The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Praise for STEPHEN KING and
THE GIRL WHO LOVED
TOM GORDON

“An absorbing tale . . . 
TOM GORDON
scores big.”

—People

“Impressive . . . A wonderful story of courage, faith, and hope . . . It is eminently engaging and difficult to put down.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“A fast, scary read . . . King blasts a homer. . . . [He] expertly stirs the major ingredients of the American psyche—our spirituality, fierce love of children, passion for baseball, and collective fear of the bad thing we know lurks on the periphery of life.”

—
New York
Daily News

“King paints a masterful, terrifying picture of every child's (and maybe adult's) worst fear. . . . King uses that creepy-crawly paranoia to perfection.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Plenty of thrills . . . [King's] an elegant writer and a master of pacing.”

—Entertainment Weekly

BAG OF BONES

“What I admire most about
Bag of Bones
is its intelligence of voice, not only the craftsmanship—the indelible sense of place, the well-fleshed characters, the unstoppable story line—but the witty and obsessive voice of King's powerful imagination.”

—
Amy Tan

“
Bag of Bones
is, hands down, King's most narratively subversive fiction. Whenever you're positive—just positive!—you know where this ghost story is heading, that's exactly when it gallops off in some jaw-dropping new direction.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“This is King at his clever, terrifying best.”

—Mademoiselle

“Contains some of [King's] best writing . . . This is King's most romantic book, and ghosts are up and about from the get-go. . . . The big surprise here is the emotional wallop the story packs.”

—
Newsweek

“Stephen King is so widely acknowledged as America's master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday. . . . This is a book about reanimation: the ghosts', of course, but also Mike's, his desire to re-embrace love and work after a long bereavement that King depicts with an eye for the kind of small but moving details that don't typically distinguish blockbuster horror novels.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Bag of Bones
proves that King is as seductive a storyteller as ever, pulling readers along as he explores the hidden evils of small-town America.”

—People
magazine

“King has honed his talent into a unique American voice, broader and more ambitious than most of his peers'. . . . [
Bag of Bones
] has depth. . . . It's a ghost story, a love story, a story about race and power. . . . One more thing: Yes, it's scary.
Of course
it's scary.”

—Minneapolis
Star Tribune

“It may be that after thirty-one novels, Stephen King is just getting started. . . . 
Bag of Bones
may be Stephen King's most ambitious novel . . . the effort has inspired a new directness and maturity in his work. . . . Very few writers can convey the passive terrors of nightmares better than King, and he crafts one amazing dream sequence after another.”

—
Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“A thoroughly compelling thriller.”

—
Esquire
magazine

“Enticing . . . King engulfs you with the cold hands of his narrative and carries you away to 4
A.M.
page-turning. Things still go bump in the night in King's world, but these days bumps are more well thought out and lead to more intricate nooks and crannies of the human condition.”

—Associated Press

Pregame

First Inning

Second Inning

Third Inning

Top of the Fourth

Bottom of the Fourth

Fifth Inning

Sixth Inning

Top of the Seventh

Seventh Inning Stretch

Eighth Inning

Top of the Ninth

Bottom of the Ninth

Bottom of the Ninth: Save Situation

Postgame

Author's Postscript

About Stephen King

This is for my son Owen, who ended up teaching me a lot more about the game of baseball than I ever taught him.

J
UNE
1998

T
HE 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 out was that he hated Sanford Middle School.

In Malden he'd had it pretty well whipped. He'd run the computer club like it was his own private kingdom; he'd had friends—nerds, yeah, but they went around in a group and the bad kids didn't pick on them. At Sanford Middle there
was
no computer club and he'd only made a single friend, Eddie Rayburn.
Then in January Eddie moved away, also the victim of a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone's game. Worse, a lot of kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated: Pete's CompuWorld.

On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn't go down to Malden to be with their father, their mother took them on outings. She was grimly dedicated to these, and although Trisha wished with all her heart that Mom would stop—it was on the outings that the worst fights happened—she knew that wasn't going to happen. Quilla Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete hated that, too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone. “If Quilla had been at Little Big Horn, the Indians would have lost,” he said, and although Trisha didn't like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom—it seemed babyish as well as disloyal—she couldn't deny that there was a nugget of truth in that particular observation.

Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom and Pete, she had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the Shaker Village in Gray, to The New England Plant-A-Torium in North Wyndham, to Six-Gun City in Randolph, New Hampshire, on a canoe trip down
the Saco River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf (where Trisha had sprained her ankle, an injury over which her mother and father had later had a screaming fight; what fun divorce was, what really good fun).

Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a rest. He had pronounced Six-Gun City “for babies,” but Mom had allowed him to spend most of the visit in the room where the electronic games were, and Pete had gone home not exactly happy but at least silent. On the other hand, if Pete didn't like one of the places their Mom picked (his least favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium; returning to Sanford that day he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind), he was generous in sharing his opinion. “Go along to get along” wasn't in his nature. Nor was it in their mother's, Trisha supposed. She herself thought it was an excellent philosophy, but of course everyone took one look at her and pronounced her her father's child. Sometimes that bothered her, but mostly she liked it.

Trisha didn't care
where
they went on Saturdays, and would have been perfectly happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf courses just because they minimized the increasingly horrible arguments. But Mom wanted the trips to be instructive, too—hence the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker Village. On top of his other problems, Pete resented
having education rammed down his throat on Saturdays, when he would rather have been up in his room, playing Sanitarium or Riven on his Mac. Once or twice he had shared his opinion (“This sucks!” pretty well summed it up) so generously that Mom had sent him back to the car and told him to sit there and “compose himself” until she and Trisha came back.

Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a kindergartener who needed a timeout—that someday they'd come back to the van and find it empty, Pete having decided to hitchhike back to Massachusetts—but of course she said nothing. The Saturday outings themselves were wrong, but Mom would never accept that. By the end of some of them Quilla Andersen looked at least five years older than when they had set out, with deep lines grooved down the sides of her mouth and one hand constantly rubbing her temple, as if she had a headache . . . but she would still never stop. Trisha knew it. Maybe if her mother had been at Little Big Horn the Indians still would have won, but the body-count would have been considerably higher.