The Tommyknockers Read online

  "Monster?" Jingles asked. "Monster Dugan knew Mrs. McCausland?"

  "Pretty well, I guess. Monster and her husband were partners before her husband died. Anyway, he said she had a hundred dolls, maybe two hundred. He said they were her only hobby, and they were exhibited once in Augusta. He said she was prouder of that exhibit than she was of any of the things she'd done for the town--and I guess she did a lot of things for Haven."

  I wish I could have called her Ruth, he thought again.

  "Monster said except for her dolls, she worked all the time." Bent considered, then added: "The way Monster talked, I got an idea he was ... uh, sweet on her." That sounded as old-fucking-fashioned as a Roy Rogers western, but that was just how Butch "Monster" Dugan had always seemed about Ruth McCausland. "Most likely you won't be the one gets stuck breaking the news to him, but if you should, lemme give you some advice: don't crack wise."

  "Yeah, okay, duly noted. Monster Dugan on my case, that's all I'd need to round the day off, you know?"

  Bent smiled with no humor.

  "Her doll collection," Jingles said. He nodded. "Course I knew they were dolls--" He saw Bent's wry glance, and smiled a little. "Okay, I had a second or two there when ... but soon's I saw the way the sun was shinin on them, and how there was no blood, I knew what they were. Just couldn't figure out how come there was so many."

  "You still don't know that. That, or much else. We don't know what they were doing there. Hell, what was she doing there?"

  Jingles looked miserable. "Who would have killed her, Bent? She was such a nice lady. Goddam!"

  "I think she was murdered," Bent said. His voice sounded like breaking sticks in his ears. "Did it look like an accident to you?"

  "No. That wasn't no furnace explosion. And the fumes that kept us from going down in the basement--that smell like oil to you?"

  Bent shook his head. Whatever it was, he'd never before smelled anything like it in his life. Maybe the only thing that nit Berringer had been right about was his opinion that breathing those fumes could be dangerous and it might be best to stay upstairs until the air in the town-hall basement cleared. Now he had to wonder if they'd been kept away on purpose--maybe so they wouldn't see a furnace that was completely unwounded.

  "After we file our reports on this fucker," Jingles said, "the local yokels are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Allison, Berringer, those guys. And they may have to do some of it to Dugan."

  Bent nodded thoughtfully. "Whole fucking thing was crazy. The place felt crazy. I mean, I actually started to get dizzy. Did you?"

  "The fumes--" Jingles began doubtfully.

  "Fuck the fumes. I was dizzy in the street. "

  "Her dolls, Bent. What were her dolls doing there?"

  "I don't know."

  "Me either. But it's another thing that doesn't fit for shit. Try this on: if somebody hated her enough to murder her, maybe they hated her enough to blow her dolls up with her. You think?"

  "Not really," Benton Rhodes said.

  "But it could be," Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.

  Their reception was a little better but still nothing to write home about. Bent couldn't remember ever getting deep interference from the Troy microwave dish this close to Derry before.

  3

  According to the witnesses they spoke to, the explosion had occurred at 3:05 P.M., give or take half a minute. The town-hall clock struck three as it always did. Five minutes later, KA-BAM! And now, riding back to Derry in the dark, an oddly persuasive picture occurred to Benton Rhodes, one that brought gooseflesh to attention all over his body. He saw the clock in the town-hall tower standing at four minutes past three on that hot and windless late-July afternoon. And suddenly, a look passes among those in the Haven Lunch; those in Cooder's General Store; those in Haven Hardware; the ladies in the Junque-A-Torium ; the children on the swings or hanging listlessly in the summer heat from the bars of the jungle gym in the playyard beside the school; it goes from the eyes of one of the overweight ladies playing doubles on the town tennis courts behind the town hall to her partner, and then to their overweight opponents on the other side of the net. The game-ball goes rolling slowly into a far corner of the court as they lie down and put their hands over their ears ... and wait. As they wait for the explosion.

