Текст книги "Salem's Lot"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Matt shrugged. “Medical examination, I suppose.”

“Exactly. And the same method to confirm or rule out foul play. If somebody poisoned him or shot him or got him to eat a piece of fudge with a bundle of wires in it—”

“Murder has gone undetected before.”

“Sure it has. But I’ll bet on the medical examiner.”

“And if the medical examiner’s verdict is ‘unknown cause’?”

“Then,” Ben said deliberately, “we can visit the grave after the funeral and see if he rises. If he does—which I can’t conceive of—we’ll know. If he doesn’t, we’re faced with the thing that bothers me.”

“The fact of my insanity,” Matt said slowly. “Ben, I swear on my mother’s name that those marks were there, that I heard the window go up, that—”

“I believe you,” Ben said quietly.

Matt stopped. His expression was that of a man who has braced himself for a crash that never came.

“You do?” he said uncertainly.

“To put it another way, I refuse to believe that you’re crazy or had a hallucination. I had an experience once…an experience that had to do with that damned house on the hill…that makes me extremely sympathetic to people whose stories seem utterly insane in light of rational knowledge. I’ll tell you about that, one day.”

“Why not now?”

“There’s no time. You have those calls to make. And I have one more question. Think about it carefully. Do you have any enemies?”

“No one who qualifies for something like this.”

“An ex-student, maybe? One with a grudge?”

Matt, who knew exactly to what extent he influenced the lives of his students, laughed politely.

“Okay,” Ben said. “I’ll take your word for it.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. First that dog shows up on the cemetery gates. Then Ralphie Glick disappears, his brother dies, and Mike Ryerson. Maybe they all tie in somehow. But this…I can’t believe it.”

“I better call Cody’s home,” Matt said, getting up. “Parkins will be at home.”

“Call in sick at school, too.”

“Right.” Matt laughed without force. “It will be my first sick day in three years. A real occasion.”

He went into the living room and began to make his calls, waiting at the end of each number sequence for the bell to prod sleepers awake. Cody’s wife apparently referred him to Cumberland Receiving, for he dialed another number, asked for Cody, and went into his story after a short wait.

He hung up and called into the kitchen: “Jimmy will be here in an hour.”

“Good,” Ben said. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Don’t touch anything.”

“No.”

By the time he reached the second-floor landing he could hear Matt on the phone to Parkins Gillespie, answering questions. The words melted into a background murmur as he went down the hall.

That feeling of half-remembered, half-imagined terror washed over him again as he contemplated the door to the guest room. In his mind’s eye he could see himself stepping forward, pushing it open. The room looks larger, seen from a child’s eye view. The body lies as they left it, left arm dangling to the floor, left cheek pressed against the pillowcase which still shows the fold lines from the linen closet. The eyes suddenly open, and they are filled with blank, animalistic triumph. The door slams shut. The left arm comes up, the hand hooked into a claw, and the lips twist into a vulpine smile that shows incisors grown wondrously long and sharp—

He stepped forward and pushed the door with tented fingers. The lower hinges squeaked slightly.

The body lay as they had left it, left arm fallen, left cheek pressed against the pillowcase—

“Parkins is coming,” Matt said from the hallway behind him, and Ben nearly screamed.

FIVE

Ben thought how apt his phrase had been: Let the machinery take over. It was very much like a machine—one of those elaborate German contraptions constructed of clockwork and cogs; figures moving in an elaborate dance.

Parkins Gillespie arrived first, wearing a green tie set off by a VFW tie tack. There were still sleepy seeds in his eyes. He told them he had notified the county M.E.

“He won’t be out himself, the son of a bitch,” Parkins said, tucking a Pall Mall into the corner of his seamed mouth, “but he’ll send out a deputy and a fella to take pitchers. You touch the cawpse?”

“His arm fell out of bed,” Ben said. “I tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t stay.”

Parkins looked him up and down and said nothing. Ben thought of the grisly sound the knuckles had made on the hardwood floor of Matt’s guest room and felt a queasy laughter in his belly. He swallowed to keep it there.

