It had. A deer, a bird, even an oncoming car that had wandered into her lane.
“Yes. But her seatbelt-”
“Oh, forget the goddam seatbelt! “she had said with such spirited vehemence that some of the diners close to them looked around briefly. “Maybe she had a headache, and it caused her to forget her seatbelt that one time, but that still doesn’t mean she deliberately crashed the car. And a headache-one of her bad ones-would explain why Todd’s belt was fastened. And it still isn’t the point.”
“What is, then?”
“That there are too many maybes here to support your anger.
And even if the worst things You suspect are true, you’ll never know, will you? “No. “And if you did know She looked at him steadily. There was a candle on the table between them. Her eyes were a darker blue in its flame, and he could see a tiny spark of light in each one.
“Well, a brain tumor is an accident, too. There is no culprit here, I per Alan, no-what do You call them in your line of work?-no petrator.
Until you accept that, there will be no chance.”
“What chance?”
“Our chance,” she said calmly. “I like You very much, Alan, and I’m not too old to take a risk, but I’m old enough to have had some sad experience of where my emotions can lead me when they get Out of control. I won’t let them get anywhere Close to that point until you’re able to put Annie and Todd to rest.”
He looked at her, speechless. She regarded him gravely over her dinner in the old country inn, firelight flickering orange on one of her smooth cheeks and the left side of her brow. Outside, the wind played a long trombone note under the eaves.
“Have I said too much?” Polly asked. “If I have, I’d like you to take me home, Alan. I hate to be embarrassed almost as much as I hate not speaking my mind.”
He reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. “No, You haven’t said too much. I like to listen to you, Polly.”
She had smiled then. It lit up her whole face. “You’ll get your chance, then,” she said.
So it began for them. They had not felt guilty about seeing each other, but they had recognized the need to be careful-not just because it was a small town where he was an elected official and she needed the good will of the community to keep her business afloat, but because both of them recognized the possibility of guilt.
Neither of them was too old to take a risk, it seemed, but they were both a little too old to be reckless. Care needed to be taken.
Then, in May, he had taken her to bed for the first time, and she had told him about all the years between Then and Now… the story he did not completely believe, the one he was convinced she would someday tell him again, without the too-direct eyes and the left hand that tugged too often at the left earlobe. He recognized how difficult it had been for her to tell him as much as she had, and was content to wait for the rest. Had to be content.
Because care had to be taken. It was enough-quite enough-to fall in love with her as the long Maine summer drowsed past them.
Now, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling of her bedroom in the dimness, he wondered if the time had come to talk about marriage again.
He had tried once, in August, and she had made that gesture with her finger again. Shush, you. He supposed…
But his conscious train of thought began to break up then, and Alan slipped easily into sleep.
9
In his dream he was shopping in some mammoth store, wandering down an aisle so long it dwindled to a point in the distance. Everything was here, everything he had ever wanted but could not afford-a pressure-sensitive watch, a genuine felt fedora from Abercrombie amp; Fitch, a Bell and Howell eight-millimeter movie camera, hundreds of other items-but someone was behind him, just behind his shoulder where he couldn’t see.
“Down here we call these things fool’s stuffing, old boss,” a voice remarked.
It was one Alan knew. It belonged to that high-toned, Toronadodriving son of a bitch George Stark.
“We call this store Endsville,” the voice said, “because it’s the place where all goods and services terminate.”
Alan saw a large snake-it looked like a python with the head of a rattler come sliding out of a huge selection of Apple computers marked FREE TO THE PUBLIC. He turned to flee, but a hand with no lines on the Palm gripped his arm and stopped him.
“Go on,” the voice said persuasively. “Take what you want, boss.
Take everything you want… and pay for it.”
But every item he picked up turned out to be his son’s charred and melted beltbuckle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
Danforth Keeton did not have a brain tumor, but he did have a terrible headache as he sat in his office early Saturday morning.
Spread out on his desk beside a stack of red-bound town tax ledgers for the years 1982 to 1989 was a sprawl of correspondence letters from the State of Maine Bureau of Taxation and Xeroxes of letters he had written in reply.
Everything was starting to come down around his ears. He knew it, but he was helpless to do anything about it.
Keeton had made a trip to Lewiston late yesterday, had returned to The Rock around twelve-thirty in the morning, and had spent the rest of the night pacing his study restlessly while his wife slept the sleep of tranquilizers upstairs. He had found his gaze turning more and more often to the small closet in the corner of his study.
There was a high shelf in the closet, stacked with sweaters. Most of the sweaters were old and motheaten. Under them was a carved wooden box his father had made long before the Alzheimer’s had stolen over him like a shadow, robbing him of all his considerable skills and memories.
There was a revolver in the box.
Keeton found himself thinking about the revolver more and more frequently. Not for himself, no; at least not at first. For Them.
The Persecutors.
At quarter to six he had left the house and had driven the dawnsilent streets between his house and the Municipal Building. Eddie Warburton, a broom in his hand and a Chesterfield in his mouth (the solid-gold Saint Christopher’s medal he had purchased at Needful Things the day before was safely hidden under his blue chambray shirt), had watched him trudge up the stairs to the second floor.
Not a word passed between the two men. Eddie had become used to Keeton’s appearances at odd hours over the last year or so, and Keeton had long ago ceased seeing Eddie at all.
Now Keeton swept the papers together, fought an impulse to simply rip them to shreds and fling the pieces everywhere, and began to sort through them. Bureau of Taxation correspondence in one pile, his own replies in another. He kept these letters in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet-a drawer to which only he had the key.
At the bottom of most of the letters was this notation: DK/sl.
DK was, of course, Danforth Keeton. sl was Shirley Laurence, his secretary, who took dictation and typed correspondence. Shirley had typed none of his responses to the Bureau’s letters, however, initials or no initials.
It was wiser to keep some things to yourself A phrase jumped out at him as he sorted: “… and we notice discrepancies in quarterly Town Tax Return I I for the tax-year 1989…”
He put it aside quickly.
Another: “… and in examining a sampling of Workmen’s Compensation forms during the last quarter of 1987, we have serious questions concerning.
Into the file.
Yet another: believe that your request for an examination deferral seems premature at this time…”