The f-word sounded good to me, and I returned his smile with enthusiasm. "Miller Lite?"
He looked puzzled. "Never heard of that one, but I've got High Life."
Of course he hadn't heard of Miller Lite; it hadn't been invented yet. "That would be fine. Guess I forgot I was on the East Coast there for a second."
"Where you from?" He used a church key to whisk the top off a bottle, and set a frosted glass in front of me.
"Wisconsin, but I'll be here for awhile." Although we were alone, I lowered my voice. It seemed to inspire confidence. "Real estate stuff. Got to look around a little."
He nodded respectfully and poured for me before I could. "Good luck to you. God knows there's plenty for sale in these parts, and most of it going cheap. I'm getting out, myself. End of the month. Heading for a place with a little less edge to it."
"It doesn't seem all that welcoming," I said, "but I thought that was just a Yankee thing. We're friendlier in Wisconsin, and just to prove it, I'll buy you a beer."
"Never drink alcohol on the job, but I might have a Coke."
"Go for it."
"Thanks very much. It's nice to have a gent on a slow night." I watched as he made the Coke by pumping syrup into a glass, adding soda water, and then stirring. He took a sip and smacked his lips. "I like em sweet."
Judging by the belly he was getting, I wasn't surprised.
"That stuff about Yankees being stand-offy is bullshit, anyway," he said. "I grew up in Fork Kent, and it's the friendliest little town you'd ever want to visit. Why, when tourists get off the Boston and Maine up there, we just about kiss em hello. Went to bartending school there, then headed south to seek my fortune. This looked like a good place to start, and the pay's not bad, but--" He looked around, saw no one, but still lowered his own voice. "You want the truth, Jackson? This town stinks."
"I know what you mean. All those mills."
"It's a lot more than that. Look around. What do you see?"
I did as he asked. There was a fellow who looked like a salesman in the corner, drinking a whiskey sour, but that was it.
"Not much," I said.
"That's the way it is all through the week. The pay's good because there's no tips. The beerjoints downtown do a booming business, and we get some folks in on Friday and Saturday nights, but otherwise, that's just about it. The carriage trade does its drinking at home, I guess." He lowered his voice further. Soon he'd be whispering. "We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can--even the newspaper doesn't play it up--but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed."
"The Barrens?"
"It's this swampy patch that runs right through the center of town. You probably saw it when you flew in."
I'd been in a car, but I still knew what he was talking about.
The bartender's eyes widened. "That's not the real estate you're interested in, is it?"
"Can't say," I told him. "If word got around, I'd be looking for a new job."
"Understood, understood." He drank half his Coke, then stifled a belch with the back of his hand. "But I hope it is. They ought to pave that goddam thing over. It's nothing but stinkwater and mosquitoes. You'd be doing this town a favor. Sweeten it up a little bit."
"Other kids found down there?" I asked. A serial child-murderer would explain a lot about the gloom I'd been feeling ever since I crossed the town line.
"Not that I know of, but people say that's where some of the disappeared ones went, because that's where all the big sewage pumping stations are. I've heard people say there are so many sewer pipes under Derry--most of em laid in the Great Depression--that nobody knows where all of em are. And you know how kids are."
"Adventurous."
He nodded emphatically. "Right with Eversharp. There's people who say it was some vag who's since moved on. Other folks say he was a local who dressed up like a clown to keep from being recognized. The first of the victims--this was last year, before I came--they found him at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson with his arm ripped clean off. Denbrough was his name, George Denbrough. Poor little tyke." He gave me a meaningful look. "And he was found right next to one of those sewer drains. The ones that dump into the Barrens."
"Christ."
"Yeah."
"I hear you using the past tense about all this stuff."
I got ready to explain what I meant, but apparently this guy had been listening in English class as well as bartending school. "It seems to've stopped, knock on wood." He rapped his knuckles on the bar. "Maybe whoever was doing it packed up and moved on. Or maybe the sonofabitch killed himself, sometimes they do that. That'd be good. But it wasn't any homicidal maniac in a clown suit who killed the little Corcoran boy. The clown who did that murder was the kid's own father, if you can believe it."
That was close enough to why I was here to feel like fate rather than coincidence. I took a careful sip of my beer. "Is that so?"
"You bet it is. Dorsey Corcoran, that was the kid's name. Only four years old, and you know what his goddam father did? Beat him to death with a recoilless hammer."