Matt led the way upstairs, and Parkins walked around the body several times. “Say, you sure he’s dead?” he asked finally. “You tried to wake him up?”

James Cody, M.D., arrived next, fresh from a delivery in Cumberland. After the amenities had passed among them (“Good t’seeya,” Parkins Gillespie said, and lit a fresh cigarette), Matt led them all upstairs again. Now, if we all only played instruments, Ben thought, we could give the guy a real send-off. He felt the laughter trying to come up his throat again.

Cody turned back the sheet and frowned down at the body for a moment. With a calmness that astounded Ben, Matt Burke said, “It reminded me of what you said about the Glick boy, Jimmy.”

“That was a privileged communication, Mr Burke,” Jimmy Cody said mildly. “If Danny Glick’s folks found out you’d said that, they could sue me.”

“Would they win?”

“No, probably not,” Jimmy said, and sighed.

“What’s this about the Glick boy?” Parkins asked, frowning.

“Nothing,” Jimmy said. “No connection.” He used his stethoscope, muttered, rolled back an eyelid, and shone a light into the glassy orb beneath.

Ben saw the pupil contract and said quite audibly, “Christ!”

“Interesting reflex, isn’t it?” Jimmy said. He let the eyelid go and it rolled shut with grotesque slowness, as if the corpse had winked at them. “David Prine at Johns Hopkins reports pupillary contraction in some cadavers up to nine hours.”

“Now he’s a scholar,” Matt said gruffly. “Used to pull C’s in Expository Writing.”

“You just didn’t like to read about dissections, you old grump,” Jimmy said absently, and produced a small hammer. Nice, Ben thought. He retains his bedside manner even when the patient is, as Parkins would say, a cawpse. The dark laughter welled inside him again.

“He dead?” Parkins asked, and tapped the ash of his cigarette into an empty flower vase. Matt winced.

“Oh, he’s dead,” Jimmy told him. He got up, turned the sheet back to Ryerson’s feet, and tapped the right knee. The toes were moveless. Ben noticed that Mike Ryerson had yellow rings of callus on the bottoms of his feet, at the ball of the heel and at the instep. It made him think of that Wallace Stevens poem about the dead woman. “Let it be the finale of seem,” he misquoted. “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

Matt looked at him sharply, and for a moment his control seemed to waver.

“What’s that?” Parkins asked.

“A poem,” Matt said. “It’s from a poem about death.”

“Sounds more like the Good Humor man to me,” Parkins said, and tapped his ash into the vase again.

SIX

“Have we been introduced?” Jimmy asked, looking up at Ben.

“You were, but only in passing,” Matt said. “Jimmy Cody, local quack, meet Ben Mears, local hack. And vice versa.”

“He’s always been clever that way,” Jimmy said. “That’s how he made all his money.”

They shook hands over the body.

“Help me turn him over, Mr Mears.”

A little squeamishly, Ben helped him turn the body on its belly. The flesh was cool, not yet cold, still pliant. Jimmy stared closely at the back, then pulled the jockey shorts down from the buttocks.

“What’s that for?” Parkins asked.

“I’m trying to place the time of death by skin lividity,” Jimmy said. “Blood tends to seek its lowest level when pumping action ceases, like any other fluid.”

“Yeah, sort of like that Drāno commercial. That’s the examiner’s job, ain’t it?”

“He’ll send out Norbert, you know that,” Jimmy said. “And Brent Norbert was never averse to a little help from his friends.”

“Norbert couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight,” Parkins said, and flipped his cigarette butt out the open window. “You lost your screen offa this window, Matt. I seen it down on the lawn when I drove in.”

“That so?” Matt asked, his voice carefully controlled.

“Yeah.”

Cody had taken a thermometer from his bag and now he slid it into Ryerson’s anus and laid his watch on the crisp sheet, where it glittered in the strong sunlight. It was quarter of seven.

“I’m going downstairs,” Matt said in a slightly strangled voice.

