“No,” Gregor said. “He would have known better than to turn it off.”
“We really have to go,” Clara Walsh said. “If this press conference turns into a brawl, we’re going to be in more trouble than we are now.”
Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came up with Stewart Gordon’s surprise, still in its clear plastic freezer bag. Jerry Young blinked. Don Hecklewhite leaned forward. Clara Walsh blanched. Only Bram Winder had no reaction at all, and he wasn’t paying attention.
Gregor handed the gun to Jerry Young, since he was technically the man in charge of the investigation. “Anna-beth Falmer found that in her couch this afternoon,” he said. “You’d better get it checked out. It was the same couch Arrow Normand was collapsed onto the day Mark Anderman was murdered, but I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t Arrow Normand who brought it into the house.”
Chapter Six
1
In the first few moments after waking up, Jack Bullard thought he was in his bed at home. Then, when that didn’t work—the light was all wrong; the windows were too large and horizontally rectangular; the colors were sickly and green—he wondered if he had ended up in the bed of some girl. There used to be a lot of girls when Jack was younger. That was especially true in high school. Margaret’s Harbor was like a lot of places where the local community lived hand in glove with people much richer and more sophisticated than they were themselves. Advancement fever had infected it, and that meant that the local high schools were full of year-round kids with dreams of going off to the Ivy League, or something close. It was not “cool” to be stupid at Margaret’s Harbor High School, even though the school served the whole island instead of any one town, and it was full of fishermen’s children who resented the hell out of the entire system. No, the biggest status symbol at MHHS was an acceptance letter to someplace “good,” and until you were in your senior year and had one, the assumption was that you were “smart” enough to get one. Jack had always been smart enough. He had always had a place at the best table in the lunchroom, and the attention of the best girls, who were all “smart” enough too. There were dumb blondes at MHHS, and even cheerleaders, but nobody ever took them seriously.
One of the reasons Jack thought he might be waking up with a girl was that there was a girl in the room, over by the windows, standing with her back to him, looking out. Jack wished that he could concentrate, or even make himself sit up. He had what felt like the mother of all hangovers. It had even invaded his limbs. They all felt weak. He wasn’t certain, because he was numb all across his torso, but he was pretty sure his penis was weak too, and just lying there, which might explain why the girl was fully dressed and at the window while he was here in bed and definitely not. It had been a while since there had been hot and cold running girls in his life. College was not everything he had expected it to be. There, everybody had been “smart,” and a lot of people were smarter than he was, and a lot of them were richer, too. It was hard to compete when the girls thought it was sweet but kind of pathetic that he had never been to Europe. Jack thought that it might have been in college when he first began to realize that life was more complicated than he had expected it to be, and that he did not want to be the kind of corporation lawyer his education would best suit him for. Corporation lawyers made lots of money, but they weren’t anybody. They were as invisible as he had been most of his life, and the money did not make up for it.
He was blithering in his head. Maybe he had blithered to this girl, and that was why she had gotten out of bed and left him alone in it. He wished he could think. He wished his head weren’t pounding. He wished a lot of things, the most urgent of which seemed to be that he had been able to explain it all to his mother before she died. His mother had not approved of any of the girls he had gone out with in high school. She was always afraid he would get one of them pregnant and ruin everything.
The girl at the window turned, and Jack noticed a number of things at once. First, he was in a hospital room. It was a bare, blank hospital room, and from the silence all around him it seemed as if the rest of the hospital was empty. He tried to remember everything he could about the hospital in Oscartown, but there was nothing to remember. He’d spent almost no time there. He had no idea if it did a lot of business or not, if it was normal or odd that the place should be dead silent and cavernously empty. Then there was his right hand. It was bandaged up like something in an Abbott and Costello movie, into a wad that looked almost like a fighter’s glove. When he tried to move his fingers, they hurt badly enough so that he wanted to cry out in pain. He didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure why. He felt as if he were in an episode of The Twilight Zone, so that he knew that making noise would be bad for him, but he didn’t know why.