Needful Things

CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday, the eleventh of October, was a banner day at Castle Rock’s newest shop, particularly as morning gave way to afternoon and people began to cash their paychecks. Money in the hand was an incentive to shop; so was the good word of mouth sent around by those who had stopped in on Wednesday. There were a number of people, of course, who believed the judgments of people crude enough to visit a new store on the very first day it was open could not be trusted, but they were a minority, and the small silver bell over the front door of Needful Things jingled prettily all day long.

More stock had been either unpacked or delivered since Wednesday.

It was hard for those interested in such things to believe there had been a delivery-no one had seen a truck-but it really didn’t matter much, one way or the other. There was a lot more merchandise in Needful Things on Friday; that was the important thing.

Dolls, for instance. And beautifully crafted wooden jigsaw puzzles, some of them double-sided. There was a unique chess set: the pieces were chunks of rock crys@ carved into African animals by some primitive but fabulously talented hand-loping giraffes for knights, rhinos with their heads combatively lowered for castles, jackals for pawns, lion kings, sinuous leopard queens. There was a necklace of black pearls which was clearly expensive-how expensive nobody quite dared to ask (at least not that day)-but their beauty made them almost painful to look at, and several visitors to Needful Things went home feeling melancholy and oddly distraught, with the image of that pearl necklace dancing in the darkness just behind their eyes, black on black. Nor were all of these women.

There was a pair of dancing jester-puppets. There was a music box, old and ornately carved-Mr. Gaunt said he was sure it played something unusual when it was opened, but he couldn’t remember just what, and it was locked shut. He reckoned a buyer would have to find someone to make a key for it; there were still a few oldtimers around, he said, who had such skill-a. He was asked a few times if the music box could be returned if the buyer did get the lid to open and discovered that the tune was not to his or her taste.

Mr. Gaunt smiled and pointed to a new sign on the wall. It read:

I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES CAVEAT EMPTOR!

“What does that mean?” Lucille Dunham asked. Lucille was a waitress at Nan’s who had stopped in with her friend Rose Ellen Myers on her coffee break.

“It means that if you buy a pig in a poke, you keep the pig and he keeps your poke,” Rose Ellen said. She saw that Mr. Gaunt had overheard her (and she could have sworn she’d seen him on the other side of the shop only a moment before), and she blushed bright red.

Mr. Gaunt, however, only laughed. “That’s right,” he told her.

“That’s exactly what it means!”

An old long-barreled revolver in one case with a card in front of it which read NED BUNTLINE SPECIAL; a boy puppet with wooden red hair, freckles, and a fixed friendly grin (HOWDY DOODY PROTOTYPE, read the card); boxes of stationery, very nice but not remarkable; a selection of antique post-cards; pen-andpencil sets; linen handkerchiefs; stuffed animals. There was, it seemed, an item for every taste and-even though there was not a single price-tag in the entire store for every budget.

Mr. Gaunt did a fine business that day. Most of the items he sold were nice but in no way unique. He did, however, make a number of “special” deals, and all of these sales took place during those lulls when there was only a single customer in the store.

“When things get slow, I get restless,” he told Sally Ratcliffe, Brian Rusk’s speech teacher, with his friendly grin, “and when I get restless, I sometimes get reckless. Bad for the seller but awfully good for the buyer.”

Miss Ratcliffe was a devout member of Rev. Rose’s Baptist flock, had met her fiance Lester Pratt there, and in addition to her No Casino Nite button, she wore one which said I’M ONE OF THE SAVED! HOW ‘BOUT You? The splinter labelled PETRIFIED WOOD FROM THE HOLY LAND caught her attention at once, and she did not object when Mr. Gaunt took it from its case and dropped it into her hand. She bought it for seventeen dollars and a promise to play a harmless little prank on Frank jewett, the principal at Castle Rock Middle School. She left the shop five minutes after she had entered, looking dreamy and abstracted.

Mr. Gaunt had offered to wrap her purchase for her, but Miss Ratcliffe refused, saying she wanted to hold it. Looking at her as she went out the door, you would have been hard-put to tell if her feet were on the floor or drifting just above it.

2

The silver bell jingled.

Cora Rusk came in, determined to buy the picture of The King, and was extremely upset when Mr. Gaunt told her it had been sold.

Cora wanted to know who had bought it. “I’m sorry,” Mr. Gaunt said, “but the lady was from out of state. There was an Oklahoma plate on the car she was driving.”

“Well, I’ll be butched!” Cora cried in tones of anger and real distress. She hadn’t realized just how badly she wanted that picture until Mr. Gaunt informed her that it was gone.

Henry Gendron and his wife, Yvette, were in the shop at that time, and Mr. Gaunt asked Cora to wait a minute while he saw to them. He believed he had something else, he told her, which she would find of equal or perhaps even greater interest. After he had sold the Gendrons a stuffed teddy bear-a present for their daughter-and seen them out, he asked Cora if she could wait a moment longer while he looked for something in the back room. Cora waited, but not with any real interest or expectation. A deep gray depression had settled over her.

She had seen hundreds of pictures of The King, maybe thousands, and owned half a dozen herself, but this one had seemed… special, somehow. She hated the woman from Oklahoma.

Then Mr. Gaunt came back with a small lizard-skin spectacles case. He opened it and showed Cora a pair of aviator glasses with lenses of a deep smoky gray. Her breath caught in her throat; her right hand rose to her quivering neck.

“Are those-” she began, and could say no more.

“The King’s sunglasses,” Mr. Gaunt agreed gravely. “One of sixty pairs. But I’m told these were his favorites.”

Cora bought the sunglasses for nineteen dollars and fifty cents.

“I’d like a little information, as well.” Mr. Gaunt looked at Cora with twinkling eyes. “Let’s call it a surcharge, shall we?”

“Information?” Cora asked doubtfully. “What sort of information?”

“Look out the window, Cora.”

Cora did as she was asked, but her hands never left the sunglasses. Across the street, Castle Rock’s Unit I was parked in front of The Clip joint. Alan Pangborn stood on the sidewalk, talking to Bill Fullerton.

“Do you see that fellow?” Gaunt asked.

“Who? Bill Ful-” “No, you dummy,” Gaunt said. “The other one.”

“Sheriff Pangborn?”

“Right.”

“Yes, I see him.” Cora felt dull and dazed. Gaunt’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. She could not stop thinking about her purchase the wonderful sunglasses. She wanted to get home and try them on right away… but of course she couldn’t leave until she was allowed to leave, because the dealing wasn’t done until Mr. Gaunt said the dealing was done.

“He looks like what folks in my line of work call a tough sell,”

Mr. Gaunt said. “What do you think about him, Cora?”

“He’s smart,” Cora said. “He’ll never be the Sheriff old George Bannerman was-that’s what my husband says-but he’s smart as a whip.”

“Is he?” Mr. Gaunt’s voice had taken on that nagging, tired edge again. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and they never left Alan Pangborn. “Well, do you want to know a secret, Cora? I don’t much care for smart people, and I hate a tough sell. In fact, I loathe a tough sell. I don’t trust people who always want to turn things over and look for cracks before they buy them, do you?”

Cora said nothing. She only stood with The King’s sunglasses case in her left hand and stared blankly out the window.

“If I wanted someone to keep an eye on smart old Sheriff Pangborn, Cora, who would be a good choice?”

