Needful Things (10 page)

“How are you, pretty lady?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and putting a hand over his eyes. The aspirin didn't seem to be doing much for his head. Maybe I should ask her for a Perc, he thought.

“I'm all right.” He heard the careful way she was speaking, going from one word to the next like a woman using stepping-stones to cross a small stream. “How about you? You sound tired.”

“Lawyers do that to me every time.” He shelved the idea of going over to see her. She would say, Of course, Alan, and she would be glad to see him—almost as glad as he would be to see her—but it would put more strain on her than she needed this evening. “I think I'll go home and turn in early. Do you mind if I don't come by?”

“No, honey. It might be a little better if you didn't, actually.”

“Is it bad tonight?”

“It's been worse,” she said carefully.

“That's not what I asked.”

“Not too bad, no.”

Your own voice says you're a liar, my dear, he thought.

“Good. What's the deal on that ultrasonic therapy you told me about? Find anything out?”

“Well, it would be great if I could afford a month and a half in the Mayo Clinic—on spec—but I can't. And don't tell me you can, Alan, because I'm feeling a little too tired to call you a liar.”

“I thought you said Boston Hospital—”

“Next year,” Polly said. “They're going to run a clinic using ultrasound therapy next year. Maybe.”

There was a moment of silence and he was about to say goodbye when she spoke again. This time her tone was a little brighter. “I dropped by the new shop this morning. I had Nettie make a cake and took that. Pure orneriness, of course—ladies don't take baked goods to openings. It's practically graven in stone.”

“What's it like? What does he sell?”

“A little bit of everything. If you put a gun to my head, I'd say it's a curios-and-collectibles shop, but it really defies description. You'll have to see for yourself.”

“Did you meet the owner?”

“Mr. Leland Gaunt, from Akron, Ohio,” Polly said, and now Alan could actually hear the hint of a smile in her voice. “He's going to be quite the heartthrob in Castle Rock's smart set this year—that's my prediction, anyway.”

“What did
you
make of him?”

When she spoke again, the smile in her voice came through even more clearly. “Well, Alan, let me be honest—you're my darling, and I hope I'm yours, but—”

“You are,” he said. His headache was lifting a little. He doubted if it was Norris Ridgewick's aspirin working this small miracle.

“—but he made
my
heart go pitty-pat, too. And you should have seen Rosalie and Nettie when they came back . . .”

“Nettie?”
He took his feet off the desk and sat up. “Nettie's scared of her own shadow!”

“Yes. But since Rosalie persuaded her to go down with her—you know the poor old dear won't go
anywhere
alone—I asked Nettie what
she
thought of Mr. Gaunt after I got home this afternoon.
Alan, her poor old muddy eyes just lit up. ‘He's got carnival glass!' she said. ‘Beautiful carnival glass! He even invited me to come back tomorrow and look at some more!' I think it's the most she's said to me all at once in about four years. So I said, ‘Wasn't that kind of him, Nettie?' And she said, ‘Yes, and do you know what?' I asked her what, of course, and Nettie said,
‘And I just might go!' ”

Alan laughed loud and heartily. “If Nettie's willing to go see him without a
duenna,
I
ought
to check him out. The guy must really be a charmer.”

“Well, it's funny—he's not handsome, at least not in a movie-star way, but he's got the most
gorgeous
hazel eyes. They light up his whole face.”

“Watch it, lady,” Alan growled. “My jealous muscle is starting to twitch.”

She laughed a little. “I don't think you have to worry. There's one other thing, though.”

“What's that?”

“Rosalie said Wilma Jerzyck came in while Nettie was there.”

“Did anything happen? Were words passed?”

“No. Nettie glared at the Jerzyck woman, and
she
kind of curled her lip at Nettie—that's how Rosalie put it—and then Nettie scurried out. Has Wilma Jerzyck called you about Nettie's dog lately?”

“No,” Alan said. “No reason to. I've cruised past Nettie's house after ten half a dozen nights over the last six weeks or so. The dog doesn't bark anymore. It was just the kind of thing puppies do, Polly. It's grown up a little, and it has a good mistress. Nettie may be short a little furniture on the top floor, but she's done her duty by that dog—what does she call it?”