“You might as well all go,” Jimmy said. “I’ll be a little while longer. Would you put on coffee, Mr Burke?”

“Sure.”

They all went out and Ben closed the door on the scene. His last glance back would remain with him: the bright, sun-washed room, the clean sheet turned back, the gold wristwatch heliographing bright arrows of light onto the wallpaper, and Cody himself, with his swatch of flaming red hair, sitting beside the body like a steel engraving.

Matt was making coffee when Brenton Norbert, the assistant medical examiner, arrived in an elderly gray Dodge. He came in with another man who was carrying a large camera.

“Where is it?” Norbert asked.

Gillespie gestured with his thumb toward the stairs. “Jim Cody’s up there.”

“Good deal,” Norbert said. “The guy’s probably jitterbugging by now.” He and the photographer went upstairs.

Parkins Gillespie poured cream into his coffee until it slopped into his saucer, tested it with his thumb, wiped his thumb on his pants, lit another Pall Mall, and said, “How did you get into this, Mr Mears?”

And so Ben and Matt started their little song and dance and none of what they said was precisely a lie, but enough was left unsaid to link them together in a tenuous bond of conspiracy, and enough to make Ben wonder uneasily if he wasn’t in the process of abetting either a harmless bit of kookery or something more serious, something dark. He thought of Matt saying that he had called Ben because he was the only person in ’salem’s Lot who might listen to such a story. Whatever Matt Burke’s mental failings might be, Ben thought, inability to read character was not one of them. And that also made him nervous.

SEVEN

By nine-thirty it was over.

Carl Foreman’s funeral wagon had come and taken Mike Ryerson’s body away, and the fact of his passing left the house with him and belonged to the town. Jimmy Cody had gone back to his office; Norbert and the photographer had gone to Portland to talk with the county M.E.

Parkins Gillespie stood on the stoop for a moment and watched the hearse trundle slowly up the road, a cigarette dangling between his lips. “All the times Mike drove that, I bet he never guessed how soon he’d be ridin’ in the back.” He turned to Ben. “You ain’t leavin’ the Lot just yet, are you? Like you to testify for the coroner’s jury, if that’s okay by you.”

“No, I’m not leaving.”

The constable’s faded blue eyes measured him. “I checked you through with the feds and the Maine State Police R&I in Augusta,” he said. “You’ve got a clean rep.”

“That’s good to know,” Ben said evenly.

“I hear it around that you’re sparkin’ Bill Norton’s girl.”

“Guilty,” Ben said.

“She’s a fine lass,” Parkins said without smiling. The hearse was out of sight now; even the hum of its engine had dwindled to a drone that faded altogether. “Guess she don’t see much of Floyd Tibbits these days.”

“Haven’t you some paperwork to do, Park?” Matt prodded gently.

He sighed and cast the butt of his cigarette away. “Sure do. Duplicate, triplicate, don’t-punch-spindle-or-mutilate. This job’s been more trouble than a she-bitch with crabs the last couple of weeks. Maybe that old Marsten House has got a curse on it.”

Ben and Matt kept poker faces.

“Well, s’long.” He hitched his pants and walked down to his car. He opened the driver’s side door and then turned back to them. “You two ain’t holdin’ nothin’ back on me, are you?”

“Parkins,” Matt said, “there’s nothing to hold back. He’s dead.”

He looked at them a moment longer, the faded eyes sharp and glittering under his hooked brows, and then he sighed. “I suppose,” he said. “But it’s awful goddamn funny. The dog, the Glick boy, then t’other Glick boy, now Mike. That’s a year’s run for a pissant little burg like this one. My old grammy used to say things ran in threes, not fours.”

He got in, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway. A moment later he was gone over the hill, trailing one farewell honk.

Matt let out a gusty sigh. “That’s over.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “I’m beat. Are you?”

“I am, but I feel…weird. You know that word, the way the kids use it?”

“Yes.”

