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  More frightening than the way she looked was the way she was handling Natalie. She had the squalling, frightened baby slung casually on one hip, carrying her as she might have carried her books to high school ten or twelve years before.

  'Oh Jesus, she's gonna drop the kid!' Sue screamed, but although she was ten steps closer to the door than he was, she made no move - simply stood where she was with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes gobbling up her face.

  Ralph didn't feel tired anymore. He sprinted up the aisle, tore open the door, and ran outside. He was just in time to catch Helen by the shoulders as she banged a hip against the ice cabinet - mercifully not the hip with Natalie on it - and went veering off in a new direction.

  'Helen!' he yelled. 'Jesus, Helen, what happened?'

  'Hun?' she asked, her voice dully curious, totally unlike the voice of the lively young woman who sometimes accompanied him to the movies and moaned over Mel Gibson. Her good eye rolled toward him and he saw that same dull curiosity in it, a look that said she didn't know who she was, let alone where she was, or what had happened, or when. 'Hun? Ral? Wha?'

  The baby slipped. Ralph let go of Helen, grabbed for Natalie, and managed to snag one of her jumper straps. Nat screamed, waved her hands, and stared at him with huge dark-blue eyes. He got his other hand between Nat's legs an instant before the strap he was holding tore free. For a moment the howling baby balanced on his hand like a gymnast on a balance beam, and Ralph could feel the damp bulge of her diapers through the overall she was wearing. Then he slipped his other hand around her back and hoisted her up against his chest. His heart was pounding hard, and even with the baby safe in his arms he kept seeing her slip away, kept seeing her head with its cap of fine hair slamming against the butt-littered pavement with a sickening crack.

  'Hum? Ar? Ral?' Helen asked. She saw Natalie in Ralph's arms, and some of the dullness went out of her good eye. She raised her hands toward the child, and in Ralph's arms, Natalie mimicked the gesture with her own chubby hands. Then Helen staggered, struck the side of the building, and reeled backward a step. One foot tangled in the other (Ralph saw splatters of blood on her small white sneakers, and it was amazing how bright everything was all of a sudden; the color had come back into the world, at least temporarily), and she would have fallen if Sue hadn't picked that moment to finally venture out. Instead of going down, Helen landed against the opening door and just leaned there, like a drunk against a lamppost.

  'Ral?' The expression in her eyes was a little sharper now, and Ralph saw it wasn't so much curiosity as incredulity. She drew in a deep breath and made an effort to force intelligible words past her swelled lips. 'Gih. Gih me my bay-ee. Bay-be. Gih me . . . Nah-lie.'

  'Not just yet, Helen,' Ralph said. 'You're not too steady on your feet right now.'

  Sue was still on the other side of the door, holding it so Helen wouldn't fall. The girl's cheeks and forehead were ashy pale, her eyes filled with tears.

  'Get out here,' Ralph told her. 'Hold her up.'

  'I can't!' she blubbered. 'She's all bluh-bluh-bloody!'

  'Oh for God's sake, quit it! It's Helen! Helen Deepneau from up the street!'

  And although Sue must have known that, actually hearing the name seemed to turn the trick. She slipped around the open door, and when Helen staggered backward again, Sue curled an arm around her shoulders and braced her firmly. That expression of incredulous surprise remained on Helen's face. Ralph found it harder and harder to look at. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

  'Ralph? What happened? Was it an accident?'

  He turned his head and saw Bill McGovern standing at the edge of the parking lot. He was wearing one of his natty blue shirts with the iron's creases still in the sleeves and holding one of his long-fingered, oddly delicate hands up to shade his eyes. He looked strange, somehow naked that way, but Ralph had no time to think about why; too much was happening.

  'It was no accident,' he said. 'She's been beaten up. Here, take the kid.'

  He held Natalie out to McGovern, who at first shrank back and then took the baby. Natalie immediately began to shriek again. McGovern, looking like someone who has just been handed an overfilled airsick bag, held her out at arm's length with her feet dangling. Behind him a small crowd was beginning to gather, many of them teenage kids in baseball uniforms on their way home from an afternoon game at the field around the corner. They were staring at Helen's puffed and bloody face with an unpleasant avidity, and Ralph found himself thinking of the Bible story about the time Noah had gotten drunk - the good sons who had looked away from the naked old man lying in his tent, the bad one who had looked . . .

