Read Online A Good Marriage by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I’ll always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb—illiterate, anyway—and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and thatwas as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”
    He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men . It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.
    “You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it—at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that—but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual . . . well . . . acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of . . . I don’t know . . . go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing.”
    Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.
    “And now . . . everything’s in Darcellen’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built . . . modest as it would look to some people, I guess . . . I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”
    “You stopped,” she said.
    He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”
    Sixteen, she thought but didn’t say.
    “For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground—although that was mostly you—I was racing around New England doing taxes and setting up foundations—”
    “You were the one who made it work,” she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. “You were the one with the expertise.”
    He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. “Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than one.”
    He cleared his throat.
    “For a dozen years, BD never made a peep. I thought he was gone. I honestly did. But then he came back. Like a ghost.” He seemed to consider this, then nodded his head very slowly. “That’s what he is. A ghost, a bad one. He started pointing out women when I was traveling. ‘Look at that one, she wants to make sure you see her nipples, but if you touched them she’d call the police and then laugh with her friends when they took you away. Look at that one, licking her lips with her tongue, she knows you’d like her to put it in your mouth and she knows you know she never will. Look at that one, showing off her pantieswhen she gets out of her car, and if you think that’s an accident, you’re an idiot. She’s just one more snoot who thinks she’ll never get what she deserves.’”
    He stopped, his eyes once more dark and downcast. In them was the Bobby who had successfully evaded her for twenty-seven years. The one he was trying to pass off as a ghost.
    “When I started to have those urges, I fought them. There are magazines . . . certain magazines . . . I bought them before we got married, and I thought if I did that again . . . or certain sites on the Internet . . . I thought I could . . . I don’t know . . . substitute fantasy for reality, I guess you’d say