Needful Things

1

At fifteen minutes to midnight on that long, long Sunday in October, a door in the basement of Kennebec Valley Hospital’s State Wing opened and Sheriff Alan Pangborn stepped through. He walked slowly, with his head down. His feet, clad in elasticized hospital slippers, shuffled on the linoleum. The sign on the door behind him could be read as it swung shut:

At the far end of the corridor, a janitor in gray fatigues was using a buffer to polish the floor in slow, lazy sweeps. Alan walked toward him, stripping the hospital cap off his head as he went. He lifted the green-gown he was wearing and stuffed the cap in a back pocket of the blue-jeans he wore beneath.

The soft drone of the buffer made him feel sleepy. A hospital in Augusta was the last place on earth he wanted to be tonight.

The janitor looked up as he approached, and switched off his machine.

“You don’t look so well, my friend,” he greeted Alan.

“I’m not surprised. Do you have a cigarette?”

The janitor took a pack of Luckies from his breast pocket and shook one out for Alan. “You can’t smoke it in here, though,” he said.

He nodded his head toward the morgue door. “Doc Ryan throws a fit.”

Alan nodded. “Where?”

The janitor took him to an intersecting corridor and pointed to a door about halfway down. “That goes to the alley beside the building.

Prop it open with something, though, or you’ll have to go all the way around to the front to get back in. You got matches?”

Alan started down the corridor. “I carry a lighter. Thanks for the smoke.”

“I heard it was a double feature in there tonight,” the janitor called after him.

“That’s right,” Alan said without turning around.

“Autopsies are bastards, ain’t they?”

“Yes,” Alan said.

Behind him, the soft drone of the floor-buffer recommenced.

They were bastards, all right. The autopsies of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck had been the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of his career, and they had all been bastards, but these two had been the worst by far.

The door the janitor had pointed out was the sort equipped with a panic-bar. Alan looked around for something he could use to prop it open and saw nothing. He pulled the green-gown off, wadded it up, and opened the door. Night air washed in, chilly but incredibly refreshing after the stale alcohol smell of the morgue and adjoining autopsy room.

Alan placed the wadded-up gown against the door-jamb and stepped out.

He carefully let the door swing back, saw that the gown would keep the latch from engaging, and forgot about it. He leaned against the cinderblock wall next to the pencil-line of light escaping through the slightly ajar door and lit his cigarette.

The first puff made his head feel swimmy. He had been trying to quit for almost two years and kept almost making it. Then something would come up. That was both the curse and the blessing of police work; something always came up.

He looked up at the stars, which he usually found calming, and couldn’t see many-the high-intensity lights which ringed the hospital dulled them out. He could make out the Big Dipper, Orion, and a faint reddish point that was probably Mars, but that was all.

Mars, he thought. That’s it. That’s undoubtedly it. The warlords of Mars landed in Castle Rock around noon, and the first people they met were Nettle and the Jerzyck bitch. The warlords bit them and turned them rabid. It’s the only thing that fits.

He thought about going in and telling Henry Ryan, the State of Maine’s Chief Medical Examiner, It was a case of alien intervention, Doc. Case closed. He doubted if Ryan would be amused. It had been a long night for him, too.

Alan dragged deeply on the cigarette. It tasted absolutely grand, swimmy head or no swimmy head, and he felt he could understand perfectly why smoking was now off-limits in the public areas of every hospital in America. John Calvin had been dead right: nothing that made you feel this way could possibly be good for you. In the meantime, though, hit me wid dat nicotine, boss-it feel so fine.

He thought idly of how nice it would be to buy an entire carton of these selfsame Luckies, rip off both ends, and then light up the whole goddam thing with a blowtorch. He thought how nice it would be to get drunk. This would be a very bad time to get drunk, he supposed.

Another inflexible rule of life-when you really need to get drunk, you can never afford to do it. Alan wondered vaguely if maybe the alcoholics of the world weren’t the only ones who really had their priorities straight.

The pencil-line of light by his feet fattened to a bar. Alan looked around and saw Norris Ridgewick. Norris stepped out and leaned against the wall next to Alan. He was still wearing his green cap, but it was askew and the tie-ribbons hung down over the back of his gown.

His complexion matched his gown.

“Jesus, Alan.”

“They were your first ones, weren’t they?”

“No, I saw an autopsy once when I was in North WyndhamSmoke-inhalation case. But these… Jesus, Alan.”

“Yeah,” he said, and exhaled smoke. “Jesus.”

“You got another cigarette?”

“No-sorry. I bummed this one from the janitor.” He looked at the Deputy with mild curiosity. “I didn’t know you smoked, Norris.”

“I don’t. I thought I might start.”

Alan laughed softly.

“Man, I can’t wait to get out fishing tomorrow. Or are off-days on hold while we sort this mess out?”

Alan thought about it, then shook his head. It hadn’t really been the warlords of Mars; this business actually looked quite simple. In a way, that was what made it so horrible. He saw no reason to cancel Norris’s off-days.

“That’s great,” Norris said, and then added, “But I’ll come in if you want, Alan. No problem.”

“Shouldn’t need you to, Norris,” he said. “John and Clut have both been in touch with me-Clut went with the CID guys to talk with Pete jerzyck, and John went with the team investigating Nettle’s end.

They’ve both been in touch. It’s pretty clear. Nasty, but clear.”

And it was… yet he was troubled about it, just the same. On some deep level, he was very troubled indeed.

“Well, what happened? I mean, the Jerzyck bitch has been asking for it for years, but when somebody finally called her bluff, I thought she’d end up with a black eye or a broken arm… nothing like this.

Was it just a case of picking on the wrong person?”

“I think that pretty well covers it,” Alan said. “Wilma couldn’t have picked a worse person in Castle Rock to start a feud with.”

“Feud?”

“Polly gave Nettle a puppy last spring. It barked a little at first.

Wilma did a lot of bitching about it.”

“Really? I don’t remember a complaint sheet.”

“She only made one official complaint. I caught it. Polly asked me if I would. She felt partly responsible, since she gave Nettle the dog in the first place. Nettle said she’d keep him inside as much as she could, and that finished it for me.

“The dog stopped the barking, but Wilma apparently went on bitching to Nettle. Polly says that Nettle’d cross the street when she saw Wilma coming, even if Wilma was two blocks away. Nettle did everything but fork the sign of the evil eye at her. Then, last week, she crossed the line. She went over to the jerzycks’ while Pete and Wilma were at work, saw the sheets hanging on the line, and covered them with mud from the garden.”

Norris whistled. “Did we catch that complaint, Alan?”

Alan shook his head. “From then until this afternoon, it was all between the ladies.”

“What about Pete Jerzyck?”

“Do you know Pete?”

Well… “Norris stopped. Thought about Pete. Thought about Wilma. Thought about the two of them together. Slowly nodded his head. “He was afraid Wilma would chew him up one side and down the other if he tried playing referee… so he stood aside.

Is that it?”

“Sort of. He actually may have headed things off, at least for awhile. Clut says Pete told the CID guys that Wilma wanted to go over to Nettle’s as soon as she got a look at her sheets. She was ready to rock and roll. She apparently called Nettle on the phone and told her she was going to rip off her head and shit down her neck.”

Norris nodded. Between the autopsy on Wilma and the autopsy on Nettle, he had called dispatch in Castle Rock and asked for a list of complaints involving each of the two women. Nettle’s list was short-one item. She had snapped and killed her husband. End of story.

No flare-ups before and none since, including the last few years she’d spent back in town. Wilma was a different kettle of tripe entirely.

