So Ralph and Annie had apparently gone back to the land.
He turned the page and blinked.
Slashed into the bottom of the page was AUG 43rd 1880 FUCK YOU!
The paper, thick as it was, had tom in several places under the fury of the hand which had driven the pen.
It was the DIVORCES GRANTED column from the Nederland paper, but he had to turn it over to make sure that Annie and Ralph were a part of it. She had pasted it in upside down.
Yes, here they were. Ralph and Anne Dugan. Grounds: mental cruelty.
“Divorced after a short illness,” Paul muttered, and again looked up, thinking he heard an approaching car. The wind, only the wind… Still, he'd better get back to the safety of his room. It wasn't just the worsening pain in his legs; he was edging toward a state of terminal freak-out.
But he bent over the book again. In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it.
Annie's marriage had been dissolved in a much more legal fashion than Paul had anticipated. It seemed fair to say that the divorce really had been after a short illness - a year and a half of wedded bliss wasn't all that much.
They had bought a house in March, and that was not step you took if you felt that your marriage was falling apart. What happened? Paul didn't know. He could have made up a story, but a story was all it would have been. Then, reading the clipping again, he noticed something suggestive: Angela Ford from John Ford. Kirsten Frawley from Stanley Frawley. Danna McLaren from Lee McLaren. And…
Ralph Dugan from Anne Dugan.
There's this American custom, right? No one talks about t much, but it's there. Men propose in the moonlight; women file in court. That's not always how it works, but usually that's it. So what tale does this grammatical structure have to tell? Angela's saying “Slip out the back, Jack!” Kirsten is saying “Make a new plan, Stan!” Danna is saying “Drop off the key, Lee!” And what was Ralph, the only man who's listed first in this column, saying? I think maybe he was saying “Let me the hell out of here!”
“Maybe he saw the dead cat on the stairs,” Paul said.
Next page. Another NEW ARRIVALS article. This one was from the Boulder, Colorado, Camera. There was a photograph of a dozen new staff members standing on the lawn of the Boulder Hospital. Annie was in the second row, her face a blank white circle under her cap with its black stripe. Another opening of another show. The date underneath was March 9th, 1981. She had re-taken her maiden name.
Boulder. That was where Annie really had gone crazy.
He turned the pages faster and faster, his horror mounting, and the two thoughts which kept repeating were Why in God's name didn't they tip faster? and How in God's name did she slip through their fingers?
May 10th, 1981 - long illness. May 14th, 1981 - long illness. May 23rd - long illness. June 9th - short illness. June 15th - short. June 16th - long.
Short. Long. Long. Short. Long. Long. Short.
The pages stuttered through his fingers. He could smell the faint odor of dried paper-paste.
“Christ, how many did she kill?” If it was right to equate each obituary pasted in this book with a murder, then her score was more than thirty people by the end of 1981… all without a single murmur from the authorities. Of course most of the victims were old, the rest badly hurt, but still… you would think…
In 1982 Annie had finally stumbled. The clipping from the January 14th Camera showed her blank, stonelike face rendered in newsprint dots below a headline which read: NEW HEAD MATERNITY WARD NURSE NAMED.
On January 29th the nursery deaths had begun.
Annie had chronicled the whole story in her meticulous way. Paul had no trouble following it. If the people after your hide had found this book, Annie, you would have been in jail or some asylum - until the end of time.
The first two infant deaths had not aroused suspicion - a story on one had mentioned severe birth defects. But babies, defective or not, weren't the same as old folks dying of renal failure or car-crash victims brought in still somehow alive in spite of heads which were only half there or steering-wheel-sized holes in their guts. And then she had begun killing the healthy along with the damaged. He supposed that, in her deepening psychotic spiral, she had begun to see all of them as poor poor things.
By mid-March of 1982 there had been five nursery deaths in the Boulder Hospital. A full-scale investigation was launched. On March 24th the Camera named the probable culprit as “tainted formula”. A “reliable hospital source” was cited, and Paul wondered if perhaps the source had not been Annie Wilkes herself.
Another baby had died in April. Two in May.
Then, from the front page of the June 1st Denver Post:
No Charges Made “As Yet,” Sheriffs Office Spokeswoman Says
By Michael Leith
Anne Wilkes, the thirty-nine-year-old head nurse of the maternity ward at Boulder Hospital, is being questioned today about the deaths of eight infants - deaths which have taken place over a span of some months. All of the deaths took place following Miss Wilkes's appointment.
When asked if Miss Wilkes was under arrest, Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Tamara Kinsolving said she was not. When asked if Miss Wilkes had come in of her own free will to give information in the case, Ms. Kinsolving replied: “I would have to say that was not the case. Things are a bit more serious than that.” Asked if Wilkes had been charged with any crime, Ms. Kinsolving replied: “No. Not as yet.”
The rest of the article was a rehash of Annie's career. It was obvious that she had moved around a lot, but there was no hint that people in all of Annie's hospitals, not just the one in Boulder, had a way of croaking when she was around.
He looked at the accompanying photograph, fascinated.
Annie in custody. Dear God, Annie in custody; the idol not fallen but teetering… teetering…
She was mounting a set of stone steps in the company of a husky policewoman, her face dull, devoid of expression. She was wearing her nurse's uniform and white shoes.
Next page: WILKES RELEASED, MUM ON INTERROGATION.
She'd gotten away with it. Somehow, she'd gotten away with it. It was time for her to fade out and show up someplace else - Idaho, Utah, California, maybe. Instead, she went back to work. And instead of a NEW ARRIVALS column from somewhere farther west there was a huge headline from the Rocky Mountain News front page of July 2nd, 1982:
The Horror Continues:
Two days later the authorities arrested a Puerto Rican orderly, only to release him nine hours later. Then, on July 19th, both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News announced Annie's arrest. There had been a short preliminary hearing in early August. On September 9th she went on trial for the murder of Girl Christopher, a female child one day of age. Behind Girl Christopher were seven other counts of first-degree murder. The article noted that some of Annie's alleged victims had even lived long enough to be given real names.
Interspersed among the accounts of the trial were Letters to the Editor printed in the Denver and Boulder newspapers.
Paul understood that Annie had been driven to cull only the most hostile ones - those which reinforced her jaundiced view of mankind as Homo brattus - but they were vituperative by any standards. There seemed to be a consensus: hanging was too good for Annie Wilkes. One correspondent dubbed her the Dragon Lady, and the name stuck for the duration of the trial. Most seemed to feel that the Dragon Lady should be jabbed to death with hot forks, and most indicated they would be very willing to serve as a jabber.