Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.
She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.
“What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?” she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument-it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.
“Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.”
“Then talk to him in the morning,” Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.
Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. “I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.”
“Well, I'm not going to wake him up!” she cried, not moving from the doorway. “He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!”
She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.
“All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a-gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!”
Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.
“Mrs. Dodd… Henrietta… “Bannerman began patiently.
Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.
“Who's this?”
“Special deputy,” Bannerman said promptly. “Henrietta, I'll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.”
“Oooh, the responsibility!” she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves-that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn't Bannerman feel it? “The ree-spon-si-bil-i-tee! Isn't that big of you, my God yes! Well, I won't have my boy waked up in the middle of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your special deputy can just go peddle your goddam papers!”
She tried to shut the door again and this time Banner-man shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that a terrible tension. “Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.”
“You can't do this!” she cried. “This isn't no police state! I'll have your job! Let's see your warrant!”
“No, that's right, but I'm going to talk to Frank,” Bannerman said, and pushed past her.
Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her Wrist-and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache. And the woman felt it, too. The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre's bosom.
“My heart… my heart… “She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills. Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.
“You knew?” he whispered.
Her fat, wrinkled mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No sound came out. It was the mouth of a beached fish.
“All of this time you knew?”
“You're a devil!” she screamed at him. “You're a monster… devil… oh my heart… oh, I'm dying… think I'm dying… call the doctor… George Bannerman don't you go up there and wake my baby!”
Johnny let go of her, and unconsciously rubbing his hand back and forth on his coat as if to free it of a stain, he stumbled up the stairs after Bannerman. The wind outside sobbed around the eaves like a lost child. Halfway up he glanced back. Henrietta Dodd sat in a wicker chair, a sprawled mountain of meat, gasping and holding a huge breast in each hand. His head still felt as if it were swelling and he thought dreamily: Pretty soon it'll just pop and that'll be the end. Thank God.
An old and threadbare runner covered the narrow hall floor. The wallpaper was watermarked. Bannerman was pounding on a closed door. It was at least ten degrees colder up here.
“Frank? Frank! It's George Bannerman! Wake up, Frank!”
There was no response. Bannerman turned the knob and shoved the door open. His hand had fallen to the butt of his gun, but he had not drawn it. It could have been a fatal mistake, but Frank Dodd's room was empty.
The two of them stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in. It was a child's room. The wallpaper-also watermarked-was covered with dancing clowns and rocking horses. There was a child- sized chair with a Raggedy Andy sitting in it, looking back at them with its shiny blank eyes. In one corner was a toybox. In the other was a narrow maple bed with the covers thrown back. Hooked over one of the bedposts and looking out of place was Frank Dodd's holstered gun.
“My God,” Bannerman said softly. “What is this?”
“Help,” Mrs. Dodd's voice floated up. “Help me
“She knew,” Johnny said. “She knew from the very beginning, from the Frechette woman. He told her. And she covered up for him.”
Bannerman backed slowly out of the room and opened another door. His eyes were dazed and hurt. It was a guest bedroom, unoccupied. He opened the closet, which was empty except for a neat tray of D-Con rat-killer on the floor. Another door. This bedroom was unfinished and cold enough to show Bannerman's breath. He looked around. There was another door, this one at the head of the stairs. He went to it, and Johnny followed. This door was locked.
“Frank? Are you in there?” He rattled the knob. “Open it, Frank!”
There was no answer. Bannerman raised his foot and kicked out, connecting with the door just below the knob. There was a flat cracking sound that seemed to echo in Johnny's head like a steel platter dropped on a tile floor.
“Oh God,” Bannerman said in a flat, choked voice. “Frank.”
Johnny could see over his shoulder, could see too much. Frank Dodd was propped on the lowered seat of the toilet. He was naked except for a shiny black raincoat, which he had looped over his shoulders; the raincoat's black hood (executioner's hood, Johnny thought dimly) dangled down on the top of the toilet tank like some grotesque, deflated black pod. He had somehow managed to cut his own throat-Johnny would not have thought that possible. There was a package of Wilkinson Sword Blades on the edge of the washbasin. A single blade lay on the floor, glittering wickedly. Drops of blood had beaded on its edge. The blood from his severed jugular vein and carotid artery had splashed everywhere. There were pools of it caught in the folds of the raincoat which dragged on the floor. It was on the shower curtain, which had a pattern of paddling ducks with umbrellas held over their heads. It was on the ceiling.
Around Frank Dodd's neck on a string was a sign crayoned in lipstick. It read: I CONFESS.
The pain in Johnny's head began to climb to a sizzling, insupportable peak. He groped out with a hand and found the doorjamb.
Knew, he thought incoherently. Knew somehow when he” saw me. Knew it was all over. Came home. Did this.
Black rings overlaying his sight, spreading like evil ripples.
What a talent God has given you, Johnny.
(I CONFESS)
“Johnny?”
From far away.
“Johnny, are you all…”
Fading. Everything fading away. That was good. Would have been better if he had never come out of the coma at all. Better for all concerned. Well, he had had his chance.
“Johnny-”
Frank Dodd had come up here and somehow he had slit his throat from the ear to the proverbial ear while the storm howled outside like all the dark things of the earth let loose. Gone a gusher, as his father had said that winter twelve years or so ago, when the pipes in the basement had frozen and burst. Gone a gusher. Sure as hell had. All the way up to the ceiling.
He believed that he might have screamed then, but afterward was never sure. It might only have been in his own head that he screamed. But he had wanted to scream;
to scream out all the horror and pity and agony in his heart.
Then he was falling forward into darkness, and grateful to go. Johnny blacked out.
From the New York Time's, December 19, 1975:
MAINE PSYCHIC DIRECTS SHERIFF TO KILLER DEPUTY'S HOME AFTER VISITING SCENE OF THE CRIME
(Special to the Times) John Smith of Pownal may not actually be psychic, but one would have difficulty persuading Sheriff George F. Bannerman of Castle County, Maine, to believe that. Desperate after a sixth assault-murder in the small western Maine town of Castle Rock, Sheriff Bannerman called Mr. Smith on the phone and asked him to come over to Castle Rock and lend a hand, if possible. Mr. Smith, who received national attention earlier this year when he recovered from a deep coma after fifty-five months of unconsciousness, had been condemned by the weekly tabloid Inside View as a hoaxer, but at a press conference yesterday Sheriff Bannerman would only say, “We don't put a whole lot of stock up here in Maine in what those New York reporters think.”
According to Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Smith crawled on his hands and knees around the scene of the sixth murder, which occurred on the Castle Rock town common. He came up with a mild case of frostbite and the murderer's name-Sheriff's Deputy Franklin Dodd, who had been on the Castle County Sheriff's payroll five years, as long as Bannerman himself.
Earlier this year Mr. Smith stirred controversy in his native state when he had a psychic flash that his physical therapist's house had caught fire. The flash turned out to be nothing but the truth. At a press conference following, a reporter challenged him to…
From Newsweek, page 41, week of December 24, 1975:.
