Her hand, her arm, they were bad, worse than any traffic accident I ever saw, but what about all those other pieces? The severed heads? The eyes? The feet? Yessir, that must have been a wowser of a furnace explosion, all right!
'Where's our backup?' Jingles asked restlessly.
'I don't know.'
But when he saw them, he could really stump them, couldn't he?
Got a riddle for you, he could say. You'll never get it. How can you have mangled bodies all over the place after an explosion, but only one dead? And just by the way, how come the only real damage a furnace explosion did was to tear off the steeple of the town hall? For that matter, how come the head selectman, that guy Berringer, wasn't able to ID the body, when even I knew who it was? Give up, guys?
He had covered the arm with a blanket. There was nothing to be done about all the other body parts, and he supposed it didn't matter, anyway. But he had covered Ruth's arm.
On the sidewalk in Haven Village's town square he had done that. He had done it while that idiotic volunteer fire chief, Allison, stood grinning as if it had been a bean supper instead of an explosion that had killed a fine woman. It was all crazy. Crazy to the max.
Peter Gabbons was nicknamed Jingles because of his gravelly Andy Devine voice - Jingles was a character Devine had played in an old TV Western series. When Gabbons came up from Georgia, Tug Ellender, the dispatcher, had started calling him that and it had stuck. Now, speaking in a high, strangled voice completely unlike his usual Jingles voice, Gabbons said: 'Pull over, Bent. I'm sick.'
Rhodes pulled over in a hurry, on the very edge of a skid that almost dumped the cruiser in the ditch. At least Gabbons had been the first to call it; that was something.
Jingles dove from the cruiser on the right. Bent Rhodes dove out on the left. In the blue strobe of the state police cruiser's lights, they both threw up everything available. Bent staggered back against the side of the car, pawing his mouth with one hand, hearing the retching noises still coming from the weeds beyond the edge of the road. He rolled his head skyward, dimly grateful for the breeze.
'That's better,' Jingles said at last. 'Thanks, Bent.'
Benton turned toward his partner. Jingles's eyes were dark, shocked holes in his face. It was the look of a man who is processing all his information and reaching no sane conclusions at all.
'What happened back there?' Bent asked.
'You blind, hoss? Town-hall steeple took off like a rocket.'
'So how did a furnace explosion blow off the steeple?'
'Dunno.'
'Spit on that.' Bent tried to spit. He couldn't. 'You believe it? A July furnace explosion that blows the steeple off the town hall?'
'No. It stinks.'
'Right, pard. It stinks to high heaven.' Bent paused. 'Jingles, what did you feel? Did you feel anything weird back there?'
Jingles said cautiously: 'Maybe. Maybe I did feel something.'
'What?'
'I don't know,' Jingles said. His voice had begun to climb, to take on the uneven, warbling inflections of a small child near tears. Above them, a galaxy of stars shone down. Crickets sang in fragrant summer silence. 'I'm just so damn glad to be out of there - '
Then Jingles, who knew he would probably be going back to Haven the next day to assist in the clean-up and investigation, did begin to cry.
2
After a while they drove on. Any remaining trace of daylight had by then left the sky. Bent was glad. He didn't really want to look at Jingles ... and didn't really want Jingles looking at him.
By the way, Bent, his mind now spoke up, it was pretty goddam startling, wasn't it? Pretty goddam weird. The severed heads and the legs with the little shoes still on most of the little feet? And the torsos! Did you see the torsos? The eye! That one blue eye? Did you see that? Must have! You kicked it into the gutter when you bent over to pick up Ruth McCausland's arm. All those severed arms and legs and heads and torsos, but Ruth was the only person who died. It's a riddle for a champeen riddle contest, all right.
The body parts had been bad. The shredded remains of the bats - an almighty lot of them - had also been bad. But neither had been as bad as Ruth's arm with her husband's ring on