Cujo Read online

  The sun was fully up now, throwing a bright rose light over the houses and the streets below, and across Castle Hill. It touched the swing set where he had pushed Tad times without number . . . all he wanted was to push his son on the swing again with his wife standing beside him. He would push until his hands fell off, if that was what Tad wanted.

  Daddy, I wanna loop the loop! I wanna!

  The voice in his mind chilled his heart. It was like a ghost voice.

  The screen door opened again a moment later. Masen sat down beside him and lit a fresh cigarette. "Twin City Ford in South Paris," he said. "That was the one, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah. We bought the Pinto there."

  "I took a shot and called them. Got lucky; the service manager was already in. Your Pinto's not there, and it hasn't been there. Who's the local guy?"

  "Joe Camber," Vic said. "She must have taken the car out there after all. She didn't want to because he's way out in the back of the beyond and she couldn't get any answer on the phone when she called. I told her he was probably there anyway, just working in the garage. It's this converted barn, and I don't think he's got a phone in there. At least he didn't the last time I was out there."

  "We'll check it out," Masen said, "but her car's not there either, Mr. Trenton. Depend on it."

  "Why not?"

  "Doesn't make a bit of logical sense," Masen said. "I was ninety-five percent sure it wasn't in South Paris, either. Look, everything we said before still holds true. A young woman with a child needs a car. Suppose she took the car over to Twin City Ford and they told her it was going to be a couple of days. How does she get back?"

  "Well . . . a loaner . . . or if they wouldn't give her a loaner, I guess they'd rent her one of their lease cars. From the cheap fleet."

  "Right! Beautiful! So where is it?"

  Vic looked at the driveway, almost as if expecting it to appear.

  "There'd be no more reason for Kemp to abscond with your wife's loaner than there would be for him to abscond with her Pinto," Masen said. "That pretty well ruled out the Ford dealership in advance. Now let's say she takes it out to this guy Camber's garage. If he gives her an old junker to run around in while he fixes her Pinto, we're back at square one right away: Where's the junker? So let's say that she takes it up there and Camber says he'll have to keep it awhile but he's got nothing he can give her to get back to town in. So she calls a friend, and a friend comes out to pick her up. With me so far?"

  "Yes, sure."

  "So who was the friend? You gave us a list, and we got them all out of bed. Lucky they were all home, it being summer and all. None of them mentioned bringing your people home from anywhere. No one has seen them any later than Monday morning."

  "Well, why don't we stop crapping around?" Vic asked. "Let's give Camber a call and find out for sure."

  "Let's wait until seven," Masen said. "That's only fifteen minutes. Give him a chance to get his face washed and wake up a little. Service managers usually clock in early. This guy's an independent."

  Vic shrugged. This whole thing was a crazy blind alley. Kemp had Donna and Tad. He knew it in his guts, just as he knew it was Kemp who had trashed the house and shot his come on the bed he and Donna shared.

  "Of course, it didn't have to be a friend," Masen said, dreamily watching his cigarette smoke drift off into the morning. "There are all sorts of possibilities. She gets the car up there, and someone she knows slightly happens to be there, and the guy or gal offers Mrs. Trenton and your son a ride back into town. Or maybe Camber runs them home himself. Or his wife. Is he married?"

  "Yes. Nice woman."

  "Could have been him, her, anyone. People are always willing to help a lady in distress."

  "Yeah," Vic said, and lit a cigarette of his own.

  "But none of that matters either, because the question always remains the same: Where's the fucking car? Because the situation's the same. Woman and kid on their own. She has to get groceries, go to the dry cleaner's, go to the post office, dozens of little errands. If the husband was only going to be gone a few days, a week, even, she might try to get along without a car. But ten days or two weeks? Jesus, that's a long haul in a town that's only got one goddam cab. Rental car people are happy to deliver in a situation like that. She could have gotten Hertz or Avis or National to deliver the car here or out to Camber's. So where's the rental car? I keep coming back to that There should have been a vehicle in this yard. Dig?"

  "I don't think it's important," Vic said.

  "And probably it's not. We'll find some simple explanation and say Oy vay, how could we be so stupid? But it fascinates me strangely . . . it was the needle valve? You're sure of that?"

