The Dark Half

you put a bunch of English teachers together with an almost unlimited supply of booze, you could burn down a weekend. Guests started arriving around eight, and who was last, honey?'

  'Rawlie DeLesseps and that awful woman from the History Department he's been going out with since Jesus was a baby,' she said. 'The one who goes around blaring: 'Just call me Billie, everyone does.''

  'Right,' Thad said. He was grinning now. 'The Wicked Witch of the East.'

  Pangborn's eyes were sending a clear you're-lying-and-we-both-know-it message. 'And what time did these friends leave?'

  Thad shuddered a little. 'Friends? Rawlie, yes. That woman, most definitely not.'

  'Two o'clock,' Liz said.

   Thad nodded. 'It had to have been at least two when we saw them out. Damn near poured them out. As I indicated, it will be a snowy day in hell before I'm inducted into the Wilhelmina Burks Fan Club, but I would have insisted they stay over if he'd had more than three miles to drive, or if it had been earlier. No one on the roads at that hour on a Tuesday night — Wednesday morning, sorry — anyhow. Except maybe a few deer raiding the gardens.' He shut his mouth abruptly. In his relief he was close to babbling.

    There was a moment's silence. The two troopers were now looking at the floor. Pangborn had an expression on his face Thad could not read — he didn't believe he had ever seen it before. Not chagrin, although chagrin was a part of it.

  What in the fuck is going on here?

  'Well, that's very convenient, Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said at last, 'but it's a long way from rock-solid. We've got the word of you and your wife — or guesstimate — as to when you saw this last couple out. If they were as blasted as you seem to think, they'll hardly be able to corroborate what you've said. And if this DeLesseps fellow really is a friend, he might say . . . well, who knows?'

    All the same, Alan Pangborn was losing steam. Thad saw it and believed — no, knew — the state troopers did, too. Yet the man wasn't ready to let it go. The fear Thad had felt initially and the anger which had followed it were changing to fascination and curiosity. He thought he had never seen puzzlement and certainty so equally at war. The fact of the party — and he must accept as fact something which could so easily be checked — had shaken him . . . but not convinced him. Nor, he saw, were the troopers entirely convinced. The only difference was that the troopers weren't so hot under the collar. They hadn't known Homer Gamache personally, and so they

didn't have any personal stake in this. Alan Pangborn had, and did.

I knew him, too, Thad thought. So maybe I have a stake in it, too. Apart from my hide, that is.

  'Look,' he said patiently, keeping his gaze locked with Pangborn's and trying not to return hostility in kind, 'let's get real, as my students like to say. You asked if we could effectively prove our whereabouts — '

  'Your whereabouts, Mr Beaumont,' Pangborn said.

  'Okay, my whereabouts. Five pretty difficult hours. Hours when most people are in bed. Thanks to nothing more than blind luck, we — I, if you prefer — can cover at least three of those five hours. Maybe Rawlie and his odious lady friend left at two, maybe they left at one-thirty or twofifteen. Whenever it was, it was late. They'll corroborate that, and the Burks woman wouldn't lie me an alibi even if Rawlie would. I think if Billie Burks saw me washed up drowning on the beach, she'd throw a bucket of water on me.'

    Liz gave him an odd, grimacing little smile as she took William, who was beginning to squirm, from him. At first he didn't understand that smile, and then it came to him. It was that phrase, of course — lie me an alibi. It was a phrase which Alexis Machine, arch-villain of the George Stark novels, sometimes used. It was odd, in a way; he could not remember ever using a Stark-ism in conversation before. On the other hand, he had never been accused of murder before, either, and murder was a George Stark kind of situation.

   'Even supposing we're off by an hour and the last guests left at one,' he continued, 'and further supposing I jumped into my car the minute — the second — they were gone over the hill, and then drove like a mad bastard for Castle Rock, it would be four-thirty or five o'clock in the morning before I could possibly get there. No turnpike going west, you know.'

   One of the troopers began: 'And the Arsenault woman said it was about quarter of one when she saw — '

'We don't need to go into that right now,' Alan interrupted quickly.

    Liz made a rude, exasperated sound, and Wendy goggled at her comically. In the crook of her other arm, William stopped squirming, suddenly engrossed in the wonderfulness of his own twiddling fingers. To Thad she said, 'There were still lots of people here at one, Thad. Lots of them.'

Then she rounded on Alan Pangborn — really rounded on him this time.

  'What is wrong with you, Sheriff? Why are you so bullheadedly determined to lay this off on my husband? Are you a stupid man? A lazy man? A bad man? You don't look like any of those things, but your behavior makes me wonder. It makes me wonder very much. Perhaps it was a lottery. Was that it? Did you draw his name out of a fucking hat?'

  Alan recoiled slightly, clearly surprised — and discomfited — by her ferocity. 'Mrs Beaumont — '

  'I have the advantage, I'm afraid, Sheriff,' Thad said. 'You think I killed Homer Gamache —'

  'Mr Beaumont, you have not been charged with — '

  'No. But you think it, don't you?'

  Color, solid and bricklike, not embarrassment, Thad thought, but frustration, had beef slowly climbing into Pangborn's cheeks like color in a thermometer. 'Yes, sir,' he said. 'I do think it. In spite of the things you and your wife have said.'

  This reply filled Thad with wonder. What, in God's name, could have happened to make this man (who, as Liz had said, did not look at all stupid) so sure? So goddamned sure?

    Thad felt a shiver go up his spine . . . and then a peculiar thing happened. A phantom sound filled his mind — not his head but his mind — for a moment. It was a sound which imparted an aching sense of deja vu for it had been almost thirty years since he had last heard it. It was the ghostly sound of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small birds.

  He put a hand up to his head and touched the small scar there, and the shiver came again, stronger this time, twisting through his flesh like wire. Lie me an alibi, George, he thought. I'm in a bit of a tight here, so lie me an alibi.

  'Thad?' Liz asked. 'Are you all right?'

  'Hmmm?' He looked around at her.

  'You're pale.'

  'I'm fine,' he said, and he was. The sound was gone. If it had really been there at all.

  He turned back to Pangborn.

  'As I said, Sheriff, I have a certain advantage in this matter. You think I killed Homer. I, however, know I didn't. Except in books, I've never killed anyone.'

  'Mr Beaumont — '

    'I understand your outrage. He was a nice old man with an overbearing wife, a funky sense of humor, and only one arm. I'm outraged, too. I'll do anything I can to help, but you'll have to drop this secret police stuff and tell me why you're here — what in the world led you to me in the first place. I'm bewildered.'

    Alan looked at him for a very long time and then said: 'Every instinct in my body says you are telling the truth.'

'Thank God,' Liz said. 'The man sees sense.'

   'If it turns out you are,' Alan said, looking only at Thad, 'I will personally find the person in A.S. R. and I. who screwed up this ID and pull his skin off.'

  'What's A.S. and whatever?' Liz asked.

  'Armed Services Records and Identification,' one of the troopers said, 'Washington.'

  'I've never known them to screw up before,' Alan went on in the same slow tone. 'They say there's a first time for everything, but . . . if they haven't screwed up and if this party of yours checks out, I'm going to be pretty damned bewildered myself.'

  'Can't you tell us what this is all about?' Thad asked.

   Alan sighed. 'We've come this far; why not? In all truth, the last guests to leave your party don't matter that much anyway. If you were here at midnight, if there are witnesses who can swear you were — '

  'Twenty-five at least,' Liz said.

  ' — then you're off the hook. Putting together the eyewitness account of the lady the trooper mentioned and the medical examiner's postmortem, we can be almost positive Homer was killed