“Hello?” she said brightly. “Oh, hi, Alan! How are you?
Good.”
She listened briefly, then smiled. If she had looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror, she would have seen a woman who appeared to be screaming… but she did not look.
“Fine, Alan,” she said. “I’m just fine.”
14
It was almost time to leave for the Raceway.
Almost.
“Come on,” Danforth Keeton whispered. Sweat ran down his face like oil. “Come on, come on, come on.”
He was sitting hunched over Winning Ticket-he had swept everything off his desk to make room for it, and he had spent most of the day playing with it. He had started with his copy of Bluegrass History.Forty Years of kentucky Derby. He had run at least two dozen Derbys, giving the tin Winning Ticket horses the names of the entrants in exactly the manner Mr. Gaunt had described. And the tin horses which got the names of the winning Derby horses from the book kept coming in first. It happened time after time. It was amazing-so amazing that it was four o’clock before he realized that he had spent the day running long-ago races when there were ten brand-new ones to be run at Lewiston Raceway that very evening.
Money was waiting to be made.
For the last hour, today’s Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, had lain to the left of the Winning Ticket board. To the right was a sheet of paper he had torn from his pocket notebook.
Listed on the sheet in Keeton’s large, hasty scrawl was this: It was only already running the last race of the night. The horses rattled and swayed around the track. One of them led by six lengths, and crossed the finish line far ahead of the others.
Keeton snatched up the newspaper and studied the evening’s Raceway card again. His face shone so brightly that he looked sanctified.
“Malabar!” he whispered, and shook his fists in the air.
The pencil caught in one of them darted and plunged like a runaway sewing needle. “It’s Malabar! Thirty-to-one! Thirty-to-one at least!
Malabar, by God!”
He scribbled on the sheet of paper, panting raggedly as he did so.
Five minutes later the Winning Ticket game was locked in his study closet and Danforth Keeton was on his way to Lewiston in his Cadillac.
1st Race: BAZOOKAJOAN
2nd Race: FILLY DELFIA
3rd Race: TAMMY’s WONDER
4th Race: I’M AMAZED
5th Race: BY GEORGE
6th Race: PUCKY BOY
7th Race: CASCO THUNDER
8th Race: DELIGHTFUL SON
9th Race: TIKO-TIKO
five in the afternoon, but Danforth Keeton was
CHAPTER NINE
1
At quarter to ten on Sunday morning, Nettle Cobb drew on her coat and buttoned it swiftly. An expression of grim determination was stamped on her face. She was standing in her kitchen. Raider was sitting on the floor, looking up at her as if to ask if she really meant to go through with it this time.
“Yes, I really mean it,” she told him.
Raider thumped his tail against the floor, as if to say he knew she could do it.
“I’ve made a nice lasagna for Polly, and I’m going to take it to her. My lampshade is locked up in the armoire, and I know it’s locked, I don’t need to keep coming back to check because I know it in my head.
That crazy Polish woman isn’t going to keep me prisoner in my own house. If I see her on the street, I’ll give her what-for! I warned her!”
She had to go out. She had to, and she knew it. She hadn’t left the house in two days, and she had come to realize that the longer she put it off, the harder it would become. The longer she sat in the living room with the shades pulled down, the harder it would get to ever raise them again. She could feel the old confused terror creeping into her thoughts.
So she had gotten up early this morning-at five o’clock!-and had made a nice lasagna for Polly, just the way she liked it, with plenty of spinach and mushrooms. The mushrooms were canned, because she hadn’t dared go out to the market last night, but she thought it had turned out very well despite that. It was now sitting on the counter, the top of the pan covered with aluminum foil.
She picked it up and marched through the living room to the door.
“You be a good boy, Raider. I’ll be back in an hour. Unless Polly gives me coffee, and then it might be a little longer. But I’ll be fine. I don’t have a thing to worry about. I didn’t do anything to that crazy Polish woman’s sheets, and if she bothers me, I’ll give her the very dickens.”
Raider uttered a stern bark to show he understood and believed.
She opened the door, peeked out, saw nothing. Ford Street was as deserted as only a small-town street can be early on Sunday morning.
In the distance, one church-bell was calling Rev. Rose’s Baptists to worship and another was summoning Father Brigham’s Catholics.
Gathering all her courage, Nettle stepped out into the Sunday sunshine, set the pan of lasagna down on the step, pulled the door closed, and locked it. Then she took her housekey and scratched it up her forearm, leaving a thin red mark. As she stooped to pick up the pan again she thought, Now when you get halfway down the block-maybe even sooner-you’ll start thinking that you really didn’t lock the door after all. But you did. You set the lasagna down to do it.
And if you still can’t believe it, just look at your arm and remember that you made that scratch with your very own housekey… after you used it to lock the house. Remember that, Nettle, and you’ll be Just fine when the doubts start to creep in.
This was a wonderful thought, and using the key to scratch her arm had been a wonderful idea. The red mark was something concrete, and for the first time in the last two days (and mostly sleepless nights), Nettle really did feel better. She marched down to the sidewalk, her head high, her lips pressed together so tightly that they almost disappeared. When she reached the sidewalk, she looked both ways for the crazy Polish woman’s little yellow car. If she saw it, she intended to walk right up to it and tell the crazy Polish woman to leave her alone. There wasn’t a sign of it, though.
The only vehicle in sight was an old orange truck parked up the street, and it was empty.
Good.
Nettle set sail for Polly Chalmers’s house, and when the doubts assailed her, she remembered that the carnival glass lampshade was locked up, Raider was on guard, and the front door was locked.
Especially that last. The front door was locked, and she only had to look at the fading red mark on her arm to prove it to herself.
So Nettle marched on with her head high, and when she reached the corner, she turned it without looking back.
2
When the nutty woman was out of sight, Hugh Priest sat up behind the wheel of the orange town truck he had drawn from the deserted motor pool at seven that morning (he had lain down on the seat as soon as he saw Crazy Nettle come out the door). He put the gearshift in neutral, and let the truck roll slowly and soundlessly down the slight grade to Nettle Cobb’s house.
3
The doorbell woke Polly from a soupy state that wasn’t really sleep but a kind of dream-haunted drug-daze. She sat up in bed and realized she was wearing her housecoat. When had she put it on?
For a moment she couldn’t remember, and that frightened her.
Then it came. The pain she’d been expecting had arrived right on schedule, easily the worst arthritic pain of her entire life. It had awakened her at five. She had gone into the bathroom to urinate, then had discovered she couldn’t even get a swatch of toilet paper off the roll to blot herself with. So she had taken a pill, put on her housecoat, and sat in the chair by the bedroom window to wait until it worked. At some point she must have gotten sleepy and gone back to bed.