Needful Things (24 page)

She went back to check it again, and while she was checking, the telephone began to ring. She hurried back into the house with the key to the armoire clutched in her sweaty right hand. She barked her shin on a footstool and cried out in pain.

By the time she got to the living room, the telephone had stopped again.

“I can't go to work today,” she muttered. “I have to . . . to . . .”

(stand guard)

That was it. She had to stand guard.

She picked up the phone and dialled quickly before her mind could start to gnaw at itself again, the way Raider gnawed at his rawhide chewy toys.

“Hello?” Polly said. “This is You Sew and Sew.”

“Hi, Polly. It's me.”

“Nettie? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, but I'm calling from home, Polly. My stomach is upset.” By now this was no lie. “I wonder if I could have the day off. I know about vacuuming the upstairs . . . and the telephone man is coming . . . but . . .”

“That's all right,” Polly said at once. “The phone man isn't coming until two, and I meant to leave early today,
anyway. My hands still hurt too much to work for long. I'll let him in.”

“If you really need me, I could—”

“No, really,” Polly assured her warmly, and Nettie felt tears prick her eyes. Polly was so
kind.

“Are they sharp pains, Nettie? Shall I call Dr. Van Allen for you?”

“No—just kind of crampy. I'll be all right. If I can come in this afternoon, I will.”

“Nonsense,” Polly said briskly. “You haven't asked for a day off since you came to work for me. Just crawl into bed and go back to sleep. Fair warning: if you try to come in, I'll just send you home.”

“Thank you, Polly,” Nettie said. She was on the verge of tears. “You're very good to me.”

“You deserve goodness. I've got to go, Nettie—customers. Lie down. I'll call this afternoon to see how you're doing.”

“Thank you.”

“You're more than welcome. Bye-bye.”

“Toodle-oo,” Nettie said, and hung up.

She went at once to the window and twitched the curtain aside. The street was empty—for now. She went back into the shed, used the key to open the armoire, and took out the lampshade. A feeling of calm and ease settled over her as soon as she had it cradled in her arms. She took it into the kitchen, washed it in warm, soapy water, rinsed it, and dried it carefully.

She opened one of the kitchen drawers and removed her butcher knife. She took this and the lampshade back into the living room and sat down in the gloom. She sat that way all morning, bolt upright in her chair, the lampshade in her lap and the butcher knife clenched in her right hand.

The phone rang twice.

Nettie didn't answer it.

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 crystal 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 old-timers around, he said, who had such skills. 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-and-pencil 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 fiancé 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.

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.

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.