Needful Things (13 page)

I got it at the new store, Dad—Needful Things. The guy gave it to me at a really
WICKED
discount . . . he said it would make people more interested in coming to his store if they knew he kept his prices down.

This was good as far as it went, but even a kid still a year too young to pay the full adult price of admission at the movies knew it didn't go far enough. When you said somebody had given you a really good deal on something, people were always interested.
Too
interested.

Oh yeah? How much did he knock off? Thirty per cent? Forty? Did he give it to you for half price? That'd still be sixty or seventy bucks, Brian, and
I KNOW
you don't have that kind of money just laying around in your piggy-bank.

Well . . . actually it was a little less than that, Dad.

Okay, tell me. How much did you pay?

Well . . . eighty-five cents.

He sold you a 1956 autographed Sandy Koufax baseball card, in uncirculated condition, for eighty-five cents?

Yeah, that's where the real trouble would start, all right.

What
kind
of trouble? He didn't know, exactly, but there would be a stink, he was sure of that. Somehow he would get blamed—maybe by his dad, but by his mom for sure.

They might even try to make him give it back, and there was no
way
he was going to give it back. It wasn't just signed; it was signed
to Brian.

No
way.

Hell, he hadn't even been able to show Stan Dawson when Stan came over to play pass, although he'd wanted to—Stan would have fudged his Jockeys. But Stan was going to sleep over on Friday night, and it was all too easy for Brian to imagine him saying to Brian's dad:
So how'd you like Brian's Sandy Koufax card, Mr. Rusk? Pretty rad, huh?
The same went for his other friends. Brian had uncovered one of the great truths of small towns: many secrets—in fact, all the really
important
secrets—cannot be shared. Because word has a way of getting around, and getting around fast.

He found himself in a strange and uncomfortable position. He had come by a great thing and could not show or share it. This should have vitiated his pleasure in his new acquisition, and it did, to some extent, but it also afforded him a furtive, niggardly satisfaction. He found himself not so much enjoying the card as
gloating
over it,
and so he had uncovered another great truth: gloating in private provides its own peculiar pleasure. It was as if one corner of his mostly open and goodhearted nature had been walled off and then lit with a special black light that both distorted and enhanced what was hidden there.

And he was not going to give it up.

No way, uh-uh,
negatory.

Then you better finish paying for it,
a voice deep in his mind whispered.

He would. No problem there. He didn't think the thing he was supposed to do was exactly nice, but he was pretty sure it wasn't anything totally gross, either. Just a . . . a . . .

Just a prank,
a voice whispered in his mind, and he saw the eyes of Mr. Gaunt—dark blue, like the sea on a clear day, and strangely soothing.
That's all. Just a little prank.

Yeah, just a prank, whatever it was.

No problem.

He settled deeper under his goosedown quilt, turned over on his side, closed his eyes, and immediately began to doze.

Something occurred to him as he and his brother sleep drew closer to each other. Something Mr. Gaunt had said.
You will be a better advertisement than the local paper could ever
THINK
of being!
Only he couldn't show the wonderful card he had bought. If a little thought had made that obvious to him, an eleven-year-old kid who wasn't even bright enough to keep out of Hugh Priest's way when he was crossing the street, shouldn't a smart guy like Mr. Gaunt have seen it, too?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Grownups didn't think the same as normal people, and besides, he had the card, didn't he? And it was in his book, right where it should be, wasn't it?

The answer to both questions was yes, and so Brian let go of the whole thing and went back to sleep as the rain pelted against his window and the restless fall wind screamed in the angles beneath the eaves.

The rain had stopped by daylight on Thursday, and by ten-thirty, when Polly looked out the front window of You Sew and Sew and saw Nettie Cobb, the clouds were beginning to break up. Nettie was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, and went scuttling along Main Street with her purse clamped under her arm as if she sensed the jaws of some new storm opening just behind her.

“How are your hands this morning, Polly?” Rosalie Drake asked.

Polly sighed inwardly. She would have to field the same question, but more insistently put, from Alan that afternoon, she supposed—she had promised to meet him for coffee at Nan's Luncheonette around three. You couldn't fool the people who had known you for a long time. They saw the pallor of your face and the dark crescents below your eyes. More important, they saw the haunted look
in
the eyes.

“Much better today, thanks,” she said. This was overstating the truth by more than a little; they were better, but
much
better? Huh-uh.

“I thought with the rain and all—”

“It's unpredictable, what makes them hurt. That's the pure devil of it. But never mind that, Rosalie, come quick and look out the window. I think we're about to witness a minor miracle.”

Rosalie joined Polly at the window in time to see the small, scuttling figure with the umbrella clutched tightly in one hand—possibly
for use as a bludgeon, judging from the way it was now being held—approach the awning of Needful Things.