“Polly Chalmers,” Cora said in her drugged voice. “She’s awful sweet on him.”

Gaunt shook his head at once. His eyes never left the Sheriff as Alan walked to his cruiser, glanced briefly across the street at Needful Things, then got in and drove away. “Won’t do.”

“Sheila Brigham?” Cora asked doubtfully. “She’s the dispatcher down at the Sheriff’s Office.”

“A good idea, but she won’t do, either. Another tough sell.

There are a few in every town, Cora-unfortunate, but true.”

Cora thought it over in her dim, distant way. “Eddie Warburton?” she asked at last. “He’s the head custodian at the Municipal Building.”

Gaunt’s face lit up. “The janitor!” he said. “Yes! Excellent!

Fifth Business! Really excellent!” He leaned over the counter and planted a kiss on Cora’s cheek.

She drew away, grimacing and rubbing frantically at the spot.

A brief gagging noise came from her throat, but Gaunt appeared not to notice. His face was wreathed in a large, shining smile.

Cora left (still rubbing her cheek with the heel of her hand) as Stephanie Bonsaint and Cyndi Rose Martin of the Ash Street Bridge Club came in. Cora almost bowled Steffie Bonsaint over in her hurry; she felt a deep desire to get home as fast as she could. To get home and actually try those glasses on. But before she did, she wanted to wash her face and rid herself of that loathsome kiss. She could feel it burning in her skin like a low fever.

Over the door, the silver bell tinkled.

3

While Steffie stood by the window, absorbed in the shifting patterns of the old-fashioned kaleidoscope she had found, Cyndi Rose approached Mr. Gaunt and reminded him of what he had told her on Wednesday: that he might have a Lalique vase to match the one she had already bought.

“Well,” Mr. Gaunt said, smiling at her in a can-you-keep-a-secret sort of way, “I just might. Can you get rid of your friend for a minute or two?”

Cyndi Rose asked Steffie to go on ahead to Nan’s and order coffee for her; she would be right along, she said. Steffie went, but with a puzzled look on her face.

Mr. Gaunt went into the back room and came out with a Lalique vase. It did not just match the other; it was an identical twin.

“How much?” Cyndi Rose asked, and caressed the sweet curve of the vase with a finger which was not quite steady. She remembered her satisfaction at the bargain she had struck on Wednesday with some rue.

He had only been planting the hook, it seemed.

Now he would reel her in. This vase would be no thirty-one-dollar bargain; this time he would really sock it to her. But she wanted it to balance off the other on the mantelpiece in the living room; she wanted it very badly.

She could hardly believe her ears at Leland Gaunt’s reply.

“Because this is my first week, why don’t we call it two for the price of one? Here you are, my dear-enjoy it.”

Her shock was so great that she almost dropped the vase on the floor when he put it in her hand.

“What… I thought you said…”

“You heard me correctly,” he said, and she suddenly found she could not take her eyes away from his. Francae was wrong about them, she thought in a distant, preoccupied sort of way. They’re not green at all. They’re gray. Dark gray. “There is one other thing, though.”

“Is there?”

“Yes-do you know a Sheriff’s Deputy named Norris Ridgewick?”

The little silver bell tinkled.

Everett Frankel, the Physician’s Assistant who worked with Dr.

Van Allen, bought the pipe Brian Rusk had noticed on his advance visit to Needful Things for twelve dollars and a prank to be played on Sally Ratcliffe. Poor old Slopey Dodd, the stutterer who attended speech therapy on Tuesday afternoons with Brian, bought a pewter teapot for his mom’s birthday. It cost him seventy-one cents… and a promise, freely given, that he would play a funny trick on Sally’s boyfriend, Lester Pratt. Mr. Gaunt told Slopey he would supply him the few items he would need to play this trick when the time came, and Slopey said that would be rub-rub-real g-g-ggood. June Gavineaux, wife of the town’s most prosperous dairy farmer, bought a cloisonne vase for ninety-seven dollars and a promise to play a funny trick on Father Brigham of Our Lady of Serene Waters. Not long after she left, Mr. Gaunt arranged for a somewhat similar trick to be played on the Reverend Willie.

It was a busy, fruitful day, and when Gaunt finally hung the CLOSED sign in the window and pulled the shade, he was tired but pleased. Business had been great, and he had even taken a step toward assuring himself he would not be interrupted by Sheriff Pangborn. That was good. Opening was always the most delightful part of his operation, but it was always stressful and could sometimes be risky, as well. He might be wrong about Pangborn, of course, but Gaunt had learned to trust his feelings in such matters, and Pangborn felt like a man he would do well to steer clear of… at least until he was ready to deal with the Sheriff on his own terms.

Mr. Gaunt reckoned it was going to be an extremely full week, and there would be fireworks before it was over.

Lots of them.

4

It was quarter past six on Friday evening when Alan turned into Polly’s driveway and cut the motor. She was standing at the door, waiting for him, and kissed him warmly. He saw she had donned her gloves for even this brief foray into the cold and frowned.

“Now stop,” she said. “They’re a little better tonight. Did you bring the chicken?”

He held up the white grease-spotted bags. “Your servant, dear lady.”

She dropped him a little curtsey. “And yours.”

She took the bags from him and led him into the kitchen. He pulled a chair out from the table, swung it around, and sat on it backwards to watch her as she pulled off her gloves and arranged the chicken on a glass plate. He had gotten it from Cluck-Cluck Tonite.

The name was country-horrible, but the chicken was just fine (according to Norris, the clams were a different story). The only problem with take-out when you lived twenty miles away was the cooling factor… and that, he thought, was what microwave ovens had been made for.

In fact, he believed the only three valid purposes microwaves served were re-heating coffee, making popcorn, and putting a buzz under take-out from places like CluckCluck Tonite.

“Are they better?” he asked as she popped the chicken into the oven and pressed the appropriate buttons. There was no need to be more specific; both of them knew what they were talking about.

“Only a little,” she admitted, “but I’m pretty sure they’re going to be a lot better soon. I’m starting to feel tingles of heat in the palms, and that’s the way the improvement usually starts.”

She held them up. She had been painfully embarrassed by her twisted, misshapen hands at first, and the embarrassment was still there, but she had come a long way toward accepting his interest as a part of his love. He still thought her hands looked stiff and awkward, as if she were wearing invisible gloves-gloves sewn by a crude and uncaring maker who had pulled them on her and then stapled them to her wrists forever.

“Have you had to take any pills today?”

“Only one. This morning.”

She had actually taken three-two in the morning, one in the early afternoon-and the pain was not much better today than it had been yesterday. She was afraid that the tingle of which she had spoken was mostly a figment of her own wistful imagination. She didn’t like lying to Alan; she believed that lies and love rarely went together, and never for long. But she had been on her own for a long time, and a part of her was still terrified by his relentless concern. She trusted him, but was afraid to let him know too much.

He had grown steadily more insistent about the Mayo Clinic, and she knew that, if he really understood how bad the pain was this time, he would grow more insistent still. She did not want her goddamned hands to become the most important component of their love… and she was also afraid of what a consultation at a place like the Mayo might show. She could live with pain; she was not sure if she could live without hope.

“Will you take the potatoes out of the oven?” she asked. “I want to call Nettle before we eat.”

