Her face went pink, then red, then a congested purple. Her struggles began to weaken.
“Nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker,” the killer panted hoarsely. He really was the killer now, Alma Frechette’s days of rubbing her body all over people at Serenity Hill were done now. Her eyes bugged out like the eyes of some of those crazy dolls they sold along carnival midways. The killer panted hoarsely. Her hands lay limp on the boards now. His fingers had almost disappeared from sight.
He let go of her throat, ready to grab her again if she stirred. But she didn’t. After a moment he ripped her coat open with shaking hands and shoved the skirt of her pink waitress uniform up.
The white sky looked down. The Castle Rock town common was deserted. In fact, no one found the strangled, violated corpse of Alma Frechette until the next day. The sheriff’s theory was that a drifter had done it. There were statewide newspaper headlines, and in Castle Rock there was general agreement with the sheriffs idea.
Surely no hometown boy could have done such a dreadful thing.
Chapter 5
1
Herb and Vera Smith went back to Pownal and took up the embroidery of their days. Herb finished a house in Durham that December. Their savings did indeed melt away, as Sarah had foreseen, and they applied to the state for Extraordinary Disaster Assistance. That aged Herb almost as much as the accident itself had done. EDA was only a fancy way of saying “welfare” or “charity” in his mind. He had spent a lifetime working hard and honestly with his hands and had thought he would never see the day when he would have to take a state dollar. But here that day was.
Vera subscribed to three new magazines which came through the mail at irregular intervals. All three were badly printed and might have been illustrated by talented children. God’s Saucers, The Coming Transfiguration, and God’s Psychic Miracles. The Upper Room, which still came monthly, now sometimes lay unopened for as long as three weeks at a stretch, but she read these others to tatters. She found a great many things in them that seemed to bear upon Johnny’s accident, and she read these nuggets to her tired husband at supper in a high, piercing voice that trembled with exaltation. Herb found himself telling her more and more frequently to be quiet, and on occasion shouting at her to shut up that drivel and let him alone. When he did that, she would give him long-suffering, compassionate, and hurt glances—then slink upstairs to continue her studies. She began to correspond with these magazines, and to exchange letters with the contributors and with other pen-friends who had had similar experiences in their lives.
Most of her correspondents were good-hearted people like Vera herself, people who wanted to help and to ease the nearly insupportable burden of her pain. They sent prayers and prayer stones, they sent charms, they sent promises to include Johnny in their nightly devotions. Yet there were others who were nothing but con-men and -women, and Herb was alarmed by his wife’s increasing inability to recognize these. There was an offer to send her a sliver of the One True Cross of Our Lord for just $99.98. An offer to send a vial of water drawn from the spring at Lourdes, which would almost certainly work a miracle when rubbed into Johnny’s forehead. That one was $110 plus postage. Cheaper (and more attractive to Vera) was a continuously playing cassette tape of the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer as spoken by southern evangelist Billy Humbarr. Played at Johnny’s bedside over a period of weeks it would almost certainly effect a marvelous recovery, according to the pamphlet. As an added blessing (For A Short Time Only) an autographed picture of Billy Humbarr himself would be included.
Herb was forced to step in more and more frequently as her passion for these pseudoreligious geegaws grew. Sometimes he surreptitiously tore up her checks and simply readjusted the checkbook balance upward. But when the offer specified cash and nothing but, he simply had to put his foot down—and Vera began to draw away from him, to view him with distrust as a sinner and an unbeliever.
2
Sarah Bracknell kept school during her days. Her afternoons and evenings were not much different than they had been following the breakup with Dan; she was in a kind of limbo, waiting for something to happen. In Paris, the peace talks were stalled. Nixon had