She had never killed anyone, but the list of complaintsthose made by her and those made about her-was a long one, and went back to what had then been Castle Rock junior High, where she had punched a substitute teacher in the eye for giving her detention. On two occasions, worried women who’d had the ill luck or judgment to get into Wilma’s bad books had requested police protection. Wilma had also been the subject of three assault complaints over the years. Ultimately all charges had been dropped, but it didn’t take much study to figure out that no one in his or her right mind would have chosen Wilma jerzyck to fuck with.

“They were bad medicine for each other,” Norris murmured.

“The worst.”

“Her husband talked Wilma out of going over there the first time she wanted to go?”

“He knew better than to even try. He told Clut he dropped two Xanax into a cup of tea and that lowered her thermostat. In fact, jerzyck says he thought it was all over.”

“Do you believe him, Alan?”

“Yeah-as much as I can believe anyone without actually talking to them face-to-face, that is.”

“What’s the stuff he dropped into her tea? Dope?”

“A tranquilizer. jerzyck told CID he’d used it a couple of times before when she got hot, and it cooled her out pretty well. He said he thought it did this time, too.”

“But it didn’t.”

“I think it did at first. Wilma didn’t just go over and start chewing Nettle’s ass, at least. But I’m pretty sure she went on harassing Nettle; it’s the pattern she established when it was just the dog they were fighting over. Making phone-calls. Doing drive-bys.

That sort of thing. Nettle’s skin was pretty thin. Stuff like that would have really gotten to her. John LaPointe and the CID team I stuck him with went to see Polly around seven o’clock. Polly said she was pretty sure that Nettle was worried about something. She was over to see Polly this morning, and let something slip then. Polly didn’t understand it at the time.” Alan sighed. “I guess now she wishes she’d listened a little more closely.”

“How’s Polly taking it, Alan?”

“Pretty well, I think.” He had spoken to her twice, once from a house near the crime scene, and a second time from here at K.V.H just after he and Norris had arrived. On both occasions her voice had been calm and controlled, but he had sensed the tears and confusion just under the carefully maintained surface. He wasn’t entirely surprised during the first call to find she already knew most of what had happened; news, particularly bad news, travels fast in small towns.

“What set off the big bang?”

Alan looked at Norris, surprised, and then realized he didn’t know yet. Alan had gotten a more or less complete report from John LaPointe between the autopsies, while Norris had been on another phone, talking to Sheila Brigham and compiling lists of complaints involving the two women.

“One of them decided to escalate,” he said. “My guess is Wilma, but the details of the picture are still hazy. Apparently Wilma went over to Nettle’s while Nettle was visiting Polly this morning. Nettle must have left without locking her door, or even latching it securely, and the wind blew it open-you know how windy it was today.”

“Yeah.”

“So maybe it started out to be just another drive-by to keep Nettle’s water hot. Then Wilma saw the door standing open and the drive-by turned into something else. Maybe it wasn’t quite that way, but it feels right to me.”

The words weren’t even out of his mouth before he recognized them as a lie. It didn’t feel right, that was the trouble. It should have felt right, he wanted it to feel right, and it didn’t. What was driving him crazy was that there was no reason for that sense of wrongness, at least none he could put his finger on. The closest he could come was to wonder if Nettle would have been careless not only about locking her door but about shutting it tightly if she was as paranoid about Wilma jerzyck as she had seemed… and that wasn’t enough to hang a suspicion on. It wasn’t enough because not all of Nettle’s gear was stowed tightly, and you couldn’t make any assumptions about what such a person would and wouldn’t do. Still…

“What did Wilma do?” Norris asked. “Trash the place?”

“Killed Nettle’s dog.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Jesus! What a bitch!”

“Well, but we knew that about her, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, but still-”

There it was again. Even from Norris Ridgewick, who could be depended on, even after all these years, to fill out at least twenty per cent of his paperwork bass-ackwards: Yeah, but still.

“She did it with a Swiss Army knife. Used the corkscrew attachment and stuck a note on it, saying it was payback for Nettle slinging mud at her sheets. So Nettle went over to Wilma’s with a bunch of rocks. She wrapped notes of her own around them with rubber bands. The notes said the rocks were Wilma’s last warning.

She threw them through all of the jerzycks’ downstairs windows.”

“Mother-a-God,” Norris said, not without some admiration.

“The jerzycks left for eleven o’clock Mass at ten-thirty or so.

After Mass they had lunch with the Pulaskis. Pete jerzyck stayed to watch the Patriots with jake Pulaski, so there was no way he could even try to cool Wilma out this time.”

“Did they meet on that corner by accident?” Norris asked.

“I doubt it. I think Wilma got home, saw the damage, and called Nettle out.”

“You mean like in a duel?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Norris whistled, then stood quietly for a few moments, hands clasped behind his back, looking out into the darkness. “Alan, why are we supposed to attend these goddam autopsies, anyway?” he asked at last.

“Protocol, I guess,” Alan said, but it was more than that… at least for him. If you were troubled about the look of a case, or the feel of it (as he was troubled by the look and feel of this one), you might see something that would knock your brain out of neutral and into one of the forward gears. You might see a hook to hang your hat on.

“Well, then, I think it’s time the county hired a protocol officer,” Norris grumbled, and Alan laughed.

He wasn’t laughing inside, though, and not just because this was going to hit Polly so hard over the next few days. Something about the case wasn’t right. Everything looked all right on top, but down in the place where instinct lived (and sometimes hid), the Martian warlords still seemed to make more sense. At least to Alan.

Hey, come on! Didn’t you just lay it out for Norris, A to Z, in the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette?

Yes, he had. That was part of the trouble. Did two women, even when one was half-nuts and the other was poison-mean, meet on a street-corner and cut each other to ribbons like a couple of hopped-up crack addicts for such simple reasons?

Alan didn’t know. And because he didn’t know, he flipped the cigarette away and began to go over the whole thing again.

2

For Alan, it began with a call from Andy Clutterbuck. Alan had just turned off the Patriots-jets game (the Patriots were already down by a touchdown and a field goal, and the second quarter was less than three minutes old) and was putting on his coat when the phone rang.

Alan had been intending to go down to Needful Things and see if Mr.

Gaunt was there. It was even possible, Alan supposed, that he might meet Polly there, after all. The call from Clut had changed all that.

Eddie Warburton, Clut said, had been hanging up the phone just as he, Clut, came back from lunch. There was some sort of ruckus going on over in the “tree-street” section of town. Women fighting or something. It might be a good idea, Eddie said, if Clut were to call the Sheriff and tell him about the trouble.

“What in the blue hell is Eddie Warburton doing answering the Sheriff’s Office telephone?” Alan asked irritably.

“Well, I guess with the dispatch office empty, he thought-”

“He knows the procedure as well as anyone-when dispatch is empty, let The Bastard route the incoming calls.”

“I don’t know why he answered the phone,” Clut said with barely concealed impatience, “but I don’t think that’s the important thing.

Second call on the incident came in four minutes ago, while I was talking with Eddie. An old lady. I didn’t get a name-either she was too upset to give me one or she just didn’t want to. Anyhow, she says there’s been some sort of serious fight on the corner of Ford and Willow. Two women involved. Caller says they were using knives. She says they’re still there.”

“Still fighting?”

“No-down, both of them. The fight’s over.”

“Right.” Alan’s mind began clicking along faster, like an express train picking up speed. “You logged the call, Clut?”

“You bet I did.”

“Good. Seaton’s on this afternoon, isn’t he? Get him out there right away.”

“Already sent him.”

“God bless you. Now call the State Police.”

“Do you want CID?”

“Not yet. For the time being, just alert them to the situation.

I’ll meet you there, Clut.”