  Everyone in town, lying down and waiting for that KA-BLAM to drill into the day like the stroke of a sledgehammer on thick wood.

  Bent suddenly shuddered behind the wheel of the cruiser.

  The checkout girls at Cooder's. The customers in the aisles. The people in the Haven Lunch by the stools or behind the counter. At 3:04 P.M. they laid down, the whole fucking bunch of them. And at 3:06 they got up and went about their business. All of 'em except for the Designated Gawkers. Also Allison and Berringer, who told everybody it was a furnace explosion, which it wasn't, and that they didn't know who the victim was, which they fucking well did.

  You don't believe they all knew it was going to happen, do you?

  A part of him believed just that. Because if the good folks of Haven hadn't known, how come the only casualties had been Ruth McCausland and her dolls? How come there hadn't been so much as a single cut arm when a shower of glass had flown across Main Street at a speed of roughly one hundred and ten miles an hour?

  "I think we ought to be clear of that fucking dish by now," Bent said. "Try it again."

  Jingles took the mike. "I still don't understand where the goddam backups are."

  "Maybe something happened somewhere else. It never rains--"

  "Yeah, it pours. Dolly arms and legs, among other things." As Jingles depressed the mike button, Bent piloted the cruiser around a curve. The headlights and flashers splashed over a pickup truck that was slewed diagonally in the middle of the road.

  "Jesus Chr--" Then reflexes took over and he hit the brakes. Firestone rubber screamed and smoked; for a moment Bent thought he was going to lose it. Then the cruiser came to a halt with its nose three yards from the body of the mongrel truck sitting silent in the road.

  "Please pass the toilet paper," Jingles said in a low, trembling voice.

  They got out, both unstrapping the handles of their guns without thinking. The smell of cooked rubber hung in the summer air.

  "What's this shit?" Jingles cried, and Bent thought: He feels it too. This isn't right, this is part of what was going on back in that creepy little town, and he feels it too.

  The breeze stirred, and Bent heard canvas flap stiffly for a moment, and a tarp slid off something in the bed of the pickup with a dry rattlesnake sound. Bent felt his balls climb north in a hurry. It looked like the barrel of a bazooka. He started to crouch, then realized with bewilderment that the bazooka was only a length of corrugated culvert-pipe in some sort of wooden cradle. Nothing to be afraid of. But he was afraid. He was terrified.

  "I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent. Parked in front of the restaurant."

  "Who's there?" Bent shouted.

  No answer.

  He looked at Jingles. Jingles, eyes wide and dark in his white face, looked back at him.

  Bent thought suddenly: Microwave interference? Was that really what was keeping us from getting through?

  "If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!" Bent called. "You--"

  A shrill, crazed titter came from the truck-bed, then drifted into silence.

  "Oh Christ, I don't like this," Jingles Gabbons moaned.

  Bent started forward, raising his gun, and then the world was filled with green light.

  5.

  RUTH McCAUSLAND

  1

  Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger--fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had. It was because her husband had been a state trooper, some said. Others said it was simply because Ruth was
Ruth. Either way, they agreed Haven was lucky to have her. She was firm but fair. She was able to keep her wits in an emergence. Haven folk said these things about her, and more besides. In a small Maine town run by the men since there had been a town to run, such testimonials were of some note. That was fair enough; she was a noteworthy woman.

  She was born and raised in Haven; she was, in fact, the great-niece of the Rev. Mr. Donald Hartley, who had been so cruelly surprised by the town's vote to change its name back in '01. In 1955 she had been granted early admittance to the University of Maine--only the third female student in the history of the university to be granted full-time-student status at the tender age of seventeen. She enrolled in the college's pre-law program.

