Stephen King - Bag of Bones (1998)

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S t e p h e n

KING

BAG OF BONES

Hodder & Stoughton

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following

copyrighted material:

reserved. Used by permission. WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL. 33014

'Don't Worry Baby' by Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, Jay Siegel, Philip Margo, Henry Medress,

PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL. 33014

Keetey and Philip Sherrard Greek M. Seferiades 1972, 1976. Reprinted by permission of Princeton

University Press.

'Welcome to the Jungle' words and music by W. Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin', Duff McKagen &

rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Cherry Lane Music Company.

First published in Great Britain in 1998

by Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the Author

of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form

or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

that in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available

from the British Library

ISBN 0 340 71819 6

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlngshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

This is for Naomi. Still.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

To an extent, this novel deals with the legal aspects of child custody in the State of Maine. I asked

for help in understanding this subject from my friend Warren Silver, who is a fine attorney. Warren

guided me carefully, and along the way he also told me about a quaint old device called the

Stenomask, which I immediately appropriated for my own fell purposes. If I've made procedural

mistakes in the story which follows, blame me, not my legal resource. Warren also asked me--

rather plaintively — if I could maybe put a 'good' lawyer in my book. All I can say is that I did my

best in that regard.

Thanks to my son Owen for technical support in Woodstock, New York, and to my friend (and

fellow Rock Bottom Remainder) Ridley Pearson for technical support in Ketchum, Idaho. Thanks

to Pam Dorman for her sympathetic and perceptive reading of the first draft. Thanks to Chuck

Verrill for a monumental editing job--your personal best, Chuck. Thanks to Susan Moldow, Nan

Graham, Jack Roman s, and Carolyn Reidy at Scribner for care and feeding. And thanks to Tabby,

who was there for me again when things got hard. I love you, hon.

S.K.

Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I;

I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and

noiseless as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel

so private as when I know you are here.

'Bartleby'

HERMAN MELVILLE

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .

As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that

the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed

as it had lived before.

Rebecca

DAPHNE DU MAURIER

Mars is heaven.

RAY BRADBURY

BAG OF BONES

CHAPTER ONE

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to

pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription — this is stuff you can buy over the counter

these days, I believe. I'd finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said

thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with

one stone and all of that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next

time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry — no walking down

a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked

body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look

at a TV screen and say yep or nope.

The Rite Aid and the Shopwell are less than a mile from our house, in a little neighborhood strip

mall which also supports a video store, a used-book store named Spread It Around (they do a very

brisk business in my old paperbacks), a Radio Shack, and a Fast Foto. It's on Up-Mile Hill, at the

intersection of Witcham and Jackson.

She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe

Wyzer, who was the druggist in those days; he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At

the checkout she picked up one of those little chocolates with marshmallow inside, this one in the

shape of a mouse. I found it later, in her purse. I unwrapped it and ate it myself, sitting at the

kitchen table with the contents of her red handbag spread out in front of me, and it was like taking

Communion. When it was gone except for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I

burst into tears. I sat there in the litter of her Kleenex and makeup and keys and half-finished rolls

of Certs and cried with my hands over my eyes, the way a kid cries.

The sinus inhaler was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and eighteen cents. There was

something else in the bag, too — an item which had cost twenty-two-fifty. I looked at this other

item for a long time, seeing it but not understanding it. I was surprised, maybe even stunned, but

the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan might have been leading another life, one I knew nothing

about, never crossed my mind. Not then.

Jo left the register, walked out into the bright, hammering sun again, swapping her regular glasses

for her prescription sunglasses as she did, and just as she stepped from beneath the drugstore's

slight overhang (I am imagining a little here, I suppose, crossing over into the country of the

novelist a little, but not by much; only by inches, and you can trust me on that), there was that

shrewish howl of locked tires on pavement that means there's going to be either an accident or a

very close call.

This time it happened — the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped

intersection at least once a week, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was pulling out of the shopping-center

parking lot and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the wheel was Mrs. Esther Easterling of

Barrett's Orchards. She was accompanied by her friend Mrs Irene Deorsey, also of Barrett's

Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she wanted to rent. Too much

violence, Irene said. Both women were cigarette widows. Esther could hardly have missed the

orange Public Works dump truck coming down the hill; although she denied this to the police, to

the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she just

forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, 'The two most common

ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They can't be held responsible for neither.'

Driving the Public Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty-eight

years old on the day of my wife's death, driving with his shirt off and thinking how badly he

wanted a cool shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had

spent eight hours putting down asphalt patch out on the Harris Avenue Extension near the airport, a

hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he might have been going a little too fast — maybe

forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the garage, sign off on the truck,

and get behind the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump truck's

brakes, while good enough to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit

them as soon as he saw the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), but it was too

late. He heard screaming tires — his own, and Esther's as she belatedly realized her danger — and

saw her face for just a moment.

