Dolores Claiborne - Stephen King [103]
This is none of your affair, Sam Marchant, I says. You better just go about your business. I have to call the island ambulance. Just make sure you pick up your mail before you go, or there's gonna be a lot of credit card companies chewin on your ass.
Mrs Donovan don't need an ambulance, he says, goin down another two steps n keepin his eyes on me the whole time, and I'm not going anywhere just yet. I think instead of the ambulance, you better make your first call to Andy Bissette.
Which, as you know, I did. Sammy Marchant stood right there n watched me do it. After I'd hung up the phone, he picked up the mail he'd spilled (takin a quick look over his shoulder every now n then, prob'ly to make sure I wasn't creepin up behind him with that rollin pin in my hand) and then just stood at the foot of the stairs, like a guard dog that's cornered a burglar. He didn't talk, and I didn't, neither. It crossed my mind that I could go through the dinin room and the kitchen to the back stairs n get my slip. But what good would that have done? He'd seen it, hadn't he? And the rollin pin was still settin there on the stairs, wa'ant it?
Pretty soon you came, Andy, along with Frank, and I went down to our nice new police station a little later n made a statement. That was just yest'y forenoon, so I guess there's no need to reheat that hash, is there? You know I didn't say anything about the slip, n when you ast me about the rollin pin, I said I wasn't really sure how it'd gotten there. It was all I could think to say, at least until someone come along n took the OUT OF ORDER sign offa my brains.
After I signed the statement I got in my car n drove home. It was all so quick n quiet-givin the statement and all, I mean-that I almost persuaded myself I didn't have nothing to worry about. After all, I hadn't killed her; she really did fall. I kept tellin myself that, n by the time I turned into my own driveway, I'd come a long way to bein convinced that everything was gonna be all right.
That feelin only lasted as long's it took me to get from the car to my back door. There was a note thumb-tacked on it. Just a plain sheet of notebook paper. It had a smear of grease on it, like it'd been torn from a book some man'd been carryin around in his hip pocket. YOU WILL NOT GET AWAY WITH IT AGAIN, the note said. That was all. Hell, it was enough, wouldn't you say?
I went inside n cracked open the kitchen windows to let out the musty smell. I hate that smell, n the house always seems to have it these days, no matter if I air it out or not. It's not just because I mostly live at Vera's now-or did, at least-although accourse that's part of it; mostly it's because the house is dead as dead as Joe n Little Pete.
Houses do have their own life that they take from the people who live in em; I really believe that. Our little one-storey place lived past Joe's dyin and the two older kids goin away to school, Selena to Vassar on a full scholarship (her share of that college money I was so concerned about went to buy clothes n textbooks), and Joe Junior just up the road to the University of Maine in Orono. It even survived the news that Little Pete had been killed in a barracks explosion in Saigon. It happened just after he got there, and less'n two months before the whole shebang was over. I watched the last of the helicopters pull away from the embassy roof on the TV in Vera's livin room and just cried n cried. I could let myself do that without fear of what she might say, because she'd gone down to Boston on a shopping binge.
It was after Little Pete's funeral that the