The Dark Half by Stephen King

he had cocked his thumb in the timeless, stateless gesture of the hitchhiker.
    â€œIt was Homer’s truck, all right, and Homer at the wheel,” Mrs. Arsenault told Norris Ridgewick. “At first I thought he’d just go on by, like any normal person who sees a hitchhiker in the middle of the night, but then his taillights flashed on and that man ran up to the passenger side of the cab and got in. ”
    Mrs. Arsenault, who was forty-six and looked twenty years older, shook her white head.
    â€œHomer must have been lit to pick up a hitchhiker that late,” she told Norris. “Lit or simple-minded, and I’ve known Homer almost thirty-five years. He ain’t simple. ”
    She paused for thought.
    â€œWell. . . not very. ”
    Norris tried to get a few more details from Mrs. Arsenault on the suit the man had been wearing, but had no luck. He thought it really was sort of a pity that the streetlamps ended at the Homeland Cemetery grounds, but small towns like The Rock had only so much money to do with.
    It had been a suit, she was sure of that, not a sport-coat or a man’s jacket, and it hadn’t been black, but that left quite a spectrum of colors to choose from. Mrs. Arsenault didn’t think the hitchhiker’s suit had been pure white, but all she was willing to swear to was that it hadn’t been black.
    â€œI’m not actually asking you to swear, Mrs. A.,” Norris said.
    â€œWhen a body’s speaking with an officer of the law on official business,” Mrs. A. replied, folding her hands primly into the arms of her sweater, “it comes to the same thing. ”
    So what she knew boiled down to this: she had seen Homer Gamache pick up a hitchhiker at about quarter to one in the morning. Nothing to call in the FBI about, you would have said. It only got ominous when you added in the fact that Homer had picked up his passenger three miles or less from his own dooryard . . . but hadn’t arrived home.
    Mrs. Arsenault was right about the suit, too. Seeing a hitchhiker this far out in the boonies in the middle of the night was odd enough—by quarter of one, any ordinary drifter would have laid up in a deserted barn or some farmer’s shed—but when you added in the fact that be had also been wearing a suit and a tie (“Some dark color,” Mrs. A. said, “just don’t ask me to swear what dark color, because I can’t, and I won’t”), it got less comfortable all the time.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do next?” Norris had asked over the radio once his report was complete.
    â€œStay where you are,” Alan said. “Swap Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories with Mrs. A. until I get there. I always used to like those myself. ”
    But before he had gone half a mile, the location of the meeting between himself and his officer had been changed from the Arsenault place to a spot about a mile west of there. A boy named Frank Gavineaux, walking home from a little early fishing down at Strimmer’s Brook, had seen a pair of legs protruding from the high weeds on the south side of Route 35. He ran home and told his mother. She had called the Sheriff’s Office. Sheila Brigham relayed the message to Alan Pangborn and Norris Ridgewick. Sheila maintained protocol and mentioned no names on the air—too many little pitchers with big Cobras and Bearcats were always listening in on the police bands—but Alan could tell by the upset tone of Sheila’s voice that even she had a good idea who those legs belonged to.
    About the only good thing which had happened all morning was that Norris had finished emptying his stomach before Alan got there, and had maintained enough wit to throw up on the north side of the road, away from the body and any evidence there might be around it.
    â€œWhat now?” Norris asked, interrupting the run of his thoughts.
    Alan sighed heavily and quit waving the flies away from