Christine, Page 58

  One way or another I guess we find out things we have to know.

  Around the same time--it seems as though it's around Christmas that my thoughts turn to it the most often--I dropped Rick Mercer a note, because the question had been on my mind more and more, gnawing at me. I wrote and asked him what had become of the block of scrap metal that had once been Christine.

  I got no answer.

  But time is teaching me how to deal with that too. I think about it less. I really do.

  So here I am, at the tag end of everything, old memories and old nightmares all bundled into a neat sheaf of pages. Soon I will put them in a folder and put the folder in my file cabinet and lock that drawer and that will be the end.

  But I told you there was something else, didn't I? Some other reason for writing it all down.

  His single-minded purpose. His unending fury.

  I read it in the paper a few weeks ago--just an item that got put on the AP wire because it was bizarre, I suppose. Be honest, Guilder, I can hear Arnie saying, so I will. It was that item that got me going, more than all the dreams and old memories.

  The news item was about a guy named Sander Galton, whose nickname, one would logically assume, must have been Sandy.

  This Sander Galton was killed out in California, where he was working at a drive-in movie theater in LA. He was apparently alone, closing up shop for the night after the movie had ended. He was in the snackbar. A car ripped right through one of the walls, plowed through the counter, smashed the popcorn machine, and got him as he was trying to unlock the door to the projection booth. The cops knew that was what he was doing when the car ran him down because they found the key in his hand. I read that item, headed BIZARRE MURDER BY CAR IN LOS ANGELES--and I thought of what Mercer had told me, that last thing: He said it bit him.

  Of course it's impossible, but it was all impossible to start with.

  I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.

  His sister in Colorado.

  Leigh in New Mexico.

  What if it's started again?

  What if it's working its way east, finishing the job?

  Saving me for last?

  His single-minded purpose.

  His unending fury.