  Gently, he replaced Sue's arm with his own. Helen's good eye rolled back to him. She said his name more clearly this time, more positively, and the gratitude Ralph heard in her blurry voice made him feel like crying.

  'Sue - take the baby. Bill doesn't have a clue.'

  She did, folding Nat gently and expertly into her arms. McGovern gave her a grateful smile, and Ralph suddenly realized what was wrong with the way he looked. McGovern wasn't wearing the Panama hat which seemed as much a part of him (in the summertime, at least) as the wen on the bridge of his nose.

  'Hey, mister, what happened?' one of the baseball kids asked.

  'Nothing that's any of your business,' Ralph said.

  'Looks like she went a few rounds with Riddick Bowe.'

  'Nah, Tyson,' one of the other baseball kids said, and incredibly, there was laughter.

  'Get out of here!' Ralph shouted at them, suddenly furious. 'Go peddle your papers! Mind your business!'

  They shuffled back a few steps, but no one left. It was blood they were looking at, and not on a movie screen.

  'Helen, can you walk?'

  'Yeff,' she said. 'Fink . . . Think so.'

  He led her carefully around the open door and into the Red Apple. She moved slowly, shuffling from foot to foot like an old woman. The smell of sweat and spent adrenaline was baking out of her pores in a sour reek, and Ralph felt his stomach turn over again. It wasn't the smell, not really; it was the effort to reconcile this Helen with the pert and pleasantly sexy woman he had spoken to yesterday while she worked in her flower-beds.

  Ralph suddenly remembered something else about yesterday. Helen had been wearing blue shorts, cut quite high, and he had noticed a couple of bruises on her legs - a large yellow blotch far up on the left thigh, a fresher, darker smudge on the right calf.

  He walked Helen toward the little office area behind the cash register. He glanced up into the convex anti-theft mirror mounted in the corner and saw McGovern holding the door for Sue.

  'Lock the door,' he said over his shoulder.

  'Gee, Ralph, I'm not supposed to--'

  'Just for a couple of minutes,' Ralph said. 'Please.'

  'Well . . . okay. I guess.'

  Ralph heard the snick of the bolt being turned as he eased Helen into the hard plastic contour chair behind the littery desk. He picked up the telephone and punched the button marked 911. Before the phone could ring on the other end, a blood-streaked hand reached out and pushed down the gray disconnect button.

  'Dough . . . Ral.' She swallowed with an obvious effort, and tried again. 'Don't.'

  'Yes,' Ralph said. 'I'm going to.'

  Now it was fear he saw in her one good eye, and nothing dull about it.

  'No,' she said. 'Please, Ralph. Don't.' She looked past him and held out her hands again. The humble, pleading look on her beaten face made Ralph wince with dismay.

  'Ralph?' Sue asked. 'She wants the baby.'

  'I know. Go ahead.'

  Sue handed Natalie to Helen, and Ralph watched as the baby - a little over a year old now, he was pretty sure - put her arms around her mother's neck and her face against her mother's shoulder. Helen kissed the top of Nat's head. It clearly hurt her to do this, but she did it again. And then again. Looking down at her, Ralph could see blood grimed into the faint creases on the nape of Helen's neck like
dirt. As he looked at this, he felt the anger begin to pulse again.

  'It was Ed, wasn't it?' he asked. Of course it was - you didn't hit the cutoff button on the phone when someone tried to call 911 if you had been beaten up by a total stranger - but he had to ask.

  'Yes,' she said. Her voice was no more than a whisper, the answer a secret imparted into the fine cloud of her baby daughter's hair. 'Yes, it was Ed. But you can't call the police.' She looked up now, the good eye full of fear and misery. 'Please don't call the police, Ralph. I can't bear to think of Natalie's dad in jail for . . . for . . .'

  Helen burst into tears. Natalie goggled at her mother for a moment in comic surprise, and then joined her.

  7

  'Ralph?' McGovern asked hesitantly. 'Do you want me to get her some Tylenol or something?'

