A Good Marriage by Stephen King Page B

Ramsey looked both sick and in pain, but his eyes were sharp. They moved quickly to the left and right, taking in everything before returning to her face.
    Be careful, she told herself. Be oh so careful of this one, Darcellen.
    “How can I help you, Mr. Ramsey?”
    “Well, one thing—if it’s not too much to ask—I could sure use a cup of coffee. I’m awfully cold. I’ve got a State car, and the heater doesn’t work worth a darn. Of course if it’s an imposition . . .”
    “Not at all. But I wonder . . . could I see your identification again?”
    He handed the folder over to her equably enough, and hung his hat on the coat tree while she studied it.
    “This RET stamped below the seal . . . does that mean you’re retired?”
    “Yes and no.” His lips parted in a smile that revealed teeth too perfect to be anything but dentures. “Had to go, at least officially, when I turned sixty-eight, but I’ve spent my whole life either in the State Police or working at SAG—State Attorney General’s Office, you know—and now I’m like an old firehorse with an honorary place in the barn. Kind of a mascot, you know.”
    I think you’re a lot more than that .
    “Let me take your coat.”
    “No, nope, I think I’ll wear it. Won’t be staying that long. I’d hang it up if it was snowing outside—so I wouldn’t drip on your floor—but it’s not. It’s just boogery cold, you know. Too cold to snow, my father would have said, and at my age I feel the cold a lot more than I did fifty years ago. Or even twenty-five.”
    Leading him into the kitchen, walking slowly so Ramsey could keep up, she asked him how old he was.
    “Seventy-eight in May.” He spoke with evident pride. “If I make it. I always add that for good luck. It’s worked so far. What a nice kitchen you have, Mrs. Anderson—a place for everything and everything in its place. My wife would have approved. She died four years ago. It was a heart attack, verysudden. How I miss her. The way you must miss your husband, I imagine.”
    His twinkling eyes—young and alert in creased, pain-haunted sockets—searched her face.
    He knows. I don’t know how, but he does.
    She checked the Bunn’s basket and turned it on. As she got cups from the cabinet, she asked, “How may I help you today, Mr. Ramsey? Or is it Detective Ramsey?”
    He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “Oh, it’s been donkey’s years since anyone called me Detective. Never mind Ramsey, either, if you go straight to Holt, that’ll work for me. And it was really your husband I wanted to talk to, you know, but of course he’s passed on—again, my condolences—and so that’s out of the question. Yep, entirely out of the question.” He shook his head and settled himself on one of the stools that stood around the butcher-block table. His topcoat rustled. Somewhere inside his scant body, a bone creaked. “But I tell you what: an old man who lives in a rented room—which I do, although it’s a nice one—sometimes gets bored with just the TV for company, and so I thought, what the hell, I’ll drive on down to Yarmouth and ask my few little questions just the same. She won’t be able to answer many of them, I said to myself, maybe not any of them, but why not go anyway? You need to get out before you get potbound, I said to myself.”
    “On a day when the high is supposed to go all the way up to ten degrees,” she said. “In a State car with a bad heater.”
    “Ayuh, but I have my thermals on,” he said modestly.
    “Don’t you have your own car, Mr. Ramsey?”
    “I do, I do,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him until now. “Come sit down, Mrs. Anderson. No need to lurk in the corner. I’m too old to bite.”
    “No, the coffee will be ready in a minute,” she said. She was afraid of this old man. Bob should have been afraid of him, too, but of course Bob was now beyond fear. “In the meantime, perhaps you can tell me what you wanted to talk about with my