  The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also in pre-law. He was tall; at six-five he was still three inches shorter than his friend Anthony Dugan (known as Butch by his friends, as Monster only by his two or three close friends), but he towered a full foot over Ruth. He was oddly--almost absurdly--graceful for such a big man, and good-natured. He wanted to be a state trooper. When Ruth asked him why, he said it was because his father had been one. He didn't need a law degree to join the fuzz, he explained to her; to become a state trooper he needed only a high-school education, good eyes, good reflexes, and a clean record. But Ralph McCausland had wanted something more than to do his father the honor of following in his footsteps. "Any man who gets into a job and doesn't plan a way to get ahead is either lazy or crazy," he told Ruth one night over Cokes in the Bear's Den. What he didn't tell her, because he was shy about his ambition, was that he hoped to be Maine's top cop someday. Ruth knew anyway, of course.

  She accepted Ralph's proposal of marriage the following year on condition that he would wait until she had her own degree. She did not want to practice law, she said, but she did want to help him all she could. Ralph agreed. Any sane man confronted with Ruth Merrill's clear-eyed, intelligent beauty would have agreed. When Ralph married her in 1959, she was a lawyer.

  She came to their marriage bed a virgin. She had been a little worried about this, although only a deep part of her mind--a part over which even she could not exert her usual iron control--dared to wonder in a murky way if that part of him was as big as the rest of him; it felt that way sometimes when they danced, and petted. But he was gentle, and there was only a momentary discomfort that quickly turned to pleasure. "Make me pregnant," she whispered in his ear as he began to move above her, in her.

  "My pleasure, lady," Ralph said a little breathlessly.

  But Ruth never quickened.

  Ruth, the only child of John and Holly Merrill, had inherited a fairish sum of money and a fine old house in Haven Village when her father died in 1962. She and Ralph sold their small postwar tract home in Derry and moved back to Haven in 1963. And although neither of them would admit anything less than perfect happiness to the other, both were aware that there were too many empty rooms in the old Victorian house. Perhaps, Ruth sometimes thought, perfect happiness occurs only in a context of small discordancies: the shattering crash of an overturned vase or fishbowl, an exultant, laughing yell just as you are drifting into a pleasant late-afternoon doze, the child who gets pregnant with Halloween candy and who must perforce give birth to a nightmare in the early-morning hours of November 1st. In her wistful moments (she saw to it that there were damned few of them) Ruth sometimes thought of the Mohammedan rug-makers, who always included a deliberate error in their work to honor the perfect Deity who had made them, more fallible creatures. It occurred to her more than once that, in the tapestry of an honestly lived life, a child guaranteed such a respectful error.

  But, for the most part, they were happy. They prepared Ralph's most difficult cases together, and his court testimony was always quiet, respectful, and devastating. It mattered little if you were a drunk driver, an arsonist, or a fellow who'd broken a beer bottle over another fellow's head in a drunken roadhouse argument. If you were arrested by Ralph McCausland, your chances of beating the rap were roughly the chances of a guy standing at ground-zero of a nuclear test site receiving only minor flesh-wounds.

  During the years when Ralph was making his slow but steady climb up the ladder of the Maine State Police bureaucracy, Ruth began her career of town service--not that she ever thought of it as a "career," and certainly she never thought of it in the context of "politics." Not town politics, but town service. That was a small but crucial difference. She was not as calmly happy about her work as she seemed to the people she was working for. It would have taken a child to completely fulfill her. There was nothing surprising or demeaning in this. She was, after all, a child of her own time, and even the very intelligent are not immune to a steady barrage of propaganda. She and Ralph had been to a doctor in Boston, and after extensive tests, he assured them that they were both fertile. His advice was for them to relax. In a way, this was cruel news. If one of them had proved to be sterile, they would have adopted. As it was, they decided to wait awhile and take the doctor's advice ... or try. And although neither knew or even intuited it, Ralph didn't have long to live by the time they had begun to discuss adoption again.

  In those last years of her marriage, Ruth had performed a sort of adoption of her own--she adopted Haven.

