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.
I walked along Kansas Street, so deep in thought that at first I didn’t realize there were no more houses on my right. The ground now dropped away steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called the Barrens. Only a rickety white fence separated the sidewalk from the drop. I planted my hands on it, staring into the undisciplined growth below. I could see gleams of murky standing water, patches of reeds so tall they looked prehistoric, and snarls of billowing brambles. The trees would be stunted down there, fighting for sunlight. There would be poison ivy, litters of garbage, and quite likely the occasional hobo camp. There would also be paths only some of the local kids would know. The adventurous ones.
I stood and looked without seeing, aware but hardly registering the faint lilt of music—something with horns in it. I was thinking about how little I had accomplished this morning. You can change the past, Al had told me, but it’s not as easy as you might think.
What was that music? Something cheery, with a little jump to it. It made me think of Christy, back in the early days, when I was besotted with her. When we were besotted with each other. Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum… Glenn Miller, maybe?
I had gone to the library hoping to get a look at the census records. The last national one would have taken place eight years ago, in 1950, and would have shown three of the four Dunning kids: Troy, Arthur, and Harold. Only Ellen, who would be seven at the time of the murders, hadn’t been around to be counted in 1950. There would be an address. It was true the family might have moved in the intervening eight years, but if so, one of the neighbors would be able to tell me where they’d gone. It was a small city.
Only the census records weren’t there. The librarian, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Starrett, told me that in her opinion those records certainly belonged in the library, but the town council had for some reason decided they belonged in City Hall. They’d been moved there in 1954, she said.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I told her, smiling. “You know what they say—you can’t fight City Hall.”
Mrs. Starrett didn’t return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I’d met in this queer place—Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Amberson. There’s nothing private about the United States Census. You march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you. Her name is Marcia Guay. She’ll help you out. Although they probably stored them in the basement, which is not where they ought to be. It’s damp, and I shouldn’t be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble—any trouble at all—you come back and see me.”
So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost all of the other documents that had been stored in the City Hall basement.
“We had terrible rains last year,” she said. “They went on for a whole week. The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town—that’s what the oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson—everything in the Low Town flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved, and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I’m awfully sorry.”
It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, Hey Tugga, wait up?