The Regulators - Stephen King [22]
Collie ran for the door, too.
8
Mary Jackson had left the accounting firm where she worked part-time not at two but at eleven. She hadn't gone to the Crossroads Mall, though. She had gone to the Columbus Hotel. There she had met a man named Gene Martin, and for the next three hours she had done everything for him a woman could possibly do for a man except cut his toenails. She supposed she would have done that, too, if she had been asked. And now here she was, almost home and looking (at least as far as she could tell from the rearview mirror) pretty much put together . . . but she was going to have to get into the shower fast, before Peter got too good a look at her, maybe. And, she reminded herself, she would need to take a pair of panties out of her top drawer to throw into the hamper along with her skirt and blouse. The pair she had been wearing — what was left of them — were currently residing under the bed in room 203. Gene Martin, a wolf in accountant's clothing if ever there had been one, had ripped them right off her. Ooo you beast, quoth the maiden fair.
The question was, what was she doing? And what was she going to do? She had loved Peter for the nine years of their marriage, even more after the miscarriage than before, if that was possible, and she still loved him. That didn't change the fact that she already wanted to be with Gene again, doing things she had never even considered doing with Peter. Guilt was freezing half of her mind, lust was frying the other half, and in between, in a kind of shrinking twilight zone, was the reasonable, good-humored, rational woman she had always considered herself to be. She was having an adulterous affair, and the guy she was having it with was just as damned married as she was; she was on her way home to a good man who suspected nothing (She was sure he didn't, prayed he didn't, of course he didn't, how could he?) with no underwear on under her skirt, she was still sore from their adventures, she didn't quite know how all this had started or how she could want to continue anything so stupid and sordid, goddam Gene Martin didn't have a brain in his head, except of course it wasn't his head she was interested in, she could have cared less about his head, and what was she going to do? She didn't know. She only knew one thing for sure, and that was how drug addicts felt, and she would never put them down again in her life. Just say no? Mother, please.
She drove with these chaotic thoughts swimming in her mind, the suburban streets passing like landmarks in a dream, hoping only that Peter wouldn't be home when she got there, that he would have maybe gone over to Milly's on the Square for ice cream (or maybe to Santa Fe to visit his mother for a few weeks, that would be great, that would maybe give her a chance to work through this awful fever). She didn't notice the way the afternoon was darkening or the fact that many of the cars that passed her on the 290 were using their headlights; she didn't hear the thunder or see the lightning. Neither did she see the yellow van parked near the corner of Bear Street and Poplar when she passed it.
What jerked her out of her reverie was seeing Brad and Belinda Josephson out in front of their house. Johnny Marinville was with them. Farther down the block she saw more people: David Carver, wearing a bathing suit that looked almost obscenely tight, standing on his walk, hands planted on his meaty hips . . . the Reed twins . . . Cammie, their mother . . . Susi Geller and a friend on their lawn with Kim Geller standing behind them . . .
A wild thought came to her: they knew. All of them knew. They were waiting for her, they were going to help Peter hang her from a sour apple tree or perhaps