Cujo

out. She had told him to go peddle his papers somewhere else. And that had prompted Kemp's vengeful little billet doux. It did not seem the rosy scenery into which two mad lovers might decide to elope.

A failing out doesn't preclude a later rapprochement, his mind retorted with a kind of grave and implacable calm.

But what about Tad? She wouldn't have taken Tad with her, would she? From her description, Kemp sounded like some sort of wildman, and although Donna hadn't said so, Vic had gotten the feeling that something damned violent had almost happened on the day she told him to fuck off.

People in love do strange things.

That strange and jealous part of his mind - he hadn't even been aware of that part in him until that afternoon in Deering Oaks - had an answer for everything, and in the dark it didn't seem to matter that most of the answers were irrational.

He was doing a slow dance back and forth between two sharpened points: Kemp on one (DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?); a vision of the telephone ringing on and on in their empty Castle Rock house on the other. She could have had an accident. She and Tad could be in hospital. Someone could have broken in. They could be lying murdered in their bedrooms. Of course if she'd had an accident, someone official would have been in touch -the office as well as Donna knew in which Boston hotel he and Roger were staying - but in the dark that thought, which should have been a comfort since no one had been in touch, only inclined his thoughts more toward murder.

Robbery and murder, his mind whispered as he lay awake in the dark. Then it danced slowly across to the other sharpened point and took up its original litany: Gone off with Kemp.

In between these points, his mind saw a more reasonable explanation, one that made him feel helplessly angry. Perhaps she and Tad had decided to spend the night with someone and had simply forgotten to call and tell him. Now it was too late to just start calling around and asking people without alarming them. He supposed he could call the sheriff's office and ask them to send someone up and check. But wouldn't that be overreacting?

No, his mind said.

Yes, his mind said, definitely.

She and Tad are both dead with knives stuck in their throats, his mind said. You read about it in the papers all the time. It even happened in Castle Rock just before we came to town. That crazy cop. That Frank Dodd.

Gone off with Kemp, his mind said.

At midnight he tried again, and this time the constant ringing of the phone with no one to pick it up froze him into a deadly certainty of trouble. Kemp, robbers, murderers, something. Trouble. Trouble at home.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and turned on the bed lamp. 'Roger,' he said. 'Wake up.'

'Huh. Wuh. Hzzzzzz. . . .' Roger had his arm over his eyes, trying to block out the light. He was in his pajamas with the little yellow college pennants.

'Roger. Roger!'

Roger opened his eyes, blinked, looked at the Travel-Ette clock.

'Hey, Vic, it's the middle of the night.'

'Roger...' He swallowed and something clicked in his throat. 'Roger, it's midnight and Tad and Donna still aren't home. I'm scared.'

Roger sat up and brought the clock close to his face to verify what Vic had said. It was now four past the hour.

'Well, they probably got freaked out staying there by themselves, Vic. Sometimes Althea takes the girls and goes over to Sally Petrie's when I'm gone. She gets nervous when the wind blows off the lake at night, she says.'

'She would have called.' With the light on, with Roger sitting up and talking to him, the idea that Donna might have just run off with Steve Kemp seemed absurd -he couldn't believe he had even indulged it. Forget logic. She had told him it was over, and he had believed her. He believed her now.

'Called?' Roger said. He was still having trouble tracking things.

'She knows I call home almost every night when I'm awayShe would have called the hotel and left a message if she was going to be gone overnight. Wouldn't Althea?'

Roger nodded. 'Yeah. She would.'

'She'd call and leave a message so you wouldn't worry. Like I'm worrying now.'

'Yeah. But she might have just forgotten, Vic.' Still, Roger's brown eyes were troubled.

'Sure,' Vic said. 'On the other hand, maybe something's happened.'

'She carries ID, doesn't she) If she and Tad were in an accident, God forbid, the cops would try home first and then the office. The answering service would -'

'I wasn't thinking about an accident,' Vic said. 'I was thinking about . . .' His voice began to tremble. 'I was thinking about her and Tadder being there alone, and ... shit, I don't know ... I just got scared, that's all.'

'Call the sheriff's office,' Roger said promptly.

'Yeah, but -'

'Yeah, but nothing. You aren't going to scare Donna, that's for sure. She's not there. But what the hell, set your mind at rest. It doesn't have to be sirens and flashing lights. Just ask if they can send a cop by to check and make sure that everything looks normal. There must be a thousand places she could be. Hell, maybe she just tied into a really good Tupperware party.'

'Donna hates Tupperware parties.'

'So maybe the girls got playing penny-ante poker and lost track of the time and Tad's asleep in someone's spare room.' Vic remembered her telling him how she had steered clear of any deep involvement with 'the girls' - I don't want to be one of those faces you see at the bake sales, she had said. But he didn't want to tell Roger that; it was too close to the subject of Kemp.

'Yeah, maybe something like that,' Vic said.

'Have you got an extra key to the place tucked away somewhere?'

'There's one on a hook under the eave of the front porch.'

'Tell the cops. Someone can go in and have a good look around ... unless you've got pot or coke or something you'd just as soon they didn't stumble over.'

'Nothing like that.'

'Then do it,' Roger said earnestly. 'She'll probably call here while they're out checking and you'll feel like a fool, but sometimes it's good to feel like a fool. You know what I mean?'

'Yeah,' Vic said, grinning a little. 'Yeah, I do.'

He picked the telephone up again, hesitated, then tried home again first. No answer. Some of the comfort he had gotten from Roger evaporated. He got directory assistance ocr Maine and jotted down the number of the Castle County Sheriff's Department. It was now nearly fifteen minutes past twelve on Wednesday morning.

Donna Trenton was sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel of the Pinto. Tad had finally fallen