May 31 to June 1

May 31 to June 1 is the overnight interval that turns a calendar detail into a decisive alibi in the investigation of Homer Gamache’s murder. Liz Beaumont recalls that the Beaumonts hosted a party on Tuesday, May 31; the medical examiner’s estimate places Homer’s death between one and three a.m. on June 1. That remembered gathering supplies witnesses for Thad Beaumont’s whereabouts at the critical time, while the gap between the party and the killing exposes the strain in the theory that he could have committed the crime.

The Dates Under Investigation

Alan Pangborn asks Thad to account for his whereabouts from eleven p.m. on May 31 until four a.m. on June 1. The question makes the overnight span the practical boundary of the inquiry: it is not enough that Thad was generally at home or in Castle Rock; the police need to know where he was during the hours in which the murder could have taken place.

The medical examiner’s post-mortem places Homer’s death between one and three a.m. on June 1. Pangborn explains that Homer was killed with his own prosthetic arm. The estimated time therefore falls within the interval about which the police question Thad, making the party’s timing—not merely its existence—important to his defense.

The Party and the Alibi

When Pangborn specifies May 31, Liz counts backward on her fingers, recognizes that the date was Tuesday, and remembers that the Beaumonts held a party that night. Her sudden certainty changes the conversation: rather than offering an unsupported assertion that Thad was home, she points to a gathering with a houseful of potential witnesses. She estimates that at least twenty-five people attended.

Pangborn does not treat the recollection by itself as proof. He says that if witnesses can establish Thad’s presence at the party around midnight, the police can clear him, especially alongside the medical examiner’s estimate. The party thus gives the dates evidentiary force: it places witnesses in the Beaumont home shortly before the hours in which Homer was killed and challenges the possibility that Thad was elsewhere.

The Imagined Twin and the Murder Timeline

Thad tests the suspicion against an elaborate hypothetical. He imagines an identical twin hosting the party, sleeping with Liz, and keeping his appointments while Thad drove Homer’s truck to a Connecticut rest stop, stole another car, went to New York, and continued to Washington, D.C., where he would have had to kill Frederick Clawson before returning to Ludlow. He even extends the deception to Liz, suggesting she might have helped sustain it.

The account is a sardonic reconstruction, not a report of what happened. Its impossible-seeming itinerary draws out what the accusation would require: two versions of Thad moving through different places while maintaining the appearance of one ordinary life. Liz laughs at the scenario, and Pangborn looks at Thad with open surprise. In the immediate investigation, the remembered party and its witnesses provide a more concrete answer to the dates than the imagined twin does.

A Second Significance of the Span

The May 31-to-June 1 interval also belongs to the book’s account of Thad’s pen name. In a later interview, Thad describes the rainy period from 1973 to early 1975 as a difficult time in which he wanted an identity separate from his own to break his writer’s block. He connects the name George Stark to Donald E. Westlake’s use of the pen name Richard Stark and to the contrast between Westlake’s different kinds of writing.

That account distinguishes the earlier origins of the identity from the present-night investigation: the historical interval explains why Thad created a separate name, while May 31 and June 1 anchor the police inquiry into a specific murder. The dates make the novel’s two concerns—authorship and criminal identity—meet in concrete questions of presence, witnesses, and responsibility.