So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to “Wooden Heart.”
It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.
Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet: He had been seen!
He sat bolt upright on his bed, staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!
What’s going on over there, boy?
I don’t know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck must be having an argument.
Brian got off his bed and went over to the window, half expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn’t, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the jerzycks’ house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.
Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn’t pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She)just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer.
“Who is it please?”
Brian thought calmly: He’ll get it out of me. I can’t lie, not to a policeman. I couldn’t even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time.
He’ll get it out of me and I’ll go to jailfor murder.
That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.
“Bri-unnn! Telephone!”
“I don’t want to talk to Stan!” he yelled. “Tell him to call back tomorrow!”
“It’s not Stan,” Sean called back. “It’s a guy. A grown-up.”
Large icy hands seized Brian’s heart and squeezed it. This was it-Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.
Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They’re very serious questions. I’m afraid if you don’t come right down to answer them, I’ll have to come and get you. I’ll have to come in my police car.
Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, “This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb.”
“Huh-huh-who is it?” he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.
“I dunno!” Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. “I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that.”
Crowfix?
Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.
Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.
Not Crowfix.
Koufax.
Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.
He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.
“Hello, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said softly.
“Huh-Huh-Hello,” Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Mr. Gaunt said. “If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn’t have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?”
“How do you know about that?” Brian again felt like throwing up.
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they’ll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.
They’ll think you didn’t see him because he was behind the house.”
Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn’t snooping. He wasn’t; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.
“I can’t lie!” he whispered into the telephone. “I always get caught out when I lie!”
“Not this time, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said. “This time you’re going to do it like a champ.”
And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.
Gaunt knew best about this, too.
2
While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.
Except it wasn’t her bedroom.
When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.
She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing “My Wish Came True” in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.
The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another.
Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.
The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing “Blue Hawaii,” and Cora hulahulaed into the jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the breasts of living pheasants.
She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.
Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn’t feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn’t look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.
Sally Ratcliffe’s speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher’s desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy-the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks-found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.