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I thought about that while the old-fashioned elevator creaked its way up to the third floor. It was
true. And if the rest of what Fred Toomey had said was also true, would anybody be surprised if
another father went to work on his family with a hammer? I thought not. I thought people would say
it was just another case of Derry being Derry. And they might be right.
As I let myself into my room, I had an authentically horrible idea: suppose I changed things just
enough in the next seven weeks so that Harry’s father killed Harry, too, instead of just leaving him
with a limp and a partially fogged-over brain?
That won’t happen, I told myself. I won’t let it happen. Like Hillary Clinton said in 2008, I’m in it to
win it.
Except, of course, she had lost.
5
I ate breakfast the following morning in the hotel’s Riverview Restaurant, which was deserted except
for me and the hardware salesman from last night. He was buried in the local newspaper. When he
left it on the table, I snagged it. I wasn’t interested in the front page, which was devoted to more
saber-rattling in the Philippines (although I did wonder briefly if Lee Oswald was in the vicinity).
What I wanted was the local section. In 2011, I’d been a reader of the Lewiston Sun Journal, and the
last page of the B section was always headed “School Doin’s.” In it, proud parents could see their kids’
names in print if they had won an award, gone on a class trip, or been part of a community cleanup
project. If the Derry Daily News had such a feature, it wasn’t impossible that I’d find one of the
Dunning kids listed.
The last page of the News, however, contained only obituaries.
I tried the sports pages, and read about the weekend’s big upcoming football game: Derry Tigers
versus Bangor Rams. Troy Dunning was fifteen, according to the janitor’s essay. A fifteen-year-old
could easily be a part of the team, although probably not a starter.
I didn’t find his name, and although I read every word of a smaller story about the town’s Peewee
Football team (the Tiger Cubs), I didn’t find Arthur “Tugga” Dunning, either.
I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed newspaper under my arm,
thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six),
something else occurred to me: I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet
society I had come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate the right
Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging Tugga Dunning and Derry into my favorite search engine
probably would have done the trick; hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother,
take care of the rest.
In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments,
and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college
—a sarcastic old bastard—who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
I went there.
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