  "Positive."

  Masen shook his head. "Why would she need all that riga-morole about loaners or rental cars anyway? That's a fifteen-minute fix for somebody with the tools and the know-how. Drive in, drive out. So where's--"

  "--her goddam car?" Vic finished wearily. The world was coming and going in waves now.

  "Why don't you go upstairs and lie down?" Masen said. "You look wiped out."

  "No, I want to be awake if something happens--"

  "And if something does, somebody will be here to wake you up. The FBI's coming with a trace-back system to hook up to your phone. Those people are noisy enough to wake the dead--so don't worry."

  Vic was too tired to feel much more than a dull dread. "Do you think that trace-back shit is really necessary?"

  "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it," Masen said, and pitched his cigarette. "Get a little rest and you'll be able to cope better, Vic. Go on."

  "All right."

  He went slowly upstairs. The bed had been stripped to the mattress. He had done it himself. He put two pillows on his side, took off his shoes, and lay down. The morning sun shone fiercely in through the window. I won't sleep, he thought, but I'll rest. I'll try to, anyway. Fifteen minutes . . . maybe half an hour . . .

  But by the time the phone woke him up, that day's burning noon had come.

  Charity Camber had her morning coffee and then called Alva Thornton in Castle Rock. This time Alva himself answered. He knew that she had chatted with Bessie the night before.

  "Nope," Alva said. "I ain't seed hide nor hair of Joe since last Thursday or so, Charity. He brought over a tractor tire he fixed for me. Never said nothing about feeding Cujo, although I'd've been happy to."

  "Alva, could you run up to the house and check on Cujo? Brett saw him Monday morning before we left for my sister's, and he thought he looked sick. And I just don't know who Joe would have gotten to feed him." After the way of country people, she added: "No hurry."

  "Ill take a run up and check," Alva said. "Let me get those damn cacklers fed and watered and I'm gone."

  "That would be fine, Alva," Charity said gratefully, and gave him her sister's number. "Thanks so much."

  They talked a little more, mostly about the weather. The constant heat had Alva worried about his chickens. Then she hung up.

  Brett looked up from his cereal when she came into the kitchen. Jim Junior was very carefully making rings on the table with his orange juice glass and talking a mile a minute. He had decided sometime during the last forty-eight hours that Brett Camber was a close relation to Jesus Christ.

  "Well?" Brett asked.

  "You were right. Dad didn't ask Alva to feed him." She saw the disappointment and worry on Brett's face and went on: "But he's going up to check on Cujo this morning, as soon as he's got his chickens tended to. I left the number this time. He said he'd call back one way or the other."

  "Thanks, Mom."

  Jim clattered back from the table as Holly called him to come upstairs and get dressed. "Wanna come up with me, Brett?"

  Brett smiled. "I'll wait for you, slugger."

  "Okay." Jim ran out trumpeting, "Mom! Brett said he'd wait! Brett's gonna wait for me to get dressed!"

  A thunder, as of elephants, on the stairs.

  "He's
a nice kid," Brett said casually.

  "I thought," Charity said, "that we might go home a little early. If that's all right with you."

  Brett's face brightened, and in spite of all the decisions she had come to, that brightness made her feel a little sad. "When?" he asked.

  "How does tomorrow sound?" She had been intending to suggest Friday.

  "Great! But"--he looked at her closely--"are you done visiting, Mom? I mean, she's your sister."

  Charity thought of the credit cards, and of the Wurlitzer jukebox Holly's husband had been able to afford but did not know how to fix. Those were the things that had impressed Brett, and she supposed they had impressed her as well in some way. Perhaps she had seen them through Brett's eyes a little . . . through Joe's eyes. And enough was enough.

  "Yes," she said. "I guess I've done my visiting. I'll tell Holly this morning."

  "Okay, Mom." He looked at her a little shyly. "I wouldn't mind coming back, you know. I do like them. And he's a neat little kid. Maybe he can come up to Maine sometime."

  "Yes," she said, surprised and grateful. She didn't think Joe would object to that. "Yes, maybe that could be arranged."

  "Okay. And tell me what Mr. Thornton said."

  "I will."