  The library, for instance. The Methodist parsonage had been full of books since time out of mind--some were Detective Book Club and Reader's Digest Condensed Books from which a clear scent of mold arose when you opened them; others had bloated to the size of telephone books when the pipes in the parsonage burst in 1947, but most were in surprisingly good condition. Ruth patiently winnowed them, keeping the good ones, selling the bad ones to be repulped, throwing away only those completely beyond salvage. The Haven Community Library had officially opened in the repainted and refurbished Methodist parsonage in December of 1968, with Ruth McCausland as volunteer librarian, a post she held until 1973. On the day she retired, the trustees hung a photograph of her over the mantel in the reading room. Ruth protested, then gave in when she saw they meant to honor her whether she wanted the honor or not. She could hurt their feelings, she saw, but not alter their purpose. They needed to honor her. The library, which she had begun single-handed, sitting on the cold parsonage floor, bundled up in one of Ralph's old red-checked hunting jackets, her breath smoking from her mouth and nose, sorting patiently through boxes of books until her hands went numb, was in 1972 voted Maine's Small Town Library of the Year.

  Ruth would have taken at least some pleasure at this under other circumstances, but she took little pleasure in anything during 1972 and '73. Nineteen seventy-two was the year Ralph McCausland died. In the late spring, he began to complain of bad headaches. In June, a large firespot appeared in his right eye. X-rays revealed a brain tumor. He died in October, two days short of his thirty-seventh birthday.

  In the funeral parlor, Ruth stood looking down into his open coffin for a long time. She had wept almost steadily over the last week, and she suspected that there would be more tears to shed--oceans, perhaps--in the weeks and months ahead. But she would no more have wept in public than she would have appeared there naked. To those watching (which was damned near everyone), she seemed as sweetly composed as always.

  "Goodbye, dear," she said at last, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She slipped his trooper's ring from the third finger of his right hand and onto the third finger of her own. The next day she drove to G. M. Pollock's in Bangor and had it sized. She wore it until the day she died, and although in the violence of her dying her arm would be ripped from her shoulder, neither Bent nor Jingles had any trouble ID'ing that ring.

  2

  The library was not Ruth's only service to the town. Each fall she collected for the Cancer Society, and for each of the seven years she did this, she collected the largest total donation in the Maine Cancer Society's small-town category. The secret of her success was simple: Ruth went everywhere. She spoke pleasantly and fearlessly to thick-browed, sunken-eyed backroad dwellers w
ho often looked almost as mongrelized as the snarling dogs they kept in back yards filled with the dead and decaying bodies of old cars and farm implements. And in most cases she got a donation. Perhaps some were surprised into it simply because it had been so long since they'd had company.

  She was dog-bit only once. It was, however, a memorable occasion. The dog itself wasn't big, but it had lots of teeth.