When he got to the crime scene and saw the extent of the damage, Alan radioed the Oxford Barracks of the State Police and told them to send a Crime Investigation Unit right away… two, if they could spare them. By then Clut and Seaton Thomas were standing in front of the downed women with their arms spread, telling people to go back into their homes. Norris arrived, took a look, then got a roll of yellow tape marked CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS out of the trunk of his cruiser.

There was a thick coating of dust on the tape, and Norris told Alan later that he hadn’t been sure it would stick, it was so old.

It had, though. Norris strung it around the trunks of oak trees, forming a large triangle around the two women who appeared to be embracing at the foot of the stop-sign. The spectators had not returned to their houses, but did retreat to their own lawns. There were about fifty of them, and the number was growing as calls were made and neighbors hurried over to view the wreckage. Andy Clutterbuck and Seaton Thomas looked almost jumpy enough to pull their pieces and start firing warning shots. Alan sympathized with the way they felt.

In Maine, the Criminal Investigation Department of the State Police handles murder investigations, and for small-fry fuzz (which is almost all of them), the scariest time comes between the discovery of the crime and the arrival of CID. Local cops and county mounties both know perfectly well that it is the time when the so-called chain of evidence is most often broken. Most also know that what they do during that time will be closely scrutinized by Monday-morning quarterbacks-most of them from the judiciary and the Attorney General’s Office-who believe that small-fry fuzz, even the County boys, are a bunch of Deputy Dawgs with ham hands and fumble fingers.

Also, those silent bunches of people standing on the lawns across the street were goddam spooky. They reminded Alan of the mallzombies in Dawn of the Dead.

He got the battery-powered bullhorn out of the back seat of his cruiser and told them he wanted them to go inside, right away.

They began to do it. He then reviewed the protocol in his head one more time, and radioed dispatch. Sandra McMillan had come in to handle the chores there. She wasn’t as steady as Sheila Brigham, but beggars could not be choosers… and Alan guessed Sheila would hear what had happened and come in before much longer.

If her sense of duty didn’t bring her, curiosity would.

Alan told Sandy to track down Ray Van Allen. Ray was Castle County’s On-Call Medical Examiner-also the county coronerand Alan wanted him here when CID arrived, if that was possible.

“Roger, Sheriff,” Sandy said self-importantly. “Base is clear.”

Alan went back to his officers on the scene. “Which one of you verified that the women are dead?”

Clut and Seat Thomas looked at each other in uneasy surprise, and Alan felt his heart sink. One point for the Monday-morning quarterbacks-or maybe not. The first Crime Investigation Unit wasn’t here yet, although he could hear more sirens approaching.

Alan ducked under the tape and approached the stop-sign, walking on tiptoe like a kid trying to sneak out of the house after curfew.

The spilled blood was mostly pooled between the victims and in the leaf-choked gutter beside them, but a fine spray of dropletswhat the forensics boys called backsplatter@otted the area around them in a rough circle. Alan dropped on one knee just outside this circle, stretched out a hand, and found he could reach the corpses-he had no doubt that was what they were-by leaning forward to the very edge of balance with one arm stretched out.

He looked back at Seat, Norris, and Clut. They were clustered together in a knot, staring at him with big eyes.

“Photograph me,” he said.

Clut and Seaton only looked at him as if he had given an order in Tagalog, but Norris ran to Alan’s cruiser and rooted around in back until he found the old Polaroid there, one of two they used for taking crime-scene photographs. When the appropriations committee met, Alan was planning to ask for at least one new camera, but this afternoon the appropriations committee meeting seemed very unimportant.

Norris hurried back with the camera, aimed, and triggered it.

The drive whined.

“Better take another one just to be safe,” Alan said. “Get the bodies, too. I’m not going to have those guys saying we broke the chain of evidence. Be damned if I will.” He was aware that his voice sounded a shade querulous, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Norris took another Polaroid, documenting Alan’s position outside the circle of evidence and the way the bodies were lying at the foot of the stop-sign. Then Alan leaned cautiously forward again and placed his fingers against the bloodstained neck of the woman lying on top.

There was no pulse, of course, but after a second the pressure of his fingers caused her head to fall away from the signpost and turn sideways. Alan recognized Nettle at once, and it was Polly he thought of.

Oh jesus, he thought dolefully. Then he went through the motions of feeling for Wilma’s pulse, even though there was a meatcleaver buried in her skull. Her cheeks and forehead were printed with small dots of blood. They looked like heathen tattoos.

Alan got up and returned to where his men were standing on the other side of the tapes. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking of Polly, and he knew that was wrong. He had to get her off his mind or he was going to bitch this up for sure. He wondered if any of the gawkers had ID’d Nettle already. if so, Polly would surely hear before he could call her. He hoped desperately that she wouldn’t come down to see for herself.

You can’t worry about that now, he admonished himself You’ve got a double murder on your hands, from the look.

“Get out your book,” he told Norris. “You’re club secretary.”

It Jesus, Alan, you know how lousy my spelling is.”

“Just write.”

Norris gave the Polaroid to Clut and got his notebook out of his back pocket. A pad of Traffic Warnings with his name rubberstamped at the bottom of each sheet fell out with it. Norris bent, picked the pad up off the sidewalk, and stuffed it absently into his pocket again.

I want you to note that the head of the woman on top, designated Victim 1, was resting against the post of the stop-sign. I inadvertently pushed it off, checking for pulse.”

How easy it is to slip into Police Speak, Alan thought, where cars become “vehicles” and crooks become “perpetrators” and dead townspeople become “designated victims.” Police Speak, the wonderful sliding glass barrier.

He turned to Clut and told him to photograph this second configuration of the bodies, feeling extremely grateful that he’d had Norris document the original position before he touched the women.

Clut took the picture.

Alan turned back to Norris. “I want you to further note that when the head of Victim 1 moved, I was able to identify her as Netitia Cobb.”

Seaton whistled. “You mean it’s Nettle.@”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Norris wrote the information down on his pad. Then he asked, “What do we do now, Alan?”

“Wait for CID’s Investigation Unit and try to look alive when they get here,” Alan said.

The CID arrived less than three minutes later in two cars, followed by Ray Van Allen in his cranky old Subaru Brat. Five minutes later a State Police ID team arrived in a blue station wagon. All the members of the State Police team then lit cigars. Alan had known they would do this. The bodies were fresh and they were outdoors, but the ritual of the cigars was immutable.

The unpleasant work known in Police Speak as “securing the scene” began. It went on until after dark. Alan had worked with Henry

Payton, head of the Oxford Barracks (and thus in nominal charge of this case and the CID guys working it), on several other occasions. He had never seen the slightest hint of imagination in Henry. The man was a plodder, but a thorough, conscientious plodder.

It was because Henry had been assigned that Alan had felt safe to creep off for a bit and call Polly.

When he returned, the hands of the victims were being secured in gallon-sized Ziploc Baggies. Wilma jerzyck had lost one of her shoes, and her stockinged foot was accorded the same treatment.

The ID team moved in and took close to three hundred photos.

More State Police had arrived by then. Some held back the crowd, which was trying to draw closer again, and others shunted the arriving TV people down to the Municipal Building. A police artist did a quick sketch on a Crime-Scene Grid.

At last the bodies themselves were taken care of-except, that was, for one final matter. Payton gave Alan a pair of disposable surgical gloves and a Ziploc Baggie. “The cleaver or the knife?”

“I’ll take the cleaver,” Alan said. It would be the messier of the two implements, still clotted with Wilma jerzyck’s brains, but he didn’t want to touch Nettle. He had liked her.

With the murder weapons removed, tagged, bagged, and on their way to Augusta, the two CID teams moved in and began to search the area around the bodies, which still lay in their terminal embrace with the blood pooled between them now hardening to a substance like enamel.