“What’s with Nettle?”

“Upset tum. She didn’t come in today. I want to make sure it’s not intestinal flu. Rosalie says there’s a lot of it going around, and Nettle’s terrified of doctors.”

And Alan, who knew more of how and what Polly Chalmers thought than Polly ever would have guessed, thought, Look who’s talking, love, as she went to the telephone. He was a cop, and he could not put away his habits of observation when he was off duty; they were automatic.

He no longer even tried. If he had been a little more observant during the last few months of Annie’s life, she and Todd might still be alive.

He had noted the gloves when Polly came to the door. He had noted the fact that she had pulled them off with her teeth rather than simply stripping them off hand-for-hand. He had watched her arrange the chicken on the plate, and noted the slight grimace which tightened her mouth when she lifted the plate and put it in the microwave. These were bad signs. He walked to the door between the kitchen and the living room, wanting to watch how confidently or tentatively she would use the telephone. It was one of the most important ways he had of measuring her pain. And here, at last, he was able to note a good sign-or what he took for one.

She punched Nettle’s telephone number quickly and confidently, and because she was on the far side of the room, he was unable to see that this phone-and all the others-had been changed earlier that day to the type with the oversized fingerpads. He went back into the kitchen, keeping one ear cocked toward the living room as he did so.

“Hello, Nettle?… I was about to give up. Did I wake you?…

Yes… Uh-huh…. Well, how is it?… Oh, good. I’ve been thinking of you…. No, I’m fine for supper, Alan brought fried chicken from that Cluck-Cluck place in Oxford… Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

Alan got a platter from one of the cabinets above the kitchen counter and thought: She is lying about her hands. It doesn’t matter how well she handles the phone-they’re as bad as they’ve been in the last year, and maybe worse.

The idea that she had lied to him did not much dismay him; his view of truth-bending was a good deal more lenient than Polly’s.

Take the child, for instance. She had borne it in early 1971, seven months or so after leaving Castle Rock on a Greyhound bus. She had told Alan the baby-a boy she’d named Kelton-had died in Denver, at the age of three months. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome-SIDS, the young mother’s worst nightmare. It was a perfectly plausible story, and Alan had no doubt whatever that Kelton Chalmers was indeed dead. There was only one problem with Polly’s version: it wasn’t true. Alan was a cop, and he knew a lie when he heard one. (except when it was Annie doing it) Yeah, he thought. Except when it was Annie doing it. Your exception is duly noted for the record.

What had told him Polly was lying? The rapid flicker of her eyelids over her too-wide, too-direct gaze? The way her left hand kept rising to tug at her left earlobe? The crossing and uncrossing of her legs, that child’s game signal which meant I’m fibbing?

All of those things and none of them. Mostly it was just a buzzer that had gone off inside, the way a buzzer in an airport metaldetector goes off when a guy with a steel plate in his skull steps through.

The lie neither angered nor worried him. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them..

. and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth. He thought that Polly’s lie about Kelton was of this last kind, and he was content to wait.

In time, she would decide to show him her secrets. There was no hurry.

No hurry.- the thought itself seemed a luxury.

Her voice-rich and calm and somehow just right as it drifted out of the living room-also seemed a luxury. He was not yet over the guilt of just being here and knowing where all the dishes and utensils were stored, of knowing which bedroom drawer she kept her nylon hose in, or exactly where her summer tan-lines stopped, but none of it mattered when he heard her voice. There was really only one fact that applied fiere, one simple fact which ruled all others: the sound of her voice was becoming the sound of home.

“I could come over later if you wanted, Nettle… You are? … Well, rest is probably the best thing… Tomorrow?”

Polly laughed. It was a free, pleasing sound that always made Alan feel as if the world had been somehow freshened. He thought he could wait a long time for her secrets to disclose themselves if she would just laugh like that every now and then.

“Gosh, no! Tomorrow’s Saturday! I’m just going to lie around and be sinful!”

Alan smiled. He pulled out the drawer under the stove, found a pair of pot holders, and opened the conventional oven. One potato, two potato, three potato, four. How in God’s name were the two of them supposed to eat four big baked potatoes? But of course he had known there would be too many, because that was the way Polly cooked. There was surely another secret buried in the fact of those four big potatoes, and someday, when he knew all the whys@r most of them, or even some of them-his feelings of guilt and strangeness might pass.

He took the potatoes out. The microwave beeped a moment later.

“I’ve got to go, Nettle-” “That’s okay!” Alan yelled. “I’ve got this under control! I’m a policeman, lady!”

“-but you call me if you need anything. You’re sure you’re okay, now?… And you’d tell me if you weren’t, Nettle, right?…

Okay… What?… No, just asking… You too… Goodnight, Nettle.”

When she came out, he had set the chicken on the table and was busy turning one of the potatoes inside-out on her plate.

“Alan, you sweetheart! You didn’t need to do that!”

“All part of the service, pretty lady.” Another thing he understood was that, when Polly’s hands were bad, life became a series of small, hellacious combats for her; the ordinary events of an ordinary life transformed themselves into a series of gruelling obstacles to be surmounted, and the penalty for failure was embarrassment as well as pain. Loading the dishwasher. Stacking kindling in the fireplace. Manipulating a knife and fork to get a hot potato out of its jacket.

“Sit down,” he said. “Let’s cluck.”

She burst out laughing and then hugged him. She squeezed his back with her inner forearms instead of her hands, the relentless observer inside noted. But a less dispassionate part of him took notice of the way her trim body pressed against his, and the sweet smell of the shampoo she used.

“You are the dearest man,” she said quietly.

He kissed her, gently at first, then with more force. His hands slid down from the small of her back to the swell of her buttocks.

The fabric of her old jeans was as smooth and soft as moleskin under his hands.

“Down, big fella,” she said at last. “Food now, snuggle later.”

“Is that an invitation?” If her hands really weren’t better, he thought, she would fudge.

But she said, “Gilt-edged, and Alan sat down satisfied.

Provisionally.

5

“Is Al coming home for the weekend?” Polly asked as they cleared away the supper things. Alan’s surviving son attended Milton Academy, south of Boston.

“Huh-uh,” Alan said, scraping plates.

Polly said, a little too casually: “I just thought, with no classes Monday because of Columbus Day-” “He’s going to Dorf’s place on Cape Cod,” Alan said. “Dorf is Carl Dorfman, his roomie. Al called last Tuesday and asked if he could go down for the three-day weekend.

I said okay, fine.”

She touched him on the arm and he turned to look at her. “How much of this is my fault, Alan?”

“How much of what’s your fault?” he asked, honestly surprised.

“You know what I’m talking about; you’re a good father, and you’re not stupid. How many times has Al been home since school started again?”

Suddenly Alan understood what she was driving at, and he grinned at her, relieved. “Only once,” he said, “and that was because he needed to talk to jimmy Catlin, his old computer-hacking buddy from junior high. Some of his choicest programs wouldn’t run on the new Commodore 64 I got him for his birthday.”

“You see? That’s my point, Alan. He sees me as trying to step into his mother’s place too soon, and-” “Oh, jeer,” Alan said. “How long have you been brooding over the idea that Al sees you as the Wicked Stepmother?”

Her brows drew together in a frown. “I hope you’ll pardon me if I don’t find the idea as funny as you apparently do.”

