Needful Things (57 page)

She crumpled the peach-colored sheet of paper into a ball and threw it onto the floor of the car. She sat bolt upright behind the wheel, breathing hard, her hair fuzzed out in sweaty tangles (she had been running her free hand distractedly through it as she studied the note). Then she bent, picked it up, smoothed it out, and stuffed both it and the photograph back into the envelope. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to try three times to get it in, and when she finally did, she tore the envelope halfway down the side.

“Chippie!” she cried again, and burst into tears. The tears were hot; they burned like acid.
“Bitch!
And
you! You!
Lying
bastard!”

She jammed the key into the ignition. The Mustang awoke with a roar that sounded as angry as she felt. She dropped the gearshift into drive and tore out of the faculty parking lot in a cloud of blue smoke and a wailing shriek of burned rubber.

Billy Marchant, who was practicing nosies on his skateboard across the playground, looked up in surprise.

She was in her bedroom fifteen minutes later, digging through her underwear, looking for the splinter and not
finding it. Her anger at Judy and her lying bastard of a boyfriend had been eclipsed by an overmastering terror—what if it was gone? What if it had been stolen after all?

Sally had brought the torn envelope in with her, and became aware that it was still clutched in her left hand. It was impeding her search. She threw it aside and tore her sensible cotton underwear out of her drawer in big double handfuls, throwing it everywhere. Just as she felt she must scream with a combination of panic, rage, and frustration, she saw the splinter. She had pulled the drawer open so hard that it had slid all the way into the left rear corner of the drawer.

She snatched it up, and at once felt peace and serenity flood through her. She grabbed the envelope with her other hand and then held both hands in front of her, good and evil, sacred and profane, alpha and omega. Then she put the torn envelope in the drawer and tossed her underwear on top of it in helter-skelter piles.

She sat down, crossed her legs, and bowed her head over the splinter. She shut her eyes, expecting to feel the floor begin to sway gently beneath her, expecting the peace which came to her when she heard the voices of the animals, the poor dumb animals, saved in a time of wickedness by the grace of God.

Instead, she heard the voice of the man who had sold her the splinter.
You really ought to take care of this, you know,
Mr. Gaunt said from deep within the relic.
You really ought to take care of this . . . this nasty business.

“Yes,” Sally Ratcliffe said. “Yes, I know.”

She sat there all afternoon in her hot maiden's bedroom, thinking and dreaming in the dark circle which the splinter spread around her, a darkness which was like the hood of a cobra.

“Lookit my king, all dressed in green . . . iko-iko one day . . . he's not a man, he's a lovin' machine . . .

While Sally Ratcliffe was meditating in her new darkness, Polly Chalmers was sitting in a bar of brilliant sunlight
by a window she had opened to let in a little of the unseasonably warm October afternoon. She was running her Singer Dress-O-Matic and singing “Iko Iko” in her clear, pleasant alto voice.

Rosalie Drake came over and said, “I know someone who's feeling better today. A
lot
better, by the sound.”

Polly looked up and offered Rosalie a smile which was strangely complex. “I do and don't,” she said.

“What you mean is that you do and can't help it.”

Polly considered this for a few moments and then nodded her head. It wasn't exactly right, but it would do. The two women who had died together yesterday were together again today, at the Samuels Funeral Home. They would be buried out of different churches tomorrow morning, but by tomorrow afternoon Nettie and Wilma would be neighbors again . . . in Homeland Cemetery, this time. Polly counted herself partially responsible for their deaths—after all, Nettie would never have come back to Castle Rock if not for her. She had written the necessary letters, attended the necessary hearings, had even found Netitia Cobb a place to live. And why? The hell of it was, Polly couldn't really remember now, except it had seemed an act of Christian charity and the last responsibility of an old family friendship.