When Ray Van Allen was finally allowed to load them into the Medical Assistance van, the scene was lit with police cruiser high beams and the orderlies first had to peel Wilma and Nettle apart.

During most of this, Castle Rock’s Finest stood around feeling like bumps on a log.

Henry Payton joined Alan on the sidelines during the conclusion of the oddly delicate ballet known as On-Scene Investigation.

“Lousy damned way to spend a Sunday afternoon,” he said.

Alan nodded.

“I’m sorry the head moved on you. That was bad luck.”

Alan nodded again.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to bother you about it, though.

You’ve got at least one good pic of the original position.” He looked toward Norris, who was talking with Clut and the newly arrived John LaPointe. “You’re just lucky that old boy there didn’t put his finger over the lens.”

“Aw, Norris is all right.”

“So’s K-Y jelly… in its place. Anyway, the whole thing looks pretty simple.”

Alan agreed. That was the trouble; he had known that long before he and Norris finished their Sunday tour of duty in an alley behind Kennebec Valley Hospital. The whole thing was too pretty simple, maybe.

“You planning to attend the cutting party?” Henry asked.

“Yes. Is Ryan going to do it?”

“That’s what I understand.”

“I thought I might take Norris with me. The bodies will go to Oxford first, won’t they?”

“Uh-huh. That’s where we log them in.”

“If Norris and I left now, we could be in Augusta before they get there.”

Henry Payton nodded. “Why not? I think it’s buttoned up here.”

“I’d like to send one of my men with each of your CID teams.

As observers. Do you have a problem with that?”

Payton thought it over. “Nope-but who’s going to keep the peace?

Ole Scat Thomas?”

Alan felt a sudden flash of something which was a little too hot to be dismissed as mere annoyance. It had been a long day, he’d listened to Henry rag on his deputies about as much as he wanted to… yet he needed to stay on Henry’s good side in order to hitch a ride on what was technically a State Police case, and so he held his tongue.

“Come on, Henry. It’s Sunday night. Even The Mellow Tiger’s closed.”

“Why are you so hot to stick with this, Alan? Is there something hinky about it? I understand there was bad feeling between the two women, and that the one on top already offed someone. Her husband, no less.”

Alan thought about it. “No-nothing hinky. Nothing that I know about, anyway. It’s just that…”

“It doesn’t quite jell in your head yet?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay. just as long as your men understand they’re there to listen and no more.”

Alan smiled a little. He thought of telling Payton that if he instructed Clut and John LaPointe to ask questions, they would probably run the other way, and decided not to. “They’ll keep their lips zipped,” he said. “You can count on it.”

3

And so here they were, he and Norris Ridgewick, after the longest Sunday in living memory. But the day had one thing in common with the lives of Nettle and Wilma: it was over.

“Were you thinking about checking into a motel room for the night?” Norris asked hesitantly. Alan didn’t have to be a mindreader to know what he was thinking about: the fishing he would miss tomorrow.

“Hell, no.” Alan bent and picked up the gown he had used to prop the door open. “Let’s beat feet.”

“Great idea,” Norris said, sounding happy for the first time since Alan had met him at the crime scene. Five minutes later they were headed toward Castle Rock along Route 43, the headlights of the County cruiser boring holes in the windy darkness. By the time they arrived, it had been Monday morning for almost three hours.

4

Alan pulled in behind the Municipal Building and got out of the cruiser. His station wagon was parked next to Norris’s dilapidated VW Beetle on the far side of the lot.

“You headed right home?” he asked Norris.

Norris offered a small, embarrassed grin and dropped his eyes.

“Soon’s I change into my civvies.”

“Norris, how many times have I told you about using the men’s room as a changing booth?”

“Come on, Alan-I don’t do it all the time.” They both knew, however, that Norris did just that.

Alan sighed. “Never mind-it’s been a hell of a long day for you.

I’m sorry.”

Norris shrugged. “It was murder. They don’t happen around here very often. When they do, I guess everybody pulls together.”

“Get Sandy or Sheila to write you up an overtime chit if either of them is still here.”

“And give Buster something else to bitch about?” Norris laughed with some bitterness. “I think I’ll pass. This one’s on me, Alan.”

“Has he been giving you shit?” Alan had forgotten all about the town’s Head Selectman these last couple of days.

“No-but he gives me a real hairy eyeball when we pass on the street. If looks could kill, I’d be as dead as Nettle and Wilma.”

“I’ll write up the chit myself tomorrow morning.”

“If your name’s on it, that’s okay,” Norris said, starting for the door marked TOWN EMPLOYEES ONLY. “Goodnight, Alan.”

“Good luck with the fishing.”

Norris brightened at once. “Thanks-you should see the rod I got down at the new store, Alan-it’s a dandy.”

Alan grinned. “I bet it is. I keep meaning to go see that fellow-he seems to have something for everyone else in town, so why not something for me?”

“Why not?” Norris agreed. “He’s got all kinds of stuff, all right.

You’d be surprised.”

“Goodnight, Norris. And thanks again.”

“Don’t mention it.” But Norris was clearly pleased.

Alan got into his car, backed out of the lot, and turned down Main Street. He checked the buildings on both sides automatically, not even registering his own examination… but storing the information just the same. One of the things he noticed was the fact that there was a light on in the living area above Needful Things.

It was mighty late for small-town folks to be up. He wondered if Mr. Leland Gaunt was an insomniac, and reminded himself again that he had that call to make-but it would keep, he reckoned, until he had the sad business of Nettle and Wilma sorted out to his satisfaction.

He reached the corner of Main and Laurel, signalled a left turn, then halted in the middle of the intersection and turned right instead.

To hell with going home. That was a cold and empty place with his remaining son living it up with his friend on Cape Cod.

There were too many closed doors with too many memories lurking behind them in that house. On the other side of town there was a live woman who might need someone quite badly just now. Almost as badly, perhaps, as this live man needed her.

Five minutes later Alan killed the headlights and rolled quietly up Polly’s driveway. The door would be locked, but he knew which corner of the porch steps to look under.

5

“What are you still doing here, Sandy?” Norris asked as he walked in, loosening his tie.

Sandra McMillan, a fading blonde who had been the county’s part-time dispatcher for almost twenty years, was slipping into her coat. She looked very tired.

“Sheila had tickets to see Bill Cosby in Portland,” she told Norris. “She said she’d stay here, but I made her go-practically pushed her out the door. I mean, how often does Bill Cosby come to Maine?”

How often do two women decide to cut each other to pieces over a dog that probably came from the Castle County Animal Shelter in the first place? Norris thought… but did not say. “Not that often, I guess.”

“Hardly ever.” Sandy sighed deeply. “Tell you a secret, thoughnow that it’s all over, I almost wish I’d said yes when Sheila offered to stay. It’s been so crazy tonight-I think every TV station in the state called at least nine times, and until eleven o’clock or so, this place looked like a department store Christmas Eve sale.”

“Well, go on home. You have my permission. Did you power up The Bastard?”

The Bastard was the machine which switched calls to Alan’s home when no dispatcher was on duty at the station. If no one picked up at Alan’s after four rings, The Bastard cut in and told callers to dial the State Police in Oxford. It was a jury-rig system that wouldn’t have worked in a big city, but in Castle County, which had the smallest population of all Maine’s sixteen counties, it worked fine.

“It’s on.”

“Good. I have a feeling that Alan might not have been going straight home.” Sandy raised her eyebrows knowingly. “Hear anything from Lieutenant Payton?” Norris asked. “Not a thing.” She paused. “Was it awful, Norris? I mean… those two women?”