A hammer. He did it with a hammer. I maintained my look of polite interest--at least I hope I did--but I felt gooseflesh go marching up my arms. "That's awful."
"Yeah, and not the wor--" He broke off and looked over my shoulder. "Get you another, sir?"
It was the businessman. "Not me," he said, and handed over a dollar bill. "I'm going to bed, and tomorrow I'm blowing this pop-shop. I hope they remember how to order hardware in Waterville and Augusta, because they sure don't here. Keep the change, son, buy yourself a DeSoto." He plodded out with his head down.
"See? That's a perfect example of what we get at this oasis." The bartender looked sadly after his departing customer. "One drink, off to bed, and tomorrow it's seeya later, alligator, after awhile, crocodile. If it keeps up, this burg's gonna be a ghost town." He stood up straight and tried to square his shoulders--an impossible task, because they were as round as the rest of him. "But who gives a rip? Come October first, I'm gone. Down the road. Happy trails to you, until we meet again."
"The father of this boy, Dorsey . . . he didn't kill any of the others?"
"Naw, he was alibi'd up. I guess he was the kid's stepfather, now that I think about it. Dicky Macklin. Johnny Keeson at the desk--he probably checked you in--told me he used to come in here and drink sometimes, until he got banned for trying to pick up a stewardess and getting nasty when she told him to go peddle his papers. After that I guess he did his drinking at the Spoke or the Bucket. They'll have anybody in those places."
He leaned over close enough for me to smell the Aqua Velva on his cheeks.
"You want to know the worst?"
I didn't, but thought I ought to. So I nodded.
"There was also an older brother in that fucked-up family. Eddie. He disappeared last June. Just poof. Gone, no forwarding, if you dig what I'm saying. Some people think he ran off to get away from Macklin, but anybody with any sense knows he would have turned up in Portland or Castle Rock or Portsmouth if that was the case--no way a ten-year-old can stay out of sight for long. Take it from me, Eddie Corcoran got the hammer just like his little brother. Macklin just won't own up to it." He grinned, a sudden and sunny grin that made his moon face almost handsome. "Have I talked you out of buying real estate in Derry yet, mister?"
"That's not up to me," I said. I was flying on autopilot by then. Hadn't I heard or read about a series of child-murders in this part of Maine? Or maybe watched it on TV, with only a quarter of my brain turned on while the rest of it was waiting for the sound of my problematic wife walking--or staggering--up to the house after another "girls' night out"? I thought so, but the only thing I remembered for sure about Derry was that there was going to be a flood in the mid-eighties that would destroy half the town.
"It's not?"
"No, I'm just the
middleman."
"Well, good luck to you. This town isn't as bad as it was--last July, folks were strung as tight as Doris Day's chastity belt--but it's still a long way from right. I'm a friendly guy, and I like friendly people. I'm splitting."
"Good luck to you, too," I said, and dropped two dollars on the bar.
"Gee, sir, that's way too much!"
"I always pay a surcharge for good conversation." Actually, the surcharge was for a friendly face. The conversation had been disquieting.
"Well, thanks!" He beamed, then stuck out his hand. "I never introduced myself. Fred Toomey."
"Nice to meet you, Fred. I'm George Amberson." He had a good grip. No talcum powder.
"Want a piece of advice?"
"Sure."
"While you're in town, be careful about talking to kids. After last summer, a strange man talking to kids is apt to get a visit from the police if people see him doing it. Or he could take a beating. That sure wouldn't be out of the question."
"Even without the clown suit, huh?"
"Well, that's the thing about dressing up in an outfit, isn't it?" His smile was gone. Now he looked pale and grim. Like everyone else in Derry, in other words. "When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside."
4
I thought about that while the old-fashioned elevator creaked its way up to the third floor. It was true. And if the rest of what Fred Toomey had said was also true, would anybody be surprised if another father went to work on his family with a hammer? I thought not. I thought people would say it was just another case of Derry being Derry. And they might be right.
As I let myself into my room, I had an authentically horrible idea: suppose I changed things just enough in the next seven weeks so that Harry's father killed Harry, too, instead of just leaving him with a limp and a partially fogged-over brain?
That won't happen, I told myself. I won't let it happen. Like Hillary Clinton said in 2008, I'm in it to win it.
Except, of course, she had lost.
