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  Larry looked up, his face pale and shaken. "This is a joke. Who put you up to it? John Kelly?"

  "I know no John Kelly. I don't joke."

  "These papers...quit-claim deed...land title search...my God, man, don't you know that piece of land is worth one and a half million dollars?"

  "You piker," Straker said coldly. "It is worth four million. Soon to be worth more, when the shopping center is built."

  "What do you want?" Larry asked. His voice was hoarse.

  "I have told you what I want. My partner and I plan to open a business in this town. We plan to live in the Marsten House."

  "What sort of business? Murder Incorporated?"

  Straker smiled coldly. "A perfectly ordinary furniture business, I am afraid. With a line of rather special antiques for collectors. My partner is something of an expert in that field."

  "Shit," Larry said crudely. "The Marsten House you could have for eight and a half grand, the shop for sixteen. Your partner must know that. And you both must know that this town can't support a fancy furniture and antique place."

  "My partner is extremely knowledgeable on any subject in which he becomes interested," Straker said. "He knows that your town is on a highway which serves tourists and summer residents. These are the people with whom we expect to do the bulk of our business. However, that is no accord to you. Do you find the papers in order?"

  Larry tapped his desk with the blue folder. "They seem to be. But I'm not going to be horse-traded, no matter what you say you want."

  "No, of course not." Straker's voice was edged with well-bred contempt. "You have a lawyer in Boston, I believe. One Francis Walsh."

  "How do you know that?" Larry barked.

  "It doesn't matter. Take the papers to him. He will confirm their validity. The land where this shopping center is to be built will be yours, on fulfillment of three conditions."

  "Ah," Larry said, and looked relieved. "Conditions." He leaned back and selected a William Penn from the ceramic cigar box on his desk. He scratched a match on shoe leather and puffed. "Now we're getting down to the bone. Fire away."

  "Number one. You will sell me the Marsten House and the business establishment for one dollar. Your client in the matter of the house is a land corporation in Bangor. The business establishment now belongs to a Portland bank. I am sure both parties will be agreeable if you make up the difference to the lowest acceptable prices. Minus your commission, of course."

  "Where do you get your information?"

  "That is not for you to know, Mr Crockett. Condition two. You will say nothing of our transaction here today. Nothing. If the question ever comes up, all you know is what I have told you--we are two partners beginning a business aimed at tourists and summer people. This is very important."

  "I don't blab."

  "Nonetheless, I want to impress on you the seriousness of the condition. A time may come, Mr Crockett, when you will want to tell someone of the wonderful deal you made on this day. If you do so, I will find out. I will ruin you. Do you understand?"

  "You sound like one of those cheap spy movies," Larry said. He sounded unruffled, but underneath he felt a nasty tremor of fear. The words I will ruin you had come out as flatly as How are you today. It gave the statement an unpleasant ring of truth. And how in hell did this joker know about Frank Walsh? Not even his wife knew about Frank Walsh.

  "Do you understand me, Mr Crockett?"

  "Yes," Larry said. "I'm used to playing them close to the vest."

  Straker offered his thin smile again. "Of course. That is why I am doing business with you."

  "The third condition?"

  "The house will need certain renovations."

  "That's one way of puttin' it," Larry said dryly.

  "My partner plans to carry this task out himself. But you will be his agent. From time to time there will be requests. From time to time I will require the services of whatever laborers you employ to bring certain things either to the house or to the shop. You will not speak of such services. Do you understand?"

  "Yeah, I understand. But you don't come from these parts, do you?"

  "Does that have bearing?" Straker raised his eyebrows.

  "Sure it does. This isn't Boston or New York. It's not going to be just a matter of me keepin' my lip buttoned. People are going to talk. Why, there's an old biddy over on Railroad Street, name of Mabel Werts, who spends all day with a pair of binoculars--"

  "I don't care about the townspeople. My partner doesn't care about the townspeople. The townspeople always talk. They are no different from the magpies on the telephone wires. Soon they will accept us."

  Larry shrugged. "It's your party."

