Needful Things (40 page)

“No,” she said hastily, in a small voice.

He patted her hand. “I'm sorry.”

She looked at him with a wonderstruck expression. He had
apologized
to her. Myrtle thought he might have done this at some time or other in their years of marriage, but she could not remember when.

“Just ask her if the State boys have been bothering about anything lately,” he said. "Land-use regulations, the damn sewage . . . taxes, maybe. I'd come in and ask myself, but I really want to catch the kick-off.”

“All right, Dan.”

The Williams house was halfway up Castle View. Keeton piloted the Cadillac into the driveway and parked behind the woman's car. It was foreign, of course. A Volvo. Keeton guessed she was a closet Communist, a lesbo, or both.

Myrtle opened her door and got out, flashing him the shy, slightly nervous smile again as she did so.

“I'll be home in half an hour.”

“Fine. Don't forget to ask if she's aware of any new town business,” he said. And if Myrt's description—garbled though it would surely be—of what Amanda Williams said raised even one single hackle on Keeton's neck, he would check in with the bitch personally . . . tomorrow. Not this afternoon. This afternoon was
his.
He was feeling much too good to even
look
at Amanda Williams, let alone make chit-chat with her.

He hardly waited for Myrtle to close her door before throwing the Cadillac in reverse and backing down to the street again.

Nettie had just taped the last of the pink sheets to the door of the closet in Keeton's study when she heard a car turn into the driveway. A muffled squeak escaped her throat. For a moment she was frozen in place, unable to move.

Caught!
her mind screamed as she listened to the soft, well-padded burble of the Cadillac's big engine.
Caught! Oh Jesus Savior meek and mild I'm caught! He'll kill me!

Mr. Gaunt's voice spoke in answer. It was not friendly now; it was cold and it was commanding and it came from a place deep in the center of her brain.
He probably
WILL
kill you if he catches you, Nettie. And if you panic, he'll catch you for sure. The answer is simple: don't panic. Leave the room. Do it now. Don't run, but walk fast. And as quietly as you can.

She hurried across the second-hand Turkish rug on the study floor, her legs as stiff as sticks, muttering “Mr. Gaunt knows best” in a low litany, and entered the living room. Pink rectangles of paper glared at her from what seemed like every available surface. One even dangled from the central light-fixture on a long strand of tape.

Now the car's engine had taken on a hollow, echoey sound. Buster had driven into the garage.

Go, Nettie! Go right away! Now is your only chance!

She fled across the living room, tripped over a hassock, and went sprawling. She banged her head on the floor almost hard enough to knock herself out—
would
have knocked herself out, almost certainly, but for the thin cushion of a throw-rug. Bright globular lights skated across her field of vision. She scrambled up again, vaguely aware that her forehead was bleeding, and began fumbling at the knob of the front door as the car engine cut off in the garage. She cast a terrified glance back over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. She could see the door to the garage, the door he would come through. One of the pink slips of paper was taped to it.

The doorknob turned under her hand, but the door wouldn't open. It seemed stuck shut.

From the garage came a hefty
swoop-chunk
as Keeton
slammed his car door. Then the rattle of the motorized garage door starting down on its tracks. She heard his footsteps gritting across the concrete. Buster was whistling.

Nettie's frantic gaze, partially obscured by blood from her cut forehead, fell upon the thumb-bolt. It had been turned. That was why the door wouldn't open for her. She must have turned it herself when she came in, although she couldn't remember doing it. She flicked it up, pulled the door open, and stepped through.

Less than a second later, the door between the garage and the kitchen opened. Danforth Keeton stepped inside, unbuttoning his overcoat. He stopped. The whistle died on his lips. He stood there with his hands frozen in the act of undoing one of the lower coat-buttons, his lips still pursed, and looked around the kitchen. His eyes began to widen.

If he had gone to the living-room window right then, he would have seen Nettie running wildly across his lawn, her unbuttoned coat billowing around her like the wings of a bat. He might not have recognized her, but he would surely have seen it was a woman, and this might have changed later events considerably. The sight of all those pink slips froze him in place, however, and in his first shock his mind was capable of producing two words and two words only. They flashed on and off inside his head like a giant neon sign with letters of screaming scarlet:
THE PERSECUTORS! THE PERSECUTORS! THE PERSECUTORS!

Nettie reached the sidewalk and ran down Castle View as fast as she could. The heels of her loafers rattled a frightened tattoo, and her ears convinced her that she was hearing more feet than her own—Buster was behind her, Buster was chasing her, and when Buster caught her he might hurt her . . . but that didn't matter. It didn't matter because he could do worse than just hurt her. Buster was an important man in town, and if he wanted her sent back to Juniper Hill, she would be sent. So Nettie ran. Blood trickled down her forehead and into her eye, and for a
moment she saw the world through a pale red lens, as if all the nice houses on the View had begun to ooze blood. She wiped it away with the sleeve of her coat and went on running.

The sidewalk was deserted, and most eyes inside the houses which were occupied this early Sunday afternoon were trained on the Patriots-Jets game. Nettie was seen by only one person.

Tansy Williams, fresh from two days in Portland where she and her mommy had gone to visit Grampa, was looking out the living-room window, sucking a lollypop and holding her teddy bear, Owen, under her left arm, when Nettie went by with wings on her heels.

“Mommy, a lady just ran by,” Tansy reported.

Amanda Williams was sitting in the kitchen with Myrtle Keeton. They each had a cup of coffee. The fondue pot sat between them on the table. Myrtle had just asked if there was any town business going on that Dan should know about, and Amanda considered this a very odd question. If Buster wanted to know something, why hadn't he come in himself? For that matter, why such a question on a Sunday afternoon in the first place?

“Honey, Mommy's talking with Mrs. Keeton.”

