11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed newspaper under my arm, thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six), something else occurred to me: I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate the right Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging Tugga Dunning and Derry into my favorite search engine probably would have done the trick; hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother, take care of the rest.

  In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college—a sarcastic old bastard—who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

  I went there.

  6

  Late that afternoon, hopes dashed (at least for the time being), I walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, pausing briefly at the intersection of Jackson and Witcham to look at the sewer drain where a little boy named George Denbrough had lost his arm and his life (at least according to Fred Toomey). By the time I got to the top of the hill, my heart was pounding and I was puffing. It wasn’t being out of shape; it was the stench of the mills.

  I was dispirited and a bit scared. It was true that I still had plenty of time to locate the right Dunning family, and I was confident I would—if calling all the Dunnings in the phone book was what it took, that was what I’d do, even at the risk of alerting Harry’s time bomb of a father—but I was starting to sense what Al had sensed: something working against me.

  I walked along Kansas Street, so deep in thought that at first I didn’t realize there were no more houses on my right. The ground now dropped away steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called the Barrens. Only a rickety white fence separated the sidewalk from the drop. I planted my hands on it, staring into the undisciplined growth below. I could see gleams of murky standing water, patches of reeds so tall they looked prehistoric, and snarls of billowing brambles. The trees would be stunted down there, fighting for sunlight. There would be poison ivy, litters of garbage, and quite likely the occasional hobo camp. There would also be paths only some of the local kids would know. The adventurous ones.

  I stood and looked without seeing, aware but hardly registering the faint lilt of music—something with horns in it. I was thinking about how little I had accomplished this morning. You can change the past, Al had told me, but it’s not as easy as you might think.

  What was that music? Something cheery, with a little jump to it. It made me think of Christy, back in the early days, when I was besotted with her. When we were besotted with each other. Bah-dah-dah … bah-dah-da-dee-dum … Glenn Miller, maybe?

  I had gone to the library hoping to get a look at the census records. The last national one would have taken place eight years ago, in 1950, and would have shown three of the four Dunning kids: Troy, Arthur, and Harold. Only Ellen, who would be seven at the time of the murders, hadn’t been around to be counted in 1950. There would be an address. It was true the family might have moved in the intervening eight years, but if so, one of the neighbors would be able to tell me where they’d gone. It was a small city.

  Only the census records weren’t there. The librarian, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Starrett, told me that in her opinion those records certainly belonged in the library, but the town council had for some reason decided they belonged in City Hall. They’d been moved there in 1954, she said.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I told her, smiling. “You know what they say—you can’t fight City Hall.”

  Mrs. Starrett didn’t return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I’d met in this queer place—Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Amberson. There’s nothing private about the United States Census. You march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you. Her name is Marcia Guay. She’ll help you out. Although they probably stored them in the basement, which is not where they ought to be. It’s damp, and I shouldn’t be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble—any trouble at all—you come back and see me.”

  So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost all of the other documents that had been stored in the City Hall basement.

  “We had terrible rains last year,” she said. “They went on for a whole week. The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town—that’s what the oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson—everything in the Low Town flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved, and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I’m awfully sorry.”

  It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, Hey Tugga, wait up?

  Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If there was such a thing as flying directly into the radar, that would be it.

  One thing was for sure—I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958 prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk. I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.

  Bah-dah-dah … bah-dah-da-dee-dum …

  That was Glenn Miller. It was “In the Mood,” a tune I had reason to know well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.

  7

  There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.

  On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen “tweenagers,” and that’s what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was charmed, but I was also … what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too, something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the actual clockwork of the universe.

  Because, you see, I had met Christy at a swing-dancing class in Lewiston, and this was one of the tunes we had learned to. Later—in our best year, six months before the marriage and six months after—we had danced in competitions, once taking fourth prize (also known as “first also-ran,” according to Christy) in the New England Swing-Dancing Competition. Our tune was a slightly slowed-down dance-mix version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”

  This isn’t a coincidence, I thought, watching them. The boy was wearing blue jeans and a crew-neck shirt; she had on a white blouse with the tails hanging down over faded red clamdiggers. That amazing hair was pulled back in the same impudently cute ponytail Christy had always worn when we danced competitively. Along with her bobby sox and vintage poodle skirt, of course.

/>   This cannot be a coincidence.