  "As you say," Straker agreed. "You will pay for all services and keep all invoices and bills. You will be reimbursed. Do you agree?"

  Larry was, as he had told Straker, used to playing them close to the vest, and he had a reputation as one of the best poker players in Cumberland County. And although he had maintained his outward calm through all of this, he was on fire inside. The deal this crazyman was offering him was the kind of thing that came along once, if ever. Perhaps the guy's boss was one of those nutty billionaire recluses who--

  "Mr Crockett? I am waiting."

  "There are two conditions of my own," Larry said.

  "Ah?" Straker looked politely interested.

  He rattled the blue folder. "First, these papers have to check out."

  "Of course."

  "Second, if you're doing anything illegal up there, I don't want to know about it. By that I mean--"

  But he was interrupted. Straker threw his head back and gave vent to a singularly cold and emotionless laugh.

  "Did I say somethin' funny?" Larry asked, without a trace of a smile.

  "Oh...ah...of course not, Mr Crockett. You must pardon my outburst. I found your comment amusing for reasons of my own. What were you about to add?"

  "These renovations. I'm not going to get you anything that would leave my ass out to the wind. If you're fixing up to make moonshine or LSD or explosives for some hippie radical outfit, that's your own lookout."

  "Agreed," Straker said. The smile was gone from his face. "Have we a deal?"

  And with an odd feeling of reluctance, Larry had said, "If these papers check out, I guess we do at that. Although it seems like you did all the dealin' and I did all the money-makin'."

  "This is Monday," Straker said. "Shall I stop by Thursday afternoon?"

  "Better make it Friday."

  "So it is. Very well." He stood. "Good day, Mr Crockett."

  The papers had checked out. Larry's Boston lawyer said the land where the Portland shopping center was to be built had been purchased by an outfit called Continental Land and Realty, which was a dummy company with office space in the Chemical Bank Building in New York. There was nothing in Continental's offices but a few empty filing cabinets and a lot of dust.

  Straker had come back that Friday and Larry signed the necessary title papers. He did so with a strong taste of doubt in the back of his mouth. He had overthrown his own personal maxim for the first time: You don't shit where you eat. And although the inducement had been high, he realized as Straker put the ownership papers to the Marsten House and erstwhile Village Washtub into his briefcase that he had put himself at this man's beck and call. And the same went for his partner, the absent Mr Barlow.

  As last August had passed, and as summer had slipped into fall and then fall into winter, he had begun to feel an indefinable sense of relief. By this spring he had almost managed to forget the deal he had made to get the papers which now resided in his Portland safe-deposit box.

  Then things began to happen.

  That writer, Mears, had come in a week and a half ago, asking if the Marsten House was available for rental, and he had given Larry a peculiar look when he told him it was sold.

  Yesterday there had been a long tube in his post office box and a letter from Straker. A note, really. It had been brief: "Kindly have the
poster which you will be receiving mounted in the window of the shop--R.T. Straker." The poster itself was common enough, and more subdued than some. It only said: "Opening in one week. Barlow and Straker. Fine furnishings. Selected antiques. Browsers welcome." He had gotten Royal Snow to put it right up.

  And now there was a car up there at the Marsten House. He was still looking at it when someone said at his elbow: "Fallin' asleep, Larry?"

  He jumped and looked around at Parkins Gillespie, who was standing on the corner next to him and lighting a Pall Mall.

  "No," he said, and laughed nervously. "Just thinking."

  Parkins glanced up at the Marsten House, where the sun twinkled on chrome and metal in the driveway, then down at the old laundry with its new sign in the window. "And you're not the only one, I guess. Always good to get new folks in town. You've met 'em, ain't you?"

  "One of them. Last year."

  "Mr Barlow or Mr Straker?"

  "Straker."

  "Seem like a nice enough sort, did he?"

  "Hard to tell," Larry said, and found he wanted to lick his lips. He didn't. "We only talked business. He seemed okay."

  "Good. That's good. Come on. I'll walk up to the Excellent with you."

