Needful Things Read online

  "I'll bring you. You won't be able to take anything away, at least not until Dr. Ryan has published his autopsy findings, but I can't see any harm in letting you copy down a few telephone numbers."

  "Thank you."

  A sudden thought occurred to him. "Polly, what time did Nettie leave here?"

  "Quarter of eleven, I guess. It might have been as late as eleven o'clock. She didn't stay a whole hour, I don't think. Why?"

  "Nothing," he said. He'd had a momentary flash: if Nettie had stayed long enough at Polly's, she might not have had time to go back home, find her dog dead, collect the rocks, write the notes, attach them to the rocks, go over to Wilma's, and break the windows. But if Nettie had left Polly's at quarter to eleven, that gave her better than two hours. Plenty of time.

  Hey, Alan! the voice--the falsely cheery one that usually restricted its input to the subject of Annie and Todd--spoke up. How come you're trying to bitch this up for yourself, good buddy?

  And Alan didn't know. There was something else he didn't know, either--how had Nettie gotten that load of rocks over to the Jerzyck house in the first place? She had no driver's license and didn't have a clue about operating a car.

  Cut the crap, good buddy, the voice advised. She wrote the notes at her house--probably right down the hall from her dog's dead body--and got the rubber bands from her own kitchen drawer. She didn't have to carry the rocks; there were plenty of those in Wilma's back-yard garden. Right?

  Right. Yet he could not get rid of the idea that the rocks had been brought with the notes already attached. He had no concrete reason to think so, but it just seemed right ... the kind of thing you'd expect from a kid or someone who thought like a kid.

  Someone like Nettie Cobb.

  Quit it ... let it go!

  He couldn't, though.

  Polly touched his cheek. "I'm awfully glad you came, Alan. It must have been a horrible day for you, too."

  "I've had better, but it's over now. You should let it go, too. Get some sleep. You have a lot of arrangements to make tomorrow. Do you want me to get you a pill?"

  "No, my hands are a little better, at least. Alan--" She broke off, but stirred restlessly under the covers.

  "What?"

  "Nothing," she said. "It wasn't important. I think I can sleep, now that you're here. Goodnight."

  "Goodnight, honey."

  She rolled away from him, pulled the covers up, and was still. For a moment he thought of how she had hugged him--the feel of her hands locked about his neck. If she was able to flex her fingers enough to do that, then she really was better. That was a good thing, maybe the best thing that had happened to him since Clut had phoned during the football game. If only things would stay better.

  Polly had a slightly deviated septum and now she began to snore tightly, a sound Alan actually found rather pleasant. It was good to be sharing a bed with another person, a real person who made real sounds ... and sometimes filched the covers. He grinned in the dark.

  Then his mind turned back to the murders and the grin faded.

  I think she'll leave me alone, anyway. I haven't seen her or heard from her, so I guess she finally got the message.

  I haven't seen her or heard from her.

  I guess she finally got the message.

  A case like this one didn't need to be solved; even Seat Thomas could have told you exactly what had happened after a single look at the crime-scene through his trifocals. It had been kitchen implements instead of duelling pistols at dawn, but the result was the same: two bodies in the morgue at K.V.H. with autopsy Y-cuts in them. The only question was why it had happened. He had had a few questions, a few vague disquiets, but they would no doubt have blown away before Wilma and Nettie had been seen into the ground.

  Now the disquiets were more urgent, and some of them

  (I guess she finally got the message)

  had names.

  To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be target with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite a while before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren't afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.

  Sometimes the gate was a piece of evidence found at a crime-scene. Sometimes it was a witness. Sometimes it was an assumption firmly based on events and logic. The assumptions he'd made in this case were: one, that Wilma had been following a long-established pattern of harassment and fuckery; two, that this time she had chosen the wrong person with whom to play mind-games; three, that Nettie had snapped again as she had when she'd killed her husband. But ...

  I haven't seen her or heard from her.