She would not duck this culpability, nor let anyone try to talk her out of it (Alan had wisely not even tried), but she was not sure she would have changed what she had done. The core of Nettie's madness had been beyond Polly's power to control or alter, apparently, but she had nevertheless spent three happy, productive years in Castle Rock. Perhaps three such years were better than the long gray time she would have spent in the institution, before old age or simple boredom cashed her in. And if Polly had, by her actions, signed her name to Wilma Jerzyck's death-warrant, hadn't Wilma written the particulars of that document herself? After all, it had been Wilma, not Polly, who had stabbed Nettie Cobb's cheery and inoffensive little dog to death with a corkscrew.

There was another part of her, a simpler part, which simply grieved for the passing of her friend, and puzzled over the fact that Nettie could have done such a thing
when it really had seemed to Polly that she was getting better.

She had spent a good part of the morning making funeral arrangements and calling Nettie's few relatives (all of them had indicated that they wouldn't be at the funeral, which was only what Polly had expected), and this job, the clerical processes of death, had helped to focus her own grief . . . as the rituals of burying the dead are undoubtedly supposed to do.

There were some things, however, which would not yet leave her mind.

The lasagna, for instance—it was still sitting in the refrigerator with the foil over the top to keep it from drying out. She supposed she and Alan would eat it for dinner tonight—if he could come over, that was. She wouldn't eat it by herself. She couldn't stand that.

She kept remembering how quickly Nettie had seen she was in pain, how exactly she had gauged that pain, and how she had brought her the thermal gloves, insisting that this time they really might help. And, of course, the last thing Nettie had said to her: “I love you, Polly.”

“Earth to Polly, Earth to Polly, come in, Pol, do you read?” Rosalie chanted. She and Polly had remembered Nettie together that morning, trading these and other reminiscences, and had cried together in the back room, holding each other amid the bolts of cloth. Now Rosalie also seemed happy—perhaps just because she had heard Polly singing.

Or because she wasn't entirely real to either of us, Polly mused. There was a shadow over her—not one that was completely black, mind you; it was just thick enough to make her hard to see. That's what makes our grief so fragile.

“I hear you,” Polly said. “I
do
feel better, I
can't
help it, and I'm very grateful
for
it. Does that about cover the waterfront?”

“Just about,” Rosalie agreed. “I don't know what surprised me more when I came back in—hearing you singing, or hearing you running a sewing machine again. Hold up your hands.”

Polly did. They would never be mistaken for the hands of a beauty queen, with their crooked fingers and the Heberden's
nodes, which grotesquely enlarged the knuckles, but Rosalie could see that the swelling had gone down dramatically since last Friday, when the constant pain had caused Polly to leave early.

“Wow!” Rosalie said. “Do they hurt at all?”

“Sure—but they're still better than they've been in a month. Look.”

She slowly rolled her fingers into loose fists. Then she opened them again, using the same care. “It's been at least a month since I've been able to do that.” The truth, Polly knew, was a little more extreme; she hadn't been able to make fists without suffering serious pain since April or May.

“Wow!”

“So I feel better,” Polly said. “Now if Nettie were here to share it, that would make things just about perfect.”

The door at the front of the shop opened.

“Will you see who that is?” Polly asked. “I want to finish sewing this sleeve.”

“You bet.” Rosalie started off, then stopped for a moment and looked back. “Nettie wouldn't mind you feeling good, you know.”

Polly nodded. “I do know,” she said gravely.

Rosalie went out front to wait on the customer. When she was gone, Polly's left hand went to her chest and touched the small bulge, not much bigger than an acorn, that rested under her pink sweater and between her breasts.

Azka
—what a wonderful word, she thought, and began to run the sewing machine again, turning the fabric of the dress—her first original since last summer—back and forth under the jittery silver blur of the needle.

She wondered idly how much Mr. Gaunt would want for the amulet. Whatever he wants, she told herself, it won't be enough. I won't—I
can't
—think that way when it comes time to dicker, but it's the simple truth. Whatever he wants for it will be a bargain.

