“The father of this boy, Dorsey . . . he didn’t kill any of the others?”

“Naw, he was alibi’d up. I guess he was the kid’s stepfather, now that I think about it. Dicky Macklin. Johnny Keeson at the desk—he probably checked you in—told me he used to come in here and drink sometimes, until he got banned for trying to pick up a stewardess and getting nasty when she told him to go peddle his papers. After that I guess he did his drinking at the Spoke or the Bucket. They’ll have anybody in those places.”

He leaned over close enough for me to smell the Aqua Velva on his cheeks.

“You want to know the worst?”

I didn’t, but thought I ought to. So I nodded.

“There was also an older brother in that fucked-up family. Eddie. He disappeared last June.

Just poof. Gone, no forwarding, if you dig what I’m saying. Some people think he ran off to get away from Macklin, but anybody with any sense knows he would have turned up in Portland or Castle Rock or Portsmouth if that was the case—no way a ten-year-old can stay out of sight for long. Take it from me, Eddie Corcoran got the hammer just like his little brother. Macklin just won’t own up to it.” He grinned, a sudden and sunny grin that made his moon face almost handsome.

“Have I talked you out of buying real estate in Derry yet, mister?”

“That’s not up to me,” I said. I was flying on autopilot by then. Hadn’t I heard or read about a series of child-murders in this part of Maine? Or maybe watched it on TV, with only a quarter of my brain turned on while the rest of it was waiting for the sound of my problematic wife walking—

or staggering—up to the house after another “girls’ night out”? I thought so, but the only thing I remembered for sure about Derry was that there was going to be a flood in the mid-eighties that would destroy half the town.

“It’s not?”

“No, I’m just the middleman.”

“Well, good luck to you. This town isn’t as bad as it was—last July, folks were strung as tight as Doris Day’s chastity belt—but it’s still a long way from right. I’m a friendly guy, and I like friendly people. I’m splitting.”

“Good luck to you, too,” I said, and dropped two dollars on the bar.

“Gee, sir, that’s way too much!”

“I always pay a surcharge for good conversation.” Actually, the surcharge was for a friendly face. The conversation had been disquieting.

“Well, thanks!” He beamed, then stuck out his hand. “I never introduced myself. Fred Toomey.”

“Nice to meet you, Fred. I’m George Amberson.” He had a good grip. No talcum powder.

“Want a piece of advice?”

“Sure.”

“While you’re in town, be careful about talking to kids. After last summer, a strange man talking to kids is apt to get a visit from the police if people see him doing it. Or he could take a beating. That sure wouldn’t be out of the question.”

“Even without the clown suit, huh?”

“Well, that’s the thing about dressing up in an outfit, isn’t it?” His smile was gone. Now he looked pale and grim. Like everyone else in Derry, in other words. “When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.” 4

I thought about that while the old-fashioned elevator creaked its way up to the third floor. It was true. And if the rest of what Fred Toomey had said was also true, would anybody be surprised if another father went to work on his family with a hammer? I thought not. I thought people would say it was just another case of Derry being Derry. And they might be right.

As I let myself into my room, I had an authentically horrible idea: suppose I changed things just enough in the next seven weeks so that Harry’s father killed Harry, too, instead of just leaving him with a limp and a partially fogged-over brain?

That won’t happen, I told myself. I won’t let it happen. Like Hillary Clinton said in 2008, I’m in it to win it.

Except, of course, she had lost.

5

I ate breakfast the following morning in the hotel’s Riverview Restaurant, which was deserted except for me and the hardware salesman from last night. He was buried in the local newspaper. When he left it on the table, I snagged it. I wasn’t interested in the front page, which was devoted to more saber-rattling in the Philippines (although I did wonder briefly if Lee Oswald was in the vicinity). What I wanted was the local section. In 2011, I’d been a reader of the Lewiston Sun Journal, and the last page of the B section was always headed “School Doin’s.” In it, proud parents could see their kids’ names in print if they had won an award, gone on a class trip, or been part of a community cleanup project. If the Derry Daily News had such a feature, it wasn’t impossible that I’d find one of the Dunning kids listed.

The last page of the News, however, contained only obituaries.

I tried the sports pages, and read about the weekend’s big upcoming football game: Derry Tigers versus Bangor Rams. Troy Dunning was fifteen, according to the janitor’s essay. A fifteen-year-old could easily be a part of the team, although probably not a starter.

I didn’t find his name, and although I read every word of a smaller story about the town’s Peewee Football team (the Tiger Cubs), I didn’t find Arthur “Tugga” Dunning, either.

I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed newspaper under my arm, thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six), something else occurred to me: I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate the right Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging Tugga Dunning and Derry into my favorite search engine probably would have done the trick; hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother, take care of the rest.

In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college—a sarcastic old bastard—who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

I went there.

6

Late that afternoon, hopes dashed (at least for the time being), I walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, pausing briefly at the intersection of Jackson and Witcham to look at the sewer drain where a little boy named George Denbrough had lost his arm and his life (at least according to Fred Toomey). By the time I got to the top of the hill, my heart was pounding and I was puffing. It wasn’t being out of shape; it was the stench of the mills.

I was dispirited and a bit scared. It was true that I still had plenty of time to locate the right Dunning family, and I was confident I would—if calling all the Dunnings in the phone book was what it took, that was what I’d do, even at the risk of alerting Harry’s time bomb of a father—but I was starting to sense what Al had sensed: something working against me.