Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

“Daddy,” I said. “Daddy.”

He turned when he heard what I’d stopped calling him when I was eight or nine. Saw I wasn’t dressed. Saw I was crying. Saw I was holding out my phone. Forgot all about the skillet.

“Craig, what is it? What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare about the funeral?”

It was a nightmare, all right, and probably it was too late—he was old, after all—but maybe it wasn’t.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. Blubbering now. “He’s not dead. At least he wasn’t at two-thirty this morning. We’ve got to dig him up. We have to, because we buried him alive.”

I told him everything. About how I’d taken Mr. Harrigan’s phone and put it in the pocket of his suit coat. Because it came to mean a lot to him, I said. And because it was something I gave him . I told him about calling that phone in the middle of the night, hanging up the first time, then calling back and leaving a message on his voicemail. I didn’t need to show Dad the text I got in return, because he’d already looked at it. Studied it, actually.

The butter in the skillet had begun to scorch. Dad got up and moved the skillet off the burner. “Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any eggs,” he said. Then he came back to the table, but instead of sitting on the other side, in his usual place, he sat next to me and put one of his hands over one of mine. “Listen up now.”

“I know it was a creepy thing to do,” I said, “but if I hadn’t, we never would have known. We have to—”

“Son—”

“No, Dad, listen! We have to get somebody out there right away! A bulldozer, a payloader, even guys with shovels! He could still be—”

“Craig, stop. You were spoofed.”

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. I knew what spoofing was, but the possibility that it had happened to me—and in the middle of the night—had never crossed my mind.

“There’s more and more of it going around,” he said. “We even had a staff meeting about it at work. Someone got access to Harrigan’s cell phone. Cloned it. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, sure, but Daddy—”

He squeezed my hand. “Someone hoping to steal business secrets, maybe.”

“He was retired!”

“But he kept his hand in, he told you that. Or it could have been access to his credit card info they were after. Whoever it was got your voicemail on the cloned phone, and decided to play a practical joke.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Daddy, we have to check!”

“We don’t, and I’m going to tell you why. Mr. Harrigan was a rich man who died unattended. In addition to that, he hadn’t visited a physician in years, although I bet Rafferty gave him hell on that score, if only because he couldn’t update the old guy’s insurance to cover more of the death duties. For those reasons, there was an autopsy. That’s how they found out he died of advanced heart disease.”

“They cut him open?” I thought of how my knuckles had brushed his chest when I put his phone in his pocket. Had there been stitched-up incisions under his crisp white shirt and knotted tie? If my dad was right, then yes. Stitched-up incisions in the shape of a Y. I had seen that on TV. On CSI .

“Yes,” Dad said. “I don’t like telling you that, don’t want it preying on your mind, but it’s better that than letting you think he was buried alive. He wasn’t. Couldn’t have been. He’s dead. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to stay home today? I will if you want.”

“No, that’s okay. You’re right. I got spoofed.” And spooked. That too.

“What are you going to do with yourself? Because if you’re going to brood and be all morbid, I should take the day off. We could go fishing.”

“I’m not going to brood and be all morbid. But I should go up to his house and water the plants.”

“Is going there a good idea?” He was watching me closely.

“I owe it to him. And I want to talk to Mrs. Grogan. Find out if he made a whatchacallit for her, too.”

“A provision. That’s very thoughtful. Of course she may tell you to mind your beeswax. She’s an old-time Yankee, that one.”

“If he didn’t, I wish I could give her some of mine,” I said.

He smiled, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good kid. Your mom would be so proud of you. Are you sure you’re okay now?”

“Yes.” I ate some eggs and toast to prove it, although I didn’t want them. My dad had to be right—a stolen password, a cloned phone, a cruel practical joke. It sure hadn’t been Mr. Harrigan, whose guts had been tossed like salad and whose blood had been replaced with embalming fluid.

Dad went to work and I went up to Mr. Harrigan’s. Mrs. Grogan was vacuuming the living room. She wasn’t singing like she usually did, but she was composed enough, and after I finished watering the plants, she asked if I’d like to go into the kitchen and have a cup of tea (which she called “a cuppa cheer”) with her.

“There’s cookies, too,” she said.

We went into the kitchen and while she boiled the kettle, I told her about Mr. Harrigan’s note, and how he’d left money in trust for my college education.

Mrs. Grogan nodded in businesslike fashion, as if she’d expected no less, and said she had also gotten an envelope from Mr. Rafferty. “The boss fixed me up. More than I expected. Prob’ly more than I deserve.”

I said I felt pretty much the same way.

Mrs. G. brought the tea to the table, a big mug for each of us. Between them she set down a plate of oatmeal cookies. “He loved these,” Mrs. Grogan said.

“Yeah. He said they got his bowels in gear.”

That made her laugh. I picked up one of the cookies and bit into it. As I chewed, I thought of the scripture from 1 Corinthians I’d read at Methodist Youth Fellowship on Maundy Thursday and at Easter service just a few months back: “And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” The cookies weren’t communion, the Rev would surely have called the idea blasphemous, but I was glad to have one just the same.

“He took care of Pete, too,” she said. Meaning Pete Bostwick, the gardener.

“Nice,” I said, and reached for another cookie. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?”

“Not so sure about that,” she said. “He was square-dealing, all right, but you didn’t want to be on his bad side. You don’t remember Dusty Bilodeau, do you? No, you wouldn’t. He was before your time.”

“From the Bilodeaus over in the trailer park?”

“Ayuh, that’s right, next to the store, but I ’spect Dusty isn’t among em. He’ll have gone on his merry way long since. He was the gardener before Pete, but wasn’t eight months on the job before Mr. Harrigan caught him stealing and fired his butt. I don’t know how much he got, or how Mr. Harrigan found out, but firing didn’t end it. I know you know some of the stuff Mr. H. gave this little town and all the ways he helped out, but Mooney didn’t tell even half of it, maybe because he didn’t know or maybe because he was on a timer. Charity is good for the soul, but it also gives a man power, and Mr. Harrigan used his on Dusty Bilodeau.”

She shook her head. Partly, I think, in admiration. She had that Yankee hard streak in her.

“I hope he filched at least a few hundred out of Mr. Harrigan’s desk or sock drawer or wherever, because that was the last money he ever got in the town of Harlow, county of Castle, state of Maine. He couldn’t have landed a job shoveling henshit out of old Dorrance Marstellar’s barn after that. Mr. Harrigan saw to it. He was a square-dealing man, but if you weren’t the same, God help you. Have another cookie.”