The Dark Half(18)

'What kind of suit was he wear - ?' Norris began, but it was useless. Mrs Arsenault was a fine old country talker, and she simply rolled over Norris Ridgewick with a kind of relentless grandiosity. He decided to wait her out and glean what he could along the way. He took his notebook out of his pocket.

'In a way,' she went on, the suit almost made me more nervous. It didn't seem right for a man to be wearing a suit at that hour, if you see what I mean. Probably you don't, probably you think I'm just a silly old woman, and probably I am just a silly old woman, but for a minute or two before Homer come along, I had an idea that man was maybe going to come to the house, and I got up to make sure the door was locked. He looked over this way, you know, I saw him do that. I imagine he looked because he could probably see the window was still lighted even though it was late. Probably could see me, too, because the curtains are only sheers. I couldn't really see his face - no moon out last night and I don't believe they'll ever get streetlights out this far, let alone cable TV, like they have in town - but I could see him turn his head. Then he did start to cross the road

- at least I think that was what he was doing, or was thinking about doing, if you see what I mean

- and I thought he would come and knock on the door and say his car was broke down and could he use the phone, and I was wondering what I should say if he did that, or even if I should answer the door. I suppose I am a silly old woman, because I got thinking about that Alfred Hitchcock Presents show where there was a crazyman who could just about charm the birdies down from the.trees, only he'd used an axe to chop somebody all up, you know, and put the pieces in the trunk of

his car, and they only caught him because one of his taillights was out, or something like that - but the other side of it was - '

'Mrs Arsenault, I wonder if I could ask - '

' - was that I didn't want to be like the Philistine or Saracen or Gomorran or whoever it was that passed by on the other side of the road,' Mrs Arsenault continued. 'You know, in the story of the Good Samaritan. So I was in a little bit of a tither about it. But I said to myself - '

By then Norris had forgotten all about sugarpeas. He was finally able to bring Mrs Arsenault to a stop by telling her that the man she had seen might figure in what he called 'an ongoing investigation.' He got her to back up to the beginning and tell him everything she had seen, leaving out Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the story of the Good Samaritan as well, if possible. The story as he related it over the radio to Sheriff Alan Pangborn was this: She had been watching The Tonight Show alone, her husband and the boys still asleep in bed. Her chair was by the window which looked out on Route 35. The shade was up. Around twelve-thirty or twelve-forty, she had looked up and had seen a man standing on the far side of the road . . . which was to say, the Homeland Cemetery side.

Had the man walked from that direction, or the other?

Mrs Arsenault couldn't say for sure. She had an idea he might have come from the direction of Homeland, which would have meant he was heading away from town, but she couldn't say for sure what gave her that impression, because she had looked out the window once and only seen the road, then looked out again before getting up to get her ice cream and he was there. Just standing there and looking toward the lighted window - toward her, presumably. She thought he was going to cross the road or had started to cross the road (probably just stood there, Alan thought; the rest was nothing but the woman's nerves talking) when lights showed on the crest of the hill. When the man in the suit saw the approaching lights, he had cocked his thumb in the timeless, stateless gesture of the hitchhiker.

'It was Homer's truck, all right, and Homer at the wheel,' Mrs Arsenault told Norris Ridgewick.

'At first I thought he'd just go on by, like any normal person who sees a hitchhiker in the middle of the night, but then his taillights flashed on and that man ran up to the passenger side of the cab and got in.'

Mrs Arsenault, who was forty-six and looked twenty years older, shook her white head.

'Homer must have been lit to pick up a hitchhiker that late,' she told Norris. 'Lit or simple-minded, and I've known Homer almost thirty-five years. He ain't simple.'

She paused for thought.

'Well. . . not very.'

Norris tried to get a few more details from Mrs Arsenault on the suit the man had been wearing, but had no luck. He thought it really was sort of a pity that the streetlamps ended at the Homeland Cemetery grounds, but small towns like The Rock had only so much money to do with. It had been a suit, she was sure of that, not a sport-coat or a man's jacket, and it hadn't been black, but that left quite a spectrum of colors to choose from. Mrs Arsenault didn't think the hitchhiker's suit had been pure white, but all she was willing to swear to was that it hadn't been black.

'I'm not actually asking you to swear, Mrs A.,' Norris said.

'When a body's speaking with an officer of the law on official business,' Mrs A. replied, folding her hands primly into the arms of her sweater, 'it comes to the same thing.'

So what she knew boiled down to this: she had seen Homer Gamache pick up a hitchhiker at about quarter to one in the morning. Nothing to call in the FBI about, you would have said. It only.got ominous when you added in the fact that Homer had picked up his passenger three miles or less from his own dooryard . . . but hadn't arrived home. Mrs Arsenault was right about the suit, too. Seeing a hitchhiker this far out in the boonies in the middle of the night was odd enough - by quarter of one, any ordinary drifter would have laid up in a deserted barn or some farmer's shed - but when you added in the fact that he had also been wearing a suit and a tie ('Some dark color,' Mrs A. said, 'just don't ask me to swear what dark color, because I can't, and I won't'), it got less comfortable all the time.