Four Past Midnight (50 page)

He asked if there was anything new. Amy said there wasn't. Then Ted took over, speaking with a faintly Southern accent which was a good deal softer than John Shooter's nasal burr. He told Mort the fire chief and a lieutenant from the Derry Police Department would meet them at what Ted called “the site.” They wanted to ask Mort a few questions. Mort said that was fine. Ted asked if he'd like a cup of coffee—they had time. Mort said that would also be fine. Ted asked how he had been. Mort used the word fine again. Each time it came out of his mouth it felt a little more threadbare. Amy watched the exchange between them with some apprehension, and Mort could understand that. On the day he had discovered the two of them in bed together, he had told Ted he would kill him. In fact, he might have said something about killing them both. His memory of the event was quite foggy. He suspected theirs might be rather foggy, too. He didn't know about the other two comers of the triangle, but he himself found that foggery not only understandable but merciful.

They had coffee. Amy asked him about “John Shooter.” Mort said he thought that situation was pretty much under control. He did not mention cats or notes or magazines. And after awhile, they left Marchman's and went to 92 Kansas Street, which had once been a house instead of a site.

The fire chief and police detective were there as promised, and there were questions, also as promised. Most of the questions were about any people who might dislike him enough to have tossed a Texaco cocktail into his study. If Mort had been on his own, he would have left Shooter's name out of it entirely, but of course Amy would bring it up if he didn't, so he recounted the initial encounter just as it had happened.

The fire chief, Wickersham, said: “The guy was pretty an
^g
ry
^?
”

“Yes.”

“Angry enough to have driven to Derry and torched your house?” the police detective, Bradley, asked.

He was almost positive Shooter hadn't done it, but he didn't want to delve into his brief dealings with Shooter any more deeply. It would mean telling them what Shooter had done to Bump, for one thing. That would upset Amy; it would upset her a great deal ... and it would open up a can of worms he would prefer to leave closed. It was time, Mort reckoned, to be disingenuous again.

“He might have been at first. But after I discovered the two stories really
were
alike, I looked up the original date of publication on mine.”

“His had never been published?” Bradley asked.

“No, I'm sure it hadn't been. Then, yesterday, he showed up again. I asked him when he'd written his story, hoping he'd mention a date that was later than the one I had. Do you understand?”

Detective Bradley nodded. “You were hoping to prove you scooped him.”

“Right. ‘Sowing Season' was in a book of short stories I published in 1983, but it was
originally
published in 1980. I was hoping the guy would feel safe picking a date only a year or two before 1983. I got lucky. He said he'd written it in 1982. So you see, I had him.”

He hoped it would end there, but Wickersham, the fire chief, pursued it. “You see and we see, Mr. Rainey, but did he see?”

Mort sighed inwardly. He supposed he had known that you could only be disingenuous for so long—if things went on long enough, they almost always progressed to a point where you had to either tell the truth or carve an outright lie. And here he was, at that point. But whose business was it? Theirs or his? His. Right. And he meant to see it stayed that way.

“Yes,” he told them, “he saw.”

“What did he do?” Ted asked. Mort looked at him with mild annoyance. Ted glanced away, looking as if he wished he had his pipe to play with. The pipe was in the car. The J. Press shirt had no pocket to carry it in.

“He went away,” Mort said. His irritation with Ted, who had absolutely no business sticking
his
oar in, made it easier to lie. The fact that he was lying to Ted seemed to make it more all right, too. “He muttered some bullshit about what an incredible coincidence it all was, then jumped into his car like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching, and took off.”

“Happen to notice the make of the car and the license plate, Mr. Rainey?” Bradley asked. He had taken out a pad and a ballpoint pen.

“It was a Ford,” Mort said. “I'm sorry, but I can't help you with the plate. It wasn't a Maine plate, but other than that . . .” He shrugged and tried to look apologetic. Inside, he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the way this was going. It had seemed okay when he was just being cute, skirting around any outright lies—it had seemed a way of sparing Amy the pain of knowing that the man had broken Bump's neck and then skewered him with a screwdriver. But now he had put himself in a position where he had told different stories to different people. If they got together and did a comparison, he wouldn't look so hot. Explaining his reasons for the lies might be sticky. He supposed that such comparisons were pretty unlikely, as long as Amy didn't talk to either Greg Carstairs or Herb Creekmore, but suppose there was a hassle with Shooter when he and Greg caught up to him and shoved the June, 1980, issue of EQMM in Shooter's face?

Never mind
, he told himself,
we'll burn that bridge when
we come to it, big
guy.
At this thought, he experienced a brief return of the high spirits he'd felt while talking to Herb at the toll plaza, and almost cackled aloud. He held it in. They would wonder why he was laughing if he did something like that, and he supposed they would be right to wonder.

“I think Shooter must be bound for—”

(
Mississippi
)

“—for wherever he came from by now,” he finished, with hardly a break.

“I imagine you're right,” Lieutenant Bradley said, “but I'm inclined to pursue this, Mr. Rainey. You might have convinced the guy he was wrong, but that doesn't mean he left your place feeling mellow. It's possible that he drove up here in a rage and torched your house just because he was pissed off—pardon me, Mrs. Rainey.”

Amy offered a crooked little smile and waved the apology away.

“Don't you think that's possible?”

No
, Mort thought,
I don't
.
If he'd decided to torch the house
,
I think he would have killed Bump before he left for Derry, just in case I woke up before he got back
.
In that case
,
the blood would have been dry and Bump would have been stiff when I found him
.
That isn't the way it happened
...
but I can't say so
.
Not even if I wanted to
.
They'd wonder why I held back the stuff about Bump as long as I did
,
for one thing
.
They'd probably think I've got a few loose screws
.