5
I ate breakfast the following morning in the hotel's Riverview Restaurant, which was deserted except for me and the hardware salesman from last night. He was buried in the local newspaper. When he left it on the table, I snagged it. I wasn't interested in the front page, which was devoted to more saber-rattling in the Philippines (although I did wonder briefly if Lee Oswald was in the vicinity). What I wanted was the local section. In 2011, I'd been a reader of the Lewiston Sun Journal, and the last page of the B section was always headed "School Doin's." In it, proud parents could see their kids' names in print if they had won an award, gone on a class trip, or been part of a community cleanup project. If the Derry Daily News had such a feature, it wasn't impossible that I'd find one of the Dunning kids listed.
The last page of the News, however, contained only obituaries.
I tried the sports pages, and read about the weekend's big upcoming football game: Derry Tigers versus Bangor Rams. Troy Dunning was fifteen, according to the janitor's essay. A fifteen-year-old could easily be a part of the team, although probably not a starter.
I didn't find his name, and although I read every word of a smaller story about the town's Peewee Football team (the Tiger Cubs), I didn't find Arthur "Tugga" Dunning, either.
I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed newspaper under my arm, thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six), something else occurred to me: I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate the right Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging Tugga Dunning and Derry into my favorite search engine probably would have done the trick; hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother, take care of the rest.
In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I'd had in college--a sarcastic old bastard--who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
I went there.
6
Late that afternoon, hopes dashed (at least for the time being), I walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, pausing briefly at the intersection of Jackson and Witcham to look at the sewer drain where a little boy named George Denbrough had lost his arm and his life (at least according to Fred Toomey). By the time I got to the top of the hill, my heart was pounding and I was puffing. It wasn't being out of shape; it was the stench of the mills.
I was dispirited and a bit scared. It was true that I still had plenty of time to locate the right Dunning family, and I was confident I would--if calling all the Dunnings in the phone book was what it took, that was what I'd do, even at the risk of alerting Harry's time bomb of a father--but I was starting to sense what Al had sensed: something working against me.
I walked along Kansas Street, so deep in thought that at first I didn't realize there were no more houses on my right. The ground now dropped away steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called the Barrens. Only a rickety white fence separated the sidewalk from the drop. I planted my hands on it, staring into the undisciplined growth below. I could see gleams of murky standing water, patches of reeds so tall they looked prehistoric, and snarls of billowing brambles. The trees would be stunted down there, fighting for sunlight. There would be poison ivy, litters of garbage, and quite likely the occasional hobo camp. There would also be paths only some of the local kids would know. The adventurous ones.
I stood and looked without seeing, aware but hardly registering the faint lilt of music--something with horns in it. I was thinking about how little I had accomplished this morning. You can change the past, Al had told me, but it's not as easy as you might think.
What was that music? Something cheery, with a little jump to it. It made me think of Christy, back in the early days, when I was besotted with her. When we were besotted with each other. Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . . Glenn Miller, maybe?
I had gone to the library hoping to get a look at the census records. The last national one would have taken place eight years ago, in 1950, and would have shown three of the four Dunning kids: Troy, Arthur, and Harold. Only Ellen, who would be seven at the time of the murders, hadn't been around to be counted in 1950. There would be an address. It was true the family might have moved in the intervening eight years, but if so, one of the neighbors would be able to tell me where they'd gone. It was a small city.
Only the census records weren't there. The librarian, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Starrett, told me that in her opinion those records certainly belonged in the library, but the town council had for some reason decided they belonged in City Hall. They'd been moved there in 1954, she said.
"That doesn't sound good," I told her, smiling. "You know what they say--you can't fight City Hall."
Mrs. Starrett didn't return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I'd met in this queer place--Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. "Don't be silly, Mr. Amberson. There's nothing private about the United States Census. You march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you. Her name is Marcia Guay. She'll help you out. Although they probably stored them in the basement, which is not where they ought to be. It's damp, and I shouldn't be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble--any trouble at all--you come back and see me."
So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost all of the other d
ocuments that had been stored in the City Hall basement.
"We had terrible rains last year," she said. "They went on for a whole week. The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town--that's what the oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson--everything in the Low Town flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved, and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I'm awfully sorry."
It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, Hey Tugga, wait up?
Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If there was such a thing as flying directly into the radar, that would be it.
One thing was for sure--I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958 prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk. I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.
Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . .
That was Glenn Miller. It was "In the Mood," a tune I had reason to know well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.
7
There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.
On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen "tweenagers," and that's what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was charmed, but I was also . . . what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too, something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the actual clockwork of the universe.