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Now his wife began to look scared. She was holding the baby close to her chest.
“For those six hours of your time, I’ll pay you two hundred dollars.”
Cullum frowned. “What’s your game, mister?”
“I’m hoping to make it cribbage.” That, however, wasn’t going to be enough. I saw it on their faces.
“Look, I’m not going to try and kid you that there isn’t more to it, but if I tried to explain, you’d
think I was crazy.”
“I think that already,” Marnie Cullum said. “Send him on his way, Andy.”
I turned to her. “It’s nothing bad, it’s nothing illegal, it’s not a scam, and it’s not dangerous. I take
my oath on it.” But I was starting to think it wasn’t going to work, oath or no oath. It had been a bad
idea. Cullum would be doubly suspicious when he met me near the Friends’ Meeting House on the
afternoon of the fifteenth.
But I kept pushing. It was a thing I’d learned to do in Derry.
“It’s just cribbage,” I said. “You teach me the game, we play for a few hours, I give you two hundred
bucks, and we all part friends. What do you say?”
“Where are you from, Mr. Amberson?”
“Upstate in Derry, most recently. I’m in commercial real estate. Right now I’m vacationing on
Sebago Lake before heading back down south. Do you want some names? References, so to speak?” I
smiled. “People who’ll tell you I’m not nuts?”
“He goes out in the woods on Saturdays during hunting season,” Mrs. Cullum said. “It’s the only
chance he gets, because he works all week and when he gets home it’s so close to dark it doesn’t even
pay to load a gun.”
She still looked mistrustful, but now I saw something else on her face that gave me hope. When
you’re young and have a kid, when your husband works manual labor—which his chapped, callused
hands said he did—two hundred bucks can mean a lot of groceries. Or, in 1958, two and a half house
payments.
“I could miss an afternoon in the woods,” Cullum said. “Town’s pretty well hunted out, anyway.
The only place left where you can get a damn deer is Bowie Hill.”
“Watch your language around the baby, Mr. Cullum,” she said. Her tone was sharp, but she smiled
when he kissed her cheek.
“Mr. Amberson, I need to talk to m’wife,” Cullum said. “Do you mind standing on the stoop for a
minute or two?”
“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll go down to Brownie’s and get myself a dope.” That was what
most Derryites called sodas. “Can I bring either of you back a cold drink?”
They declined with thanks, and then Marnie Cullum closed the door in my face. I drove to
Brownie’s, where I bought an Orange Crush for myself and a licorice whip I thought the baby might
like, if she was old enough to have such things. The Cullums were going to turn me down, I thought.
With thanks, but firmly. I was a strange man with a strange proposal. I had hoped that changing the
past might be easier this time, because Al had already changed it twice. Apparently that wasn’t going
to be the case.
But I got a surprise. Cullum said yes, and his wife allowed me to give the licorice to the little girl,
who received it with a gleeful chortle, sucked on it, then ran it through her hair like a comb. They
even invited me to stay for the evening meal, which I declined. I offered Andy Cullum a fifty-dollar
retainer, which he declined . . . until his wife insisted that he take it.
I went back to Sebago feeling exultant, but as I drove back to Durham on the morning of
November fifteenth (the fields white with a frost so thick that the orange-clad hunters, who were
already out in force, left tracks), my mood had changed. He will have called the State Police or the local
constable, I thought. And while they’re questioning me in the nearest police station, trying to find out what