  When they crossed the street, Lawrence Crockett was thinking about deals with the devil.

  TWELVE

  1:00 PM

  Susan Norton stepped into Babs' Beauty Boutique, smiled at Babs Griffen (Hal and Jack's eldest sister), and said, "Thank goodness you could take me on such short notice."

  "No problem in the middle of the week," Babs said, turning on the fan. "My, ain't it close? It'll thunderstorm this afternoon."

  Susan looked at the sky, which was an unblemished blue. "Do you think so?"

  "Yeah. How do you want it, hon?"

  "Natural," Susan said, thinking of Ben Mears. "Like I hadn't even been near this place."

  "Hon," Babs said, closing in on her with a sigh, "that's what they all say."

  The sigh wafted the odor of Juicy Fruit gum, and Babs asked Susan if she had seen that some folks were opening up a new furniture store in the old Village Washtub. Expensive stuff by the look of it, but wouldn't it be nice if they had a nice little hurricane lamp to match the one she had in her apartment and getting away from home and living in town was the smartest move she'd ever made and hadn't it been a nice summer? It seemed a shame it ever had to end.

  THIRTEEN

  3:00 PM

  Bonnie Sawyer was lying on the big double bed in her house on the Deep Cut Road. It was a regular house, no shanty trailer, and it had a foundation and a cellar. Her husband, Reg, made good money as a car mechanic at Jim Smith's Pontiac in Buxton.

  She was naked except for a pair of filmy blue panties, and she looked impatiently over at the clock on the nightstand: 3:02--where was he?

  Almost as if the thought had summoned him, the bedroom door opened the tiniest bit, and Corey Bryant peered through.

  "Is it okay?" he whispered. Corey was only twenty-two, had been working for the phone company two years, and this affair with a married woman--especially a knockout like Bonnie Sawyer, who had been Miss Cumberland County of 1973--left him feeling weak and nervous and horny.

  Bonnie smiled at him with her lovely capped teeth. "If it wasn't, honey," she said, "you'd have a hole in you big enough to watch TV through."

  He came tiptoeing in, his utility lineman's belt jingling ridiculously around his waist.

  Bonnie giggled and opened her arms. "I really like you, Corey. You're cute."

  Corey's eyes happened on the dark shadow beneath the taut blue nylon, and he began to feel more horny than nervous. He forgot about tiptoeing and came to her, and as they joined, a cicada began to buzz somewhere in the woods.

  FOURTEEN

  4:00 PM

  Ben Mears pushed away from his desk, the afternoon's writing done. He had forgone his walk in the park so he could go to dinner at the Nortons' that night with a clear conscience, and had written for most of the day without a break.

  He stood up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. His torso was wet with sweat. He went to the cupboard at the head of the bed, pulled out a fresh towel, and went down to the bathroom to shower before everyone else got home from work and clogged the place.

  He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door, and then went to the window, where something had caught his eye. Nothing in town; it was drowsing away the late afternoon under a sky that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on fine late summer days.

  He could look across the two-story buildings on Jointner Avenue, could see their flat, asphalted roofs, and across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared behind the shoulder of that first wooded hill. His eyes traveled naturally up to the break in the woods where the Burns Road and the Brooks Road intersected in a T--and on up to where the Marsten House sat overlooking the town.

  From here it was a perfect miniature, diminished to the size of a child's dollhouse. And he liked it that way. From here the Marsten House was a size that could be coped with. You could hold up your hand and blot it out with your palm.

  There was a car in the driveway.

  He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of terror in his belly that he did not try to analyze. Two of the fallen shutters had been replaced, too, giving the house a secretive, blind look that it had not possessed before.

  His lips moved silently, as if forming words no one--even himself--could understand.

  FIFTEEN

  5:00 PM

  Matthew Burke left the high school carrying his briefcase in his left hand and crossed the empty parking lot to where his old Chevy Biscayne sat, still on last year's snow tires.

