coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The
note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except
perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the
murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far
in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but
seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole
winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his
wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was
gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens'
Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came
back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had
forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in
the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching
the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no
recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his
forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his
eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel
Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his
son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little
impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm
until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not
remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed
'Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please
no.' Children, of course, forget very easily. But some
subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss
Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of
doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the
echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally
disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine
wilderness, Moss whispered: 'Not you, Em, not tonight.' That
Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in
to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed
'Becka's mind.
1 Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School,
was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the
lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green
pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer
Society.
2 Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought
the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of 'bitchin' reefer'
between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told
'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday
to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent
tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her
boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what
they called 'the horizontal bop.' They did the horizontal bop
and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three
o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in
Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.
3 Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a
