new life, but he shied away from The Dreaded D-Word, stuffing it back into the deep closet of his subconscious whenever it happened to glimmer for a moment in his thoughts. Loneliness was okay. Depression most certainly was not.
Maybe you need to get more exercise, he thought. Do some walking' like you used to last summer. After all, you've been leading a pretty sedentary life-get up, eat a toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the hah f hey happen to be sitting out, eat upper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for awhile. Then what?
Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed.
Sedentary.
Boring. No wonder you wake up early.
Except that was crap. His life sounded sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn't. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from "pottering around." Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. "Punishment" probably would have been closer to the mark than "pottering," but punishment for what?
Waking up before dawn?
Ralph didn't know and didn't care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn't really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional lights of black spots in front of his eyes.
He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.
"You ought to quit that," Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning.
It's got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic."
"Maybe I am a lunatic," Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.
He did begin walking again-nothing like the Marathons of '92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn't raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used-book store and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.
Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the announcements of outdated bean suppers and ancient church socials, placed so it covered roughly half of a yellowing PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT placard.
The woman in the two photographs at the top of the poster was a pretty blonde in her late thirties or early forties, but the style of the photos-unsmiling full face on the left, unsmiling profile on the right, plain white background in both-was unsettling enough to stop Ralph in his tracks. The photos made the woman look as if she belonged on a Post office wall or in a TV docudrama... and that, the poster's printed matter made clear, was no accident.
The photos were what stopped him, but it was the woman's name that held him.
WANTED FOR MURDER SUSAN EDWINA DAY was printed across the top in big black letters. And below the simulated mug-shots, in red: STAY OUT OF OUR CITY!
There was a small line of print at the very bottom of the poster.
Ralph's close vision had deteriorated quite a bit since Carolyn's death-gone to hell in a handbasket might actually have been a more accurate way of putting it-and he had to lean forward until his brow was pressed against the dirty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes before he could decipher it: Paid for by the Mane LifeWatch Committee Far down in his mind a voice whispered: Hey, hey, Susan Day.
Hou, many kids did you kill today?
Susan Day, Ralph recalled, was a Political activist from either New York or Washington, the sort