Gerald's Game - Stephen King [162]
In '79 he was sent away to Juniper Hill for raping and blinding a six-year-old boy. This time it was supposed to be for good, but when it comes to politics and state-run institutions — especially state-run mental institutions — I think it's fair to say that nothing is forever. He was released from Juniper Hill in 1984, once more adjudged 'cured'. Brandon feels — and so do I — that this second cure had more to do with cuts in the state's mental health budget than with any miracle of modern science or psychiatry. At any rate, Joubert returned to Motton to live with his stepmother and her commonlaw, and the state forgot about him . . . except to issue him a driver's license, that is. He took a road-test and got a perfectly legal one — in some ways I find this the most amazing fact of all — and at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, he started using it to tour the local cemeteries.
He was a busy boy. In the wintertime he had his crypts and mausoleums; in the fall and the spring he broke into seasonal camps and homes all over western Maine, taking anything that struck his fancy — 'my things,' you know. He apparently had a great fondness for framed photographs. They found four trunks of them in the attic of the house on Kingston Road. Brandon says they are still counting, but that the total number will probably be over seven hundred.
It's impossible to say to what extent' Daddy-Mummy' participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn't made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, 'They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn't nothing to us.' It's got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn't you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.
They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well . . . that's actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feel you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. 'Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin' off into the desert. I'll tell you when we're past.'
'I'm willing to accept that Joubert was probably in the house with you,' he said. 'I'd have to be a goddam ostrich with my head stuck in the sand not to at least entertain the idea; everything fits. But answer me this: why are you going on with it, Jessie? What possible good can it do?'
I didn't know how to answer that, Ruth, but I did know one thing: there was nothing I could do that would make things any worse than they already were. So I hung tough until Brandon realized the little lady wasn't going to get back into the stagecoach until she had gotten her look at the dead Injuns. So I saw the pictures. The one I looked at the longest had a little sign saying STATE POLICE EXHIBIT 217 propped up in the corner. Looking at it was like looking at a videotape someone has somehow made of your worst nightmare. The photo showed a square wicker basket standing open so the photographer could shoot the contents, which happened to be heaps of bones with a wild collection of jewelry mixed in: some trumpery, some valuable, some stolen from summer homes and some doubtless stripped from the cold hands of corpses kept in small-town cold-storage.
I looked at that picture, so glaring and somehow bald, as police evidence photographs always are, and I was back in the lake house again — it happened right away, with no lag whatsoever, Not remembering, do you understand? I'm there, handcuffed and helpless,