“I guess so,” he said, “but I met the guy. He didn't strike me as the house-burning type.”

“You mean he wasn't a Snopes,” Amy said suddenly.

Mort looked at her, startled—then smiled. “That's right,” he said. “A Southerner, but not a Snopes.”

“Meaning what?” Bradley asked, a little warily.

“An old joke, Lieutenant,” Amy said. “The Snopeses were characters in some novels by William Faulkner. They got their start in business burning barns.”

“Oh,” Bradley said blankly.

Wickersham said: “There is no house-burning type, Mr. Rainey. They come in all shapes and sizes. Believe me.”

“Well—”

“Give me a little more on the car, if you can,” Bradley said. He poised a pencil over his notebook. “I want to make the State Police aware of this guy.”

Mort suddenly decided he was going to lie some more. Quite a lot more, actually.

“Well, it was a sedan. I can tell you that much for sure.”

“Uh-huh. Ford sedan. Year?”

“Somewhere in the seventies, I guess,” Mort said. He was fairly sure Shooter's station wagon had actually been built around the time a fellow named Oswald had elected Lyndon Johnson President of the United States. He paused, then added: “The plate was a light color. It could have been Florida. I won't swear to it, but it could have been.”

“Uh-huh. And the man himself?”

“Average height. Blonde hair. Eyeglasses. The round wire-framed ones John Lennon used to wear. That's really all I re—”

“Didn't you say he was wearing a hat?” Amy asked suddenly.

Mort felt his teeth come together with a click. “Yes,” he said pleasantly. “That's right, I forgot. Dark gray or black. Except it was more of a cap. With a bill, you know.”

“Okay.” Bradley snapped his book closed. “It's a start.”

“Couldn't this have been a simple case of vandalism, arson for kicks?” Mort asked. “In novels, everything has a connection, but my experience has been that in real life, things sometimes just happen.”

“It could have been,” Wickersham agreed, “but it doesn't hurt to check out the obvious connections.” He dropped Mort a solemn little wink and said, “Sometimes life imitates art, you know.”

“Do you need anything else?” Ted asked them, and put an arm around Amy's shoulders.

Wickersham and Bradley exchanged a glance and then Bradley shook his head. “I don't think so, at least not at the present.”

“I only ask because Amy and Mort will have to put in some time with the insurance agent,” Ted said. “Probably an investigator from the parent company, as well.”

Mort found the man's Southern accent more and more irritating. He suspected that Ted came from a part of the South several states north of Faulkner country, but it was still a coincidence he could have done without.

The officials shook hands with Amy and Mort, expressed their sympathy, told them to get in touch if anything else occurred to either of them, and then took themselves off, leaving the three of them to take another turn around the house.

“I'm sorry about all of this, Amy,” Mort said suddenly. She was walking between them, and looked over at him, apparently startled by something she had heard in his voice. Simple sincerity, maybe. “All of it. Really sorry.”

“So am I,” she said softly, and touched his hand.

“Well, Teddy makes three,” Ted said with solemn heartiness. She turned back to him, and in that moment Mort could have cheerfully strangled the man until his eyes popped out jittering at the ends of their optic strings.

They were walking up the west side of the house toward the street now. Over here had been the deep corner where his study had met the house, and not far away was Amy's flower-garden. All the flowers were dead now, and Mort reflected that was probably just as well. The fire had been hot enough to crisp what grass had remained green in a twelve-foot border all around the ruin. If the flowers had been in bloom, it would have crisped them, as well, and that would have been just too sad. It would have been—

Mort stopped suddenly. He was remembering the stories. The story. You could call it “Sowing Season” or you could call it “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” but they were the same thing once you took the geegaws off and looked underneath. He looked up. There was nothing to see but blue sky, at least now, but before last night's fire, there would have been a window right where he was looking. It was the window in the little room next to the laundry. The little room that was Amy's office. It was where she went to write checks, to write in her daily journal, to make the telephone calls that needed to be made ... the room where, he suspected, Amy had several years ago started a novel. And, when it died, it was the room where she had buried it decently and quietly in a desk drawer. The desk had been by the window. Amy had liked to go there in the mornings. She could start the wash in the next room and then do paperwork while she waited for the buzzer which proclaimed it was time to strip the washer and feed the drier. The room was well away from the main house and she liked the quiet, she said. The quiet and the clear, sane morning light. She liked to look out the window every now and then, at her flowers growing in the deep corner formed by the house and the study ell. And he heard her saying,
It's the best room in the house
,
at least for me
,
because hardly anybody ever goes there but me
. It's got a
secret window
,
and it looks down on a secret garden.

“Mort?” Amy was saying now, and for a moment Mort took no notice, confusing her real voice with her voice in his mind, which was the voice of memory. But was it a true memory or a false one? That was the real question, wasn't it? It
seemed
like a true memory, but he had been under a great deal of stress even before Shooter, and Bump, and the fire. Wasn't it at least possible that he was having a ... well, a recollective hallucination? That he was trying to make his own past with Amy in some way conform to that goddam story where a man had gone crazy and killed his wife?

Jesus
,
I hope not
.
I hope not
,
because if I am
,
that's too close to nervous
-
breakdown territory for comfort
.

“Mort, are you okay?” Amy asked. She plucked fretfully at his sleeve, at least temporarily breaking his trance.

“Yes,” he said, and then, abruptly: “No. To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a little sick.”

“Breakfast, maybe,” Ted said.

Amy gave him a look that made Mort feel a bit better. It was not a very friendly look. “It
isn't
breakfast,” she said a little indignantly. She swept her arm at the blackened ruins. “It's this. Let's get out of here.”