“They’ve got another one: spaced out. Like coming down from an acid trip or speed, when even being normal is crazy.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “God, you must think I’m a lunatic. It all sounds like a madman’s raving in the daylight, doesn’t it?”

“Yes and no,” Ben said. He put a diffident hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Gillespie is right, you know. There is something going on. And I’m thinking more and more that it has to do with the Marsten House. Other than myself, the people up there are the only new people in town. And I know I haven’t done anything. Is our trip up there tonight still on? The rustic welcome wagon?”

“If you like.”

“I do. You go in and get some sleep. I’ll get in touch with Susan and we’ll drop by this evening.”

“All right.” He paused. “There’s one other thing. It’s been bothering me ever since you mentioned autopsies.”

“What?”

“The laugh I heard—or thought I heard—was a child’s laugh. Horrible and soulless, but still a child’s laugh. Connected to Mike’s story, does that make you think of Danny Glick?”

“Yes, of course it does.”

“Do you know what the embalming procedure is?”

“Not specifically. The blood is drained from the cadaver and replaced with some fluid. They used to use formaldehyde, but I’m sure they’ve got more sophisticated methods now. And the corpse is eviscerated.”

“I wonder if all that was done to Danny?” Matt said, looking at him.

“Do you know Carl Foreman well enough to ask him in confidence?”

“Yes, I think I could find a way to do that.”

“Do it, by all means.”

“I will.”

They looked at each other a moment longer, and the glance that passed between them was friendly but indefinable; on Matt’s part the uneasy defiance of the rational man who has been forced to speak irrationalities, on Ben’s a kind of ill-defined fright of forces he could not understand enough to define.

EIGHT

Eva was ironing and watching Dialing for Dollarswhen he came in. The jackpot was currently up to forty-five dollars, and the emcee was picking telephone numbers out of a large glass drum.

“I heard,” she said as he opened the refrigerator and got a Coke. “Awful. Poor Mike.”

“It’s too bad.” He reached into his breast pocket and fished out the crucifix on its fine-link chain.

“Do they know what—”

“Not yet,” Ben said. “I’m very tired, Mrs Miller. I think I’ll sleep for a while.”

“Of course you should. That upstairs room is hot at midday, even this late in the year. Take the one in the downstairs hall if you like. The sheets are fresh.”

“No, that’s all right. I know all the squeaks in the one upstairs.”

“Yes, a person does get used to their own,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why in the world did Mr Burke want Ralph’s crucifix?”

Ben paused on his way to the stairs, momentarily at a loss. “I think he must have thought Mike Ryerson was a Catholic.”

Eva slipped a new shirt on the end of her ironing board. “He should have known better than that. After all, he had Mike in school. All his people were Lutherans.”

Ben had no answer for that. He went upstairs, pulled his clothes off, and got into bed. Sleep came rapidly and heavily. He did not dream.

NINE

When he woke up, it was quarter past four. His body was beaded with sweat, and he had kicked the upper sheet away. Still, he felt clearheaded again. The events of that early morning seemed to be far away and dim, and Matt Burke’s fancies had lost their urgency. His job for tonight was only to humor him out of them if he could.

TEN

He decided that he would call Susan from Spencer’s and have her meet him there. They could go to the park and he would tell her the whole thing from beginning to end. He could get her opinion on their way out to see Matt, and at Matt’s house she could listen to his version and complete her judgment. Then, on to the Marsten House. The thought caused a ripple of fear in his midsection.

He was so involved in his own thoughts that he never noticed that someone was sitting in his car until the door opened and the tall form accordioned out. For a moment his mind was too stunned to command his body; it was busy boggling at what it first took to be an animated scarecrow. The slanting sun picked the figure out in detail that was sharp and cruel: the old fedora hat pulled low around the ears; the wraparound sunglasses; the ragged overcoat with the collar turned up; the heavy industrial green rubber gloves on the hands.

“Who—” was all Ben had time to get out.

The figure moved closer. The fists bunched. There was an old yellow smell that Ben recognized as that of mothballs. He could hear breath slobbering in and out.

