• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

'Yes.'

'They were in Homeland, weren't they?' Across the room, Liz's eyes widened.

'How did you know that?' Alan sounded off-balance for the first time. 'I didn't tell you that.'

'Have you read the article yet? The one in People?'

'Yes.

'That's where the woman set up the fake tombstone. That's where George Stark was buried.'

Silence from the other end. Then: 'Oh shit.'

'You get it?'

'I think so,' Alan said. 'If this guy thinks he's Stark, and if he's crazy, the idea of him starting at Stark's grave makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it? Is this photographer in New York?'

Thad started. 'Yes.'

'Then she might also be in danger?'

'Yes, I . . . well, I never thought of that, but I suppose she might.'

'Name? Address?'

'I don't have her address.' She had given him her business card, he remembered — probably thinking about the book on which she hoped he would collaborate with her — but he had thrown it away. Shit. All he could give Alan was the name. 'Phyllis Myers.'

'And the guy who actually wrote the story?'

'Mike Donaldson.'

'Also in New York?'

Thad suddenly realized he didn't know that, not for sure, and backtracked a little. 'Well, I guess I just assumed both of them were — '

'It's a reasonable enough assumption. If the magazine's offices are in New York, they'd stick close, wouldn't they?'

'Maybe, but if one or both of them is freelance — '

'Let's go back to this trick photo. The cemetery wasn't specifically identified, either in the photo caption or in the body of the story, as Homeland. I'm sure of that. I should have recognized it from the background, but I was concentrating on the details.'

'No,' Thad said. 'I guess it wasn't.'

'The First Selectman, Dan Keeton, would have insisted that Homeland not be identified — that would have been a brass-bound condition. He's a very cautious type of guy. Sort of a pill, actually. I can see him giving permission to do the photos, but I think he would have nixed an ID of the specific cemetery in case of vandalism . . . people looking for the headstone and all of that.'

Thad was nodding. It made sense.

'So your psycho either knows you or comes from here,' Alan was going on.

Thad had made an assumption of which he was now heartily ashamed: that the sheriff of a small Maine county where there were more trees than people must be a jerk. This was no jerk; he was certainly running rings around the world champeen novelist Thaddeus Beaumont.

'We have to assume that, at least for the time being, since it seems he had inside information.'

'Then the tracks you mentioned were in Homeland.'

'Sure they were,' Pangborn said almost absently. 'What are you holding back, Thad?'

'What do you mean?' he asked warily.

'Let's not dance, okay? I've got to call New York with these other two names, and you've got to put on your thinking cap and see if there are any more names I should have. Publishers . . . editors . . . I don't know. Meantime, you tell me the guy we want actually thinks he is George Stark. We were theorizing about it Saturday night, blue-skying it, and tonight you tell me it's a stone fact. Then, to back it up, you throw the footprints at me. Either you've made some dizzying leap of deduction based on the facts we have in common, or you know something I don't. Naturally, I like the second alternative better. So give.'

But what did he have? Blackout trances which were announced by thousands of sparrows crying in unison? Words that he might have written on a manuscript after Alan Pangborn had told him those same words were written on the living-room wall of Frederick Clawson's apartment? More words written on a paper which had been torn to shreds and then fed into the English-Math Building's incinerator? Dreams in which a terrible unseen man led him through his house in Castle Rock and everything he touched, including his own wife, self-destructed? I could call what I believe a known fact of the heart instead of an intuition