He took her gently by the upper arms and kissed the corner of her mouth. “I don’t find it funny at all. There are times-I was just thinking about this-when I feel a little strange, being with you. It seems too soon. It isn’t, but sometimes it seems that way. Do you know what I mean?”

She nodded. Her frown smoothed out a little but did not disappear. “Of course I do. Characters in movies and TV shows always get to spend a little more time pining dramatically, don’t they?”

“You put your finger on it. In the movies you get a lot of pining and precious little grief. Because grief is too real. Grief is..

.” He let go of her arms, slowly picked up a dish and began to wipe it dry. “Grief is brutal” “Yes.”

“So sometimes I feel a little guilty, yeah.” He was sourly amused by the defensiveness he heard lurking in his voice. “Partly because it seems too early, even though it isn’t, and partly because it seems I got off too easy, even though I didn’t. This idea that I owe more grief is still there part of the time, I can’t deny that, but to my credit I know that it’s nuts because part of me-a lot of me, in factis still grieving.”

“You must be human,” she said softly. “How weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.”

“Yeah, I guess so. As for Al, he’s dealing with this in his own way. It’s a good way, too-good enough for me to be proud of him.

He still misses his mother, but if he’s still grievin@and I guess I’m not completely sure he is-then it’s Todd he’s grieving for. But your idea that he’s staying away because he doesn’t approve of you… or us… that’s way off the beam.”

“I’m glad it is. You don’t know how much you’ve relieved my mind.

But it still seems…”

“Not quite right, somehow?”

She nodded.

“I know what you mean. But kids’ behavior, even when it’s as normal as ninety-eight-point-six, never seems quite right to adults.

We forget how easy they heal, sometimes, and we almost always forget how fast they change. Al is pulling away. From me, from his old buddies like jimmy Catlin, from The Rock itself. Pulling away, that’s all. Like a rocket when the third-stage booster kicks in. Kids always do it, and I guess it’s always kind of a sad surprise to their parents.”

“It seems early, though,” Polly said quietly. “Seventeen seems early to pull away.”

“It is early,” Alan said. He spoke in a tone which was not quite angry. “He lost his mother and his brother in a stupid accident. His life blew apart, my life blew apart, and we got together the way I guess fathers and sons almost always do in those situations to see if we could find most of the pieces again. We managed pretty well, I think, but I’d be blind not to know that things have changed. My life is here, Polly, in The Rock. His isn’t, not anymore. I thought maybe it was going to be again, but the look that came into his eyes when I suggested that he might like to transfer to Castle Rock High this fall set me right on that in a hurry. He doesn’t like to come back here because there are too many memories. I think that might change… in time… and for now I’m not going to push him. But it has nothing to do with you and me. Okay?”

“Okay. Alan?”

“Hmmm?”

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Alan agreed simply. “Every day.” He was appalled to find himself suddenly on the verge of tears. He turned away and opened a cupboard at random, trying to get himself under control.

The easiest way to do it would be to re-route the conversation, and fast. “How’s Nettle?” he asked, and was relieved to hear that his voice sounded normal.

“She says she’s better tonight, but it took her an awfully long time to answer the phone-I had visions of her lying on the floor, unconscious.”

“Probably she was asleep.”

“She said not, and she didn’t sound like it. You know how people sound when the phone wakes them up?”

He nodded. It was another cop thing. He had been on both the giving and receiving end of a lot of telephone calls that broke someone’s sleep.

“She said she was sorting through some of her mother’s old stuff in the woodshed, but-” “If she has intestinal flu, you probably called while she was on the throne and she didn’t want to admit it,” Alan said dryly.

She considered this, then burst out laughing. “I’ll bet that was it. It’s just like her.”

“Sure,” he said. Alan peered into the sink, then pulled the plug.

“Honey, we’re all washed up.”

“Thank you, Alan.” She pecked his cheek.

“Oh, say, look what I found,” Alan said. He reached behind her ear and pulled out a fifty-cent piece. “Do you always keep those back there, pretty lady?”

“How do you do that?” she asked, looking at the half-buck with real fascination.

“Do what?” he asked. The fifty-cent piece seemed to float over the gently shuttling knuckles of his right hand. He pinched the coin between his third and fourth fingers and turned his hand over. When he turned it back the other way again, the coin was gone. “Think I ought to run away and join the circus?” he asked her.

She smiled. “No-stay here with me. Alan, do you think I’m silly to worry about Nettle so much?”

“Nope,” Alan said. He stuck his left hand-the one to which he had transferred the fifty-cent piece-into his pants pocket, pulled it out empty, and grabbed a dishtowel. “You got her out of the funny-farm, you gave her a job, and you helped buy her a house.

You feel responsible for her, and I suppose to some degree you are. If you didn’t worry about her, I think I’d worry about you.”

She took the last glass from the dish-drainer. Alan saw the sudden dismay on her face and knew she wasn’t going to be able to hold it, although the glass was already almost dry. He moved quickly, bending his knees and sticking out his hand. The move was so gracefully executed that it looked to Polly almost like a dance-step.

The glass fell and plunked neatly into his hand, which hung palm up less than eighteen inches from the floor.

The pain which had nagged her all night-and the attendant fear that Alan would tumble to just how bad it was-was suddenly buried under a wave of desire so hard and unexpected that it did more than startle her; it frightened her. And desire was a little too coy, wasn’t it?

What she felt was simpler, an emotion whose hue was utterly primary.

It was lust.

“You move like a damned cat,” she said as he straightened. Her voice was thick, a little slurred. She kept seeing the graceful way his legs had bent, the flex of the long muscles in his thighs. The smooth curve of one calf. “How does a man as big as you move that fast?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and looked at her with surprise and puzzlement. “What’s wrong, Polly? You look funny. Do you feel faint?”

“I feel,” she said, “like I’m going to come in my pants.”

It came to him, too, then. Just like that. There was no wrong about it, no right. It just was. “Let’s see if you are,” he said, and moved forward with that same grace, that weird speed you would never suspect if you saw him ambling down Main Street. “Let’s just see about that.” He set the glass on the counter with his left hand and slipped his right between her legs before she knew what was happening.

“Alan what are you do-” And then, as his thumb pressed with gentle force against her clitoris, doing turned to do-ooooh!-ing and he lifted her with his easy, amazing strength.

She put her arms around his neck, being careful even at this warm moment to hold with her forearms; her hands stuck off behind him like stiff bundles of sticks, but they were suddenly the only parts of her which were stiff. The rest of her seemed to be melting.

“Alan, put me down!”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and lifted her higher. He slid his free hand between her shoulder-blades as she started to slip and pressed her forward. And suddenly she was rocking back and forth on the hand between her legs like a girl on a hobby-horse, and he was helping her rock, and she felt as if she were in some wonderful swing with her feet in the wind and her hair in the stars.

“Alan-” “Hold tight, pretty lady,” he said, and he was laughing, as if she weighed no more than a bag of feathers. She leaned back, almost unaware of his steadying hand in her growing excitement, only knowing he would not let her fall, and then he brought her forward again, and one hand was rubbing her back, and the thumb of his other hand was doing things to her down there, things she had never even considered, and she rocked back again, calling his name out deliriously.