  'Better not,' he said. 'We don't know what's wrong with her, how bad she might be hurt.' His eyes shifted to the show window, not wanting to see what was out there, hoping not to, and seeing it anyway: avid faces lined up all the way down to the place where the beer cooler cut off the view. Some of them were cupping their hands to the sides of their faces to cut the glare.

  'What should we do, you guys?' Sue asked. She was looking at the gawkers and picking nervously at the hem of the Red Apple duster employees had to wear. 'If the company finds out I locked the door during business hours, I'm apt to lose my job.'

  Helen tugged at his hand. 'Please, Ralph,'she repeated, only it came out Peese, Raff through her swollen lips. 'Don't call anybody.'

  Ralph looked at her uncertainly. He had seen a lot of women wearing a lot of bruises over the course of his life, and a couple (although not many, in all honesty) who had been beaten much more severely than Helen. It hadn't always seemed this grim, though. His mind and morals had been formed at a time when people believed that what went on between a husband and wife behind the closed doors of their marriage was their business, and that included the man who hit with his fists and the woman who cut with her tongue. You couldn't make people behave, and meddling into their affairs - even with the best of intentions - all too often turned friends into enemies.

  But then he thought of the way she had been carrying Natalie as she staggered across the parking lot: held casually on one hip like a textbook. If she had dropped the baby in the lot, or crossing Harris Avenue, she probably wouldn't have known it; Ralph guessed that it was nothing but instinct that had caused Helen to take the baby in the first place. She hadn't wanted to leave Nat in the care of the man who had beaten her so badly she could only see out of one eye and talk in mushy, rounded syllables.

  He thought of something else, as well, something that had to do with the days following Carolyn's death earlier in the year. He had been surprised at the depth of his grief - it had been an expected death, after all; he had believed he had taken care of most of his grieving while Carolyn was still alive - and it had rendered him awkward and ineffective about the final arrangements which needed to be made. He had managed the call to the Brookings-Smith funeral home, but it was Helen who had gotten the obit form from the Derry News and helped him to fill it out, Helen who had gone with him to pick out a coffin (McGovern, who hated death and the trappings which surrounded it, had made himself scarce), and Helen who had helped him choose a floral centerpiece - the one which said Beloved Wife. And it had been Helen, of course, who had orchestrated the little party afterward, providing sandwiches from Frank's Catering and soft drinks and beer from the Red Apple.

  These were things Helen had done for him when he could not do them for himself. Did he not have an obligation to repay her kindness, even if Helen might not see it as kindness right now?

  'Bill?' he asked. 'What do you think?'

  McGovern looked from Ralph to Helen, sitting in the red plastic chair with her battered face lowered, and then back to Ralph again. He produced a handkerchief and wiped his lips nervously. 'I don't know. I like Helen a lot, and I want to do the right thing - you know I do - but something like this . . . who knows what the right thing is?'

  Ralph suddenly remembered what Carolyn used to say whenever he started moaning and bitching about some chore he didn't want to do, some errand he didn't want to run, or some duty call he didn't want to make: It's a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.

  He reached for the phone again, and this time when Helen reached for his wrist, he pushed it away.

  'You have reached the Derry Police Department,' a recorded voice told him. 'Push one for emergency services. Push two for police services. Push three for information.'

  Ralph, who suddenly understood he needed all three, hesitated for a second and then pushed two. The telephone buzzed and a woman's voice said, 'This is Police 911, how may I help you?'

  He took a deep breath and said, 'This is Ralph Roberts. I'm at the Red Apple Store on Harris Avenue, with my neighbor from up the street. Her name is Helen Deepneau. She's been beaten up pretty badly.' He put his hand gently on the side of Helen's face and she pressed her forehead against his side. He could feel the heat of her skin through his shirt. 'Please come as fast as you can.'

  He hung up the telephone, then squatted down next to Helen. Natalie saw him, crowed with delight, and reached out to give his nose a friendly honk. Ralph smiled, kissed her tiny palm, then looked into Helen's face.

  'I'm sorry, Helen,' he said, 'but I had to. I couldn't not do it. Do you understand that? I couldn't not do it.'