  MORAN, the mailbox said. No one home but the dog. The dog came around the side of the house, growling, as she stood knocking on the unpainted porch door. She held out a hand to it, and Mr. Moran's dog immediately bit it and then stepped away from Ruth and piddled on the porch in its excitement. Ruth started down the steps, taking a handkerchief from her purse and wrapping it around her bleeding hand. The dog bounded after her and bit her again, this time on the leg. She kicked at it and it shied away, but as she limped on toward her Dart, it came up behind her and bit her a third time. This was the only serious bite. Mr. Moran's dog removed a sizable chunk of meat from Ruth's left calf (she was wearing a skirt that day; she never went out collecting for the Cancer Society in a skirt again) and then retired to the center of Mr. Moran's weedy front lawn, where it sat snarling and slobbering, Ruth's blood dripping from its lolling tongue. Instead of getting behind the wheel of her car, she opened the Dart's trunk. She did not hurry. She felt if she did, the dog would almost certainly attack her again. She took the Remington .30-06 she'd had ever since she was sixteen. She shot the dog dead just as it began trotting toward her again. She picked up the corpse and laid it on spread newspapers in her trunk and drove it to Dr. Daggett, the Augusta vet who had cared for Bobbi's dog, Peter, before selling the practice and moving to Florida. "If this bitch was rabid, I am in a good deal of trouble," she told Daggett. The vet peered from the dog, which had a bullet directly between its glazed eyes and very little left to the back of its skull, to Ruth McCausland, who, although bitten and bleeding, was as pleasant as ever. "I know I haven't left as much of the brain for examination as you'd probably like, but that was unavoidable. Would you take a look, Dr. Daggett?" He told her she needed to see a doctor; the wounds had to be flushed, and she'd need stitches in her calf. Daggett was as close to flustered as Daggett ever got. Ruth told him he was perfectly capable of flushing the wounds. As for what she called "the crocheting," she would go to the emergency room at Derry Home as soon as she made a few telephone calls. She told him to work on the dog while she made them, and asked if she could use his private office so as not to upset the clientele. A woman had screamed when Ruth came in, which was not really surprising. One of Ruth's legs was bloody and torn open. In her blood-streaked arms she bore the stiffening, blanket-wrapped corpse of Moran's dog. Daggett said she was welcome to use his phone. She did so (being careful to reverse the charges the first time and billing the call to her home telephone the second time; she somehow doubted if Mr. Moran would accept a collect call). Ralph was at Monster Dugan's house, going over crime photos for an upcoming manslaughter trial. Monster's wife detected nothing amiss in Ruth's voice and neither did Ralph; he told her later that she would have made a great criminal. She said she had taken a delay while canvassing for the Cancer Society. She told him if he got home before she did, he should warm up the meatloaf and make himself some of those stir-fried vegetables that he liked; there were six or seven packages in the freezer. Also, she said, there was a coffee cake in the breadbox if he fancied something sweet. By now, Daggett had come into the office and was disinfecting her wounds and Ruth was very pale. Ralph wanted to know what kind of delay she had taken. She said she'd tell him about it when she got home. Ralph said he looked forward to it and said he loved her. Ruth said she felt exactly the same way about him. Then, as Daggett finished with the bite behind her knee (he'd done her hand while she spoke to Ralph) and went on to the deep wound in her calf (she could actually feel her wounded flesh trying to pull away from the alcohol), she called Mr. Moran. Ruth told him his dog had bitten her three times and that was one time too many so she had shot and killed it and that she had left his pledge card in his mailbox and the American Cancer Society would be very grateful for any donation he felt he could make. There was a brief silence. Then Mr. Moran began to speak. Soon Mr. Moran began to shout. Finally Mr. Moran began to scream. Mr. Moran was so enraged he attained a vulgar fluency of expression that neared not just poetry but Homeric verse. He would never equal it again in his life, although when he sometimes tried and failed, he would remember that conversation with a sad, almost fond nostalgia. She'd brought out the best in him, no denying that. Mr. Moran said she could expect to get sued for every town dollar she had, and a few country ones in the bargain. Mr. Moran said he was going to law, and he was poker-buddies with the best lawyer in the county. Mr. Moran opined that Ruth was going to find the cartridge she had used to kill his good old dog the most expensive one she had ever jacked into a breech. Mr. Moran said when he got done with her she would curse her mother for ever having opened her legs to her father. Mr. Moran said that even though her mother had been stupid enough to do that, he could tell, just talking to her, that the best part of her had squirted out'n her father's unquestionably substandard pecker and run down the chunk of lard her mother called a thigh. Mr. Moran informed her that, while Mrs. High and Mighty Ruth McCausland might currently feel she was Queen Turd of Shit Hill, she would shortly find out she was just another little turd floating in the Great Toilet Bowl of Life. Mr. Moran added that, in this particular case, he had his hand on the lever of that great disposal unit and fully intended to push it. Mr. Moran said a great deal more. Mr. Moran did more than speak; Mr. Moran sermonized. Preacher Colson (or was it Cooder?) at the height of his powers could not have equaled Moran on that day. Ruth waited patiently until he had at least temporarily run dry. Then, speaking in a low and pleasant voice that did not at all suggest that her calf now felt as if it was burning in a furnace, she told Mr. Moran that while the law was not entirely clear on the point, damages had more often been awarded to the caller, even if uninvited, rather than the owner, in cases of animal assault. The real question was whether or not the owner had taken all reasonable care to ensure ...