  He was sixty-three, two years from mandatory retirement, and still carrying a full load of English classes and extracurricular activities. Fall's activity was the school play, and he had just finished readings for a three-act farce called Charley's Problem. He had gotten the usual glut of utter impossibles, perhaps a dozen usable warm bodies who would at least memorize their lines (and then deliver them in a deathly, trembling monotone), and three kids who showed flair. He would cast them on Friday and begin blocking next week. They would pull together between then and October 30, which was the play date. It was Matt's theory that a high school play should be like a bowl of Campbell's Alphabet Soup: tasteless but not actively offensive. The relatives would come and love it. The theater critic from the Cumberland Ledger would come and go into polysyllabic ecstasies, as he was paid to do over any local play. The female lead (Ruthie Crockett this year, probably) would fall in love with some other cast member and quite possibly lose her virginity after the cast party. And then he would pick up the threads of the Debate Club.

  At sixty-three, Matt Burke still enjoyed teaching. He was a lousy disciplinarian, thus forfeiting any chance he might once have had to step up to administration (he was a little too dreamy-eyed to ever serve effectively as an assistant principal), but his lack of discipline had never held him back. He had read the sonnets of Shakespeare in cold, pipe-clanking classrooms full of flying airplanes and spitballs, had sat down upon tacks and thrown them away absently as he told the class to turn to page 467 in their grammars, had opened drawers to get composition paper only to discover crickets, frogs, and once a seven-foot black snake.

  He had ranged across the length and breadth of the English language like a solitary and oddly complacent Ancient Mariner: Steinbeck period one, Chaucer period two, the topic sentence period three, and the function of the gerund just before lunch. His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

  Children did not revere or love him; he was not a Mr Chips languishing away in a rustic corner of America and waiting for Ross Hunter to discover him, but many of his students
did come to respect him, and a few learned from him that dedication, however eccentric or humble, can be a noteworthy thing. He liked his work.

  Now he got into his car, pumped the accelerator too much and flooded it, waited, and started it again. He tuned the radio to a Portland rock 'n' roll station and jacked the volume almost to the speaker's distortion point. He thought rock 'n' roll was fine music. He backed out of his parking slot, stalled, and started the car up again.

  He had a small house out on the Taggart Stream Road, and had very few callers. He had never been married, had no family except for a brother in Texas who worked for an oil company and never wrote. He did not really miss the attachments. He was a solitary man, but solitude had in no way twisted him.

  He paused at the blinking light at the intersection of Jointner Avenue and Brock Street, then turned toward home. The shadows were long now, and the daylight had taken on a curiously beautiful warmth--flat and golden, like something from a French Impressionist painting. He glanced over to his left, saw the Marsten House, and glanced again.

  "The shutters," he said aloud, against the driving beat from the radio. "Those shutters are back up."

  He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that there was a car parked in the driveway. He had been teaching in 'salem's Lot since 1952, and he had never seen a car parked in that driveway.

  "Is someone living up there?" he asked no one in particular, and drove on.

  SIXTEEN

  6:00 PM

  Susan's father, Bill Norton, the Lot's first selectman, was surprised to find that he liked Ben Mears--liked him quite a lot. Bill was a big, tough man with black hair, built like a truck, and not fat even after fifty. He had left high school for the Navy in the eleventh grade with his father's permission, and he had clawed his way up from there, picking up his diploma at the age of twenty-four on a high school equivalency test taken almost as an afterthought. He was not a blind, bullish anti-intellectual as some plain workingmen become when they are denied the level of learning that they may have been capable of, either through fate or their own doing, but he had no patience with "art farts," as he termed some of the doe-eyed, long-haired boys Susan had brought home from school. He didn't mind their hair or their dress. What bothered him was that none of them seemed serious-minded. He didn't share his wife's liking for Floyd Tibbits, the boy that Susie had been going around with the most since she graduated, but he didn't actively dislike him, either. Floyd had a pretty good job at the executive level in the Falmouth Grant's, and Bill Norton considered him to be moderately serious-minded. And he was a hometown boy. But so was this Mears, in a manner of speaking.