“It was pretty awful, all right,” he agreed. His civies were hung neatly on a hanger he had hooked over a filing-cabinet handle. He removed it and started for the men’s room. It had been his habit to change in and out of his uniforms at work for the last three years or so, although the changes rarely came at such an outrageous hour as this. “Go home, Sandy-I’ll lock up when I’m done.”

He pushed through the bathroom door and hooked the hanger over the top of the door to the toilet stall. He was unbuttoning his uniform shirt when there was a light knock on the door.

“Norris?” Sandy called. “I think I’m the only one here,” he called back. “I almost forgot-someone left a present for you. It’s on your desk.” Norris paused in the act of unbuckling his pants. “A present? Who from?”

“I don’t know-the place really was a madhouse. But it’s got a card on it. Also a bow. It must be your secret lover.”

“My lover’s so secret even I don’t know about her,” Norris said with real regret. He stepped out of his pants and laid them over the stall door while he put on his jeans.

Outside, Sandy McMillan smiled with a touch of malice. “Mr. Keeton was by tonight,” she said. “Maybe he left it. Maybe it’s a kiss-and-make-up present.” Norris laughed. “That’ll be the day.”

“Well, make sure you tell me tomorrow-I’m dying to know. It’s a pretty package. Goodnight, Norris.”

“Night.” Who could have left me a present? he wondered, zipping up his fly.

6

Sandy left, pulling the collar of her coat up as she went out-the night was very cold, reminding her that winter was on its way. Cyndi Rose Martin, the lawyer’s wife, was one of the many people she had seen that night-Cyndi Rose had turned up early in the evening.

Sandy never thought of mentioning her to Norris, however; he did not move in the Martins’ more rarefied social and professional circles.

Cyndi Rose said she was looking for her husband, which made a certain amount of sense to Sandy (although the evening had been so harum-scarum that Sandy probably wouldn’t have thought it odd if the woman had said she was looking for Mikhail Baryshnikov), because Albert Martin did some of the town’s legal work.

Sandy said she hadn’t seen Mr. Martin that evening, although Cyndi Rose w?-s welcome to check upstairs and see if he was in with Mr.

Keeton, if she wanted. Cyndi Rose said she thought she would do that, as long as she was here. By then the switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree again, and Sandy did not see Cyndi Rose take the rectangular package with the bright foil paper and the blue velvet bow from her large handbag and put it on Norris Ridgewick’s desk. Her pretty face had been lit with a smile as she did it, but the smile itself was not pretty at all. It was, in fact, rather cruel.

7

Norris heard the outer door shut and, dimly, the sound of Sandy starting her car. He tucked his shirt into his jeans, stepped into his loafers, and arranged his uniform carefully on its hanger. He sniffed the shirt at the armpits and decided it didn’t have to go to the cleaners right away. That was good; a penny saved was a penny earned.

When he left the men’s room, he put the hanger back on the same file-cabinet handle, where he could not help seeing it on his way out.

That was also good, because Alan got pissed like a bear when Norris forgot and left his duds hanging around the police station. He said it made the place look like a laundrymat.

He went over to his desk. Someone really had left him a present-it was a box done up in light-blue foil wrapping paper and blue velvet ribbon exploding into a fluffy bow on top. There was a square white envelope tucked under the ribbon. Very curious now, Norris removed the envelope and tore it open. There was a card inside. Typed on it in capital letters was a short, enigmatic message:

!!!!!JUSTA REMINDER!!!!!

He frowned. The only two persons he could think of who were always reminding him of things were Alan and his mother… and his mother had died five years ago. He picked up the package, broke the ribbon, and set the bow carefully aside. Then he took off the paper, revealing a plain white cardboard box. It was about a foot long, four inches wide, and four inches deep. The lid was taped shut.

Norris broke the tape and opened the box. There was a layer of white tissue paper over the object inside, thin enough to indicate a flat surface with a number of raised ridges running across it, but not thin enough to allow him to see what his present was.

He reached in to pull the tissue paper out, and his forefinger struck something hard-a protruding tongue of metal. A heavy steel jaw closed on the tissue paper and also on Norris Ridgewick’s first three fingers. Pain ripped up his arm. He screamed and stumbled backward, grabbing his right wrist with his left hand. The white box tumbled to the floor. Tissue-paper crinkled.

Oh, son of a bitch, it hurt! He grabbed at the tissue, which hung down in a wrinkled ribbon, and tore it free. What he revealed was a large Victory rat-trap. Someone had armed it, stuck it in a box, put tissue-paper over it to hide it, and then wrapped it in pretty blue paper. Now it was clamped on the first three fingers of his right hand. It had torn the nail of his index finger right off, he saw; all that remained was a bleeding crescent of raw flesh.

“Whoremaster!” Norris cried. In his pain and shock, he at first beat the trap against the side of John LaPointe’s desk instead of just prying back the steel bar. All he managed to do was bang his hurt fingers against the desk’s metal corner and send a fresh snarl of pain up his arm. He screamed again, then grabbed the trap’s bar and pulled it back. He released his fingers and dropped the trap.

The steel bar snapped down again on the trap’s wooden base as it fell to the floor.

Norris stood trembling for a moment, then bolted back into the men’s room, turned on the cold water with his left hand, and thrust his right hand under the tap. It throbbed like an impacted wisdom tooth.

He stood with his lips drawn back in a grimace, watching thin threads of blood swirl down the drain, and thought of what Sandy had said: Mr. Keeton was by. maybe it’s a kiss-andmake-up present.

And the card: JUST A REMINDER.

Oh, it had been Buster, all right. He didn’t doubt it a bit. It was just Buster’s style.

“You son of a bitch,” Norris groaned.

The cold water was numbing his fingers, damping down that sick throbbing, but he knew it would be back by the time he arrived home.

Aspirin might dull it a little, but he still thought he could forget getting any real sleep tonight. Or any fishing tomorrow, for that matter.

Oh yes I will-I’ll go fishing even if my fucking hand falls fucking off. I had it planned, I’ve been looking forward to it, and Danforth Fucking Buster Keeton isn’t going to stop me.

He turned off the water and used a paper towel to blot his hand gently dry. None of the fingers which had been caught in the trap were broken-at least he didn’t think so-but they were already beginning to swell, cold water or no cold water. The arm of the trap had left a dark red-purple weal which ran across the fingers between the first and second knuckles. The exposed flesh beneath what had been the nail of his index finger was sweating small beads of blood, and that sick throbbing was already beginning again.

He went back into the deserted bullpen and looked at the sprung trap, lying on its side by John’s desk. He picked it up and went over to his own desk. He put the trap inside the gift-box and put it in the top drawer of his desk. He took his aspirin out of the lower drawer and shook three of them into his mouth. Then he got the tissue-paper, the wrapping paper, the ribbon, and the bow. These he stuffed into the trash basket, covering them with balls of discarded paper.

He had no intention of telling Alan or anyone else about the nasty trick Buster had played on him. They wouldn’t laugh, but Norris knew what they would think… or thought he did: Only Norris Ridgewick would fall for something like that-stuck his hand right into a loaded rat-trap, can you believe it?

It must be your secret lover… Mr. Keeton was by tonight… maybe it’s a kiss-and-make-up present.

“I’ll take care of this myself,” Norris said in a low, grim voice. He was holding his wounded hand against his chest. “In my own way, and in my own time.”

Suddenly a new and urgent thought came to him: what if Buster hadn’t been content with the rat-trap, which, after all, might not have worked? What if he had gone up to Norris’s house? The Bazun fishing rod was there, and it wasn’t even locked up; he had just leaned it in the corner of the shed, next to his reel.

What if Buster knew about it and had decided to break it in two?

