just now, I guess. I’ll be in for some of the popcorn.”
Brett went out with his uncle. She sat on the sofa and looked at the telephone and thought of Brett night-walking, feeding a phantom dog phantom dogfood in her sister’s modern kitchen.
Cujo’s not hungry no more, not no more.
Her arms suddenly tightened, and she shivered. We’re going to take care of this business tomorrow morning, she promised herself. One way or the other. Either that or go back and take care of it ourselves. That’s a promise, Brett.
Vic tried home again at ten o’clock. There was no answer. He tried again at eleven o’clock and there was still no answer, although he let the phone ring two dozen times. At ten he was beginning to be scared. At eleven he was good and scared—of what, he was not precisely sure.
Roger was sleeping. Vic dialed the number in the dark, listened to it ring in the dark, hung up in the dark. He felt alone, childlike, lost. He didn’t know what to do or what to think. Over and over his mind played a simple litany: She’s gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp.
All reason and logic was against it. He played over everything he and Donna had said to each other—he played it over again and again, listening to the words and to the nuances of tone in his mind. She and Kemp had had a falling out. She had told him to go peddle his papers somewhere else. And that had prompted Kemp’s vengeful little billet-doux. It did not seem the rosy scenery into which two mad lovers might decide to elope.
A falling out doesn’t preclude a later rapprochement, his mind retorted with a kind of grave and implacable calm
But what about Tad? She wouldn’t have taken Tad with her, would she? From her description, Kemp sounded like some sort of wildman, and although Donna hadn’t said so, Vic had gotten the feeling that something damned violent had almost happened on the day she told him to fuck off.
People in love do strange things.
That strange and jealous part of his mind—he hadn’t even been aware of that part in him until that afternoon in Deering Oaks—had an answer for everything, and in the dark it didn’t seem to matter that most of the answers were irrational.
He was doing a slow dance back and forth between two sharpened points: Kemp on one (Do you HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?); a vision of the telephone ringing on and on in their empty Castle Rock house on the other. She could have had an accident. She and Tad could be in the hospital. Someone could have broken in. They could be lying murdered in their bedrooms. Of course if she’d had an accident, someone official would have been in touch—the office as well as Donna knew in which Boston hotel he and Roger were staying—but in the dark that thought, which should have been a comfort since no one had been in touch, only inclined his thoughts more toward murder.
Robbery and murder, his mind whispered as he lay awake in the dark. Then it danced slowly across to the other sharpened point and took up its original litany: Gone off with Kemp.
In between these points, his mind saw a more reasonable explanation, one that made him feel helplessly angry. Perhaps she and Tad had decided to spend the night with someone and had simply forgotten to call and tell him. Now it was too late to just start calling around and asking people without alarming them. He supposed he could call the sheriff’s office and ask them to send someone up and check. But wouldn’t that be overreacting?
No, his mind said.
Yes, his mind said, definitely.
She and Tad are both dead with knives stuck in their throats, his mind said. You read about it in the papers all the time. It even happened in Castle Rock just before we came to town. That crazy cop. That Frank Dodd.
Gone off with Kemp, his mind said.
At midnight he tried again, and this time the constant ringing of the phone with no one to pick it up froze him into a deadly certainty of trouble. Kemp, robbers, murderers, something. Trouble. Trouble at home.
He dropped the phone back into its cradle and turned on the bed lamp. “Roger,” he said. “Wake up.”
“Huh. Wuh. Hzzzzzzz. . . .” Roger had his arm over his eyes, trying to block out the light. He was in