AT ABOUT THE same time that Charlie Bencroft is meeting Captain Jake Rinaldi and Chet Landry is pulling his truck out of the Dagger Hill Mobile Home Park, headed for town, Alice Kemmerer, Chief Albright’s secretary, is returning to the station after her lunch break at the diner. Harry Kunz said that Colonel Higgins was there this morning, questioning him about the chief’s son and his friends, said that she implied the kids were somehow responsible for Kimberly Dowd’s disappearance.
It was a casual conversation—just Harry gabbing away as usual—but Alice tucked the info into the front pocket of her memory and means to get ahold of the chief first thing, let him know what’s going on.
As she goes into the office, though, she hears something odd. A woman’s voice, floating up from the holding cells in the basement. The door to “the dungeon,” as everyone likes to call it, is standing open, and the lights are on downstairs. Now that she thinks about it, Alice remembers seeing Mel’s patrol car parked out front. Which is odd, because he’s normally out on his afternoon rounds by now.
“Mel?” she calls lightly. She pokes her head into the main part of the office, where everyone’s desks are standing unattended. From the basement, that voice keeps going. It’s almost like the woman is singing, but the sound of it is faint and crackly. “Hello?” Alice says without much conviction.
She’s shaking a little by the time she approaches the basement door, and she’s not sure why. Maybe it’s because of everything going on in town right now. Maybe it’s because she’s starting to make out some of the words to the woman’s song, and it doesn’t sound like anything she’s ever heard before.
Alice almost gets on the dispatch radio and calls for the chief before going down to the basement. Almost.
But then she sets her shoulders square and marches down the steps to the dungeon. There’s a line of three cells down here. The only time they’ve ever used them during Alice’s tenure with the WPD is to let some of the rowdier drunks spilling from the Stuck Pig sleep it off for a night.
Today, two of the cell doors are open, as they usually are. The one in the middle, however, is sealed shut. There’s a lump of something on the floor just inside, pressing up against the bars. Something blue and black and uncomfortably familiar. There’s a radio playing in there, too. That’s what Alice is hearing. A weird, singsong rhyme repeating itself through crackling speakers. Only the voice sounds just as familiar.
“A song sung one, end of the line. A song sung two, we’ll be just fine…”
Alice is more afraid than ever. She doesn’t want to go all the way into the basement, to see what that blue lump is or figure out where the voice is coming from or who it belongs to. There’s already a strange undercurrent to that rhyme that’s edging itself deeper inside her head. A curled, knobby finger poking at the soft tissue of her mind, probing for weak spots.
She shakes her head, rolls her hands into fists, and takes the last strides into the dungeon.
The first thing she recognizes is June Rapaport’s boom box. It’s sitting on the cot inside the cell, and the song or rhyme or whatever it is that Alice is hearing is coming from the speakers. But the thing that sets Alice’s nerves on edge is that it’s June Rapaport’s voice singing the words in a weak, whispery falsetto.
“… A song sung three, dead is divine. A song sung four, all outta time…”
June herself is sitting on the cot right beside her stereo. Her head is tilted forward, the thin locks of her gray hair falling across her face. Her mouth does not appear to be moving.
Then Alice’s eyes drift away from the older woman and down to that lump on the ground. It’s a blue uniform and a black gun belt and a pale face that almost certainly belongs to Mel O’Connell. Or at least, it did. Anyone can see that he’s dead now. Alice can see the finger-shaped bruises, dark purple ringed with red, around Mel’s throat.
Alice backs away from the cell door, her hand over her mouth. She runs into the cinder block wall and has to stop, can’t bring herself to move in any other direction. She can’t bring herself to move anywhere—her legs are too weak and shaky. “Oh my god,” she whimpers.
After that, all she can do is scream.