Free The Dark Half by Stephen King Page B

nervous, even if he is wearing a suit. ”
    â€œWhat kind of suit was he wear—” Norris began, but it was useless. Mrs. Arsenault was a fine old country talker, and she simply rolled over Norris Ridgewick with a kind of relentless grandiosity. He decided to wait her out and glean what he could along the way. He took his notebook out of his pocket.
    â€œIn a way,” she went on, “the suit almost made me more nervous. It didn’t seem right for a man to be wearing a suit at that hour, if you see what I mean. Probably you don’t, probably you think I’m just a silly old woman, and probably I am just a silly old woman, but for a minute or two before Homer come along, I had an idea that man was maybe going to come to the house, and I got up to make sure the door was locked. He looked over this way, you know, I saw him do that. I imagine he looked because he could probably see the window was still lighted even though it was late. Probably could see me, too, because the curtains are only sheers. I couldn’t really see his face—no moon out last night and I don’t believe they’ll ever get streetlights out this far, let alone cable TV, like they have in town—but I could see him turn his head. Then he did start to cross the road—at least I think that was what he was doing, or was thinking about doing, if you see what I mean—and I thought he would come and knock on the door and say his car was broke down and could he use the phone, and I was wondering what I should say if he did that, or even if I should answer the door. I suppose I am a silly old woman, because I got thinking about that Alfred Hitchcock Presents show where there was a crazyman who could just about charm the birdies down from the trees, only he’d used an axe to chop somebody all up, you know, and he put the pieces in the trunk of his car, and they only caught him because one of his taillights was out, or something like that—but the other side of it was—”
    â€œMrs. Arsenault, I wonder if I could ask—”
    â€œâ€”was that I didn’t want to be like the Philistine or Saracen or Gomorran or whoever it was that passed by on the other side of the road,” Mrs. Arsenault continued. “You know, in the story of the Good Samaritan. So I was in a little bit of a tither about it. But I said to myself—”
    By then Norris had forgotten all about sugarpeas. He was finally able to bring Mrs. Arsenault to a stop by telling her that the man she had seen might figure in what he called “an ongoing investigation.” He got her to back up to the beginning and tell him everything she had seen, leaving out Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the story of the Good Samaritan as well, if possible.
    The story as he related it over the radio to Sheriff Alan Pangborn was this: She had been watching The Tonight Show alone, her husband and the boys asleep in bed. Her chair was by the window which looked out on Route 35. The shade was up. Around twelve-thirty or twelve-forty, she had looked up and had seen a man standing on the far side of the road . . . which was to say, the Homeland Cemetery side.
    Had the man walked from that direction, or the other?
    Mrs. Arsenault couldn’t say for sure. She had an idea he might have come from the direction of Homeland, which would have meant he was heading away from town, but she couldn’t say for sure what gave her that impression, because she had looked out the window once and only seen the road, then looked out again before getting up to get her ice cream and he was there. Just standing there and looking toward the lighted window—toward her , presumably. She thought he was going to cross the road or had started to cross the road (probably just stood there, Alan thought; the rest was nothing but the woman’s nerves talking), when lights showed on the crest of the hill. When the man in the suit saw the approaching lights,