“You’re the son of a bitch that stole my girl,” Floyd Tibbits said in a grating, toneless voice. “I’m going to kill you.”

And while Ben was still trying to clear all this through his central switchboard, Floyd Tibbits waded in.

Chapter Nine

Susan (

II

)

Susan arrived home from Portland a little after three in the afternoon, and came into the house carrying three crackling brown department-store bags—she had sold two paintings for a sum totaling just over eighty dollars and had gone on a small spree. Two new skirts and a cardigan top.

“Suze?” Her mother called. “Is that you?”

“I’m home. I got—”

“Come in here, Susan. I want to talk to you.”

She recognized the tone instantly, although she had not heard it to that precise degree since her high school days, when the arguments over hem lines and boyfriends had gone on day after bitter day.

She put down her bags and went into the living room. Her mother had grown colder and colder on the subject of Ben Mears, and Susan supposed this was to be her Final Word.

Her mother was sitting in the rocker by the bay window, knitting. The TV was off. The two in conjunction were an ominous sign.

“I suppose you haven’t heard the latest,” Mrs Norton said. Her needles clicked rapidly, meshing the dark green yarn she was working with into neat rows. Someone’s winter scarf. “You left too early this morning.”

“Latest?”

“Mike Ryerson died at Matthew Burke’s house last night, and who should be in attendance at the deathbed but your writer friend, Mr Ben Mears!”

“Mike…Ben…what?”

Mrs Norton smiled grimly. “Mabel called around ten this morning and told me. Mr Burke sayshe met Mike down at Delbert Markey’s tavern last night—although what a teacher is doing barhopping I don’t know—and brought him home with him because Mike didn’t look well. He died in the night. And no one seems to know just what Mr Mears was doing there!”

“They know each other,” Susan said absently. “In fact, Ben says they hit it off really well…what happened to Mike, Mom?”

But Mrs Norton was not to be sidetracked so quickly. “Nonetheless, there’s some that think we’ve had a little too much excitement in ’salem’s Lot since Mr Ben Mears showed his face. A little too much altogether.”

“That’s foolishness!” Susan said, exasperated. “Now, what did Mike—”

“They haven’t decided that yet,” Mrs Norton said. She twirled her ball of yarn and let out slack. “There’s some that think he may have caught a disease from the little Glick boy.”

“If so, why hasn’t anyone else caught it? Like his folks?”

“Some young people think they know everything,” Mrs Norton remarked to the air. Her needles flashed up and down.

Susan got up. “I think I’ll go downstreet and see if—”

“Sit back down a minute,” Mrs Norton said. “I have a few more things to say to you.”

Susan sat down again, her face neutral.

“Sometimes young people don’t know all there is to know,” Ann Norton said. A spurious tone of comfort had come into her voice that Susan distrusted immediately.

“Like what, Mom?”

“Well, it seems that Mr Ben Mears had an accident a few years ago. Just after his second book was published. A motorcycle accident. He was drunk. His wife was killed.”

Susan stood up. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I’m telling you for your own good,” Mrs Norton said calmly.

“Who told you?” Susan asked. She felt none of the old hot and impotent anger, or the urge to run upstairs away from that calm, knowing voice and weep. She only felt cold and distant, as if drifting in space. “It was Mabel Werts, wasn’t it?”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s true.”

“Sure it is. And we won in Vietnam and Jesus Christ drives through the center of town in a go-cart every day at high noon.”

“Mabel thought he looked familiar,” Ann Norton said, “and so she went through the back issues of her newspapers box by box—”

“You mean the scandal sheets? The ones that specialize in astrology and pictures of car wrecks and starlets’ tits? Oh, what an informed source.” She laughed harshly.

“No need to be obscene. The story was right there in black and white. The woman—his wife if she really was—was riding on the backseat and he skidded on the pavement and they went smack into the side of a moving van. They gave him a breathalyzer test on the spot, the article said. Right…on…the spot.” She emphasized intensifier, preposition, and object by tapping a knitting needle against the arm of her rocker.