“Is that Nettie? Is it really?” Rosalie almost gasped.

“It really is.”

“My God, she's going in!”

But for a moment it seemed that Rosalie's prediction had queered the deal. Nettie approached the door . . . then pulled back. She shifted the umbrella from hand to hand and looked at the façade of Needful Things as if it were a snake which might bite her.

“Go on, Nettie,” Polly said softly. “Go for it, sweetie!”

“The
CLOSED
sign must be in the window,” Rosalie said.

“No, he's got another one that says
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
. I saw it when I came in this morning.”

Nettie was approaching the door again. She reached for the knob, then drew back again.

“God, this is
killing
me,” Rosalie said. “She told me she might come back, and I know how much she likes carnival glass, but I never really thought she'd go through with it.”

“She asked me if it would be all right for her to leave the house on her break so she could come down to what she called ‘that new place' and pick up my cake-box,” Polly murmured.

Rosalie nodded. “That's our Nettie. She used to ask me for permission to use the john.”

“I got an idea part of her was hoping I'd say no, there was too much to do. But I think part of her wanted me to say yes, too.”

Polly's eyes never left the fierce, small-scale struggle going on less than forty yards away, a mini-war between Nettie Cobb and Nettie Cobb. If she actually
did
go in, what a step forward that would be for her!

Polly felt dull, hot pain in her hands, looked down, and saw she had been twisting them together. She forced them down to her sides.

“It's not the cake-box and it's not the carnival glass,” Rosalie said. “It's
him.”

Polly glanced at her.

Rosalie laughed and blushed a little. “Oh, I don't mean Nettie's got the hots for him, or anything like that, although she
did
look a little starry-eyed when I caught up with her outside. He was
nice
to her, Polly. That's all. Honest and nice.”

“Lots of people are nice to her,” Polly said. “Alan goes out of his way to be kind to her, and she still shies away from him.”

“Our Mr. Gaunt has got a special kind of nice,” Rosalie said simply, and as if to prove this, they saw Nettie grasp the knob and turn it. She opened the door and then only stood there on the sidewalk clutching her umbrella, as if the shallow well of her resolve had been utterly exhausted. Polly felt a sudden certainty that Nettie would now pull the door closed again and hurry away. Her hands, arthritis or no arthritis, closed into loose fists.

Go on, Nettie. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.

Then Nettie smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest . . . and went inside.

The door closed behind her.

Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.

“Way to go, Nettie!” Rosalie said.

“Two points for our side!” Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.

Five minutes later, Nettie Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers's cake container
on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettie Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop. Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.

“A deed,” she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr. Gaunt's more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.

“Yes, that's right. It's really just a small matter. You know Mr. Keeton, don't you?”

“Oh yes,” Nettie said. “Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?”

“The younger,” Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. “The Head Selectman.”

“They call him Buster behind his back,” Nettie said, and giggled. It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettie's not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. “They have ever since he was a little boy.”

“I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster.”

“Trick?” Nettie looked vaguely alarmed.

Gaunt smiled. “Just a harmless prank. And he'll never know it was you. He'll think it was someone else.”

“Oh.” Nettie looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze—greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and pleasure. “Well . . .”

“It will be all right, Nettie. No one will ever know . . . and you'll have the lampshade.”

Nettie spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else.” She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm. “If it doesn't
hurt
him. I don't want to
hurt
him. I hurt my husband, you know.”

“It won't hurt him,” Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettie's hands. “It won't
hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house.”

“How could I get in Buster's—”

“Here.”

He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.

“When?” Nettie asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.

“Soon.” He released her hands and stood up. “And now, Nettie, I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you. Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in—” He glanced at his watch. “Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can't begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days—most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts.”

Nettie also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. “It
is
lovely, isn't it?”

“Very lovely,” Mr. Gaunt agreed warmly. “And I can't tell you . . . can't even begin to express . . . how happy it makes me to know it will have a good home, a place where someone will do more than dust it on Wednesday afternoons and then, after years of that, break it in a careless moment and sweep the pieces up and then drop them into the trash without a second thought.”

“I'd never do that!” Nettie cried.

“I know you wouldn't,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It's one of your charms, Netitia.”

Nettie looked at him, amazed. “How did you know my name?”

“I have a flair for them. I never forget a name or a face.”

He went through the curtain at the back of his shop. When he returned, he held a flat sheet of white cardboard in one hand and a large fluff of tissue paper in the other. He set the tissue paper down beside the cake container (it began at once to expand, with secret little ticks and snaps, into something which looked like a giant corsage) and began to fold the cardboard into a box exactly the right size for the lampshade. “I know you'll be a fine custodian of the
item you have purchased. That's why I sold it to you.”