Barely two hours' sleep tonight, and he found himself again thinking that dead might be better. No more insomnia then. No more long waits for dawn in this hateful chair. No more days when he seemed to be looking at the world through the Gardol Invisible Shield they used to prattle about on the toothpaste commercials. Back when TV had been almost brand-new, that had been, in the days when he had yet to find the first strands of gray in his hair and he was always asleep five minutes after he and Carol had finished making love.
And people keep talking about how good I look. That's the weirdest part of it.
Except it wasn't. Considering some of the things he'd seen just lately, a few people saying he looked like a new man was far, far down on his list of oddities.
Ralph's eyes returned to May Locher's house. The place had been locked up, according to Leydecker, but Ralph had seen the two little bald doctors come out the front door, he had seen them, goddammit But had he?
Had he really?
Ralph cast his mind back to the previous morning, Sitting down in this same chair with a cup of tea and thinking Let the play begin.
And then he had seen those two little bald bastards come out, dammit, he had seen them come out of May Locher's house."
Except maybe that was wrong, because he hadn't really been looking at Mrs. Locher's house; he had been pointed more in the direction of the Red Apple. He'd thought the flicker of movement in the corner of his eye was probably Rosalie, and had turned his head to check. That was when he'd seen the little bald doctors on the stoop of May Locher's house. He was no longer entirely sure he had seen the front door open; maybe he had just assumed that part, and by not? They sure as hell hadn't come up Mrs. Locher's walk.
You can't be sure of that, Ralph.
Except he could. At three in the morning, Harris Avenue was as still as the mountains of the moon-the slightest movement anywhere within the range of his vision registered.
Had Doc #1 and Doc #2 come out the front door? The longer Ralph thought about it, the more he doubted it.
Then what happened, Ralph? Did they maybe step out from behind the Gardol Invisible Shield? Or-how's this?-maybe they walked through the door, like those ghosts that used to haunt Cosmo Topper in that old TV show And the craziest thing of all was that felt just about right.
What? That they walked through the fucking DOOR? Oh, Ralph, you need help. You need to talk to someone about what's happening to you.
Yes. That was the one thing of which he was sure: he needed to spill all this to someone before it drove him crazy. But who? Carolyn would have been best, but she was dead. Leydecker? The problem there was that Ralph had already lied to him about the 911 call.
Why? Because the truth would have sounded insane. It would have sounded, in fact, as if he had caught Ed Deepneau's paranoia like a cold. And wasn't that really the most likely explanation, when you looked at the situation dead-on?
"But that's not it," he whispered. "They were real. The auras, too." It's a long ivalk hack to Eden, sweetheart... and watch out lo)r those green-gold white-man tracks while you're on the way.
Tell someone. Lay it all out. Yes. And he ought to do it before John Leydecker listened to that 911 tape and showed up asking for an explanation. Wanting to know, basically, why Ralph had lied, and what Ralph actually knew about the death of May Locher.
Tell someone. Lay it all out.
But Carolyn was dead, Leydecker was still too new, Helen was lying low at the WomanCare shelter somewhere out in the willywags, and Lois Chasse might gossip to her girlfriends. Who did that leave?
The answer became clear once he put it to himself that way, but Ralph still felt a surprising reluctance to talk to McGovern about the things which had been happening to him. He remembered the day he had found Bill sitting on a bench by the softball field, crying over his old friend and mentor, Bob Polhurst. Ralph had tried to tell Bill about the auras, and it had been as if McGovern couldn't hear him; he had been too busy running through his well-thumbed script on the subject of how shitty it was to grow