the state police and the A.G.’s office know about this development, Sheriff Bannerman?”
“Do you think you can break the case, Johnny?”
“Sheriff, have you deputized this guy?”
Bannerman pushed his way slowly and solidly through them, zipping his coat. “No comment, no comment.” Johnny said nothing at all.
The reporters clustered in the foyer as Johnny and Bannerman went down and snowy steps. It wasn’t until they bypassed the cruiser and began wading across the street that one of them realized they were going to the common. Several of them ran back for their topcoats. Those who had been dressed for outside when Bannerman and Johnny emerged from the office now floundered down the Town Office steps after them, calling like children.
9
Flashlights bobbing in the snowy dark. The wind howled, blowing snow past them this way and that in errant sheets.
“You’re not gonna be able to see a damn thing,” Bannerman said. “You w ... holy shit!” He was almost knocked off his feet as a reporter in a bulky overcoat and a bizarre tam o’shanter sprawled into him.
“Sorry, Sheriff,” he said sheepishly. “Slippery. Forgot my galoshes.”
Up ahead a yellow length of nylon rope appeared out of the gloom. Attached to it was a wildly swinging sign reading POLICE INVESTIGATION.
“You forgot your brains, too,” Bannerman said. “Now you keep back, all of you! Keep right back!”
“Town common’s public property, Sheriff!” one of the reporters cried.
“That’s right, and this is police business. You stay behind this rope here or you’ll spend the night in my holding cell.”
With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snowmounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight.
“Flying blind,” Bannerman said.
“Well, there’s nothing to see, anyway,” Johnny said. “Is there?”
“No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down anytime. Now I’m glad he didn’t get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?”
“Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were.”
They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. “Here,” he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.
Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man’s face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.
Johnny’s hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted snow ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weather-beaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.
He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him—he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again. He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It was ...
(A summer bench)
How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to “God Bless America,” to “Stars and Stripes Forever” (“Be kind to your web-footed friends ... for a duck may be somebody’s moooother ...”), to the Castle Rock Cougars’ fight song? Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms ...
(for a duck ... may be ... somebody’s mother ...)
Good summer people sitting here, listening, applauding, holding programs that had been designed and printed in the Castle Rock High School graphic arts shop.
But this morning a killer had been sitting here. Johnny could feel him.
Dark tree branches etched against a gray snow-sky like runes. He (I) am sitting here, smoking, waiting, feeling good, feeling like he (I) could jump right over the roof of the world and land lightly on two feet. Humming a song. Something by the Rolling Stones. Can’t get that, but very clearly everything is ... is what?
All right. Everything is all right, everything is gray and waiting for snow, and I’m