Christine - Stephen King [54]
He looked at me.
'That idea scares me if I think about it too much, Dennis. There seems to be something well, decidedly unchristian about it.'
'And for your brother there was "sell Christine time"?'
'Perhaps. Ecclesiastes says there's a season for everything - a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was "Christine time" in Rollie's life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away as well.
'If so, he would have known it. He was an animal, and animals listen very well to their instincts.
'Or maybe he finally just tired of it,' LeBav finished.
I nodded that that might be it, mostly because I was anxious to be gone, not because that explained it to my complete satisfaction. George LeBay hadn't seen that car on the day Arnie had yelled at me go back. I had seen it though. The '58 hadn't looked like a car that had been resting peacefully in a garage. It had been dirty and dented, the windscreen cracked, one bumper mostly torn away. It had looked like a corpse that had been disinterred and left to decay in the sun.
I thought of Veronica LeBay and shivered.
As if reading my thoughts - part of them, anyway LeBay said, 'I knew very little about how my brother may have lived or felt during the last years of his life, but I'm quite sure of one thing, Dennis. When he felt, in 1965 or whenever it was, that it was time to put the car away, he put it away. And when he felt it was time to put it up for sale, he put it up for sale.'
He paused.
'And I don't think I have anything else to tell you except that I really believe your friend would be happier if he got rid of that car. I looked at him closely, your friend. He didn't look like a particularly happy young man at the present. Am I wrong about that?'
I considered his question carefully. No, happiness wasn't exactly Amie's thing, and never had been. But until the thing had begun with the Plymouth, he had seemed at least content as if he had reached a modus vivendi with life. Not a completely happy one, but at least a workable one.
'No,' I said. 'You're not wrong.'
'I don't believe my brother's car will make him happy. If anything, just the opposite.' And as if he had just read my thoughts of a few minutes before, he went on: 'I don't believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough the way a carton of milk will take the flavour of certain strongly spiced foods if it's left open in the refrigerator. Or perhaps that's only a ridiculous fancy on my part, Possibly it's just that I would feel better knowing the car my niece choked in and my sister-in-law killed herself in had been pressed down into a cube of meaningless metal. Perhaps all I feel is a sense of outraged propriety.'
'Mr LeBay, you said you'd hired someone to take care of your brother's house until it was sold. Was that true?'
He shifted a little in his chair. 'No, it wasn't. I lied on impulse. I didn't like the thought of that car back in that garage as if it had found its way home. If there are emotions and feelings that still live on, they would be there, as well as in the car herself.' And very quickly he corrected himself: 'Itself.'
Not long after, I said my goodbyes and followed my headlights home through the dark, thinking over everything LeBay had told me. I wondered if it would make any difference to Arnie if I told him one person had had a mortal accident in his car and another had actually died in it. I pretty well knew that it wouldn't; in his own way, Arnie could be every bit as stubborn as Roland LeBay himself. The lovely little scene over the car with