Her orgasm hit like a sweet exploding bullet, rushing both ways from the center of her. Her legs swung back and forth six inches above the kitchen floor (one of her loafers flew off and sailed all the way into the living room), her head fell back so her dark hair trailed over his forearm in a small tickling torrent, and at the height of her pleasure he kissed the sweet white line of her throat.

He set her down… then reached out quickly to steady her as her knees buckled.

“Oh my God,” she said, beginning to laugh weakly. “Oh my God, Alan, I’ll never wash these jeans again.”

That struck him as hilarious, and he bellowed laughter. He collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs with his legs stuck out straight in front of him and howled, holding his stomach. She took a step toward him. He grasped her, pulled her onto his lap for a moment, and then stood with her in his arms.

She felt that fainting wave of emotion and need sweep her again, but it was clearer now, better defined. Now, she thought, now it is desire. I desire this man so much.

“Take me upstairs,” she said. “If you can’t make it that far, take me to the couch. And if you can’t make it to the couch, do me right here on the kitchen floor.”

“I think I can make it at least as far as the living room,” he said.

“How are your hands, pretty lady?”

“What hands?” she asked dreamily, and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the clear joy of this moment, moving through space and time in his arms, moving in darkness and circled by his strength.

She pressed her face against his chest, and when he put her on the couch she pulled him down… and this time she used her hands to do it.

6

They were on the couch for nearly an hour, then in the shower for she didn’t know how long-until the hot water started to fail and drove them out, anyway. Then she took him into her bed, where she lay too exhausted and too content to do anything but bundle.

She had expected to make love to him tonight, but more to allay his concern than out of any real desire on her own part. She had certainly not expected such a series of explosions as had resulted… but she was glad. She could feel the pain in her hands beginning to assert itself again, but she would not need a Percodan to sleep tonight.

“You are one fantastic lover, Alan.”

“So are you.”

“It’s unanimous,” she said, and put her head against his chest.

She could hear his heart lub-dubbing calmly away in there, as if to say ho-hum, stuff like this is all in a night’s work for me and the boss. She thought again-and not without a faint echo of her earlier fierce passion-of how quick he was, how strong… but mostly how quick. She had known him ever since Annie had come to work for her, had been his lover for the last five months, and she had never known how quickly he could move until tonight. It had been like a whole-body version of the coin tricks, the card tricks, and the shadow-animals that almost every kid in town knew about and begged for when they saw him. It was spooky… but it was also wonderful.

She could feel herself drifting off now. She should ask him if he meant to stay the night, and tell him to put his car in the garage if he did-Castle Rock was a small town where many tongues wagged-but it seemed like too much trouble. Alan would take care. Alan, she was beginning to think, always did.

“Any fresh outbursts from Buster or the Reverend Willie?” she asked sleepily.

Alan smiled. “Quiet on both fronts, at least for the time being.

I appreciate Mr. Keeton and Reverend Rose the most when I see them the least, and by that standard today was great.”

“That’s good,” she murmured.

“Yeah, but I know something even better.”

“What?”

“Norris is back in a good mood. He bought a rod and reel from your friend Mr. Gaunt, and all he can talk about is going fishing this weekend. I think he’ll freeze his butt off-what little butt he has-but if Norris is happy, I’m happy. I was sorry as hell when Keeton rained on his parade yesterday. People make fun of Norris because he’s skinny and sort of ditzy, but he’s developed into a pretty good small-town peace officer over the past three years. And his feelings are as sensitive as anyone else’s. It’s not his fault that he looks like Don Knotts’s half-brother.”

“Ummmmm…”

Drifting. Drifting into some sweet darkness where there was no pain. Polly let herself go, and as sleep took her there was a small and catlike expression of satisfaction on her face.

7

For Alan, sleep was longer coming.

The interior voice had returned, but its tone of false glee was gone. Now it sounded questioning, plaintive, almost lost. Where are we, Alan? it asked. Isn’t this the wrong room? The wrong bed? The wrong woman? I don’t seem to understand anything anymore.

Alan suddenly found himself feeling pity for that voice. It was not self-pity, because the voice had never seemed so unlike his own as it did now. It occurred to him that the voice wanted to speak as little as he the rest of him, the Alan existing in the present and the Alan planning for the future-wanted to hear it. It was the voice of duty, the voice of grief. And it was still the voice of guilt.

A little over two years ago, Annie Pangborn had begun having headaches. They weren’t bad, or so she said; she was as loath to talk about them as Polly was to talk about her arthritis. Then, one day when he was shaving-very early in 1990, that must have been-Alan noticed that the cap had been left off the family-size bottle of Anacin 3 standing beside the bathroom sink. He started to put the cap back on … then stopped. He had taken a couple of aspirin from that bottle, which held two hundred and twenty-five caplets, late the week before.

It had been almost full then. Now it was almost empty. He had wiped the remains of shaving cream from his face and gone down to You Sew and Sew, where Annie had worked since Polly Chalmers opened. He took his wife out for coffee… and a few questions. He asked her about the aspirin. He remembered being a little frightened. (only a little, the interior voice agreed mournfully) but only a little, because nobody takes a hundred and ninety aspirin caplets in a single week; nobody. Annie told him he was being silly. She had been wiping the counter beside the sink, she said, and had knocked the bottle over. The top hadn’t been on tight, and most of the caplets had poured into the sink. They’d started to melt, and she’d thrown them away.

She said.

But he was a cop, and even when he was off-duty he could not put away the automatic habits of observation which came with the territory.

He could not turn off the lie detector. If you watched people when they answered the questions you asked, really watched them, you almost always knew when they were lying. Alan had once questioned a man who signalled every lie he told by picking at his eyetooth with his thumbnail. The mouth articulated the lies; the body, it seemed, was doomed to signal the truth. So he had stretched his hand across the table of the booth in Nan’s where they had been sitting, had grasped Annie’s hands in his own, and had asked her to tell the truth. And when, after a moment’s hesitation, she told him that, yes, the headaches were a little worse, and yes, she had been taking quite a few aspirin, but no, she hadn’t taken all the caplets which were missing, that the bottle really had spilled in the sink, he had believed her.

He had fallen for the oldest trick in the book, the one con-men called bait-and-switch: if you tell a lie and get caught, back up and tell half the truth. If he had watched her more closely, he would have known Annie still wasn’t being straight with him. He would have forced her to admit something which seemed nearly impossible to him, but which he now believed to be the truth: that the headaches were bad enough for her to be taking at least twenty aspirin a day. And if she had admitted that, he would have had her in a Portland or Boston neurologist’s office before the week was out. But she was his wife, and in those days he had been less observant when he was off-duty.

He had contented himself with making an appointment for her with Ray Van Allen, and she had kept the appointment. Ray had found nothing, and Alan had never held that against him. Ray had run through the usual reflex tests, had looked into her eyes with his trusty ophthalmoscope, had tested her vision to see if there was any doubling, and had sent her to Oxford Regional for an X-ray.

He had not, however, ordered a CAT scan, and when Annie said the headaches were gone, Ray had believed her. Alan suspected he might have been right to believe her. He knew that doctors are almost as attuned to the body’s language of lies as cops. Patients are almost as apt to lie as suspects, and from the same motive: simple fear. And when Ray saw Annie, he had not been off-duty.

So maybe, between the time Alan had made his discovery and the time Annie went to see Dr. Van Allen, the headaches had gone away.