“Raider.”

“Well, Wilma Jerzyck will just have to find something else to bitch about, because Raider is squared away. She will, though. Ladies like Wilma always do. It was never the dog, anyway, not really; Wilma was the only person in the whole neighborhood who complained. It was Nettie. People like Wilma have noses for weakness. And there's a lot to smell on Nettie Cobb.”

“Yes.” Polly sounded sad and thoughtful. “You know
that Wilma Jerzyck called her up one night and told her that if Nettie didn't shut the dog up, she'd come over and cut his throat?”

“Well,” Alan said evenly, “I know that Nettie told you so. But I also know that Wilma frightened Nettie very badly, and that Nettie has had . . . problems. I'm not saying Wilma Jerzyck isn't capable of making a call like that, because she is. But it
might
have only been in Nettie's mind.”

That Nettie had had problems was understating by quite a little bit, but there was no need to say more; they both knew what they were talking about. After years of hell, married to a brute who abused her in every way a man can abuse a woman, Nettie Cobb had put a meat-fork in her husband's throat as he slept. She had spent five years in Juniper Hill, a mental institution near Augusta. She had come to work for Polly as part of a work-release program. As far as Alan was concerned, she could not possibly have fallen in with better company, and Nettie's steadily improving state of mind confirmed his opinion. Two years ago, Nettie had moved into her own little place on Ford Street, six blocks from downtown.

“Nettie's got problems, all right,” Polly said, “but her reaction to Mr. Gaunt was nothing short of amazing. It really was awfully sweet.”

“I have to see this guy for myself,” Alan said.

“Tell me what you think. And check out those hazel eyes.”

“I doubt if they'll cause the same reaction in me they seem to have caused in you,” Alan said dryly.

She laughed again, but this time he thought it sounded slightly forced.

“Try to get some sleep,” he said.

“I will. Thanks for calling, Alan.”

“Welcome.” He paused. “I love you, pretty lady.”

“Thank you, Alan—I love you, too. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

He racked the telephone, twisted the gooseneck of the desk lamp so it threw a spot of light on the wall, put his feet up on his desk, and brought his hands together in front of his chest, as if praying. He extended his index fingers. On the wall, a shadow-rabbit poked up its ears.
Alan slipped his thumbs between his extended fingers, and the shadow-rabbit wiggled its nose. Alan made the rabbit hop across the makeshift spotlight. What lumbered back was an elephant, wagging its trunk. Alan's hands moved with a dextrous, eerie ease. He barely noticed the animals he was creating; this was an old habit with him, his way of looking at the tip of his nose and saying “Om.”

He was thinking about Polly; Polly and her poor hands. What to do about Polly?

If it had been just a matter of money, he would have had her checked into a room at the Mayo Clinic by tomorrow afternoon—signed, sealed, and delivered. He would have done it even if it meant wrapping her in a straitjacket and shooting her full of sedative to get her out there.

But it
wasn't
just a matter of money. Ultrasound as a treatment for degenerative arthritis was in its infancy. It might eventually turn out to be as effective as the Salk vaccine, or as bogus as the science of phrenology. Either way, it didn't make sense right now. The chances were a thousand to one that it was a dry hole. It was not the loss of money he dreaded, but Polly's dashed hopes.

A crow—as limber and lifelike as a crow in a Disney animated cartoon—flapped slowly across his framed Albany Police Academy graduation certificate. Its wings lengthened and it became a prehistoric pterodactyl, triangular head cocked as it cruised toward the filing cabinets in the corner and out of the spotlight.

The door opened. The doleful basset-hound face of Norris Ridgewick poked through. “I did it, Alan,” he said, sounding like a man confessing to the murder of several small children.

“Good, Norris,” Alan said. “You're not going to get hit with the shit on this, either. I promise.”

Norris looked at him for a moment longer with his moist eyes, then nodded doubtfully. He glanced at the wall. “Do Buster, Alan.”

Alan grinned, shook his head, and reached for the lamp.

“Come on,” Norris coaxed. “I ticketed his damn car—I deserve it. Do Buster, Alan.
Please.
That wipes me out.”