“If he did that, I’d break him in two,” Norris said. He spoke in a low, angry growl Henry Payton-nor many of his other law enforcement colleagues, for that matter-would not have recognized. He forgot all about locking up when he left the office. He had even temporarily forgotten the pain in his hand. The only thing that mattered was getting home. Getting home and making sure the Bazun rod was still all right.

8

The shape under the blankets didn’t move when Alan eased into the room, and he thought Polly was asleep-probably with the help of a Percodan at bedtime. He undressed quietly and slid into bed beside her. As his head settled on the pillow, he saw that her eyes were open, watching him. It gave him a momentary start and he jerked.

“What stranger comes to this maiden’s bed?” she asked softly.

“Only I,” he replied, smiling a little. “I apologize for waking you, maiden.”

“I was awake,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. He slipped his own about her waist. The deep bed-warmth of her pleased him-she was like a sleepy furnace. He felt something hard against his chest for a moment, and it almost registered that she was wearing something under her cotton nightgown. Then it shifted, tumbling down between her left breast and her armpit on its fine silver chain.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She pressed the side of her face against his cheek, still holding him. He could feel her hands locked together at the nape of his neck.

“No,” she said. The word came out in a trembling sigh, and then she began to sob.

He held her while she cried, stroking her hair.

“Why didn’t she tell me what that woman was doing, Alan?”

Polly asked at last. She drew away from him a little. Now his eyes had ad usted to the dark, and he could see her face-dark eyes, dark hair, white skin.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“If she’d told me, I would have taken care of it! I would have gone to see Wilma Jersyck myself, and… and…

It was not the moment to tell her that Nettle had apparently played the game with almost as much vigor and malice as Wilma herself.

Nor was it the moment to tell her that there came a time when the Nettle Cobbs of the world-and the Wilma Jersycks, too, he supposed-could no longer be fixed. There came a time when they went beyond anyone’s ability to repair.

“It’s three-thirty in the morning,” he said. “That’s a bad time to talk about should-haves and would-haves.” He hesitated for a moment before speaking again. “According to John LaPointe, Nettle said something to you about Wilma this morning-yesterday morning, now. What was it?”

Polly thought it over. “Well, I didn’t know it was about Wilmanot then, anyway. Nettle brought over a lasagna. And my hands… my hands were really bad. She saw it right away. Nettle is-wasmay have been-I don’t know-vague about some things, but I couldn’t hide a thing from her.”

“She loved you very much,” Alan said gravely, and this brought on a fresh spate of sobbing. He had known it would, just as he knew that some tears have to be cried no matter what the houruntil they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

After awhile, Polly was able to go on. Her hands crept back around Alan’s neck as she spoke.

“She got those stupid thermal gloves out, only this time they really helped-the current crisis seems to have passed, anywayand then she made coffee. I asked her if she didn’t have things to do at home and she said she didn’t. She said Raider was on guard and then she said something like, ’i think she’ll leave me alone, anyway. I haven’t seen her or heard from her, so I guess she finally got the message.’ That isn’t exact, Alan, but it’s pretty close.”

“What time did she come by?”

“Around quarter past ten. It might have been a little earlier or a little later, but not much. Why, Alan? Does it mean anything?”

When Alan slid between the sheets, he felt that he would be asleep ten seconds after his head hit the pillow. Now he was wide awake again, and thinking hard.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think it means anything, except that Nettle had Wilma on her mind.”

“I just can’t believe it. She seemed so much better-she really did. Remember me telling you about how she got up the courage to go into Needful Things all on her own last Thursday?”

“Yes.”

She released him and rolled fretfully onto her back. Alan heard a small metallic chink! as she did so, and again thought nothing of it.

His mind was still examining what Polly had just told him, turning it this way and that, like a jeweller examining a suspect stone.

“I’ll have to make the funeral arrangements,” she said. “Nettle has got people in Yarmouth-a few, anyway-but they didn’t want to have anything to do with her when she was alive, and they’ll want to have even less to do with her now that she’s dead. But I’ll have to call them in the morning. Will I be able to go into Nettle’s house, Alan?

I think she had an address book.”

“I’ll bring you. You won’t be able to take anything away, at least not until Dr. Ryan has published his autopsy findings, but I can’t see any harm in letting you copy down a few telephone numbers.”

“Thank you.”

A sudden thought occurred to him. “Polly, what time did Nettle leave here?”

“Quarter of eleven, I guess. It might have been as late as eleven o’clock. She didn’t stay a whole hour, I don’t think. Why?”

“Nothing,” he said. He’d had a momentary flash: if Nettle had stayed long enough at Polly’s, she might not have had time to go back home, find her dog dead, collect the rocks, write the notes, attach them to the rocks, go over to Wilma’s, and break the windows. But if Nettle had left Polly’s at quarter to eleven, that gave her better than two hours. Plenty of time.

Hey, Alan! the voice the falsely cheery one that usually restricted its input to the subject of Annie and Todd-spoke up. How come you’re trying to bitch this up for yourself, good buddy?

And Alan didn’t know. There was something else he didn’t know, either-how had Nettle gotten that load of rocks over to the jerzyck house in the first place? She had no driver’s license and didn’t have a clue about operating a car.

Cut the crap, good buddy, the voice advised. She wrote the notes at her house-probably right down the hall from her dog’s dead bodyand got the rubber bands from her own kitchen drawer, She didn’t have to carry the rocks; there were Plenty of those in Wilma’s back-yard garden.

Right?

Right. Yet he could not get rid of the idea that the rocks had been brought with the notes already attached. He had no concrete reason to think so, but it just seemed right… the kind of thing you’d expect from a kid or someone who thought like a kid.

Someone like Nettle Cobb.

Quit it… let it go!

He couldn’t, though.

Polly touched his cheek. “I’m awfully glad you came, Alan. It must have been a horrible day for you, too.”

“I’ve had better, but it’s over now. You should let it go, too.

Get some sleep. You have a lot of arrangements to make tomorrow.

Do you want me to get you a pill?”

“No, my hands are a little better, at least. Alan-” She broke off, but stirred restlessly under the covers.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It wasn’t important. I think I can sleep, now that you’re here. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, honey.”

She rolled away from him, pulled the covers up, and was still.

For a moment he thought of how she had hugged him-the feel of her hands locked about his neck. If she was able to flex her fingers enough to do that, then she really was better. That was a good thing, maybe the best thing that had happened to him since Clut had phoned during the football game. If only things would stay better.

Polly had a slightly deviated septum and now she began to snore lightly, a sound Alan actually found rather pleasant. It was good to be sharing a bed with another person, a real person who made real sounds… and sometimes filched the covers. He grinned in the dark.

Then his mind turned back to the murders and the grin faded.

I think she’ll leave me alone, anyway. I haven’t seen her or heard from her, so I guess she finally got the message.

I haven’t seen her or heardfrom her.

I guess she finally got the message.

A case like this one didn’t need to be solved; even Seat Thomas could have told you exactly what had happened after a single look at the crime-scene through his trifocals. It had been kitchen implements instead of duelling pistols at dawn, but the result was the same: two bodies in the morgue at K.V.H. with autopsy Y-cuts in them. The only question was why it had happened. He had had a few questions, a few vague disquiets, but they would no doubt have blown away before Wilma and Nettle had been seen into the ground.

Now the disquiets were more urgent, and some of them (I guess she finally got the message) had names.

To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be large, with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite awhile before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren’t afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.

Sometimes the gate was a piece of evidence found at a crimescene.

Sometimes it was a witness. Sometimes it was an assumption firmly based on events and logic. The assumptions he’d made in this case were: one, that Wilma had been following a longestablished pattern of harassment and fuckery; two, that this time she had chosen the wrong person with whom to play mind-games; three, that Nettle had snapped again as she had when she’d killed her husband. But…

I haven’t seen her or heard from her.

