“Say-hey and abracadabra,” Gaunt said softly.
10
Myrtle Keeton went to the door of her husband’s study for the third time that day and listened. When she got out of bed around nine o’clock that morning, Danforth had already been in there with the door locked. Now, at one in the afternoon, he was still in there with the door locked. When she asked him if he wanted some lunch, he told her in a muffled voice to go away, he was busy.
She raised her hand to knock again… and paused. She cocked her head slightly. A noise was coming from beyond the door-a grinding, rattling sound. It reminded her of the sounds her mother’s cuckoo clock had made during the week before it broke down completely.
She knocked lightly. “Danforth?”
“Go away!” His voice was agitated, but she could not tell if the reason was excitement or fear.
“Danforth, are you all right?”
“Yes, dammit! Go away! I’ll be out soon!”
Rattle and grind. Grind and rattle. It sounded like dirt in a dough-mixer. It made her a little afraid. She hoped Danforth wasn’t having a nervous breakdown in there. He had been acting so strange lately.
“Danforth, would you like me to go down to the bakery and get some doughnuts?”
“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Yes! Doughnuts! Toilet paper! A nose job! Go anywhere! Get anything! just leave me alone!”
She stood a moment longer, troubled. She thought about knocking again and decided not to. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what Danforth was doing in his study. She was no longer sure she even wanted him to open the door.
She put on her shoes and her heavy fall coat-it was sunny but chilly-and went out to the car. She drove down to The Country Oven at the end of Main Street and got half a dozen doughnutshoney-glazed for her, chocolate coconut for Danforth. She hoped they would cheer him up-a little chocolate always cheered her up.
On her way back, she happened to glance in the show window of Needful Things. What she saw caused her to jam both feet down on the brake-pedal, hard. If anyone had been following her, she would have been rammed for sure.
There was the most gorgeous doll in the window.
The shade was up again, of course. And the sign hanging from the clear plastic suction cup again read
Of course.
Polly Chalmers spent that Saturday afternoon in what was, for her, a most unusual fashion: by doing nothing at all. She sat by the window in her bentwood Boston rocker with her hands folded neatly in her lap, watching the occasional traffic on the street outside. Alan had called her before going out on patrol, had told her of having missed Leland Gaunt, had asked her if she was all right and if there was anything she needed. She had told him that she was fine and that she didn’t need a single thing, thanks. Both of these statements were lies; she was not fine at all and there were several things she needed. A cure for arthritis headed the list.
No, Polly what you really need is some courage. just enough to walk UP to the man you love and say, “Alan, I bent the truth in places about the years when I was away from Castle Rock, and I outright lied to you about what happened to my son. Now I’d like to ask your forgiveness and tell you the truth.”
It sounded easy when you stated it baldly like that. It only got hard when you looked the man you loved in the eyes, or when you tried to find the key that would unlock your heart without tearing it into bleeding, painful pieces.
Pain and lies; lies and pain. The two subjects her life seemed to revolve around just lately.
How are you today, Polly?
Fine, Alan. I’m fine.
In fact, she was terrified. it wasn’t that her hands were so awfully painful at this very second; she almost wished they did hurt, because the pain, bad as it was when it finally came, was still better than the waiting.
11
Shortly after noon today, she had become aware of a warm tingling-almost a vibration-in her hands. It formed rings of heat around her knuckles and at the base of her thumb; she could feel it lurking at the bottom of each fingernail in small, steely arcs like humorless smiles. She had felt this twice before, and knew what it meant. She was going to have what her Aunt Betty, who’d been afflicted with the same sort of arthritis, called a real bad spell. “When my hands start to tingle like electric shocks, I always know it’s time to batten down the hatches,” Betty had said, and now Polly was trying to batten down her own hatches, with a notable lack of success.
Outside, two boys walked down the middle of the street, tossing a football back and forth between them. The one on the rightthe youngest of the Lawes boys-went up for a high pass. The ball ticked off his fingers and bounced onto Polly’s lawn. He saw her looking out the window as he went after it and waved to her. Polly raised her own hand in return… and felt the pain flare sullenly, like a thick bed of coals in an errant gust of wind. Then it was gone again and there was only that eerie tingling. It felt to her the way the air sometimes felt before a violent electrical storm.
The pain would come in its own time; she could do nothing about it. The lies she had told Alan about Kelton, though… that was quite another thing. And, she thought, it’s not as though the truth is so awful, so glaring, so shocking… and it’s not as though he doesn’t already suspect or even know that you’ve lied. He does.
I’ve seen it in his face. So why is this so hard, Polly? Why?
Partially because of the arthritis, she supposed, and partially because of the pain medication she had come to rely on more and more heavily-the two things together had away of blurring rational thought, of making the clearest and cleanest of right angles look queerly skewed. Then there was the fact of Alan’s own pain… and the honesty with which he had disclosed it. He had laid it out for her inspection without a single hesitation.
His feelings in the wake of the peculiar accident which had taken
Annie’s and Todd’s lives were confused and ugly, surrounded by an unpleasant (and frightening) swirl of negative emotions, but he had laid them out for her just the same. He had done it because he wanted to find out if she knew things about Annie’s state of mind that he did not… but he had also done it because playing fair and keeping such things in the open were just part of his nature.
She was afraid of what he might think when he found out that playing fair wasn’t always a part of hers; that her heart as well as her hands had been touched with early frost.
She stirred uneasily in the chair.
I have to tell him-sooner or later I have to. And none of that explains why it’s so hard; none of that even explains why I told him the lies in the first place. I mean, it isn’t as if I killed my son…
She sighed-a sound that was almost a sob-and shifted in her chair.
She looked for the boys with the football, but they were gone. Polly settled back in her chair and closed her eyes.
12
She wasn’t the first girl to ever turn up pregnant as the result of a date-night wrestling match, or the first to ever argue bitterly with her parents and other relations as a result. They had wanted her to marry Paul “Duke” Sheehan, the boy who had gotten her pregnant.
She had replied that she wouldn’t marry Duke if he was the last boy on earth. This was true, but what her pride would not let her tell them was that Duke didn’t want to marry her-his closest friend had told her he was already making panicky preparations to join the Navy when he turned eighteen… which he would do in less than six weeks.