Hour Game

She kept shaking her head at the memory of it. "I've never felt so helpless like that before, Sean. I've never encountered a man that strong before. It was like he was possessed by something not of this world."

"I think he was," replied King.

All of which brought King to where he was right now, sitting at his desk and wondering what Eddie had meant by his last words while lying bleeding on that hill.

"Just one tick off, man." The five words beat into his head, and he couldn't get rid of them. He finally rose from his desk and drove over to the Battles'. Remmy was home, Mason told him.

There were several pieces of luggage stacked in the foyer.

"Someone going on a trip?" asked King.

" Sava

Lucky her, thought King as Mason led him down the hallway.

Remmy seemed a very pale version of her former self. She was sipping from her cup of coffee. King felt certain it was actually nine-tenths Mr. Beam.

"I hear Sava

"Yes, but she said she might come back for Christmas," the mother said hopefully.

Or not,thought King.

"Is Dorothea out of rehab?"

"Yes. She's back next door. I'm going to help her with her money problems."

"That's good to know. No reason not to spread the wealth. And she is family. The police no longer suspect her in Kyle's death?"

"I don't think they do. I doubt they'll ever solve that."

"You never know."

Neither said a word about Eddie. What was there to say anyway?

King was anxious to leave, so he decided to just get to it. "Remmy, I came here to ask you one question. It's about a former employee of yours, Billy Edwards?"

She looked at him sharply. "The mechanic?"

"That's right."

"What's the question?"

"I need the exact date when he left."

"The payroll records will show that."

"I was hoping you'd say that." He looked at her expectantly.

"Do you want them now?"

"Right now."

When she returned with them, King had turned to leave but then something made him stop.

He stared down at the meticulously groomed and attired Remington Battle sitting there in a beautiful old chair, the epitome of the aristocratic southern grande dame.

She glanced up. "Is there something else?" she asked him coldly.

"Was it worth it?"

"Was what worth it?"

"Being Bobby Battle's wife. Was it worth losing both your sons?"

"How dare you!" she said sharply. "Do you realize the hell I've been through?"

"Yeah, it's really been a piece of cake for me too. Why don't you try answering my question?"

"Why should I?" she retorted.

"Call it a gracious act by a refined and dignified lady."

"Your sarcasm is absolutely lost on me."

"Then let me lay it straight out for you. Bobby Jr. was your child. How could you just let him die?"

"It wasn't like that!" she said, her voice rising. "You think it was an either/ or choice? You think I didn't love my son?"

"Words are easy, it's the actions that are hard, Remmy. Like standing up to your husband. Like telling him you didn't give a shit where he got the disease but that your son was getting treatment for it. It's not like it's that hard to diagnose, even back then. You put the kid on penicillin and chances are extremely good you'd have both your sons in your life right now. Did you ever think about it in those terms?"

Remmy started to say something and then stopped. She set her cup of coffee down and folded her hands in her lap.

"Maybe I wasn't as strong back then as I am now." King saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. "But I finally did make the right decision. I took Bobby Jr. to all sorts of specialists."

"But it was too late."

"Yes," Remmy said quietly. "And then the cancer came. And he just couldn't fight it off." She brushed at her tears, reached for her coffee but then stopped and looked up at him.

"Everyone has to make choices in life, Sean," she said.

"And lots of people make the wrong choices."

Remmy seemed about to make some biting comment, but King stopped her cold when he took a photo off the shelf and held it up. It was of Eddie and Bobby Jr. as children. She suddenly put a hand to her mouth as though to stifle a sob. She looked at him, the tears sliding down her cheeks now. "Bobby was a very different man when we first married. Maybe that's the one I was clinging to, hoping he'd come back."

King put the photo back. "I think any man who lets his own son die without lifting a hand to save him isn't a man worth waiting for."

He walked out and never looked back.

As King came outside, he saw a driver was loading Sava

She said, "I wanted to see you before I left. I heard some of what you said to my mother. I wasn't eavesdropping. I was just passing by."

"Frankly, I don't know whether to pity or loathe her."

She stared at the house. "She always wanted to be the matriarch of this great southern family. You know, sort of a dynasty."

"She didn't quite make it," commented King.

Sava

They hugged, and King held the car door for her.

"Best of luck, Sava

"Oh, Sean, please tell Michelle thanks for everything she did."

"I will."

"And tell her I took her advice on my tattoo."

King looked at her quizzically but said nothing. He waved as the car sped off.

King drove to the Wrightsburg Gazette and unwittingly sat at the same microfiche machine that Eddie had when he broke in that night.

King raced through the spool of back issues until he found the date he was looking for, the day Edwards had been let go. He didn't find what he was searching for. Then it occurred to him that it might have happened too late to make the next day's edition. He forwarded to the day after that. He didn't have to read far. It was front-page news. He read the story carefully, sat back and then finally laid his head down on the desk as his mind began to creep into areas that were truly unthinkable.

When he rose back up, he noted the wall Eddie had written on. It had been cleaned off, but there were still traces of the word he'd written there.

TEAT

A few days before, he'd played with various combinations of the word:tent, test, text. Nothing seemed to work. Yet he didn't believe Eddie would have written that word if it wasn't important.

King pulled the cipher disk out of his pocket and played with it. He had taken to carrying it around for some reason. Long ago it was discovered that frequency analysis could break an encryption of fair length. The method was straightforward. Some letters of the alphabet occur far more frequently than others. And the letter that occurs far more often than all others is the letter e. This discovery had put the code-breakers on top for quite some time until the encryption folks once more got the upper hand centuries later.

King spun the outer ring of the cipher disk around until the lettere was lined up with the lettera. One tick off. He looked at the wall and in his mind's eye changed one letter, e for an a. Now it read:

TEET

That made no sense either. What was a teet? As a long shot he left and went back to his office, went to a search engine on the Internet and typed in the word teet, and for the hell of it, the word crime. He didn't expect to find anything. However, a long list came up. Probably all garbage, he thought. And yet when he looked at the very first listing, he suddenly sat up.