If Nettle had really said that, how much did it change? How many assumptions did that single sentence knock into cocked hats?

Alan didn’t know.

He stared into the darkness of Polly’s bedroom and wondered if he’d found the gate after all.

Maybe Polly hadn’t heard what Nettle had said correctly.

It was technically possible, but Alan didn’t believe it. Nettle’s actions, at least up to a certain point, supported what Polly claimed to have heard. Nettle hadn’t come to work at Polly’s on Friday. she’d said she was ill. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just scared of Wilma. That made sense; they knew from Pete Jerzyck that Wilma, after discovering that her sheets had been vandalized, had made at least one threatening call to Nettle. She might have made others the next day that Pete didn’t know about. But Nettle had come to see Polly with a gift of food on Sunday morning.

Would she have done that if Wilma was still stoking the fires? Alan didn’t think so.

Then there was the matter of the rocks which had been thrown through Wilma’s windows. Each of the attached notes said the same thing: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. A warning usually means that the person being warned has more time to change his or her ways, but time had been up for Wilma and Nettle.

They had met on that street-corner only two hours after the rocks had been thrown.

He supposed he could get around that one if he had to. When Nettle found her dog, she would have been furious. Ditto Wilma when she got home and saw the damage to her house. All it would have taken to strike the final spark was a single telephone call. One of the two women had made that call gone up.

Alan turned over on his side, wishing that these were the old days, when you could still obtain records of local calls. If he could have documented the fact that Wilma and Nettle had spoken before their final meeting, he would have felt a lot better. Still-take the final phone-call as a given. That still left the notes themselves.

This is how it must have happened, he thought. Nettle comes home from Polly’s and finds her dog dead on the hallfloor. She reads the note on the corkscrew. Then she writes the same message on fourteen or sixteen sheets of Paper and puts them in the Pocket of her coat. She also gets a bunch of rubber bands. When she gets to Wilma’s, she goes into the back yard. She Piles up fourteen or sixteen rocks and uses the elastic bands to attach the notes. She must have done all that prior to throwing any rocks-it would have taken too long if she had to stop in the middle of the festivities to pick out more rocks and attach more notes. And when she’s done, she goes home and broods over her dead pet some more.

It felt all wrong to him.

It felt really lousy.

It presupposed a chain of thought and action that just didn’t fit what he knew of Nettle Cobb. The murder of her husband had and the balloon had been the outcome of long cycles of abuse, but the murder itself had been an impulse crime committed by a woman whose sanity had broken.

If the records in George Bannerman’s old files were correct, Nettle sure hadn’t written Albion Cobb any warning notes beforehand.

What felt right to him was much simpler: Nettle comes home from Polly’s. She finds her dog dead in the hallway. She gets a cleaver from the kitchen drawer and heads up the street to cut herself a wide slice of Polish butt.

But if that was the case, who had broken Wilma jerzyck’s windows?

“Plus the times are all so weird,” he muttered, and rolled restlessly over onto his other side.

John LaPointe had been with the CID team which had spent Sunday afternoon and evening tracing Nettle’s movements-what movements there had been. She had gone to Polly’s with the lasagna.

She told Polly that she would probably go by the new shop, Needful Things, on her way home and speak to the owner, Leland Gaunt, if he was in-Polly said Mr. Gaunt had invited her to look at an item that afternoon and Nettle was going to tell Mr. Gaunt that Polly would probably show up, even though her hands were paining her quite badly.

If Nettle had gone into Needful Things, if Nettle had spent some time there-browsing, talking to the new shopkeeper that everyone in town thought was so fascinating and whom Alan kept not meeting-that might have bitched up her window of opportunity and re-opened the possibility of a mystery rock-thrower. But she hadn’t. The shop had been closed. Gaunt had told both Polly, who had indeed dropped by later on, and the CID boys that he had seen neither hide nor hair of Nettle since the day she came in and bought her carnival glass lampshade. In any case, he had spent the morning in the back room, listening to classical music and cataloguing items. If someone had knocked, he probably wouldn’t have heard anyway. So Nettle must have gone directly home, and that left her the time to do all those things which Alan found so unlikely.

Wilma Jersyck’s window of opportunity was even narrower. Her husband had some woodworking equipment in the basement; he had been down there Sunday morning from eight until just past ten. He saw it was getting late, he said, so he’d shut down the machinery and gone upstairs to dress for eleven o’clock Mass.

Wilma, he told the officers, had been in the shower when he entered the bedroom, and Alan had no reason to doubt the new widower’s testimony.

It must have gone like this: Wilma leaves her house on a driveby mission at nine-thirty-five or nine-forty. Pete’s in the basement, making birdhouses or whatever, and doesn’t even know she’s gone.

Wilma gets to Nettle’s at about quarter to ten-just minutes after Nettle must have left for Polly’s-and sees the door standing open.

To Wilma, this is as good as a gilt-edged invitation. She parks, goes inside, kills the dog and writes the note on impulse, and leaves again. None of the neighbors remembered seeing Wilma’s bright yellow Yugo-inconvenient, but hardly proof it hadn’t been there.

Most of the neighbors had been gone, anyway, either to church or visiting out of town.

Wilma drives back to her house, goes upstairs while Pete is shutting down his planer or jigsaw or whatever, and gets undressed.

When Pete enters the master bathroom to wash the sawdust off his hands before putting on a coat and tie, Wilma has just stepped into the shower; in fact, she’s probably still dry on one side.

Pete jerzyck’s finding his wife in the shower was the only thing in the whole mess that made perfect sense to Alan. The corkscrew which had been used on the dog was a lethal enough weapon, but a short one.

She’d have wanted to wash off any bloodstains on her hands and arms.

Wilma just misses Nettle on one end and just misses her husband on the other. Was it possible? Yes. Only by a squeak and a gasp, but it was possible.

So let it go, Alan. Let it go and go to sleep.

But he still couldn’t, because it still sucked. It sucked hard.

Alan rolled onto his back once more. Downstairs he heard the clock in the living room softly chiming four. This was getting him nowhere at all, but he couldn’t seem to turn his mind off.

He tried to imagine Nettle sitting patiently at her kitchen table, writing THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING overand overagain while, less than twenty feet away, her beloved little dog lay dead. He couldn’t do it no matter how he tried. What had seemed like a gate into this particular garden now seemed more and more like a clever painting of a gate on the high, unbroken wall. A trompe Poeil.

Had Nettle walked over to Wilma’s house on Willow Street and broken the windows? He didn’t know, but he did know that Nettle Cobb was still a figure of interest in Castle Rock… the crazy lady who had killed her husband and then spent all those years in juniper Hill.

On the rare occasions when she deviated from the path of her usual routine, she was noticed. If she had gone stalking over to Willow Street on Sunday morning-perhaps muttering to herself as she went and almost certainly crying-she would have been noticed. Tomorrow Alan would start knocking on the doors between the two houses and asking questions.

He began to slip off to sleep at last. The image that followed him down was a pile of rocks with a sheet of note-paper banded around each one. And he thought again: If Nettle didn’t throw them, then who did?

9

As the small hours of Monday morning crept toward dawn and the beginning of a new and interesting week, a young man named Ricky Bissonette emerged from the hedge surrounding the Baptist parsonage.

Inside this neat-as-a-pin building, the Reverend William Rose slept the sleep of the just and the righteous.