Probably they had gone away. Ray had told Alan later, in a long conversation over glasses of brandy at the doctor’s Castle View home, that the symptoms often came and went in cases where the tumor was located high on the stem of the brain. “Seizures are often associated with stem tumors,” he told Alan. “If she’d had a seizure, maybe -.

.” And he had shrugged. Yes. Maybe. And maybe a man named Thad Beaumont was an unindicted co-conspirator in the deaths of his wife and son, but Alan could not find blame in his heart for Thad, either.

Not all the things which happen in small towns are known to the residents, no matter how sharp their ears are or how energetically their tongues wag. In Castle Rock they knew about Frank Dodd, the cop who went crazy and killed the women back in Sheriff Bannerman’s day, and they knew about Cujo, the Saint Bernard who had gone rabid out on Town Road #3, and they knew that the lakeside home of Thad Beaumont, novelist and local Famous Person, had burned to the ground during the summer of 1989, but they did not know the circumstances of that burning, or that Beaumont had been haunted by a man who was really not a man at all, but a creature for which there may be no name. Alan Pangborn knew these things, however, and they still haunted his sleep from time to time. All that was over by the time Alan became fully aware of Annie’s headaches… except it really wasn’t over. By virtue of Thad’s drunken phonecalls, Alan had become an unwilling witness to the crash of Thad’s marriage and the steady erosion of the man’s sanity. And there was the matter of his own sanity, as well. Alan had read an article in some doctor’s office about black holes-great celestial empty places that seemed to be whirlpools of anti-matter, voraciously sucking up everything within their reach. In the late summer and fall of 1989, the Beaumont affair had become Alan’s own personal black hole. There were days when he found himself questioning the most elementary concepts of reality, and wondering if any of it had actually happened. There were nights when he lay awake until dawn stained the east, afraid to go to sleep, afraid the dream would come: a black Toronado bearing down on him, a black Toronado with a decaying monster behind the wheel and a sticker reading HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH on the rear bumper. In those days, the sight of a single sparrow perched on the porch railing or hopping about on the lawn had made him feel like screaming.

If asked, Alan would have said, “When Annie’s trouble began, I was distracted.” But it wasn’t a matter of distraction; somewhere deep down inside of his mind he had been fighting a desperate battle to hold onto his sanity. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCHhow that came back to him.

How it haunted him. That, and the sparrows.

He had still been distracted on the day in March when Annie and Todd had gotten into the old Scout they kept for around-town errands and had headed off to Hemphill’s Market. Alan had gone over and over her behavior that morning, and could find nothing unusual about it, nothing out of the ordinary. He had been in his study when they left.

He had looked out the window by his desk and waved goodbye. Todd had waved back before getting in the Scout. It was the last time he saw them alive. Three miles down Route 117 and less than a mile from Hemphill’s, the Scout had veered off the road at high speed and had struck a tree. The State Police estimated from the wreckage that Annie, ordinarily the most careful of drivers, had been doing at least seventy. Todd had been wearing his seatbelt. Annie had not. She had probably been dead as soon as she went through the windshield, leaving one leg and half an arm behind. Todd might still have been alive when the ruptured gas-tank exploded. That preyed on Alan more than anything else. That his ten-year-old son, who wrote a joke astrology column for the school paper and lived for Little League, might still have been alive. That he might have burned to death trying to work the clasp on his seatbelt.

There had been an autopsy. The autopsy revealed the brain tumor.

It was, Van Allen told him, a small one. About the size of a peanut-cluster was how he put it. He did not tell Alan it would have been operable if it had been diagnosed; this was information Alan gleaned from Ray’s miserable face and downcast eyes. Van Allen said he believed she had finally had the seizure which would have alerted them to the real problem if it had come sooner. It could have galvanized her body like a strong electric shock, causing her to jam the gas pedal to the floor and lose control. He did not tell Alan these things of his own free will-, he told them because Alan interrogated him mercilessly, and because Van Allen saw that, grief or no grief, Alan meant to have the truth… or as much of it as he, or anyone who hadn’t actually been in the car that day, could ever know. “Please,”

Van Allen had said, and touched Alan’s ‘ble accident, but that’s all it hand briefly and kindly. “It was a terri was. You have to let it go.

You have another son, and he needs you now as much as you need him.

You have to let it go and get on with your affairs.” He had tried.

The irrational horror of the business with Thad Beaumont, the business with the (sparrows the sparrows are flying) birds, had begun to fade, and he had honestly tried to put his life back together-widower, small-town cop, father of a teenaged boy who was growing up and growing away too fast… not because of Polly but because of the accident.

Because of that horrible, numbing trauma: Son, I’ve got some awful news; you’ve got to brace yourself… And then, of course, he had begun to cry, and before long, Al had been crying, too.

Nonetheless, they had gone about the business of reconstruction, and were still going about it. Things were better these days… but two things refused to go away.

One was that huge bottle of aspirin, almost empty after only a week.

The other was the fact that Annie hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.

But Annie always wore her seatbelt.

After three weeks of agonizing and sleepless nights, he made an appointment with a neurologist in Portland after all, thinking of stolen horses and barn doors locked after the fact as he did it. He went because the man might have better answers to the questions Alan needed to ask, and because he was tired of dragging answers out of Ray Van Allen with a chainfall. The doctor’s name was Scopes, and for the first time in his life, Alan hid behind his job: he told Scopes that his questions were related to an ongoing police investigation. The doctor confirmed Alan’s central suspicions: yes, People with brain tumors sometimes suffered bursts of irrationality, and they sometimes became suicidal. When a person with a brain tumor committed suicide, Scopes said, the act was often committed on impulse, after a period of consideration which might last a minute or even seconds. Might such a person take someone with them?

Alan asked.

Scopes was seated behind his desk, cocked back in his chair with his hands laced behind his neck, and could not see Alan’s own hands, which were clasped so tightly together between his knees that the fingers were dead white. Oh yes, Scopes said. That was a not uncommon pattern in such cases; tumors of the brain stem often caused behaviors the layman might think of as psychotic. One which the sufferer feels is a misery was a conclusion that the misery which is shared by either his loved ones or the whole human race; another was the idea that the sufferer’s loved ones would not want to live if he was dead. Scopes mentioned Charles Whitman, the Eagle Scout who had climbed to the top of the Texas Tower and killed more than two dozen people before making an end to himself, and a substitute grammar-school teacher in Illinois who had killed several of her students before going home and putting a bullet in her own brain. Autopsies had revealed brain tumors in both cases. it was a pattern, but not one which held true in all cases, or even most of them. Brain tumors sometimes caused odd, even exotic symptoms; sometimes they caused no symptoms at all. It was impossible to say for sure.

Impossible. So let it alone.

Good advice, but hard to swallow. Because of the aspirin bottle.

And the seatbeltMostly it was the seatbelt that hung in the back of Alan’s minda small black cloud that simply wouldn’t go away. She never drove without buckling it. Not even down to the end of the block and back. Todd had been wearing his, just like always, though. Didn’t that mean something? If she had decided, sometime after she had backed down the driveway for the last time, to kill herself and take Todd with her, wouldn’t she have insisted that Todd unbuckle his belt as well?

Even hurt, depressed, confused, she wouldn’t have wanted Todd to suffer, would she? impossible to say for sure. Let it alone.