'That was the worst part, somehow,' he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers — it was

October by then, and although the sun was warm on our faces, we were both wearing sweaters.

'You know how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks? ' I nodded. 'Well, she was looking up

to see me — craning up, you'd say — and the sun was full in her face. I could see how old she was.

I remember thinking, 'Holy shit, she's gonna break like glass if I can't stop.' But old people are

tough, more often than not. They can surprise you. I mean, look at how it turned out, both those old

biddies still alive, and your wife . . . '

He stopped then, bright red color dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy who has

been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who have noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, but

if I'd smiled, it only would have confused him.

'Mr. Noonan, I'm sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me.'

'It's all right,' I told him. 'I'm over the worst of it, anyway.' That was a lie, but it put us back on

track.

'Anyway,' he said, 'we hit. There was a loud bang, and a crumping sound when the driver's side

of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown against the wheel hard enough so I couldn't

draw a breath without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a big bruise right here.' He drew an

arc on his chest just below the collarbones. 'I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to

crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob . . . no bleeding, not even a headache.

My wife says I've just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the woman driving the Toyota, Mrs.

Easterling, thrown across the console between the front bucket seats. Then we were finally stopped,

all tangled together in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I

expected to find them both dead.'

Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had

three broken ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact,

suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all; she was 'treated and

released at Home Hospital,' as the Derry News always puts it in such cases.

My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood

outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder and her prescription bag in one hand.

Like Bill Fraker, she must have thought the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously

hurt. The sound of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled through the hot

afternoon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged

lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently together in the middle of Jackson Street, the dirty

orange truck looming over the pale-blue import like a bullying parent over a cowering child.

Johanna began to sprint across the parking lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all

around her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the

accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered running past Johanna — at least she was

pretty sure she remembered someone in yellow slacks — but she couldn't be sure. By then, Mrs.

Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldn't somebody help her and

her friend Irene.

Halfway across the parking lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife fell down.

Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the

sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item stayed put.

No one noticed her lying there by the newspaper dispensers; everyone was focused on the

tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of water and antifreeze from the

Public Works truck's ruptured radiator. ('That's gas!' the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone

who would listen. 'That's gas, watch out she don't blow, fellas!') I suppose one or two of the would-

be rescuers might have jumped right over her, perhaps thinking she had fainted. To assume such a

thing on a day when the temperature was pushing ninety-five degrees would not have been

unreasonable.

Roughly two dozen people from the shopping center clustered around the accident; another four

dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball game had been going on. I

imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them

more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the

driver's-side window to pat Esther's trembling old hand. People immediately giving way for Joe

Wyzer; at such moments anyone in a white coat automatically becomes the belle of the ball. In the

distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator.

All during this, lying unnoticed in the parking lot, was my wife with her purse still over her

shoulder (inside, still wrapped in foil, her uneaten chocolate-marshmallow mouse) and her white

prescription bag near one outstretched hand. It was Joe Wyzer, hurrying back to the pharmacy to

get a compression bandage for Irene Deorsey's head, who spotted her. He recognized her even

though she was lying face-down. He recognized her by her red hair, white blouse, and yellow

slacks. He recognized her because he had waited on her not fifteen minutes before.

'Mrs. Noonan?' he asked, forgetting all about the compression bandage for the dazed but

apparently not too badly hurt Irene Deorsey. 'Mrs. Noonan, are you all right?' Knowing already (or

so I suspect; perhaps I am wrong) that she was not.

He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and

pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the heat baking down from above and then

bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh

and in our minds, they put on weight.

There were red marks on her face. When I identified her I could see them clearly even on the

video monitor. I started to ask the assistant medical examiner what they were, but then I knew. Late

August, hot pavement, elementary, my dear Watson. My wife died getting a sunburn.

Wyzer got up, saw that the ambulance had arrived, and ran toward it. He pushed his way through

the crowd and grabbed one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. 'There's a woman

over there,' Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot.

'Guy, we've got two women right here, and a man as well,' the attendant said. He tried to pull

away, but Wyzer held on.

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StephenKINGBAGOFBONESHodder&StoughtonGratefulacknowledgementismadeforpermissiontoreprintexcerptsfromthefollowingcopyrightedmaterial:'AllSheWantstoDoIsDance'byDannyKortchmar.Copyright©1984WBMusicCorp.Allrightsreserved.Usedbypermission.WARNERBROS.PUBLICATIONSU.S.INC.,Miami,FL.33014'AsTimeGoesBy'byHerm...

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