Ricky, nineteen and not overburdened with brains, worked down at Sonny’s Sunoco. He had closed up hours ago but had hung around in the office, waiting until it was late enough (or early enough) to play a little prank on Rev. Rose. On Friday afternoon, Ricky had stopped by the new shop, and had fallen into conversation with the proprietor, who was one interesting old fellow. One thing led to another, and at some point Ricky had realized he was telling Mr. Gaunt his deepest, most secret wish. He mentioned the name of a young actress-model-a very young actress-model-and told Mr. Gaunt he would give just about anything for some pictures of this young woman with her clothes off.

“You know, I have something that might interest you,” Mr.

Gaunt had said. He glanced around the store as if to verify that it was empty except for the two of them, then went to the door and turned the OPEN sign over to CLOSED. He returned to his spot by the cash register, rummaged under the counter, and came up with an unmarked manila envelope. “Have a look at these, Mr.

Bissonette,” Mr. Gaunt said, and then dropped a rather lecherous man-of-the-world wink. “I think you’ll be startled. Perhaps even amazed.”

Stunned was more like it. It was the actress-model for whom Ricky lusted-it had to be!-and she was a lot more than just nude.

In some of the pictures she was with a well-known actor. In others, she was with two well-known actors, one of whom was old enough to be her grand father. And in still othersBut before he could see any of the others (and it appeared there were fifty or more, all brilliant eight-by-ten glossy color shots), Mr.

Gaunt had snatched them away.

“That’s -!” Ricky gulped, mentioning a name which was well known to readers of the glossy tabloids and watchers of the glossy talk-shows.

“Oh, no,” Mr. Gaunt said, while his jade-colored eyes said Oh, yes. “I’m sure it can’t be… but the resemblance is remarkable, isn’t it? The sale of pictures such as these is illegal, of course-sexual content aside, the girl can’t be a minute over seventeen, whoever she is-but I might be persuaded to deal for these just the same, Mr. Bissonette. The fever in my blood is not malaria but commerce. So! Shall we dicker?”

They dickered. Ricky Bissonette ended up purchasing seventytwo pornographic photographs for thirty-six dollars… and this little prank.

He ran across the parsonage lawn bent over at the waist, settled into the shadow of the porch for a moment to make sure he was unwatched, then climbed the steps. He produced a plain white card from his back pocket, opened the mail-slot, and dropped the card through.

He eased the brass slot closed with the tips of his fingers, not wanting it to clack shut. Then he vaulted the porch railing and ran fleetly back across the lawn. He had big plans for the two or three hours of darkness which still remained to this Monday morning; they involved seventy-two photographs and a large bottle of jergens hand lotion.

The card looked like a white moth as it fluttered from the mailslot to the faded rug-runner in the front hall of the parsonage.

It landed message-side up: How you doing you Stupid Babtist Rat-Fuck.

We are writting you to say you better Quit talking out aginst our Casino Nite. We are just going to have a little fun we are not hurting You. Anyway a bunch of us Loyal Catholics are tired of your Babtist Bullshit. We know all You Babtists are a bunch of Cunt Lickers anyway.

Now to THIS You better Pay Atention, Reverund Steam-Boat Willy. If you dont keept your Dick-Face out of Our business, we are going to stink You and your Ass-Face Buddies up so bad you will Stink Forever!

Leave us alone you Stupid Babtist Rat-Fuck or You WILL BE A SORRY SON OF A BITCH. “Just a Warning” from THE CONCERNED CATHOLIC MEN OF CASTLE ROCK Rev. Rose discovered the note when he came downstairs in his bathrobe to collect the morning paper. His reaction is perhaps better imagined than described.

Leland Gaunt stood at the window of the front room above Needful Things with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out across the town of Castle Rock.

The four-room apartment behind him would have raised eyebrows in town, for there was nothing in it-nothing at all. Not a bed, not an appliance, not a single chair. The closets stood open and empty. A few dust-bunnies tumbled lazily across floors innocent of rugs in a slight draft that blew through the place at ankle level.

The only furnishings were, quite literally, window-dressing: homey checked curtains. They were the only furnishings which mattered, because they were the only ones which could be seen from the street.

The town was sleeping now. The shops were dark, the houses were dark, and the only movement on Main Street was the blinker at the intersection of Main and Watermill, flashing on and off in sleepy yellow beats. He looked over the town with a tender loving eye. It wasn’t his town just yet, but it soon would be. He had a lien on it already. They didn’t know that… but they would. They would.

The grand opening had gone very, very well.

Mr. Gaunt thought of himself as an electrician of the human soul.

In a small town like Castle Rock, all the fuse-boxes were lined up neatly side by side. What you had to do was open the boxes… and then start cross-wiring. You hot-wired a Wilma jerzyck to a Nettle Cobb by using wires from two other fuse-boxes-those of a young fellow like Brian Rusk and a drunk fellow like Hugh Priest, let us say.

You hot-wired other people in the same way, a Buster Keeton to a Norris Ridgewick, a Frank jewett to a George Nelson, a Sally Ratcliffe to a Lester Pratt.

At some point you tested one of your fabulous wiring jobs just to make sure everything was working correctly-as he had done today-and then you laid low and sent a charge through the circuits every once in awhile to keep things interesting. To keep things hot.

But mostly you just laid low until everything was done… and then you turned on the juice.

All the juice.

All at once.

All it took was an understanding of human nature, and"Of course it’s really a question of supply and demand,” Leland Gaunt mused as he looked out over the sleeping town.

And why? Well… just because, actually. just because.

People always thought in terms of souls, and of course he would take as many of those as he could when he closed up shop; they were to Leland Gaunt what trophies were to the hunter, what stuffed fish were to the fisherman. They were worth little to him these days in any practical sense, but he still bagged his limit if he possibly could, no matter what he might say to the contrary; to do any less would not be playing the game.

Yet it was mostly amusement, not souls, that kept him going.

Simple amusement. It was the only reason that mattered after awhile, because when the years were long, you took diversion where you could find it.

Mr. Gaunt took his hands from behind his back-those hands which revolted anyone unlucky enough to feel their crepitant touch-and locked them together tightly, the knuckles of his right hand pressing into the palm of his left, the knuckles of his left pressing into the palm of his right. His fingernails were long and thick and yellow. They were also very sharp, and after a moment or two they cut into the skin of his fingers, bringing a blackish-red flow of thick blood.

Brian Rusk cried out in his sleep.

Myra Evans thrust her hands into the fork of her crotch and began to masturbate furiously-in her dream, The King was making love to her.

Danforth Keeton dreamed he was lying in the middle of the homestretch at Lewiston Raceway, and he covered his face with his hands as the horses bore down on him.

Sally Ratcliffe dreamed she opened the door of Lester Pratt’s Mustang only to see it was full of snakes.

Hugh Priest screamed himself awake from a dream in which Henry Beaufort, the bartender at The Mellow Tiger, poured lighter fluid all over his fox-tail and set it on fire.

Everett Frankel, Ray Van Allen’s Physician’s Assistant, dreamed he slipped his new pipe into his mouth only to discover the stem had turned into a razor-blade and he had cut off his own tongue.

Polly Chalmers began to moan softly, and inside the small silver charm she wore something stirred and moved with a rustling like the whir of small dusty wings. And it sent up a faint, dusty aroma… like a tremor of violets.

Leland Gaunt relaxed his grip slowly. His big, crooked teeth were exposed in a grin which was both cheerful and surpassingly ugly. All over Castle Rock, dreams blew away and uneasy sleepers rested easy once more.

For now.

Soon the sun would be up. Not long after that a new day would begin, with all its surprises and wonders. He believed the time had come to hire an assistant… not that the assistant would be immune to the process which he had now set in motion. Heavens, no.

That would spoil all the fun.

Leland Gaunt stood at the window and looked at the town below, spread out, defenseless, in all that lovely darkness. m