Yet even now, lying here in Polly’s bed with Polly sleeping beside him, he found it hard advice to take. His mind went back to work on it, like a puppy worrying an old and ragged strip of rawhide with its sharp little teeth.

An image had always come to him at this point, a nightmarish image which had finally driven him to Polly Chalmers, because Polly was the woman Annie had been closest to in town-and, considering the Beaumont business and the psychic toll it had taken on Alan, Polly had probably been there for Annie more than he had during the last few months of her life.

The image was of Annie unbuckling her own seatbelt, jamming the gas pedal to the floor, and taking her hands off the wheel. Taking them off the wheel because she had another job for them in those last few seconds.

Taking them off so she could unbuckle Todd’s belt, as well.

That was the image: the Scout roaring down the road at seventy, veering to the right, veering toward the trees under a white March sky that promised rain, while Annie struggled to unbuckle Todd’s belt and Todd, screaming and afraid, struggled to beat her hands away. He saw Annie’s well-loved face transformed into the hagiike mask of a witch, saw Todd’s drawn long with terror. Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night, his body dressed in a clammy jacket of sweat, with Todd’s voice ringing in his ears: The trees, Mommy!

Look out for the TREEEES!

So he had gone to see Polly one day at closing time, and asked her if she would come up to the house for a drink, or, if she felt uncomfortable about doing that, if he could come over to her house.

Seated in his kitchen (the right kitchen, the interior voice asserted) with a mug of tea for her and coffee for him, he had begun to speak, slowly and stumblingly, of his nightmare.

“I need to know, if I can, if she was going through periods of depression or irrationality that I either didn’t know about or didn’t notice,” he said. “I need to know if…” He stopped, momentarily helpless. He knew what words he needed to say, but it was becoming harder and harder to bring them out. It was as if the channel of communication between his unhappy, confused mind and his mouth was growing smaller and shallower, and would soon be entirely closed to shipping.

He made a great effort and went on.

“I need to know if she was suicidal. Because, you see, it wasn’t just Annie who died. Todd died with her, and if there were sighs… signs, I mean, signs… that I didn’t notice, then I am responsible for his death, too. And that’s something I feel I have to know.”

He had stopped there, his heart pounding dully in his chest.

He wiped a hand over his forehead and was mildly surprised when it came away wet with sweat.

“Alan,” she said, and put a hand on his wrist. Her light-blue eyes looked steadily into his. “If I had seen such signs and hadn’t told anyone, I would be as guilty as you seem to want to be.”

He had gaped at her, he remembered that. Polly might have seen something in Annie’s behavior which he had missed; he had gotten that far in his reasoning. The idea that noticing strange behavior conveyed a responsibility to do something about it had never occurred to him until now.

You didn’t?” he asked at last.

“No. I’ve gone over it and over it in my mind. I don’t mean to belittle your grief and loss, but you’re not the only one who feels those things, and you’re not the only one who has done a fair amount of soul-searching since Annie’s accident. I went over those last few weeks until I was dizzy, replaying scenes and conversations in light of what the autopsy showed. I’m doing it again now, in light of what nd do you know what I you’ve told me about that aspirin bottle. A find?”

“What?” basis which was oddly “Zilch.” She said it with a lack of emphasis convincing. “Nothing at all. There were times when I thought she looked a little pale. I can remember a couple of occasions when I heard her talking to herself while she was hemming skirts or unpacking fabric. That’s the most eccentric behavior I can recall, and I’ve been guilty of it myself many times. How about YOu?”

Alan nodded.

“Mostly she was the way she was ever since I first met her: cheerful, friendly, helpful… a good friend.”

“But-” Her hand was still on his wrist; it tightened a little.

“No, Alan.

No buts. Ray Van Allen is doing it, too, you know-Monday morning quarterbacking, I believe it’s called. Do you blame him?

Do you feel Ray’s to blame for missing the tumor?”

“No, but-” “What about me? I worked with her every day, side by side most of the time; we drank coffee together at ten, ate lunch together at noon, and drank coffee again at three. We talked very frankly as time went on and we got to know and like each other, Alan.

I know you pleased her, both as a friend and as a lover, and I know she loved the boys. But if she was drifting toward suicide as the result of her illness… that I didn’t know. So tell me-do you blame me?”

And her clear blue eyes had looked frankly and curiously into his own.

“No, but-” The hand squeezed again, light but commanding.

“I want to ask you something. it’s important, so think carefully.”

He nodded.

“Ray was her doctor, and if it was there, he didn’t see it. I was her friend, and if it was there, I didn’t see it. You were her husband, and if it was there, you didn’t see it, either. And you think that’s all, that’s the end of the line, but it’s not.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“Someone else was close to her,” Polly had said. “Someone closer than either of us, I imagine.”

“Who are you talking ah-” “Alan, what did Todd say?”

He could only gaze at her, not understanding. He felt as if she had spoken a word in a foreign tongue.

“Todd,” she said, sounding impatient. “Todd, your son. The one who keeps you awake nights. It is him, isn’t it? Not her, but him.”

“Yes,” he said. “Him.” His voice came out high and unsteady, something starting to shift not like his own voice at all, and he felt inside him, something large and fundamental. Now, lying here 1 1 in Polly’s bed, he could remember that moment at his kitchen table with almost supernatural clarity: her hand on his wrist in a slanting bar of late-afternoon sun, the hairs a fine spun gold; her light eyes; her gentle relentlessness.

“Did she force Todd into the car, Alan? Was he kicking?

Screaming? Fighting her?”

“No, of course not, but she was his m-” “Whose idea was it for Todd to go with her to the market that day? Hers or his? Can you remember?”

He started to say no, but suddenly he did. Their voices, floating in from the living room, as he sat at his desk, going through county warrant-orders: Gotta run down to the market, Todd-you want to come?

Can I look at the new video-tapes?

I guess so. Ask your father if he wants anything.

“It was her idea,” he told Polly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. But she asked him. She didn’t tell him.”

That thing inside, that fundamental thing, was still movlonugt. oltf the ground when it did, for its roots were planted b t was going to fall, he thought, and it would rip almighoythhedelep and wide.

“Was he scared of her?”

Now she was almost cross-examining him, the way he had crossexamined Ray Van Allen, but he seemed helpless to make her stop.

I Nor was he sure he wanted to. There was something here, all right, something that had never occurred to him on his long nights.

Something that was still alive.

“Todd scared of Annie? God, no!”

“Not in the last few months they were alive?”

“No.”

“In the last few weeks?”

“Polly, I wasn’t in much condition to observe things then. There was this thing that happened with Thad Beaumont, the writer… this crazy thing-” “Are you saying you were so out Of it you never noticed Annie and Todd when they were around, or that you weren’t at home much, anyway?”

“No… yes… I mean of course I was home, but-” It was an odd feeling, being on the receiving end of these rapid fire questions. It was as if Polly had doped him with Novocain and then started using him for a punching bag. And that fundamental thing, whatever it was, was still in motion, still rolling out toward the boundary where gravitation would begin working not to hold it up but to pull it down.

“Did Todd ever come to you and say ‘I’m scared of Mommy’?”

“No-” “Did he ever come and say ‘Daddy, I think Mommy’s planning to kill herself, and take me along for company’?”

