. Painful was one thing,
uselessly
painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and his growing certainty of suicide—the trickle of milk on his father's chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office—had been hiding another, more potent, image all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn't that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering quantum physics and then using it to build a video game. Worse, discovering that was really all quantum physics
was good for. Of course they had done a good thing—without them, Josie Rinkenhauer would have died in that pipe like a rat in a rainbarrel. But—come on—it wasn't as if they'd rescued a future Nobel Peace Prize winner—

I can't follow everything that just went through your head,
Owen said, suddenly deep in Henry's mind,
but it sounds pretty goddam arrogant. Which street?

Stung, Henry glared at him. “We haven't been back to see him lately, okay? Could we just leave it at that?”

“Yes,” Owen said.

“But we all sent him Christmas cards, okay? Every year, which is how I know they moved to Dearborn Street, 41 Dearborn Street, West Side Derry, make your right three streets up.”

“Okay. Calm down.”

“Fuck your mother and die.”

“Henry—”

“We just fell out of touch. It happens. Probably never happened to a Mr. Perfection like your honored self, but to the rest of us . . . the rest of us . . .” Henry looked down, saw that his fists were clenched, and forced them to roll open.

“Okay, I said.”

“Probably Mr. Perfection stays in touch with
all
his junior-high-school friends, right? You guys probably get together once a year to snap bras, play your Mötley Crüe records, and eat Tuna Surprise just like they used to serve in the cafeteria.”

“I'm sorry if I upset you.”

“Oh, bite me. You act like we fucking
abandoned
him.” Which, of course, was pretty much what they had done.

Owen said nothing. He was squinting through the swirling snow, looking for the Dearborn Street sign in the pallid gray light of early morning . . . and there it was, just up ahead. A plow passing along Kansas Street had plugged the end of Dearborn, but Owen thought the Humvee could beat its way past.

“It's not like I stopped thinking about him,” Henry said. He started to continue by thought, then switched back to words again. Thinking about Duddits was too revealing. “We all thought about him. In fact, Jonesy and I were going to go see him this spring. Then Jonesy had his accident, and I forgot all about it. Is that so surprising?”

“Not at all,” Owen said mildly. He swung the wheel hard to the right, flicked it back the other way to control the skid, then floored the accelerator. The Hummer hit the packed and crusty wall of snow hard enough to throw both of them forward against their seatbelts. Then they were through, Owen jockeying the wheel to keep from hitting the drifted-in cars parked on either side of the street.