He shook his head as he got up and walked over to the dish drainer. “I don’t know and I don’t know.
How’s that for helpful?
Where do you keep your dish-wipers, Lois?”
“Never mind where I keep my dish-wipers. Go sit down. Please tell me you’re not one of these modern men, Ralph-the ones that are always hugging each other and bawling.”
Ralph laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I was just well trained, that’s all.”
“Okay. As long as you don’t start going on about how sensitive you are. There are some things a girl likes to find out for herself.”
She opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed him a faded but scrupulously clean dishtowel. ’Just dry them and put them on the counter. I’ll put them away myself. While you’re working, you can tell me your story. The unabridged version.”
“You got a deal.”
He was still wondering where to begin when his mouth opened, seemingly of its own accord, and began for him. “When I finally started to get it through my head that Carolyn was going to die, I went for a lot of walks. And one day, while I was out on the Extension.
He told her everything, beginning with his intervention between Ed and the fat man wearing the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap and ending with Bill telling him that he’d better go see his doctor, because at their age mental illness was common, at their age it was common as hell. He had to double back several times to pick up dropped stitches-the way Old Dor had showed up in the middle of his efforts to keep Ed from going at the man from West Side Gardeners, for instance-but he didn’t mind doing that, and Lois didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping his narrative straight, either.
The overall feeling Ralph was conscious of as he wound his way through his tale was a relief so deep it was nearly painful. it was as if someone. had stacked bricks on his heart and mind and he was now removing them, one by one.
By the time he was finished, the dishes were done and they had left the kitchen in favor of the living room with its dozens of framed photographs, presided over by Mr. Chasse from his place on the TV.
“So?” Ralph said. “How much of it do you believe?”
“All of it, of course,” she said, and either did not notice the expression of relief on Ralph’s face or chose to ignore it. “After what we saw this morning-not to mention what you knew about my wonderful daughter-in-law-I can’t very well not believe. That’s my advantage over Bill.”
Not your only one, Ralph thought but didn’t say.
“None of this stuff is coincidental, is it?” she asked him.
Ralph shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“When I was seventeen,” she said, “my mother hired this boy from down the road-Richard Henderson, his name was-to do chores around our place.
There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him… and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean.”
“Of course I do, She was matchmaking.”
“Uh-huh, but at least she wasn’t doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn’t care a fig for Richie at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she’d have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. if I was feeding the chickens, she’d have Richie cutting side-bay next to the dooryard.
She wanted me to see him around… to get used to him… and if we got to like each other’s company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. it was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that’s what this is like.”
“The pushes don’t feel all that gentle to me Ralph said. His hand went nvoluntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.
“No, of course they don’t. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?”
Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some (entity) force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force-or being-would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?”
“And what do we do now?” she added.
Ralph could only shake his head.
She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone.
“Almost three-thirty! My goodness!”
Ralph touched her hand. “Who are you calling?”
“Simone Castonguay. I’d made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon -there’s a card-party at the Grangebut I can’t go after all this. I’d lose my shirt.” She laughed, then colored prettily. just a figure of speech.”
Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver.
“Go on to your card-party, Lois.”
“Really?” She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.
“Yes.” He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn’t see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.
Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.
Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. The), might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers… but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois’s being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition-or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition-that Doc #3 couldn’t follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.
You can’t know any such thing, Ralph.
Maybe not, but itfelt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he did know was that Doc #3 hadn’t cut Lois’s balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3-Crazy Doc-intended to Cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.
Let’s say you’re right, Ralph,-let’s say he can’t get at her this afternoon if she’s playing nickel-in, dime-or-out in Ludlow.
What about tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?
What’s the solution? Does she call up her son and her bitch of a daughter-in-law, tell them she’s changed her mind about Riverview Estates and wants to go there after all?
He didn’t know. But he knew he needed time to think, and he also knew that constructive thinking would be hard to do until he was fairly sure that Lois was safe, at least for awhile.
“Ralph? You’re getting that moogy look again.”