  But Alva never called back. As he was feeding his chickens that morning, the motor in his big air conditioner blew, and he was immediately in a life-or-death struggle to save his birds before the day's heat could kill them. Donna Trenton might have called it another stroke of that same Fate she saw reflected in Cujo's muddy, homicidal eyes. By the time the issue of the air conditioner was settled, it was four in the afternoon (Alva Thornton lost sixty-two chickens that day and counted himself off cheaply), and the confrontation which had begun Monday afternoon in the Cambers' sunstruck dooryard was over.

  Andy Masen was the Maine Attorney General's Wunderkind, and there were those who said that someday--and not too distant a day, either--he would lead the A.G.'s criminal division. Andy Masen's sights were set a good deal higher than that. He hoped to be Attorney General himself in 1984, and in a position to run for Governor by 1987. And after eight years as Governor, who knew?

  He came from a large, poor family. He and his three brothers and two sisters had grown up in a ramshackle "poor white trash" house on the outer Sabbatus Road in the town of Lisbon. His brothers and sisters had been exactly up--or down--to town expectations. Only Andy Masen and his youngest brother, Marty, had managed to finish high school. For a while it had looked as if Roberta might make it, but she had gotten herself knocked up higher than a kite following a dance her senior year. She had left school to marry the boy, who still had pimples at twenty-nine, drank Narragansett straight from the can, and knocked both her and the kid around. Marty had been killed in a car crash over on Route 9 in Durham. He and some of his drunk friends had tried to take the tight curve up Sirois Hill at seventy. The Camaro in which they were riding rolled over twice and burned.

  Andy had been the star of the family, but his mother had never liked him. She was a little afraid of him. When talking to friends she would say, "My Andy's a cold fish," but he was more than that. He was always tightly controlled, always buttoned up. He knew from the fifth grade on that he was going to somehow get through college and become a lawyer. Lawyers made a lot of money. Lawyers worked with logic. Logic was Andy's God.

  He saw each event as a point from which a finite number of possibilities radiated. At the end of each possibility line was another event point. And so on. This point-to-point blueprint of life had served him very well. He made straight A's through grammar school and high school, got a Merit Scholarship, and could have gone to college almost anywhere. He decided on the University of Maine, throwing away his chance at Harvard because he had already decided to start his career in Augusta, and he didn't want some piney-woodser in gumrubber boots and a lumberman's jacket throwing Harvard in his face.

  On this hot July morning, things were right on schedule.

  He put Vic Trenton's phone down. There had been no answer at the Camber telephone number. The State Police detective and Bannerman were still here, waiting for instructions like well-trained dogs. He had worked with Townsend, the State Police guy, before, and he was the sort of fellow Andy Masen felt comfortable with. When you said fetch, Townsend fetched. Bannerman was a new one, and Masen didn't care for him. His eyes were a little too bright, and the way he had suddenly come out with the idea that Kemp might have coerced the woman by using the kid . . . well, such ideas, if they were going to come, ought to come from Andy Masen. The three of them sat on the sectional sofa, not talking, just drinking coffee and waiting for the FBI guys to show up with the trace-back equipment

  Andy thought about the case. It might be a tempest in a teapot, but it might well be something more. The husband was convinced it was a kidnapping and attached no importance to the missing car. He was fixated on the idea that Steven Kemp had taken his people.

  Andy Masen was not so sure.

  Camber wasn't home; no one was home up there. Maybe they had all gone on vacation. That was likely enough; July was the quintessential vacation month, and they had been due to hit someone who was gone. Would he have taken her car in for a repair job if he was going away? Unlikely. Unlikely that the car was there at all. But it had to be checked, and there was one possibility he had neglected to mention to Vic.

  Suppose she had taken the car up to Camber's Garage? Suppose someone had offered her a lift back? Not a friend, not an acquaintance, not Camber or his wife, but a total stranger. Andy could hear Trenton saying, "Oh, no, my wife would never accept a ride from a stranger." But, in the vernacular, she had accepted several rides from Steve Kemp, who was almost a stranger. If the hypothetical man was friendly, and if she was anxious to get her son home, she might have accepted. And maybe the nice, smiling man was some kind of freak. They had had just such a freak here in Castle Rock before, Frank Dodd. Maybe the nice, smiling man had left them in the brush with their throats cut and had hied on his merry way. If that was the case, the Pinto would be at Camber's.