The Castle Rock selectmen (and selectwoman) shared a single full-time secretary, a young woman with the exotic name of Ariadne St. Claire. She was a happy young woman, not overburdened with intelligence but tireless and pleasing to look at. She had large breasts which rose in soft, steep hills beneath an apparently endless supply of angora sweaters, and lovely skin. She also had very bad eyes. They swam, brown and enlarged, behind the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. Buster liked her. He considered her too dumb to be one of Them.

Ariadne poked her head into his office at quarter to four. “Deke Bradford came by, Mr. Keeton. He needs a signature on a fund-release form. Can you do it?”

“Well, let's see what it is,” Buster said, slipping that day's sports section of the Lewiston
Daily Sun,
folded to the racing card, deftly into his desk drawer.

He felt better today; purposeful and alert. Those wretched pink slips had been burned in the kitchen stove, Myrtle had stopped sidling away like a singed cat when he approached (he no longer cared much for Myrtle, but it was still annoying to live with a woman who thought you were the Boston Strangler), and he expected to clear another large bundle of cash at the Raceway that night. Because of the holiday, the crowds (not to mention the payoffs) would be bigger.

He had, in fact, started to think in terms of quinellas and trifectas.

As for Deputy Dickface and Sheriff Shithead and all the rest of their merry crew . . . well, he and Mr. Gaunt knew about Them, and Buster believed the two of them were going to make one hell of a team.

For all these reasons he was able to welcome Ariadne into his office with equanimity—he was even able to take some of his old pleasure in observing the gentle way her bosom swayed within its no doubt formidable harness.

She put a fund-release form on his desk. Buster picked it up and leaned back in his swivel chair to look it over. The amount requested was noted in a box at the top—nine hundred and forty dollars. The payee was to be Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston. In the space reserved for
Goods and/or Services to Be Supplied,
Deke had printed 16
CASES OF DYNAMITE
. Below, in the
Comments/Explanations
section, he had written:

We've finally come up against that granite ridge at the gravel pit out on Town Road #5
,
the one the state geologist warned us about back in '87 (see my report for details). Anyway, there is plenty more gravel beyond it, but we'll have to blow out the rock to get at it. This should be done before it gets cold and the winter snowfall starts. If we have to buy a winter's worth of gravel over in Norway, the taxpayers are going to howl blue murder. Two or three bangs should take care of it, and Case has a big supply of Taggart Hi-Impact on hand—I checked. We can have it by noon tomorrow, if we want, and start blasting on Wednesday. I have the spots marked if anyone from the Selectmen's Office wants to come out and take a look.

Below this, Deke had scrawled his signature.

Buster read Deke's note twice, tapping his front teeth thoughtfully as Ariadne stood waiting. At last he rocked forward in his chair, made a change, added a sentence, initialed both the change and the addition, then signed his own name below Deke's with a flourish. When he handed the pink sheet of paper back to Ariadne, he was smiling.

“There!” he said. “And
everyone thinks I'm such a skinflint!”

Ariadne looked at the form. Buster had changed the amount from nine hundred and forty dollars to fourteen hundred dollars. Below Deke's explanation of what he wanted the dynamite for, Buster had added this:
Better get at least twenty cases while the supply is good.

“Will you want to go out and look at the gravel pit, Mr. Keeton?”

“Nope, nope, won't be necessary.” Buster leaned back in his chair again and locked his hands together behind his neck. “But ask Deke to give me a call when the stuff arrives. That's a lot of bang. We wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, would we?”

“No indeed,” Ariadne said, and went out. She was glad to go. There was something in Mr. Keeton's smile which she found . . . well, a little creepy.

Buster, meanwhile, had swivelled his chair around so he could look out at Main Street, which was a good deal busier than it had been when he had looked out over the town with such despair on Saturday morning. A lot had happened since then, and he suspected that a lot more
would
happen in the next couple of days. Why, with twenty cases of Taggart Hi-Impact Dynamite stored in the town's Public Works shed—a shed to which he, of course, had a key—almost anything could happen.