  They were doing a Lindy variation I knew as the Hellzapoppin. It’s supposed to be a fast dance—lightning-fast, if you have the physical stamina and grace to bring it off—but they were dancing it slow because they were still learning their steps. I could see inside every move. I knew them all, although I hadn’t actually danced any of them in five years or more. Come together, both hands clasped. He stoops a little and kicks with his left foot while she does the same, both of them twisting at the waist so that they appear to be going in opposite directions. Move apart, hands still clasped, then she twirls, first to the left and then to the right—

  But they goofed up the return spin and she went sprawling on the grass. “Jesus, Richie, you never get that right! Gah, you’re hopeless!” She was laughing, though. She flopped on her back and stared up at the sky.

  “I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett!” the boy cried in a screechy pickaninny voice that would have gone over like a lead balloon in the politically correct twenty-first century. “I’se just a clodhoppin country boy, but I intends to learn dis-yere dance if it kills me!”

  “I’m the one it’s likely to kill,” she said. “Start the record again before I lose my—” Then they both saw me.

  It was a strange moment. There was a veil in Derry—I came to know that veil so well I could almost see it. The locals were on one side; people from away (like Fred Toomey, like me) were on the other. Sometimes the locals came out from behind it, as Mrs. Starrett the librarian had when expressing her irritation about the misplaced census records, but if you asked too many questions—and certainly if you startled them—they retreated behind it again.

  Yet I had startled these kids, and they didn’t retreat behind the veil. Instead of closing up, their faces remained wide open, full of curiosity and interest.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you. I heard the music and then I saw you lindy-hopping.”

  “Trying to lindy-hop, is what you mean,” the boy said. He helped the girl to her feet. He made a bow. “Richie Tozier, at your service. My friends all say ‘Richie-Richie, he live in a ditchie,’ but what do they know?”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “George Amberson.” And then—it just popped out—“My friends all say ‘Georgie-Georgie, he wash his clothes in a Norgie,’ but they don’t know anything, either.”

  The girl collapsed on one of the picnic table benches, giggling. The boy raised his hands in the air and bugled: “Strange grown-up gets off a good one! Wacka-wacka-wacka! Dee-lightful! Ed McMahon, what have we got for this wonderful fella? Well, Johnny, today’s prizes on Who Do You Trust are a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to suck em up wi—”

  “Beep-beep, Richie,” the girl said. She was wiping the corners of her eyes.

  This caused an unfortunate reversion to the screeching pickaninny voice. “I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett, don’t be whuppin on me! I’se still got scabs from de las’ time!”

  “Who are you, Miss?” I asked.

  “Bevvie-Bevvie, I live on the levee,” she said, and started giggling again. “Sorry—Richie’s a fool, but I have no excuse. Beverly Marsh. You’re not from around here, are you?”

  A thing everybody seemed to know immediately. “Nope, and you two don’t seem like you are, either. You’re the first two Derryites I’ve met who don’t seem … grumpy.”

  “Yowza, it’s a grumpy-ass town,” Richie said, and took the tone arm off the record. It had been bumping on the final groove over and over.

  “I understand folks’re particularly worried about the children,” I said. “Notice I’m keeping my distance. You guys on grass, me on sidewalk.”

  “They weren’t all that worried when the murders were going on,” Richie grumbled. “You know about the murders?”

  I nodded. “I’m staying at the Town House. Someone who works there told me.”

  “Yeah, now that they’re over, people are all concerned about the kids.” He sat down next to Bevvie who lived on the levee. “But when they were going on, you didn’t hear jack spit.”

  “Richie,” she said. “Beep-beep.”

  This time the boy tried on a really atrocious Humphrey Bogart imitation. “Well it’s true, schweetheart. And you know it’s true.”

  “All that’s over,” Bevvie told me. She was as earnest as a Chamber of Commerce booster. “They just don’t know it yet.”

  “They meaning the townspeople or just grown-ups in general?”

  She shrugged as if to say what’s the difference.

  “But you do know.”

  “As a matter of fact, we do,” Richie said. He looked at me challengingly, but behind his mended glasses, that glint of maniacal humor was still in his eyes. I had an idea it never completely left them.

  I stepped onto the grass. Neither child fled, screaming. In fact, Beverly shoved over on the bench (elbowing Richie so he would do the same) and made room for me. They were either very brave or very stupid, and they didn’t look stupid.

