advance slowly, head lowered, down the crushed gravel toward her.
It was twelve thirty when Donna Trenton stepped out of her Pinto for the last time.
Vic turned off the Maple Sugar Road and onto Town Road No. 3 just as his wife was going for Brett Camber’s old Hillerich & Bradsby in the weeds. He was driving fast, intent on getting up to Camber’s so he could turn around and go to Scarborough, some fifty miles away. Perversely, as soon as he had made his decision to come out here first, his mind began dolefully telling him that he was on a wild goosechase. On the whole, he had never felt so impotent in his life.
He was moving the Jag along at better than sixty, so intent on the road that he was past Gary Pervier’s before he realized that Joe Camber’s station wagon had been parked there. He slammed on the Jag’s brakes, burning twenty feet of rubber. The Jag’s nose dipped toward the road. The cop might have gone up to Camber’s and found nobody home because Camber was down here.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw the road was empty, and backed up quickly. He wheeled the Jag into Pervier’s driveway and got out.
His feelings were remarkably like those of Joe Camber himself when, two days before, Joe had discovered the splatters of blood (only now these were dried and maroon-colored) and the smashed bottom panel of the screen door. A foul, metallic taste flooded Vic’s mouth. This was all a part of it. Somehow it was all a part of Tad’s and Donna’s disappearance.
He let himself in and the smell hit him at once-the bloated, green smell of corruption. It had been a hot two days. There was something halfway down the hall that looked like a knocked-over endtable, except that Vie was mortally sure that it wasn’t an endtable. Because of the smell. He went down to the thing in the hall and it wasn’t an endtable. It was a man. The man appeared to have had his throat cut with an extremely dull blade.
Vie stepped back. A dry gagging sound came from his throat. The telephone. He had to call someone about this.
He started for the kitchen and then stopped. Suddenly everything came together in his mind. There was an instant of crushing revelation; it was like two half pictures coming together to make a three-dimensional whole.
The dog. The dog had done this.
The Pinto was at Joe Camber’s. The Pinto had been there all along. The Pinto and—
“Oh my God, Donna—”
Vic turned and ran for the door and his car.
Donna almost went sprawling; that was how bad her legs were. She caught herself and grabbed for the baseball bat, not daring to look around for Cujo until she had it tightly held in her hands, afraid she might lose her balance again. If she had had time to look a little farther—just a little-she would have seen George Bannerman’s service pistol lying in the grass. But she did not.
She turned unsteadily and Cujo was running at her.
She thrust the heavy end of the baseball bat at the Saint Bernard, and her heart sank at the unsteady way the thing wiggled in her hand-the handle was badly splintered, then. The Saint Bernard shied away, growling. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly in the white cotton bra. The cups were blood-streaked ; she had wiped her hands on them after clearing Tad’s mouth.
They stood staring at each other, measuring each other, in the still summer sunlight. The only sounds were her low rapid breathing, the sound of Cujo growling deep in his chest, and the bright squawk of a sparrow somewhere near. Their shadows were short, shapeless things at their feet.
Cujo began to move to his left. Donna moved right. They circled. She held the bat at the point where she believed the split in the wood to be the deepest, her palms tight on the rough texture of the Black Cat friction tape the handle had been wrapped with.
Cujo tensed down.
“Come on, then!” she screamed at him, and Cujo leaped.
She swung the bag like Mickey Mantle going after a high fastball. She missed Cujo’s head but the bat struck him in the ribs. There was a heavy, dull thump and a snapping sound from somewhere inside Cujo. The dog uttered a sound like a scream and went sprawling in the gravel. She felt the bat give sickeningly under the friction tape—but for the moment it still