Stephen King: A Good Marriage

Bob laughed ruefully.

“If I was a religious fella, I’d say God saved me from myself. And who knows if there isn’t Something… some Fate… that has its own plan for us.”

“And this Fate’s plan for you was for you to torture and kill women?” Darcy asked. She couldn’t help herself.

He looked at her reproachfully. “They were snoots,” he said, and raised a teacherly finger. “Also, it wasn’t me. It was Beadie who did that stuff—and I say did for a reason, Darce. I say did instead of does because all of that’s behind me now.”

“Bob—your friend BD is dead. He’s been dead for almost forty years. You must know that. I mean, on some level you must .”

He tossed his hands in the air: a gesture of good-natured surrender. “Do you want to call it guilt-avoidance? That’s what a shrink would call it, I suppose, and it’s fine if you do. But Darcy, listen!” He leaned forward and pressed a finger to her forehead, between her eyebrows. “Listen and get this through your head. It was Brian. He infected me with… well, certain ideas, let’s say that. Some ideas, once you get them in your head, you can’t unthink them. You can’t…”

“Put the toothpaste back in the tube?”

He clapped his hands together, almost making her scream. “ That’s it exactly! You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Brian was dead, but the ideas were alive. Those ideas—getting women, doing whatever to them, whatever crazy idea came into your head—they became his ghost.”

His eyes shifted upward and to the left when he said this. She had read somewhere that this meant the person who was talking was telling a conscious lie. But did it matter if he was? Or which one of them he was lying to? She thought not.

“I won’t go into the details,” he said. “It’s nothing for a sweetheart like you to hear, and like it or not—I know you don’t right now—you’re still my sweetheart. But you have to know I fought it. For seven years I fought it, but those ideas— Brian’s ideas—kept growing inside my head. Until finally I said to myself, ‘I’ll try it once, just to get it out of my head. To get him out of my head. If I get caught, I get caught—at least I’ll stop thinking about it. Wondering about it. What it would be like.’”

“You’re telling me it was a male exploration,” she said dully.

“Well, yes. I suppose you could say that.”

“Or like trying a joint just to see what all the shouting was about.”

He shrugged modestly, boyishly. “Kinda.”

“It wasn’t an exploration, Bobby. It wasn’t trying a joint. It was taking a woman’s life .”

She had seen no guilt or shame, absolutely none—he appeared incapable of those things, it seemed the circuit-breaker that controlled them had been fried, perhaps even before birth—but now he gave her a sulky, put-upon look. A teenager’s you-don’t-understand-me look.

“Darcy, they were snoots .”

She wanted a glass of water, but she was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom. She was afraid he would stop her, and what would come after that? What then?

“Besides,” he resumed, “I didn’t think I’d get caught. Not if I was careful and made a plan. Not a half-baked and horny-fourteen-year-old boy’s plan, you know, but a realistic one. And I realized something else, too. I couldn’t do it myself. Even if I didn’t screw up out of nervousness, I might out of guilt. Because I was one of the good guys. That’s how I saw myself, and believe it or not, I still do. And I have the proof, don’t I? A good home, a good wife, two beautiful children who are all grown up and starting their own lives. And I give back to the community. That’s why I took the Town Treasurer’s job for two years, gratis. That’s why I work with Vinnie Eschler every year to put on the Halloween blood drive.”

You should have asked Marjorie Duvall to give, Darcy thought. She was A-positive .

Then, puffing out his chest slightly—a man nailing down his argument with one final, irrefutable point—he said: “That’s what the Cub Scouts are about. You thought I’d quit when Donnie went on to Boy Scouts, I know you did. Only I didn’t. Because it’s not just about him, and never was. It’s about the community. It’s about giving back.”

“Then give Marjorie Duvall back her life. Or Stacey Moore. Or Robert Shaverstone.”

That last one got through; he winced as if she had struck him. “The boy was an accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“But you being there wasn’t an accident?”

“It wasn’t me, ” he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. “I’m no adulterer. It was BD. It’s always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spelling, because I sometimes called him BD back when I first told you about him. You might not remember that, but I did.”

She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he’d gone to. No wonder he hadn’t been caught. If she hadn’t stubbed her toe on that damned carton—

“None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD—the BD inside—he does, too. We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tell. They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I’m sure. Married, but that didn’t keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop—the Sunnyside in Waterville. I used to go up there to Mickleson’s Coins, remember? You even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off all the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how ’bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard. Which she did, I admit it, I’m a man with a man’s needs, and although you never turned me away or said no… well, rarely… I’m a man with a man’s needs and I’ve always been highly sexed. Some women sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off.”

He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.

“Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Well, I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. ‘Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smell it on you, but this little rub’s all you’re going to get, so deal with it.’ I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him.”

He shook his head slowly.

“There are lots of women like that. It’s easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There’s a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I’ve done that… oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could call it a hobby, I guess. You could say I collect information as well as coins. Usually it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD will say, ‘She’s the one you want to follow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We’ll make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.’ And that’s what I do.”

He took her hand, and folded her limp and chilly fingers into his.

“You think I’m crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I’m not, honey. It’s BD who’s crazy… or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I’ll always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb—illiterate, anyway—and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”