  Andy did not think this line of reasoning likely, but it was possible. He would have sent a man up to the Cambers' anyway--it was routine--but he liked to understand why he was doing each thing he was doing. He thought that, for all practical purposes, he could dismiss Camber's Garage from the structure of logic and order he was building. He supposed she could have gone up there, discovered the Cambers were gone, and then had her car conk out on her, but Castle Rock's Town Road No. 3 was hardly Antarctica. She and the kid had only to walk to the nearest house and ask to use the phone in that case, but they hadn't done it.

  "Mr. Townsend," he said in his soft voice. "You and Sheriff Bannerman here ought to take a ride out to this Joe Camber's Garage. Verify three things: no blue Pinto there, license number 218-864, no Donna and Theodore Trenton there, no Cambers there. Got that?"

  "Fine," Townsend said. "Do you want--"

  "I want only those three things," Andy said softly. He didn't like the way Bannerman was looking at him, with a kind of weary contempt. It upset him. "If any of those three are there, call me here. And if I'm not here, I'll leave a number. Understand?"

  The telephone rang. Bannerman picked it up, listened, and offered it to Andy Masen. "For you, hotshot."

  Their eyes locked over the telephone. Masen thought that Bannerman would drop his, but he didn't. After a moment Andy took the phone. The call was from the State Police barracks in Scarborough. Steve Kemp had been picked up. His van had been spotted in the courtyard of a small motel in the Massachusetts town of Twickenham. The woman and the boy were not with him. After receiving the Miranda, Kemp had given his name and had since been standing on his right to remain silent.

  Andy Masen found that extremely ominous news.

  "Townsend, you come with me," he said. "You can handle the Camber place by yourself, can't you, Sheriff Bannerman?"

  "It's my town," Bannerman said.

  Andy Masen lit a cigarette a
nd looked at Bannerman through the shifting smoke. "Have you got a problem with me, Sheriff?"

  Bannerman smiled. "Nothing I can't handle."

  Christ, I hate these hicks, Masen thought, watching Bannerman leave. But he's out of the play now, anyway. Thank God for small favors.

  Bannerman got behind the wheel of his cruiser, fired it up, and backed out of the Trenton driveway. It was twenty minutes after seven. He was almost amused at how neatly Masen had shunted him off onto a siding. They were headed toward the heart of the matter; he was headed nowhere. But ole Hank Townsend was going to have to listen to a whole morning's worth of Masen's bullshit, so maybe he had gotten off well at that.

  George Bannerman loafed out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, siren and flashers off. It surely was a pretty day. And he saw no need to hurry.

  Donna and Tad Trenton were sleeping.

  Their positions were very similar: the awkward sleeping positions of those forced to spend long hours on interstate buses. Their heads lolled against the sockets of their shoulders, Donna's turned to the left, Tad's to the right. Tad's hands lay in his lap like beached fish. Now and again they would twitch. His breathing was harsh and stertorous. His lips were blistered, his eyelids a purplish color. A line of spittle running from the corner of his mouth to the soft line of his jaw had begun to dry.

  Donna was in middle sleep. As exhausted as she was, her cramped position and the pain in her leg and belly and now her fingers (in his seizure Tad had bitten them to the bone) would let her sink no deeper. Her hair clung to her head in sweaty strings. The gauze pads on her left leg had soaked through again, and the flesh around the superficial wounds on her belly had gone an ugly red. Her breathing was also harsh, but not as uneven as Tad's.

  Tad Trenton was very close to the end of his endurance. Dehydration was well advanced. He had lost electrolytes, chlorides, and sodium through his perspiration. Nothing had replaced them. His inner defenses were being steadily rolled back, and now he had entered the final critical stage. His life had grown light, not sunken firmly into his flesh and bones but trembling, ready to depart on any puff of wind.

  In his feverish dreams his father pushed him on the swing, higher and higher, and he did not see their back yard but the duckpond, and the breeze was cool on his sunburned forehead, his aching eyes, his blistered lips.