“Then why isn’t he in prison?”

“These famous fellows always know people,” she said with calm certainty. “There are ways to get out of everything, if you’re rich enough. Just look at what those Kennedy boys have gotten away with.”

“Was he tried in court?”

“I told you, they gave him a—”

“You said that, Mother. But was he drunk?”

“I told you he was drunk!” Spots of color had begun to creep into her cheeks. “They don’t give you a breathalyzer test if you’re sober! His wife died! It was just like that Chappaquiddick business! Just like it!”

“I’m going to move into town,” Susan said slowly. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I should have done it a long time ago, Mom. For both of us. I was talking to Babs Griffen, and she says there’s a nice little four-room place on Sister’s Lane—”

“Oh, she’s offended!” Mrs Norton remarked to the air. “Someone just spoiled her pretty picture of Mr Ben Big-shot Mears and she’s just so mad she could spit.” This line had been particularly effective some years back.

“Mom, what’s happened to you?” Susan asked a little despairingly. “You never used to…to get this low—”

Ann Norton’s head jerked up. Her knitting slid off her lap as she stood up, clapped her hands to Susan’s shoulders, and gave her a smart shake.

“You listen to me! I won’t have you running around like a common trollop with some sissy boy who’s got your head all filled up with moonlight. Do you hear me?”

Susan slapped her across the face.

Ann Norton’s eyes blinked and then opened wide in stunned surprise. They looked at each other for a moment in silence, shocked. A tiny sound came and died in Susan’s throat.

“I’m going upstairs,” she said. “I’ll be out by Tuesday at the latest.”

“Floyd was here,” Mrs Norton said. Her face was still rigid from the slap. Her daughter’s finger marks stood out in red, like exclamation points.

“I’m through with Floyd,” Susan said tonelessly. “Get used to the idea. Tell your harpy friend Mabel all about it on the telephone, why don’t you? Maybe then it will seem real to you.”

“Floyd loves you, Susan. This is…ruining him. He broke down and told me everything. He poured out his heart to me.” Her eyes shone with the memory of it. “He broke down at the end and cried like a baby.”

Susan thought how unlike Floyd that was. She wondered if her mother could be making it up, and knew by her eyes that she was not.

“Is that what you want for me, Mom? A crybaby? Or did you just fall in love with the idea of blond-haired grandchildren? I suppose I bother you—you can’t feel your job is complete until you see me married and settled down to a good man you can put your thumb on. Settled down with a fellow who’ll get me pregnant and turn me into a matron in a hurry. That’s the scoop, isn’t it? Well, what about what Iwant?”

“Susan, you don’t know what you want.”

And she said it with such absolute, convinced certainty that for a moment Susan was tempted to believe her. An image came to her of herself and her mother, standing here in set positions, her mother by her rocker and she by the door; only they were tied together by a hank of green yarn, a cord that had grown frayed and weak from many restless tuggings. Image transformed into her mother in a nimrod’s hat, the band sportily pierced with many different flies. Trying desperately to reel in a large trout wearing a yellow print shift. Trying to reel it in for the last time and pop it away in the wicker creel. But for what purpose? To mount it? To eat it?

“No, Mom. I know exactly what I want. Ben Mears.”

She turned and went up the stairs.

Her mother ran after her and called up shrilly: “You can’t get a room! You haven’t any money!”

“I’ve got a hundred in checking and three hundred in savings,” Susan replied calmly. “And I can get a job down at Spencer’s, I think. Mr Labree has offered several times.”

“All he’ll care about is looking up your dress,” Mrs Norton said, but her voice had gone down an octave. Much of her anger had left her and she felt a little frightened.

“Let him,” Susan said. “I’ll wear bloomers.”

“Honey, don’t be mad.” She came two steps up the stairs. “I only want what’s best for—”

“Spare it, Mom. I’m sorry I slapped you. That was awful of me. I do love you. But I’m moving out. It’s way past time. You must see that.”