  'I don't understand anyfing!' she said. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but when she reached up to swipe at it, she winced back from the touch of her own fingers.

  'Helen, why did he do it? Why would Ed beat you up like this?' He found himself remembering the other bruises - a pattern of them, perhaps. If there had been a pattern, he had missed it until now. Because of Carolyn's death. And because of the insomnia which had come afterward. In any case, he did not believe this was the first time Ed had put his hands on his wife. Today might have been a drastic escalation, but it hadn't been the first time. He could grasp that idea and admit its logic, but he discovered he still couldn't see Ed doing it. He could see Ed's quick grin, his lively eyes, the way his hands moved restlessly when he talked . . . but he couldn't see Ed using those hands to beat the crap out of his wife, no matter how hard he tried.

  Then a memory resurfaced, a memory of Ed walking stiff-legged toward the man who had been driving the blue pickup - it had been a Ford Ranger, hadn't it? - and then flicking the flat of his hand across the heavyset man's jowls. Remembering that was like opening the door of Fibber McGee's closet in that old radio show - only what came falling out wasn't an avalanche of old stored junk but a series of vivid images from that day last July. The thunderheads building over the airport. Ed's arm popping out of the Datsun's window and waving up and down, as if he could make the gate slide open faster that way. The scarf with the Chinese symbols on it.

  Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today? Ralph thought, only it was Ed's voice he heard, and he pretty well knew what Helen was going to say before she even opened her mouth.

  'So stupid,' she said dully. 'He hit me because I signed a petition - that's all it was. They're circulating all over town. Someone pushed it into my face when I was going into the supermarket day before yesterday. He said something about a benefit for WomanCare, and that seemed all right. Besides, the baby was fussing, so I just . . .'

  'You just signed it,' Ralph finished softly.

  She nodded and began to cry again.

  'What petition?' McGovern asked.

  'To bring Susan Day to Derry,' Ralph told him. 'She's a feminist--'

  'I know who Susan Day is,' McGovern said irritably.

  'Anyway, a bunch of people are trying to get her here to speak. On behalf of WomanCare.'

  'When Ed came home today he was in a great mood,' Helen said through her tears. 'He almost always is on Thursdays, because it's his half day. He was talking about how he was going to spend the afternoon pretending to read a book
and actually just watching the sprinkler go around . . . you know how he is . . .'

  'Yes,' Ralph said, remembering how Ed had plunged his arm into one of the heavyset man's barrels, and the crafty grin (I know a trick worth two of that) on his face. 'Yes, I know how he is.'

  'I sent him out to get some baby food . . .' Her voice was rising, becoming fretful and frightened. 'I didn't know he'd be upset . . . I'd all but forgotten about signing the damned thing, to tell the truth . . . and I still don't know exactly why he was so upset . . . but . . . but when he came back . . .' She hugged Natalie to her, trembling.

  'Shhh, Helen, take it easy, everything's okay.'

  'No, it's not!' She looked up at him, tears streaming from one eye and seeping out from beneath the swelled lid of the other. 'It's nuh-nuh-not! Why didn't he stop this time? And what's going to happen to me and the baby? Where will we go? I don't have any money except for what's in the joint checking account . . . I don't have a job . . . oh Ralph, why did you call the police? You shouldn't have done that!' And she hit his forearm with a strengthless little fist.

  'You're going to get through this just fine,' he said. 'You've got a lot of friends in the neighborhood.'

  But he barely heard what he was saying and hadn't felt her small punch at all. The anger was thudding away in his chest and at his temples like a second heartbeat.

  Not Why didn't he stop; that wasn't what she had said. What she had said was Why didn't he stop this time?

  This time.

  'Helen, where's Ed now?'

  'Home, I guess,' she said dully.

  Ralph patted her on the shoulder, then turned and started for the door.

  'Ralph?' Bill McGovern asked. He sounded alarmed. 'Where you going?'

  'Lock the door after me,' Ralph told Sue.

  'Jeez, I don't know if I can do that.' Sue looked doubtfully at the line of gawkers peering in through the dirty window. There were more of them now.

  'You can,' he said, then cocked his head, catching the first faint wail of an approaching siren. 'Hear that?'