Chapter 7

Maggie said: “I’m confused. Your cousin never said anything about 11/22/63 at all?”

Camilla shook her head. “It wasn’t published until November 8th. He dropped by the house on June 10th. He purposely withheld it from me, so I wouldn’t suspect what he was really up to in his visit.”

“Laying the groundwork for your trip to 1963,” Gary said.

“My shanghaiing,” she corrected bitterly. “I never suspected 11/22/63 of being anything but fiction, despite his inclusion of Marshall-slash-Derry into the storyline. Like everyone else, I thought it was an opportune tie in, an extravagant easter-egg for his fans.” She explained the significance of ‘easter-egg’ in 2019 lingo.

“IT was one of his top selling books, after all. Everyone wanted to know more about Derry and the Losers.” She wagged her head as Gary meant to correct her. “They don’t know you as the Misfits over there. Or over here, I assume, in the future. They don’t know that any of you really exist.”

Shaking his head, Bill objected: “It doesn’t add up! If he visited you on June 10th, the same day that he supposedly experienced Iterations Two, Three and Four back in 1958, then how could he have written 11/22/63 when he disappeared a day later? No one can write a novel and get it published in five months,” he scoffed, “and if Stephen King is as famous and recognizable as you say he is, then good luck finding a place to hide out in the first place to write it.”

“But he did hide out,” Camilla reminded him. “In 1958.”

Like earlier, Gary snapped his fingers excitedly. “The Tamarack Motor Court! He was there for a month, trying to decide what to do about Sadie Dunhill! He wrote the book then!” He waited, expression quizzical. Camilla smiled crookedly.

“That was an important detail to leave out of your narrative,” Bill grumbled irritably. When Camilla nodded apologetically, he said: “But my objection stands: he wrote the book in a month? Less than a month?”

“In the novel you wrote for three weeks straight, every day, all day, twelve hours or more at a time. I imagine that someone as talented as you could write a complete novel in three weeks’ time, Bill. You’d been doing it all your life, after all. Writing books. Maybe not in three weeks’ time,” she allowed with a hesitant grin. “My guess is that you—he—delivered it to his agent before leaving to see me on June 10th. Probably with instructions to publish the book with, or without him. He had time to do that. It was right around noon when he returned to 2011, his next to last time.”

“His next to last?” Gary questioned.

Wide-eyed, Maggie raised her hand and said: “Ooh! Ooh! I know! He went back a last time to reset the timeline, didn’t he, so his month in 1958 would be undone? Just in case. And then he moved the diner away from the...” She faltered at the wry look on Camilla’s face.

“There was no diner,” Gary said. “No way he’d include so easily identifiable an object in his novel as a roadside diner. Even if he had it towed away on June 10th, everyone in Lisbon Falls would remember the diner as being real. And with this Google business of yours, anybody could look on ... the Internet? ... and discover it was real. Believers would descend on the town in droves, exploring every square inch of the spot the diner sat. Someone would track down the diner itself, no matter what Bill did with the darned thing. Short of burning it to the ground, anyway. They’d break in and ransack the supply closet in search of the missing steps.