“You think it over,” Mrs Norton said, now clearly sorry as well as frightened. “I still don’t think I spoke out of turn. That Ben Mears, I’ve seen showboats like him before. All he’s interested in is—”

“No. No more.”

She turned away.

Her mother came up another step and called after her: “When Floyd left here he was in an awful state. He—”

But the door to Susan’s room closed and cut off her words.

She lay down on her bed—which had been decorated with stuffed toys and a poodle dog with a transistor radio in its belly not so long ago—and lay looking at the wall, trying not to think. There were a number of Sierra Club posters on the wall, but not so long ago she had been surrounded by posters clipped from Rolling Stoneand Creemand Crawdaddy, pictures of her idols—Jim Morrison and John Lennon and Dave van Ronk and Chuck Berry. The ghost of those days seemed to crowd in on her like bad time exposures of the mind.

She could almost see the newsprint, standing out on the cheap pulp stock. going-places young writer and young wife involved in “maybe” motorcycle fatality. The rest in carefully couched innuendoes. Perhaps a picture taken at the scene by a local photographer, too gory for the local paper, just right for Mabel’s kind.

And the worst was that a seed of doubt had been planted. Stupid. Did you think he was in cold storage before he came back here? That he came wrapped in a germ-proof cellophane bag, like a motel drinking glass? Stupid. Yet the seed had been planted. And for that she could feel something more than adolescent pique for her mother—she could feel something black that bordered on hate.

She shut the thoughts—not out but away—and put an arm over her face and drifted into an uncomfortable doze that was broken by the shrill of the telephone downstairs, then more sharply by her mother’s voice calling, “Susan! It’s for you!”

She went downstairs, noticing it was just after five-thirty. The sun was in the west. Mrs Norton was in the kitchen, beginning supper. Her father wasn’t home yet.

“Hello?”

“Susan?” The voice was familiar, but she could not put a name to it immediately.

“Yes, who’s this?”

“Eva Miller, Susan. I’ve got some bad news.”

“Has something happened to Ben?” All the spit seemed to have gone out of her mouth. Her hand came up and touched her throat. Mrs Norton had come to the kitchen door and was watching, a spatula held in one hand.

“Well, there was a fight. Floyd Tibbits showed up here this afternoon—”

“Floyd!”

Mrs Norton winced at her tone.

“—and I said Mr Mears was sleeping. He said all right, just as polite as ever, but he was dressed awful funny. I asked him if he felt all right. He had on an old-fashioned overcoat and a funny hat and he kept his hands in his pockets. I never thought to mention it to Mr Mears when he got up. There’s been so much excitement—”

“What happened?” Susan nearly screamed.

“Well, Floyd beat him up,” Eva said unhappily. “Right out in my parking lot. Sheldon Corson and Ed Craig went out and dragged him off.”

“Ben. Is Ben all right?”

“I guess not.”

“What is it?” She was holding the phone very tightly.

“Floyd got in one last crack and sent Mr Mears back against that little foreign car of his, and he hit his head. Carl Foreman took him over to Cumberland Receiving, and he was unconscious. I don’t know anything else. If you—”

She hung up, ran to the closet, and pulled her coat off the hanger.

“Susan, what is it?”

“That nice boy Floyd Tibbits,” Susan said, hardly aware that she had begun to cry. “He’s put Ben in the hospital.”

She ran out without waiting for a reply.

TWO

She got to the hospital at six-thirty and sat in an uncomfortable plastic contour chair, staring blankly at a copy of Good Housekeeping. And I’m the only one, she thought. How damned awful. She had thought of calling Matt Burke, but the thought of the doctor coming back and finding her gone had stopped her.

The minutes crawled by on the waiting room clock, and at ten minutes of seven, a doctor with a sheaf of papers in one hand stepped through the door and said, “Miss Norton?”

“That’s right. Is Ben all right?”

“That’s not an answerable question at this point.” He saw the dread come into her face and added: “He seems to be, but we’ll want him here for two or three days. He’s got a hairline fracture, multiple bruises, contusions, and one hell of a black eye.”