  If Nettie had really said that, how much did it change? How many assumptions did that single sentence knock into cocked hats? Alan didn't know.

  He stared into the darkness of Polly's bedroom and wondered if he'd found the gate after all.

  Maybe Polly hadn't heard what Nettie had said correctly.

  It was technically possible, but Alan didn't believe it. Nettie's actions, at least up to a certain point, supported what Polly claimed to have heard. Nettie hadn't come to work at Polly's on Friday--she'd said she was ill. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just scared of Wilma. That made sense; they knew from Pete Jerzyck that Wilma, after discovering that her sheets had been vandalized, had made at least one threatening call to Nettie. She might have made others the next day that Pete didn't know about.

  But Nettie had come to see Polly with a gift of food on Sunday morning. Would she have done that if Wilma was still stoking the fires? Alan didn't think so.

  Then there was the matter of the rocks which had been thrown through Wilma's windows. Each of the attached notes said the same thing: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. A warning usually means that the person being warned has more time to change his or her ways, but time had been up for Wilma and Nettie. They had met on that street-corner only two hours after the rocks had been thrown.

  He supposed he could get around that one if he had to. When Nettie found her dog, she would have been furious. Ditto Wilma when she got home and saw the damage to her house. All it would have taken to strike the final spark was a single telephone call. One of the two women had made that call ... and the balloon had gone up.

  Alan turned over on his side, wishing that these were the old days, when you could still obtain records of local calls. If he could have documented the fact that Wilma and Nettie had spoken before their final meeting, he would have felt a lot better. Still--take the final phone-call as a given. That still left the notes themselves.

  This is how it must have happened, he thought. Nettie comes home from Polly's and finds her dog dead on the hall floor. She reads the note on the corkscrew. Then she writes the same message on fourteen or sixteen sheets of paper and puts them in the pocket of her coat. She also gets a bunch of rubber bands. When she gets to Wilma's, she goes into the back yard. She piles up fourteen or sixteen rocks and uses the elastic bands to attach the notes. She must have done all that prior to throwing any rocks--it would have taken too long if she had to stop in the middle of the festivities to pick out more rocks and attach more notes. And when she's done, she goes home and broods over her dead pet some more.

  It felt all wrong to him.

  It felt really lousy.

  It presupposed a chain of thought and action that just didn't fit what he knew of Nettie Cobb. The murder of her husband had been the outcome of long cycles of abuse, but the murder itself had been an impulse crime committed by a woman whose sanity had broken. If the records in George Bannerman's old files were correct, Nettie sure hadn't written Albion Cobb any wa
rning notes beforehand.

  What felt right to him was much simpler: Nettie comes home from Polly's. She finds her dog dead in the hallway. She gets a cleaver from the kitchen drawer and heads up the street to cut herself a wide slice of Polish butt.

  But if that was the case, who had broken Wilma Jerzyck's windows?

  "Plus the times are all so weird," he muttered, and rolled restlessly over onto his other side.

  John LaPointe had been with the CIU team which had spent Sunday afternoon and evening tracing Nettie's movements--what movements there had been. She had gone to Polly's with the lasagna. She told Polly that she would probably go by the new shop, Needful Things, on her way home and speak to the owner, Leland Gaunt, if he was in--Polly said Mr. Gaunt had invited her to look at an item that afternoon and Nettie was going to tell Mr. Gaunt that Polly would probably show up, even though her hands were paining her quite badly.

  If Nettie had gone into Needful Things, if Nettie had spent some time there--browsing, talking to the new shopkeeper that everyone in town thought was so fascinating and whom Alan kept not meeting--that might have bitched up her window of opportunity and re-opened the possibility of a mystery rock-thrower. But she hadn't. The shop had been closed. Gaunt had told both Polly, who had indeed dropped by later on, and the CID boys that he had seen neither hide nor hair of Nettie since the day she came in and bought her carnival glass lampshade. In any case, he had spent the morning in the back room, listening to classical music and cataloguing items. If someone had knocked, he probably wouldn't have heard anyway. So Nettie must have gone directly home, and that left her the time to do all those things which Alan found so unlikely.

