Big Driver by Stephen King Page B

wheelchairs.”
    Of course that was true. Good thinking, Fritzy.
    The cat regarded Tess with a skeptical eye and said, “But maybe you’re not right about that.”
    â€œEven if I’m not,” Tess said, “ nobody roots for psycho bad guys.”
    She recognized this for the stupidity it was as soon as it was out of her mouth. If people didn’t root for psychos, they wouldn’t still be making movies about the nut in the hockey mask and the burn victim with scissors for fingers. But Fritzy did her the courtesy of not laughing.
    â€œYou better not,” Tess said. “If you’re tempted, remember who fills your food dish.”
    She googled Ramona Norville, got forty-four thousand hits, added Chicopee, and got a more manageable twelve hundred (although even most of those, she knew, would be coincidental dreck). The first relevant one was from the Chicopee Weekly Reminder, and concerned Tess herself: LIBRARIAN RAMONA NORVILLE ANNOUNCES “WILLOW GROVE FRIDAY.”
    â€œThere I am, the starring attraction,” Tess murmured. “Hooray for Tessa Jean. Now let’s see my supporting actress.” But when she pulled up the clipping, the only photo Tess saw was her own. It was the bare-shoulders publicity shot her part-time assistant routinely sent out. She wrinkled her nose and went back to Google, not sure why she wanted to look at Ramona again, only knowing that she did. When she finally found a photo of the librarian, she saw what her subconscious might already have suspected, at least judging by Tom’s comments on the ride back to her house.
    It was in a story from the August 3 issue of the Weekly Reminder . BROWN BAGGERSANNOUNCE SPEAKING SCHEDULE FOR FALL, the headline read. Below it, Ramona Norville stood on the library steps, smiling and squinting into the sun. A bad photograph, taken by a part-timer without much talent, and a bad (but probably typical) choice of clothes on Norville’s part. The man-tailored blazer made her look as wide in the chest as a pro football tackle. Her shoes were ugly brown flatboats. A pair of too-tight gray slacks showcased what Tess and her friends back in middle school had called “thunder thighs.”
    â€œHoly fucking shit, Fritzy,” she said. Her voice was watery with dismay. “Look at this.” Fritzy didn’t come over to look and didn’t reply—how could he, when she was too upset to make his voice?
    Make sure of what you’re seeing, she told herself. You’ve had a terrible shock, Tessa Jean, maybe the biggest shock a woman can have, short of a mortal diagnosis in a doctor’s office. So make sure.
    She closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man from the old Ford pickup truck with the Bondo around the headlights. He had seemed so friendly at first. Didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?
    Only he hadn’t been green, he’d been a tanned hulk of a man who didn’t ride in his pickup but wore it.
    Ramona Norville, not a Big Driver but certainly a Big Librarian, was too old to be his sister.And if she was a lesbian now, she hadn’t always been one, because the resemblance was unmistakable.
    Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m looking at a picture of my rapist’s mother.

- 29 -
    She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn’t getting it. An old half-filled bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey’s years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more—a sip rather than a nip—and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.
    Rage—the biggest, truest rage of her adult life—had invaded her like a fever,