“She had blood on her,” Tansy reported further.

Amanda smiled at Myrtle. "I
told
Buddy that if he was going to rent that
Fatal Attraction,
he should wait until Tansy was in bed to watch it.”

Meantime, Nettie went on running. When she reached the intersection of Castle View and Laurel, she had to stop for a while. The Public Library was here, and there was a curved stone wall running around its lawn. She leaned against it, gasping and sobbing for breath as the wind tore past her, tugging at her coat. Her hands were pressed against her left side, where she had a deep stitch.

She looked back up the hill and saw that the street was empty. Buster had not been following her after all; that had just been her imagination. After a few moments she was able to hunt through her coat pockets for a Kleenex to wipe away some of the blood on her face. She found one, and she also discovered that the key to Buster's house was no longer there. It might have fallen out of her pocket as she ran down the hill. but she thought it more likely
that she had left it in the lock of the front door. But what did that matter? She had gotten out before Buster saw her, that was the important thing. She thanked God that Mr. Gaunt's voice had spoken to her in the nick of time, forgetting that Mr. Gaunt was the reason she had been in Buster's home in the first place.

She looked at the smear of blood on the Kleenex and decided the cut probably wasn't as bad as it could have been. The flow seemed to be slowing down. The stitch in her side was going away, too. She pushed off the rock wall and began to plod toward home with her head down, so the cut wouldn't show.

Home, that was the thing to think about. Home and her beautiful carnival glass lampshade. Home and the Sunday Super Movie. Home and Raider. When she was at home with the door locked, the shades pulled, the TV on, and Raider sleeping at her feet, all of this would seem like a horrible dream—the sort of dream she'd had in Juniper Hill, after she had killed her husband.

Home, that was the place for her.

Nettie walked a little faster. She would be there soon.

Pete and Wilma Jerzyck had a light lunch with the Pulaskis after Mass, and following lunch, Pete and Jake Pulaski settled in front of the TV to watch the Patriots kick some New York ass. Wilma cared not a fig for football—baseball, basketball, or hockey, either, as far as that went. The only pro sport she liked was wrestling, and although Pete didn't know it, Wilma would have left him in the wink of an eye for Chief Jay Strongbow.

She helped Frieda with the dishes, then said she was going home to watch the rest of the Sunday Super Movie—it was
On the Beach,
with Gregory Peck. She told Pete she was taking the car.

“That's fine,” he said, his eyes never leaving the TV. "I don't mind walking.”

“Goddam good thing for you,” she muttered under her breath as she went out.

Wilma was actually in a good mood, and the major reason had to do with Casino Nite. Father John wasn't backing down on it the way Wilma had expected him to do, and she had liked the way he'd looked that morning during the homily, which was called “Let Us Each Tend Our Own Garden.” His tone had been as mild as ever, but there had been nothing mild about his blue eyes or his outthrust chin. Nor had all his fancy gardening metaphors fooled Wilma or anyone else about what he was saying: if the Baptists insisted on sticking their collective nose into the Catholic carrot-patch, they were going to get their collective ass kicked.

The thought of kicking ass (particularly on this scale) always put Wilma in a good mood.

Nor was the prospect of ass-kicking the only pleasure of Wilma's Sunday. She hadn't had to cook a heavy Sunday meal for once, and Pete was safely parked with Jake and Frieda. If she was lucky, he would spend the whole afternoon watching men try to rupture each other's spleens and she could watch the movie in peace. But first she thought she might call her old friend Nettie. She thought she had Crazy Nettie pretty well buffaloed, and that was all very well . . . for a start. But
only
for a start. Nettie still had those muddy sheets to pay for, whether she knew it or not. The time had come to put a few more moves on Miss Mental Illness of 1991. This prospect filled Wilma with anticipation, and she drove home as fast as she could.

Like a man in a dream, Danforth Keeton walked to his refrigerator and pulled off the pink slip which had been taped there. The Words

TRAFFIC VIOLATION WARNING

were printed across the top in black block letters. Below these words was the following message:

Just a
WARNING
—but please read and heed! You have been observed breaking one or more
traffic laws. The citing officer has elected to “let you off with a warning” this time, but he has recorded the make, model, and license number of your car, and next time you will be charged. Please remember that traffic laws are for
EVERYBODY.

Drive defensively!

Arrive alive!

Your Local Police Department thanks you!

Below the sermon was a series of blanks labelled
MAKE, MODEL
, and
LIC
. #. Printed on the slip in the first two blanks were the words Cadillac and Seville. Neatly printed in the blank for
LIC
. # was this:

BUSTER
1.

Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking. None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words
OTHER VIOLATION(S),
followed by two blank lines.
OTHER VIOLATION(S)
had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:

BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.

At the bottom was a line with the words
CITING OFFICER
printed under it. The rubber-stamp signature on this line was Norris Ridgewick.

Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip. It crackled and bent and crumpled. At last it disappeared between Keeton's big knuckles. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the other pink slips. A vein beat time in the center of his forehead.

“I'll kill him,” Keeton whispered. “I swear to God and all the saints I'll kill that skinny little fuck.”

When Nettie arrived home it was only twenty past one, but it felt to her as if she had been gone for months, maybe even years. As she walked up the cement path to her door, her terrors slipped from her shoulders like invisible weights. Her head still ached from the tumble she had taken, but she thought a headache was a very small price to pay for being allowed to arrive back at her own little house safe and undetected.

She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress. She took it out and put it in the lock. “Raider?” she called as she turned it. “Raider, I'm home!”

She opened the door.

“Where's Mummy's wittle boy, hmmm? Where
is
ums? Izzum hungwy?” The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped; in. “Is Mummy's wittle boy
awful
hungwy? Izzum just
sooo
hung—”