  Wilma Jerzyck's window of opportunity was even narrower. Her husband had some woodworking equipment in the basement; he had been down there Sunday morning from eight until just past ten. He saw it was getting late, he said, so he'd shut down the machinery and gone upstairs to dress for eleven o'clock Mass. Wilma, he told the officers, had been in the shower when he entered the bedroom, and Alan had no reason to doubt the new widower's testimony.

  It must have gone like this: Wilma leaves her house on a drive-by mission at nine-thirty-five or nine-forty. Pete's in the basement, making birdhouses or whatever, and doesn't even know she's gone. Wilma gets to Nettie's at about quarter to ten--just minutes after Nettie must have left for Polly's--and sees the door standing open. To Wilma, this is as good as a gilt-edged invitation. She parks, goes inside, kills the dog and writes the note on impulse, and leaves again. None of the neighbors remembered seeing Wilma's bright yellow Yugo--inconvenient, but hardly proof it hadn't been there. Most of the neighbors had been gone, anyway, either to church or visiting out of town.

  Wilma drives back to her house, goes upstairs while Pete is shutting down his planer or jigsaw or whatever, and gets undressed. When Pete enters the master bathroom to wash the sawdust off his hands before putting on a coat and tie, Wilma has just stepped into the shower; in fact, she's probably still dry on one side.

  Pete Jerzyck's finding his wife in the shower was the only thing in the whole mess that made perfect sense to Alan. The corkscrew which had been used on the dog was a lethal enough weapon, but a short one. She'd have wanted to wash off any bloodstains on her hands and arms.

  Wilma just misses Nettie on one end and just misses her husband on the other. Was it possible? Yes. Only by a squeak and a gasp, but it was possible.

  So let it go, Alan. Let it go and go to sleep.

  But he still couldn't, because it still sucked. It sucked hard.

  Alan rolled onto his back once more. Downstairs he heard the clock in the living room softly chiming four. This was getting him nowhere at all, but he couldn't seem to turn his mind off.

  He tried to imagine Nettie sitting patiently at her kitchen table, writing THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING over and over again while, less than twenty feet away, her beloved little dog lay dead. He couldn't do it no matter how he tried. What had seemed like a gate into this particular garden now seemed more and more like a clever painting of a gate on the high, unbroken wall. A trompe l'oeil,

  Had Nettie walked over to Wilma's house on Willow Street and broken the windows? He didn't know, but he did know that Nettie Cobb was still a figure of interest in Castle Rock ... the crazy lady who had killed her husband and then spent all those years in Juniper Hill. On the rare occasions when she deviated from the path of her usual routine, she was noticed. If she had gone stalking over to Willow Street on Sunday morning--perhaps muttering to herself as she went and almost certainly crying--she would have been noticed. Tomorrow Alan would start knocking on the doors between the two houses and asking questions.

  He began to slip off to sleep at last. The image that followed him down was a pile of rocks with a sheet of note-paper banded around each one. And he thought again: If Nettie didn't throw them, then who did?

  9

  As the small hours of Monday morning crept toward dawn and the beginning of a new and interesting week, a young man named Ricky Bissonette emerged from the hedge surrounding the Baptist parsonage. Inside this neat-as-a-pin building, the Reverend William Rose slept the sleep of the just and the righteous.

  Ricky, nineteen and not overburdened with brains, worked down at Sonny's Sunoco. He had closed up hours ago but had hung around in the office, waiting until it was late enough (or early enough) to play a little prank on Rev. Rose. On Friday afternoon, Ricky had stopped by the new shop, and had fallen into conversation with the proprietor, who was one interesting old fellow. One thing led to another, and at some point Ricky had realized he was telling Mr. Gaunt his deepest, most secret wish. He mentioned the name of a young actress-model--a very young actress-model--and told Mr. Gaunt he would give just about anything for some pictures of this young woman with her clothes off.

