A Face in the Crowd

the front row.”
    “What am I looking at?”
    Evers stood up behind the netting and waved his blue foam finger. “Do you see me?”
    “No, where are you?”
    Young Dr. Young hobbled down the steep stairs on his bad leg, using the seat backs to steady himself. On his smock, like a medal, was a coffee-colored splotch of dried blood.
    “Do you see me now?” Evers took the phone from his ear and waved both arms over his head as if he was flagging a train. The grotesque finger nodded back and forth.
    “No.”
    So, no.
    Which was fine. Which was actually better.
    “Be good, Patty,” Evers said. “I love you.”
    He hit END as, all around the park, the sections were filling in. He couldn’t see who’d come to spend eternity with him in peanut heaven or the far reaches of the outfield, but the premium seats were going fast. Here came the ushers with the shambling, rag-clad remnants of Soupy Embree, and then his mother, haggard after a double shift, and Lennie Wheeler in his pinstripe funeral suit and Grandfather Lincoln with his cane and Martha and Ellie and his mother and father and all the people he’d ever wronged in his life. As they filed into his row from both sides, he stuck his phone in his pocket and took his seat again, pulling off the foam finger as he did. He propped it on the now unoccupied seat to his left. Saving it for Kaz. Because he was sure Kaz would be joining them at some point, after seeing him on TV, and calling him. If Evers had learned anything about how this worked, it was that the two of them weren’t done talking just yet.
    A cheer erupted, and the rattle of cowbells. The Rays were still hitting. Down the right field line, though it was far too early, some loudmouth was exhorting the crowd to start the wave. As always when distracted from the action, Evers checked the scoreboard to catch up. It was only the third and Beckett had already thrown sixty pitches. The way things were looking, it was going to be a long game.

Turn the page for a preview of Stephen King’s
    The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
    Copyright © 1999 by Stephen King
    Described in the
Daily Mail
as ‘a compelling battle for survival that you dare not put down’.
    Available as an audio digital download, paperback and eBook from Hodder & Stoughton

PREGAME

    The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten o’clock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mother’s Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the back) and playing with Mona, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods. By eleven she was trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think,
This is serious, this is very serious.
Trying not to think that sometimes when people got lost in the woods they got seriously hurt. Sometimes they died.
    All because I needed to pee,
she thought . . . except she hadn’t needed to pee all that badly, and in any case she could have asked Mom and Pete to wait up the trail a minute while she went behind a tree. They were fighting again, gosh what a surprise
that
was, and that was why she had dropped behind a little bit, and without saying anything. That was why she had stepped off the trail and behind a high stand of bushes. She needed a breather, simple as that. She was tired of listening to them argue, tired of trying to sound bright and cheerful, close to screaming at her mother,
Let him go, then! If he wants to go back to Malden and live with Dad so much, why don’t you just let him? I’d drive him myself if I had a license, just to get some peace and quiet around here!
And what then? What would her mother say then? What kind of look would come over her face? And Pete. He was older, almost fourteen, and not stupid, so why didn’t he know better? Why couldn’t he just give it a rest?
Cut the crap
was what she wanted to say to him (to both of them, really),
just cut the crap.
    The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten custody. Pete had protested the move from suburban Boston to southern Maine bitterly and at length. Part of it really was wanting to be with Dad, and that was the lever he always used on Mom (he understood with some unerring instinct that it was the one he could plant the deepest and pull on the hardest), but Trisha knew it wasn’t the only reason, or even the biggest one. The real reason Pete wanted