“Polly, that’s ridiculous! I-” “Did he?”

“No!”

“Did he ever even say she was acting or talking funny?”

“No-” “And Al was away at school, right?”

“What does that have to do with-” “She had one child left in the nest. When you were gone, working, it was just the two of them in that nest. She ate supper with him, helped him with his homework, watched TV with him-” “Read to him-” he said. His voice was blurred, strange.

He hardly recognized it.

“She was probably the first person Todd saw each morning and the last person he saw at night,” Polly said. Her hand lay on his wrist.

Her eyes looked earnestly into his. “If anyone was in a position to see it coming, it was the person who died with her. And that person never said a word.”

Suddenly the thing inside fell. His face began to work. He could feel it happening-it was as if strings had been attached to it in a score of different places, and each was now being tugged by a gentle but insistent hand. Heat flooded his throat and tried to close it.

Heat flooded his face. His eyes filled with tears; Polly Chalmers doubled, trebled, and then broke into prisms of light and image.

His chest heaved but his lungs seemed to find no air. His hand turned over with that scary quickness he had and clamped on hersit must have hurt her terribly, but she made no sound. “I miss her!” he cried out at Polly, and a great, painful sob broke the words into a pair of gasps- “I miss them both, ah, God, how I miss them both!”

“I know,” Polly said calmly. “I know. That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? How you miss them both.”

He began to weep. Al had wept every night for two weeks, and Alan had been there to hold him and offer what comfort he could, but Alan had not cried himself Now he did. The sobs took him and carried him just as they would; he had no power to stop or stay them. He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.

He pushed the coffee cup blindly aside, heard it hit the floor in some other world and shatter there. He laid his overheated, throbbing head on the table and wrapped his arms around it and wept.

At some point, he had felt her raise his head with her cool hands, her misshapen, kindly hands, and place it against her stomach. She held it there and he wept for a long, long time.

8

Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there. anyway.

That had been the beginning between them, even though he felt more like the end had not recognized it as a beginning; it had he had finally musof something. Between then and the day when tered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner with him, he had thought often of the look of her blue eyes and the feel of her hand lying on his wrist.

He thought of the gentle relentlessness with which she had forced him toward ideas he had either ignored or overlooked. And during that time he tried to deal with a new set of feelings about Annie’s death; once the roadblock between him and his grief had been removed, these of her feelings had poured out in a flood. Chief and most distressing among them had been a terrible rage at her for concealing a disease that could have been treated and cured… and for having taken their son with her that day. He had talked about some of these feelings with Polly at The Birches on a chilly, rain-swept night last April.

“You’ve stopped thinking about suicide and started thinking you’re angry, Alan.” about murder,” she’d said. “That’s why you He shook his head and started to speak, but she had leaned over the table and put one of her crooked fingers firmly against his lips for a moment. Shush, you. And the gesture so startled him that he did shush.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m not going to catechize you this time, Alanit’s been a long time since I’ve been out to dinner with a man, and I’m enjoying it too much to play Ms. Chief Prosecutor. But people don’t get angry at other people-not the way you’re angry, at leastfor being in accidents, unless there has been a big piece of carelessness involved. If Annie and Todd had died because the brakes in the Scout failed, you might blame yourself for not having had them checked, or you might sue Sonny jackett for having done a sloppy job the last time you took it in for maintenance, but you wouldn’t blame her. Isn’t that true?”

“I guess it is.”

“I know it is. Maybe there was an accident of some kind, Alan.

You know she might have had a seizure while she was driving, because Dr. Van Allen told you so. But has it ever occurred to you that she might have swerved to avoid a deer@ That it might have been something as simple as that?”

It had. A deer, a bird, even an oncoming car that had wandered into her lane.

“Yes. But her seatbelt-” “Oh, forget the goddam seatbelt! ” she had said with such spirited vehemence that some of the diners close to them looked around briefly. “Maybe she had a headache, and it caused her to forget her seatbelt that one time, but that still doesn’t mean she deliberately crashed the car. And a headache-one of her bad ones-would explain why Todd’s belt was fastened. And it still isn’t the point.”

“What is, then?”

“That there are too many maybes here to support your anger.

And even if the worst things You suspect are true, you’ll never know, will you? “No. ” “And if you did know She looked at him steadily. There was a candle on the table between them. Her eyes were a darker blue in its flame, and he could see a tiny spark of light in each one.

“Well, a brain tumor is an accident, too. There is no culprit here, I per Alan, no-what do You call them in your line of work?-no petrator.

Until you accept that, there will be no chance.”

“What chance?”

“Our chance,” she said calmly. “I like You very much, Alan, and I’m not too old to take a risk, but I’m old enough to have had some sad experience of where my emotions can lead me when they get Out of control. I won’t let them get anywhere Close to that point until you’re able to put Annie and Todd to rest.”

He looked at her, speechless. She regarded him gravely over her dinner in the old country inn, firelight flickering orange on one of her smooth cheeks and the left side of her brow. Outside, the wind played a long trombone note under the eaves.

“Have I said too much?” Polly asked. “If I have, I’d like you to take me home, Alan. I hate to be embarrassed almost as much as I hate not speaking my mind.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. “No, You haven’t said too much. I like to listen to you, Polly.”

She had smiled then. It lit up her whole face. “You’ll get your chance, then,” she said.

So it began for them. They had not felt guilty about seeing each other, but they had recognized the need to be careful-not just because it was a small town where he was an elected official and she needed the good will of the community to keep her business afloat, but because both of them recognized the possibility of guilt.

Neither of them was too old to take a risk, it seemed, but they were both a little too old to be reckless. Care needed to be taken.

Then, in May, he had taken her to bed for the first time, and she had told him about all the years between Then and Now… the story he did not completely believe, the one he was convinced she would someday tell him again, without the too-direct eyes and the left hand that tugged too often at the left earlobe. He recognized how difficult it had been for her to tell him as much as she had, and was content to wait for the rest. Had to be content.

Because care had to be taken. It was enough-quite enough-to fall in love with her as the long Maine summer drowsed past them.

Now, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling of her bedroom in the dimness, he wondered if the time had come to talk about marriage again.

He had tried once, in August, and she had made that gesture with her finger again. Shush, you. He supposed…

But his conscious train of thought began to break up then, and Alan slipped easily into sleep.

9

In his dream he was shopping in some mammoth store, wandering down an aisle so long it dwindled to a point in the distance. Everything was here, everything he had ever wanted but could not afford-a pressure-sensitive watch, a genuine felt fedora from Abercrombie & Fitch, a Bell and Howell eight-millimeter movie camera, hundreds of other items-but someone was behind him, just behind his shoulder where he couldn’t see.

“Down here we call these things fool’s stuffing, old boss,” a voice remarked.

It was one Alan knew. It belonged to that high-toned, Toronadodriving son of a bitch George Stark.

“We call this store Endsville,” the voice said, “because it’s the place where all goods and services terminate.”

Alan saw a large snake-it looked like a python with the head of a rattler come sliding out of a huge selection of Apple computers marked FREE TO THE PUBLIC. He turned to flee, but a hand with no lines on the Palm gripped his arm and stopped him.

“Go on,” the voice said persuasively. “Take what you want, boss.

Take everything you want… and pay for it.”

But every item he picked up turned out to be his son’s charred and melted beltbuckle.