Stephen King - A Good Marriage

“According to the story,” Darcy said, “the crocodile lets that bird live there because it keeps the crocodile’s teeth clean. Eats the grain right out from between them.” She made pecking motions with the fingers of her right hand. “It’s probably not true… but it is true that I used to drive Bobby to the dentist. Left to himself, he’d accidentally-on-purpose forget his appointments. He was such a baby about pain.” Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. She wiped them away with the heels of her hands, cursing them. This man would not respect tears shed on Robert Anderson’s account.

Or maybe she was wrong about that. He was smiling and nodding his head. “And your kids. They’d be run over once when the world found out their father was a serial killer and torturer of women. Then run over again when the world decided their mother had been covering up for him. Maybe even helping him, like Myra Hindley helped Ian Brady. Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

“Never mind, then. But ask yourself this: what would a woman in a difficult position like that do?”

“What would you do, Holt?”

“I don’t know. My situation’s a little different. I may be just an old nag—the oldest horse in the firebarn—but I have a responsibility to the families of those murdered women. They deserve closure.”

“They deserve it, no question… but do they need it?”

“Robert Shaverstone’s penis was bitten off, did you know that?”

She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the warm tears trickling through the lashes. Did not “suffer” my ass, she thought, and if Bob had appeared before her, hands out and begging for mercy, she would have killed him again.

“His father knows,” Ramsey said. Speaking softly. “And he has to live with that knowledge about the child he loved every day.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”

She felt him take her hand across the table. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

She flung it off. “Of course you did! But do you think I haven’t been? Do you think I haven’t been, you… you nosy old man?”

He chuckled, revealing those sparkling dentures. “No. I don’t think that at all. Saw it as soon as you opened the door.” He paused, then said deliberately: “I saw everything.”

“And what do you see now?”

He got up, staggered a little, then found his balance. “I see a courageous woman who should be left alone to get after her housework. Not to mention the rest of her life.”

She also got up. “And the families of the victims? The ones who deserve closure?” She paused, not wanting to say the rest. But she had to. This man had fought considerable pain—maybe even excruciating pain—to come here, and now he was giving her a pass. At least, she thought he was. “Robert Shaverstone’s father?”

“The Shaverstone boy is dead, and his father’s as good as.” Ramsey spoke in a calm, assessing tone Darcy recognized. It was a tone Bob used when he knew a client of the firm was about to be hauled before the IRS, and the meeting would go badly. “Never takes his mouth off the whiskey bottle from morning til night. Would knowing that his son’s killer—his son’s mutilator —was dead change that? I don’t think so. Would it bring any of the victims back? Nawp. Is the killer burning in the fires of hell for his crimes right now, suffering his own mutilations that will bleed for all of eternity? The Bible says he is. The Old Testament part of it, anyway, and since that’s where our laws come from, it’s good enough for me. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have to stop at every rest area between here and Augusta going back, but it was worth it. You make a good cup.”

Walking him to the door, Darcy realized she felt on the right side of the mirror for the first time since she had stumbled over that carton in the garage. It was good to know he had been close to being caught. That he hadn’t been as smart as he’d assumed he was.

“Thank you for coming to visit,” she said as he set his hat squarely on his head. She opened the door, letting in a breeze of cold air. She didn’t mind. It felt good on her skin. “Will I see you again?”

“Nawp. I’m done as of next week. Full retirement. Going to Florida. I won’t be there long, according to my doctor.”

“I’m sorry to hear th—”

He abruptly pulled her into his arms. They were thin, but sinewy and surprisingly strong. Darcy was startled but not frightened. The brim of his Homburg bumped her temple as he whispered in her ear. “You did the right thing.”

And kissed her cheek.

He went slowly and carefully down the path, minding the ice. An old man’s walk. He should really have a cane, Darcy thought. He was going around the front of his car, still looking down for ice patches, when she called his name. He turned back, bushy eyebrows raised.

“When my husband was a boy, he had a friend who was killed in an accident.”

“Is that so?” The words came out in a puff of winter white.

“Yes,” Darcy said. “You could look up what happened. It was very tragic, even though he wasn’t a very nice boy, according to my husband.”

“No?”

“No. He was the sort of boy who harbors dangerous fantasies. His name was Brian Delahanty, but when they were kids, Bob called him BD.”

Ramsey stood by his car for several seconds, working it through. Then he nodded his head. “That’s very interesting. I might have a look at the stories about it on my computer. Or maybe not; it was all a long time ago. Thank you for the coffee.”

“Thank you for the conversation.”

She watched him drive down the street (he drove with the confidence of a much younger man, she noticed—probably because his eyes were still so sharp) and then went inside. She felt younger, lighter. She went to the mirror in the hall. In it she saw nothing but her own reflection, and that was good.

Magnolia Hotel

Omaha, Nebraska

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession. In June of 1922 I murdered my wife, Arlette Christina Winters James, and hid her body by tupping it down an old well. My son, Henry Freeman James, aided me in this crime, although at 14 he was not responsible; I cozened him into it, playing upon his fears and beating down his quite normal objections over a period of 2 months. This is a thing I regret even more bitterly than the crime, for reasons this document will show.

The issue that led to my crime and damnation was 100 acres of good land in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. It was willed to my wife by John Henry Winters, her father. I wished to add this land to our freehold farm, which in 1922 totaled 80 acres. My wife, who never took to the farming life (or to being a farmer’s wife), wished to sell it to the Farrington Company for cash money. When I asked her if she truly wanted to live downwind from a Farrington’s hog butchery, she told me we could sell up the farm as well as her father’s acreage—my father’s farm, and his before him! When I asked her what we might do with money and no land, she said we could move to Omaha, or even St. Louis, and open a shop.

“I will never live in Omaha,” I said. “Cities are for fools.”

This is ironic, considering where I now live, but I will not live here for long; I know that as well as I know what is making the sounds I hear in the walls. And I know where I shall find myself after this earthly life is done. I wonder if Hell can be worse than the City of Omaha. Perhaps it is the City of Omaha, but with no good country surrounding it; only a smoking, brimstone-stinking emptiness full of lost souls like myself.