Needful Things (71 page)

Fooled ya! Fooled ya, Sheriff!

“Brian, please tell me what's going on around here. If you know, please tell me.”

Brian closed the lid of the Playmate cooler and said nothing. It made a soft little
snick!
in the drowsy autumn afternoon.

“Can't say?”

Brian nodded slowly—meaning, Alan thought, that he was right: he couldn't say.

“Tell me this, at least: are you scared? Are you scared, Brian?”

Brian nodded again, just as slowly.

“Tell me what you're scared of, son. Maybe I can make it go away.” He tapped one finger lightly against the badge he wore on the left side of his uniform shirt. “I think that's why they pay me to lug this star around. Because sometimes I can make the scary stuff go away.”

“I—” Brian began, and then the police radio Alan had installed beneath the dash of the Town and Country wagon three or four years ago squawked to life.

“Unit One, Unit One, this is base. Do you copy? Over?”

Brian's eyes broke away from Alan's. They turned toward the station wagon and the sound of Sheila Brigham's voice—the voice of authority, the voice of the police. Alan saw that, if the boy had been on the verge of telling him something (and it might only be wishful thinking to believe he had been), he wasn't anymore. His face had closed up like a clamshell.

“You go on home now, Brian. We're going to talk about this . . . this dream of yours . . . more later on. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Brian said. “I guess so.”

“In the meantime, think about what I said: most of what being Sheriff's about is making the scary stuff go away.”

“I have to go home now, Sheriff. If I don't get home pretty soon, my mom's gonna be mad at me.”

Alan nodded. “Well, we don't want that. Go on, Brian.”

He watched the boy go. Brian's head was down, and once again he did not seem to be riding the bike so much as trudging along with it between his legs. Something was wrong there, so wrong that Alan's finding out what had happened to Wilma and Nettie seemed secondary to finding out what had put the tired, haunted expression on that kid's face.

The women, after all, were dead and buried. Brian Rusk was still alive.

He went to the tired old station wagon he should have traded a year ago, leaned in, grabbed the Radio Shack mike, and depressed the transmit button. “Yeah, Sheila, this is Unit One. I copy—come on back.”

“Henry Payton called for you, Alan,” Sheila said. “He told me to tell you it's urgent. He wants me to patch you through to him. Ten-four?”

“Go for it,” Alan said. He felt his pulse pick up.

“It may take a couple of minutes, ten-four?”

“That's fine. I'll be right here. Unit One clear.”

He leaned against the side of the car in the dappled shade, mike in hand, waiting to see what was urgent in Henry Payton's life.

By the time Polly reached home, it was twenty minutes past three, and she felt torn in two completely different directions. On one hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to be about the errand Mr. Gaunt had given her (she didn't like to think of it in his terms, as a prank—Polly Chalmers was not much of a prankster), to get it done so that the
azka
would finally belong to her. The concept that the dealing wasn't done until Mr. Gaunt
said
the dealing was done had not so much as crossed her mind.

On the other hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to get in touch with Alan, to tell him exactly what had happened . . . or as much of it as she could remember. One thing she
could
remember—it filled her with shame
and a low sort of horror, but she could remember it, all right—was this: Mr. Leland Gaunt hated the man Polly loved, and Mr. Gaunt was doing something—
something
—that was very wrong. Alan should know. Even if the
azka
stopped working, he should know.

You don't mean that.

But yes—part of her meant
exactly
that. The part that was terrified of Leland Gaunt even though she couldn't remember what, exactly, he had done to induce that feeling of terror.

Do you want to go back to the way things were, Polly? Do you want to go back to owning a pair of hands that feel full of shrapnel?

No . . . but neither did she want Alan hurt. Neither did she want Mr. Gaunt to do whatever he was planning to do, if it was something (she suspected it was) that would hurt the town. Nor did she want to be a part of that something, by going out to the old deserted Camber place at the end of Town Road #3 and playing some sort of trick she didn't even understand.

So these conflicting wants, each championed by its own hectoring voice, pulled at her as she walked slowly home. If Mr. Gaunt had hypnotized her in some way (she had been positive of this when she left the store, but she became less and less sure as time passed), the effects had worn off now. (Polly really believed this.) And she had never in her life found herself so incapable of deciding what to do next. It was as if her whole supply of some vital decision-making chemical had been stolen from her brain.

In the end she went home to do what Mr. Gaunt had advised (although she no longer precisely remembered the advice). She would check her mail, and then she would call Alan and tell him what Mr. Gaunt wanted her to do.

If you do that, the interior voice said grimly, the
azka
really
will
stop working. And you know it.

Yes—but there was still the question of right and wrong. There was still that. She would call Alan, and apologize for being so short with him, and then tell him what Mr. Gaunt wanted of her. Perhaps she would even give him the envelope Mr. Gaunt had given her, the one she was supposed to put in the tin can.

Perhaps.

