Misery Chastain was dead. Paul Sheldon had just killed her — with relief, with joy. Misery had made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wanted to get on to some real writing. That’s when the car accident happened, and he woke up in pain in a strange bed. But it wasn’t the hospital.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
but in a white dress frothing with lace. Beside her, holding her hands in his, was a man named Ralph Dugan. Dugan was a physical therapist. DUGAN-WILKES NUPTIALS, the clipping was headed. Rocky Mountain News, January 2nd, 1979. Dugan was quite unremarkable save for one thing: he looked like Annie’s father. Paul thought if you shaved off Dugan’s singles-bar moustache — which she had probably gotten him to do as soon as the honeymoon was over — the resemblance would be just short of uncanny.
Paul thumbed the thickness of the remaining pages in Annie’s book and thought Ralph Dugan should have checked his horoscope whoops, make that horrorscope — the day he proposed to Annie.
I think the chances are very good that somewhere up ahead in these untumed pages I am going to find a brief article about you. Some people have appointments in Samarra; I think you may well have had one with a pile of laundry or a dead cat on a flight of stairs. A dead cat with a cute name.
But he was wrong. The next clipping was a NEW ARRIVALS from the Nederland newspaper. Nederland was a small town just west of Boulder. Not all that far from here, Paul judged. For a moment he couldn’t find Annie in the short, name-filled clipping, and then realized he was looking for the wrong name. She was here, but had become part of a socio-sexual corporation called “Mr and Mrs Ralph Dugan”.
Paul’s head snapped up. Was that a car coming? No… just the wind. Surely the wind. He looked back down at Annie’s book.
Ralph Dugan had gone back to helping the lame, the halt, and the blind at Arapahoe County Hospital; presumably Annie went back to that time-honored nurse’s job of giving aid and comfort to the grievously wounded.
Now the killing starts, he thought. The only real question is about Ralph: does he come at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end?
But he was wrong again. Instead of an obit, the next clipping showed a Xerox of a realtor’s one-sheet. In the upper left corner of the ad was a photo of a house. Paul recognized it only by the attached barn — he had, after all, never seen the house itself from the outside.
Beneath, in Annie’s neat firm hand: Earnest money paid March 3rd, 1979. Papers passed March 18th, 1979.
Retirement home? Paul doubted it. Summer place? No; they couldn’t afford the luxury. So…?
Well, maybe it was just a fantasy, but try this. Maybe she really loves old Ralph Dugan. Maybe a year has passed and she still can’t smell cockadoodie on him. Something has sure changed; there have been no obituaries since — He flicked back to see.
Since Laura Rothberg in September 1978. She stopped killing around the same time she met Ralph. But that was then and this is now; now the pressure is starting to build up again. The depressive interludes are coming back. She looks at the old people… the terminally ill… and she thinks about what poor poor things they are, and maybe she thinks, It’s this environment that’s depressing me. The miles of tiled corridor and the smells and the squeak of crepe-soled shoes and the sounds of people in pain. If I could get out of this place I’d be all right.
So Ralph and Annie had apparently gone back to the land.
He turned the page and blinked.
Slashed into the bottom of the page was AUG 43rd 1880 FUCK YOU!
The paper, thick as it was, had tom in several places under the fury of the hand which had driven the pen.
It was the DIVORCES GRANTED column from the Nederland paper, but he had to turn it over to make sure that Annie and Ralph were a part of it. She had pasted it in upside down.
Yes, here they were. Ralph and Anne Dugan. Grounds: mental cruelty.
“Divorced after a short illness,” Paul muttered, and again looked up, thinking he heard an approaching car. The wind, only the wind… Still, he’d better get back to the safety of his room. It wasn’t just the worsening pain in his legs; he was edging toward a state of terminal freak-out.
But he bent over the book again. In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it.
Annie’s marriage had been dissolved in a much more legal fashion than Paul had anticipated. It seemed fair to say that the divorce really had been after a short illness — a year and a half of wedded bliss wasn’t all that much.
They had bought a house in March, and that was not step you took if you felt that your marriage was falling apart. What happened? Paul didn’t know. He could have made up a story, but a story was all it would have been. Then, reading the clipping again, he noticed something suggestive: Angela Ford from John Ford. Kirsten Frawley from Stanley Frawley. Danna McLaren from Lee McLaren. And…
Ralph Dugan from Anne Dugan.
There’s this American custom, right? No one