Alan glanced over Norris's shoulder, saw no one, and curled one
hand against the other. On the wall, a stout shadow-man stalked across the spotlight, belly swinging. He paused once to hitch up his shadow-pants in the back and then stalked on, head turning truculently from side to side.

Norris's laughter was high and happy—the laughter of a child. For one moment Alan was reminded forcibly of Todd, and then he shoved that away. There had been enough of that for one night, please God.

“Jeez, that
slays
me,” Norris said, still laughing. “You were born too late, Alan—you coulda had a career on
The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“Go on,” Alan said. “Get out of here.”

Still laughing, Norris pulled the door closed.

Alan made Norris—skinny and a little self-important—walk across the wall, then snapped off the lamp and took a battered notebook from his back pocket. He thumbed through it until he found a blank page, and wrote
Needful Things.
Below that he jotted:
Leland Gaunt, Cleveland, Ohio.
Was that right? No. He scratched out
Cleveland
and wrote
Akron.
Maybe I really am losing my mind, he thought. On a third line he printed:
Check it out.

He put his notebook back in his pocket, thought about going home, and turned on the lamp again instead. Soon the shadow-parade was marching across the wall once more: lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Like Sandburg's fog, the depression crept back on small feline feet. The voice began speaking about Annie and Todd again. After a while, Alan Pangborn began to listen to it. He did it against his will . . . but with growing absorption.

Polly was lying on her bed, and when she finished talking with Alan, she turned over on her left side to hang up the telephone. It fell out of her hand and crashed to the floor instead. The Princess phone's base slid slowly across the nighttable, obviously meaning to join its other half. She reached for it and her hand struck the edge of the table instead. A monstrous bolt of pain broke through the thin
web the painkiller had stretched over her nerves and raced all the way up to her shoulder. She had to bite down on her lips to stifle a cry.

The telephone base fell off the edge of the table and crashed with a single
cling!
of the bell inside. She could hear the steady idiot buzz of the open line drifting up. It sounded like a hive of insects being broadcast via shortwave.

She thought of picking the telephone up with the claws which were now cradled on her chest, having to do it not by grasping—tonight her fingers would not bend at all—but by
pressing,
like a woman playing the accordion, and suddenly it was too much, even something as simple as picking up a telephone which had fallen on the floor was too much, and she began to cry.

The pain was fully awake again, awake and raving, turning her hands—especially the one she had bumped—into fever-pits. She lay on her bed, looking up at the ceiling through her blurry eyes, and wept.

Oh I would give anything to be free of this,
she thought.
I would give anything, anything, anything at all.

By ten o'clock on an autumn weeknight, Castle Rock's Main Street was as tightly locked up as a Chubb safe. The streetlamps threw circles of white light on the sidewalk and the fronts of the business buildings in diminishing perspective, making downtown look like a deserted stage-set. Soon, you might think, a lone figure dressed in tails and a top-hat—Fred Astaire, or maybe Gene Kelly—would appear and dance his way from one of those spots to the next, singing about how lonely a fellow could be when his best girl had given him the air and all the bars were closed. Then, from the other end of Main Street, another figure would appear—Ginger Rogers or maybe Cyd Charisse—dressed in an evening gown. She would dance toward Fred (or Gene), singing about how lonely a gal could be when her best guy had stood her up. They would see each other, pause
artistically, and then dance together in front of the bank or maybe You Sew and Sew.

Instead, Hugh Priest hove into view.

He did not look like either Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, there was no girl at the far end of Main Street advancing toward a romantic chance meeting with him, and he most definitely did not dance. He did drink, however, and he had been drinking steadily in The Mellow Tiger since four that afternoon. At this point in the festivities just walking was a trick, and never mind any fancy dance-steps. He walked slowly, passing through one pool of light after another, his shadow running tall across the fronts of the barber shop, the Western Auto, the video-rental shop. He was weaving slightly, his reddish eyes fixed stolidly in front of him, his large belly pushing out his sweaty blue tee-shirt (on the front was a drawing of a huge mosquito above the words,
MAINE STATE BIRD
) in a long, sloping curve.