Feeling a little better, Polly put her key in the front door of her house—again rejoicing at the ease of this operation, almost without being aware of it—and turned it. The mail was in its usual place on the carpet—not very much today. Usually there was more junk mail after the Post Office had taken a day off. She bent and picked it up. A cable-TV brochure with Tom Cruise's smiling, impossibly handsome face on the front; one catalogue from the Horchow Collection and another from The Sharper Image. Also—

Polly saw the one letter and a ball of dread began to grow deep in her stomach. To Patricia Chalmers of Castle Rock, from the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare . . . from 666 Geary. She remembered 666 Geary so very well from her trips down there. Three trips in all. Three interviews with three Aid to Dependent Children bureaucrats, two of whom had been men—men who had looked at her the way you looked at a candy-wrapper that's gotten stuck on one of your best shoes. The third bureaucrat had been an extremely large black woman, a woman who had known how to listen and how to laugh, and it was from this woman that Polly had finally gotten an approval. But she remembered 666 Geary, second floor, so very, very well. She remembered the way the light from the big window at the end of the hall had laid a long, milky stain on the linoleum; she remembered the echoey sound of typewriters from offices where the doors always stood open; she remembered the cluster of men smoking cigarettes by the sand-filled urn at the far end of the hall, and how they had looked at her. Most of all she remembered how it had felt to be dressed in her one good outfit—a dark polyester pants suit, a white silk blouse, L'Eggs Nearly Nude pantyhose, her low heels—and how terrified and lonely she had felt, for the dim second-floor corridor of 666 Geary seemed to be a place with neither heart nor soul. Her ADC application had finally been approved there, but it was the turndowns she remembered, of course—the eyes of the men, how they had crawled across her breasts (they were better dressed than Norville down at the diner, but otherwise, she thought, not really much different); the mouths of the men, how they had pursed
in decorous disapproval as they considered the problem of Kelton Chalmers, the bastard offspring of this little trollop, this Janey-come-lately who didn't look like a hippie
now,
oh
no,
but who would undoubtedly take off her silk blouse and nice pants suit as soon as she got out of here, not to mention her brassiere, and put on a pair of tight bellbottom jeans and a tie-dyed blouse that would showcase her nipples. Their eyes said all that and more, and although the response of the Department had come in the mail, Polly had known immediately that she would be turned down. She had wept as she left the building on each of those first two occasions, and it seemed to her now that she could remember the acid-trickle of each tear as it slid down her cheek. That, and the way the people on the street had looked at her. No caring in their eyes; just a certain dull curiosity.

She had never wanted to think about those times or that dim second-floor hallway again, but now it was back with her—so clearly she could smell the floor polish, could see the milky reflected light from the big window, could hear the echoey, dreamy sound of old manual typewriters chewing through another day in the bowels of the bureaucracy.

What did they want? Dear God, what could the people at 666 Geary want with her at this late date?

Tear it up!
a voice inside nearly screamed, and the command was so imperative that she came very close to doing just that. She ripped the envelope open instead. There was a single sheet of paper inside. It was a Xerox. And although the envelope had been addressed to her, she saw with astonishment that the letter was not; it was addressed to Sheriff Alan Pangborn.

Her eyes dropped to the foot of the letter. The name typed below the scrawled signature was John L. Perlmutter, and this name rang a very faint bell for her. Her eyes dropped a little further and she saw, at the very foot of the letter, the notation “cc: Patricia Chalmers.” Well, this was a Xerox, not a carbon, but it still cleared up the puzzling matter of this being Alan's letter (and settled her first confused idea that it had been delivered to her by mistake). But what, in God's name . . .

Polly sat on the Shaker bench in the hallway and began
to read the letter. As she did so, a remarkable series of emotions lensed across her face, like cloud formations on an unsettled, windy day: puzzlement, understanding, shame, horror, anger, and finally fury. She screamed aloud once—
“No!”
—and then went back and forced herself to read the letter again, slowly, all the way to the end.

San Francisco Department of Child Welfare

666 Geary Street

San Francisco, California 94112

September 23, 1991

Sheriff Alan J. Pangborn

Castle County Sheriff's Office

2 The Municipal Building

Castle Rock, Maine 04055

Dear Sheriff Pangborn:

I am in receipt of your letter of September 1, and am writing to tell you I can offer you no help whatever in this matter. It is the policy of this Department to give out information on applicants for Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) only when we are compelled to do so by a valid court order. I have shown your letter to Martin D. Chung, our chief legal counsel, who instructs me to tell you that a copy of your letter has been forwarded to the California Attorney General's Office. Mr. Chung has asked for an opinion as to whether your request may be illegal in and of itself. Whatever the result of that inquiry, I must tell you that I find your curiosity about this woman's life in San Francisco to be both inappropriate and offensive.

I suggest, Sheriff Pangborn, that you lay this matter to rest before you incur legal difficulties.

Sincerely,

John L. Perlmutter

Deputy Director

cc: Patricia Chalmers

After her fourth reading of this terrible letter, Polly rose from the bench and walked into the kitchen. She walked slowly and gracefully, more like one who swims than one who walks. At first her eyes were dazed and confused, but by the time she had taken the handset from the wall mounted phone and tapped out the number of the Sheriff's Office on the oversized pads, they had cleared. The look which lit them was simple and unmistakable: an anger so strong it was nearly hate.

Her lover had been sniffing around in her past—she found the idea simultaneously unbelievable and strangely, hideously plausible. She had done a lot of comparing herself to Alan Pangborn in the last four or five months, and that meant she had done a lot of coming off second best. His tears; her deceptive calm, which hid so much shame and hurt and secret defiant pride. His honesty; her little stack of lies. How saintlike he had seemed! How dauntingly perfect! How hypocritical her own insistence that he put the past away!

And all the time he had been sniffing around, trying to find out the real story on Kelton Chalmers.

“You bastard,” she whispered, and as the telephone began to ring, the knuckles of the hand holding the telephone turned white with strain.