  Then the girl said something that flabbergasted me. “Do I know you? Do we know you?”

  Before I could answer, Richie spoke up. “No, it’s not that. It’s … I dunno. Do you want something, Mr. Amberson? Is that it?”

  “Actually, I do. Some information. But how did you know that? And how do you know I’m not dangerous?”

  They looked at each other, and something passed between them. It was impossible to know just what, yet I felt sure of two things: they had sensed an otherness about me that went way beyond just being a stranger in town … but, unlike the Yellow Card Man, they weren’t afraid of it. Quite the opposite; they were fascinated by it. I thought those two attractive, fearless kids could have told some stories if they wanted to. I’ve always remained curious about what those stories might have been.

  “You’re just not,” Richie said, and when he looked to the girl, she nodded agreement.

  “And you’re sure that the … the bad times … are over?”

  “Mostly,” Beverly said. “Things’ll get better. In Derry I think the bad times are over, Mr. Amberson—it’s a hard place in a lot of ways.”

  “Suppose I told you—just hypothetically—that there was one more bad thing on the horizon? Something like what happened to a little boy named Dorsey Corcoran.”

  They winced as if I had pinched a place where the nerves lay close to the surface. Beverly turned to Richie and whispered in his ear. I’m not positive about what she said, it was quick and low, but it might have been That wasn’t the clown. Then she looked back at me.

  “What bad thing? Like when Dorsey’s father—”

  “Never mind. You don’t have to know.” It was time to jump. These were the ones. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did. “Do you know some kids named Dunning?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Troy, Arthur, Harry, and Ellen. Only Arthur’s also called—”

  “Tugga,” Beverly said matter-of-factly. “Sure we know him, he goes to our school. We’re practicing the Lindy for the school talent show, it’s just before Thanksgiving—”

  “Miss Scawlett, she b’leeve in gittin an early start on de practicin,” Richie said.

  Beverly Marsh took no notice. “Tugga’s signed up for the show, too. He’s going to lip-synch to ‘Splish Splash.’” She rolled her eyes. She was good at that.

  “Where does he live? Do you know?”

  They knew, all right, but neither of them said. And if I didn’t give them a little more, they wouldn’t. I could see that in their faces.

  “Suppose I told you there’s a good chance Tugga’s never going to be in the talent show unless somebody watches out for him? His brothers and his sister, too? Would you believe a thing like that?”

  The kids looked at each other again, conversing with their eyes. It went on a long time—ten seconds, maybe. It was the sort of long gaze that lovers indulge in, but these tweenagers couldn’t be lovers. Friends, though, for sure. Close friends who’d been
through something together.

  “Tugga and his family live on Cossut Street,” Richie said finally. That’s what it sounded like, anyway.

  “Cossut?”

  “That’s how people around here say it,” Beverly told me. “K-O-S-S-U-T-H. Cossut.”

  “Got it.” Now the only question was how much these kids were going to blab about our weird conversation on the edge of the Barrens.

  Beverly was looking at me with earnest, troubled eyes. “But Mr. Amberson, I’ve met Tugga’s dad. He works at the Center Street Market. He’s a nice man. Always smiling. He—”

  “The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore,” Richie interrupted. “His wife kicked im out.”

  She turned to him, eyes wide. “Tug told you that?”

  “Nope. Ben Hanscom. Tug told him.”

  “He’s still a nice man,” Beverly said in a small voice. “Always joking around and stuff but never touchy-grabby.”

  “Clowns joke around a lot, too,” I said. They both jumped, as if I had pinched that vulnerable bundle of nerves again. “That doesn’t make them nice.”

  “We know,” Beverly whispered. She was looking at her hands. Then she raised her eyes to me. “Do you know about the Turtle?” She said turtle in a way that made it sound like a proper noun.

  I thought of saying I know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and didn’t. It was decades too early for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo. So I just shook my head.

  She looked doubtfully at Richie. He looked at me, then back at her. “But he’s good. I’m pretty sure he’s good.” She touched my wrist. Her fingers were cold. “Mr. Dunning’s a nice man. And just because he doesn’t live at home anymore doesn’t mean he isn’t.”

  That hit home. My wife had left me, but not because I wasn’t nice. “I know that.” I stood up. “I’m going to be around Derry for a little while, and it would be good not to attract too much attention. Can you two keep quiet about this? I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”