One of the people I spoke to was Doris Dunning. Pretty as a picture, Chaz Frati had said. A generally meaningless cliché, but true in this case. The years had put fine lines around her eyes and deeper ones at the corners of her mouth, but she had exquisite skin and a terrific full-breasted figure (in 1958, the heyday of Jayne Mansfield, full breasts are considered attractive rather than embarrassing). We spoke on the stoop. To invite me in with the house empty and the kids at school would have been improper and no doubt the subject of neighborly gossip, especially with her husband “living out.” She had a dustrag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a bottle of furniture polish poking out of her apron pocket. Like most folks in Derry, she was polite but distant.

Yes, she said, when it was still up and running, West Side Rec had been a fine facility for the kiddos. It was so nice to have a place like that close by where they could go after school and race around to their hearts’ content. She could see the playground and the basketball court from her kitchen window, and it was very sad to see them empty. She said she thought the Rec had been closed in a round of budget cuts, but the way her eyes shifted and her mouth tucked in suggested something else to me: that it had been closed during the round of child-murders and disappearances.

Budget concerns might have been secondary.

I thanked her and handed her one of my recently printed business cards. She took it, gave me a distracted smile, and closed the door. It was a gentle close, not a slam, but I heard a rattle from behind it and knew she was putting on the chain.

I thought the Rec might do for my purposes when Halloween came, although I didn’t completely love it. I anticipated no problems getting inside, and one of the front windows would give me a fine view of the street. Dunning might come in his car rather than on foot, but I knew what it looked like. It would be after dark, according to Harry’s essay, but there were streetlights.

Of course, that visibility thing cut both ways. Unless he was totally fixated on what he’d come to do, Dunning would almost certainly see me running at him. I had the pistol, but it was only dead accurate up to fifteen yards. I’d need to be even closer before I dared risk a shot, because on Halloween night, Kossuth Street was sure to be alive with pint-sized ghosts and goblins. Yet I couldn’t wait until he actually got in the house before breaking cover, because according to the essay, Doris Dunning’s estranged husband had gone to work right away. By the time Harry came out of the bathroom, all of them were down and all but Ellen were dead. If I waited, I was apt to see what Harry had seen: his mother’s brains soaking into the couch.

I hadn’t traveled across more than half a century to save just one of them. And so what if he saw me coming? I was the man with the gun, he was the man with the hammer—probably filched from the tool drawer at his boardinghouse. If he ran at me, that would be good. I’d be like a rodeo clown, distracting the bull. I’d caper and yell until he got in range, then put two in his chest.

Assuming I was able to pull the trigger, that was.

And assuming the gun worked. I’d test-fired it in a gravel pit on the outskirts of town, and it seemed fine . . . but the past is obdurate.

It doesn’t want to change.

4

Upon further consideration, I thought there might be an even better location for my Halloween-night stakeout. I’d need a little luck, but maybe not too much. God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, bartender Fred Toomey had said on my first night in Derry. My explorations had borne that out. In the wake of the murders (and the big flood of ’57, don’t forget that), it seemed that half the town was for sale. In a less standoffish burg, a supposed real-estate buyer like myself probably would have been given a key to the city and a wild weekend with Miss Derry by now.

One street I hadn’t checked out was Wyemore Lane, a block south of Kossuth Street. That meant the Wyemore backyards would abut on Kossuth backyards. It couldn’t hurt to check.

Though 206 Wyemore, the house directly behind the Dunnings’, was occupied, the one next to it on the left—202—looked like an answered prayer. The gray paint was fresh and the shingles were new, but the shutters were closed up tight. On the freshly raked lawn was a yellow-and-green sign I’d seen all over town: FOR SALE BY DERRY HOME REAL ESTATE SPECIALISTS. This one invited me to call Specialist Keith Haney and discuss financing. I had no intention of doing that, but I parked my Sunliner in the newly asphalted driveway (someone was going all-out to sell this one) and walked into the backyard, head up, shoulders back, big as Billy-be-damned. I had discovered many things while exploring my new environment, and one of them was that if you acted like you belonged in a certain place, people thought you did.

The backyard was nicely mowed, the leaves raked away to showcase the velvety green. A push lawnmower had been stored under the garage overhang with a swatch of green tarpaulin tucked neatly over the rotary blades. Beside the cellar bulkhead was a doghouse with a sign on it that showed Keith Haney at his don’t-miss-a-trick best: YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE. Inside was a pile of unused leaf-bags with a garden trowel and a pair of hedge clippers to hold them down. In 2011, the tools would have been locked away; in 1958, someone had taken care to see they were out of the rain and called it good. I was sure the house was locked, but that was okay. I had no interest in breaking and entering.

At the far end of 202 Wyemore’s backyard was a hedge about six feet tall. Not quite as tall as I was, in other words, and although it was luxuriant, a man could force his way through easily enough if he didn’t mind a few scratches. Best of all, when I walked down to the far right corner, which was behind the garage, I was able to look on a diagonal into the backyard of the Dunning house. I saw two bicycles. One was a boy’s Schwinn, leaning on its kickstand. The other, lying on its side like a dead pony, was Ellen Dunning’s. There was no mistaking the training wheels.

There was also a litter of toys. One of them was Harry Dunning’s Daisy air rifle.

5

If you’ve ever acted in an amateur stage company—or directed student theatricals, which I had several times while at LHS—you’ll know what the days leading up to Halloween were like for me. At first, rehearsals have a lazy feel. There’s improvisation, joking, horseplay, and a good deal of flirting as sexual polarities are established. If someone flubs a line or misses a cue in those early rehearsals, it’s an occasion for laughter. If an actor shows up fifteen minutes late, he or she might get a mild reprimand, but probably nothing more.

Then opening night begins to seem like an actual possibility instead of a foolish dream.

Improv falls away. So does the horseplay, and although the jokes remain, the laughter that greets them has a nervous energy that was missing before. Flubbed lines and missed cues begin to seem exasperating rather than amusing. An actor arriving late for rehearsal once the sets are up and opening night is only days away is apt to get a serious reaming from the director.