  "You know, I have something that might interest you," Mr. Gaunt had said. He glanced around the store as if to verify that it was empty except for the two of them, then went to the door and turned the OPEN sign over to CLOSED. He returned to his spot by the cash register, rummaged under the counter, and came up with an unmarked manila envelope. "Have a look at these, Mr. Bissonette," Mr. Gaunt said, and then dropped a rather lecherous man-of-the-world wink. "I think you'll be startled. Perhaps even amazed."

  Stunned was more like it. It was the actress-model for whom Ricky lusted--it had to be!--and she was a lot more than just nude. In some of the pictures she was with a well-known actor. In others, she was with two well-known actors, one of whom was old enough to be her grandfather. And in still others--

  But before he could see any of the others (and it appeared there were fifty or more, all brilliant eight-by-ten glossy color shots), Mr. Gaunt had snatched them away.

  "That's--!" Ricky gulped, mentioning a name which was well known to readers of the glossy tabloids and watchers of the glossy talk-shows.

  "Oh, no," Mr. Gaunt said, while his jade-colored eyes said Oh, yes. "I'm sure it can't be... but the resemblance is remarkable, isn't it? The sale of pictures such as these is illegal, of course--sexual content aside, the girl can't be a minute over seventeen, whoever she is--but I might be persuaded to deal for these just the same, Mr. Bissonette. The fever in my blood is not malaria but commerce. So! Shall we dicker?"

  They dickered. Ricky Bissonette ended up purchasing seventy-two pornographic photographs for thirty-six dollars ... and this little prank.

  He ran across the parsonage lawn bent over at the waist, settled into the shadow of the porch for a moment to make sure he was unwatched, then climbed the steps. He produced a plain white card from his back pocket, opened the mail-slot, and dropped the card through. He eased the brass slot closed with the tips of his fingers, not wanting it to clack shut. Then he vaulted the porch railing and ran fleetly back across the lawn. He had big plans for the two or three hours of darkness which still remained to this Monday morning; they involved seventy-two photographs and a large bottle of Jergens hand lotion.

  The card looked like a white
moth as it fluttered from the mail-slot to the faded rug-runner in the front hall of the parsonage. It landed message-side up: How you doing you Stupid Babtist Rat-Fuck.

  We are writting you to say you better Quit talking out aginst our Casino Nite. We are just going to have a little fun we are not hurting You. Anyway a bunch of us Loyal Catholics are tired of your Babtist Bullshit. We know all You Babtists are a bunch of Cunt Lickers anyway. Now to THIS You better Pay Atention, Reverund Steam-Boat Willy. If you dont keept your DickFace out of Our business, we are going to stink You and your Ass-Face Buddies up so bad you will Stink Forever!

  Leave us alone you Stupid Babtist Rat-Fuck or YOU WILL BE A SORRY SON OF A BITCH. "Just a Warning" from THE CONCERNED CATHOLIC MEN OF CASTLE ROCK

  Rev. Rose discovered the note when he came downstairs in his bathrobe to collect the morning paper. His reaction is perhaps better imagined than described.

  10

  Leland Gaunt stood at the window of the front room above Needful Things with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out across the town of Castle Rock.

  The four-room apartment behind him would have raised eyebrows in town, for there was nothing in it--nothing at all. Not a bed, not an appliance, not a single chair. The closets stood open and empty. A few dust-bunnies tumbled lazily across floors innocent of rugs in a slight draft that blew through the place at ankle level. The only furnishings were, quite literally, window-dressing: homey checked curtains. They were the only furnishings which mattered, because they were the only ones which could be seen from the street.

  The town was sleeping now. The shops were dark, the houses were dark, and the only movement on Main Street was the blinker at the intersection of Main and Watermill, flashing on and off in sleepy yellow beats. He looked over the town with a tender loving eye. It wasn't his town just yet, but it soon would be. He had a lien on it already. They didn't know that ... but they would. They would.