Gerald's Game - Stephen King [143]
Maybe an awful lot.
So she dialed New Today, New Tomorrow, the loose association of counsellors with which Nora had been affiliated, and was shocked to silence when the receptionist told her Nora had died of leukemia the year before — some weird, sly variant which had hidden successfully in the back alleys of her limbic system until it was too late to do a damned thing about it. Would Jessie perhaps care to meet with Laurel Stevenson? the receptionist asked, but Jessie remembered Laurel — a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who wore high heels with sling backs and looked as if she would enjoy sex to the fullest only when she was on top. She told the receptionist she'd think it over. And that had been it for counselling.
In the three months since she had learned of Nora's death, she'd had good days (when she was only afraid) and bad days (when she was too terrified even to leave this room, let alone the house) but only Brandon Milheron had heard anything approaching the complete story of Jessie Mahout's hard time by the lake . . . and Brandon hadn't believed the crazier aspects of that story. Had sympathized, yes, but not believed. Not at first, anyway.
'No pearl earring,' he had reported the day after she first told him about the stranger with the long white face. 'No muddy footprint, either. Not in the written reports, at least.'
Jessie shrugged and said nothing. She could have said things, but it seemed safer not to. She had badly needed a friend in the weeks following her escape from the summer house, and Brandon had filled the bill admirably. She didn't want to distance him or drive him away entirely with a lot of crazy talk. So she didn't tell him what he was certainly smart enough to have figured out for himself — the pearl earring could have disappeared into someone's pocket, and a single muddy footprint by the bureau could have been overlooked. The bedroom had, after all, been treated as the scene of an accident, not a murder.
And there was something else, too, something simple and direct: maybe Brandon was right. Maybe her visitor had just been a soupçon of moonlight, after all.
Little by little she had been able to persuade herself, at least in her waking hours, that this was the truth of it. Her space cowboy had been a kind of Rorschach pattern, one made not of ink and paper but of wind-driven shadows and imagination. She didn't blame herself for any of this, however; quite the opposite. If not for her imagination, she never would have seen how she might be able to get the water-glass . . . and even if she had gotten it, she never would have thought of using a magazine blow-in card as a straw. No, she thought her imagination had more than earned its right to a few hallucinatory megrims, but it remained important for her to remember she'd been alone that night. If recovery began anywhere, she had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.
Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of the Press-Herald's County News section. All her assumptions began to change then, and they had gone right on changing as the story of Raymond Andrew Joubert began its steady march from filler between the Community Calendar and the County Police Beat to banner headlines on the front page. Then, yesterday . . . seven days after Joubert's name had first appeared on the County page . . .
There was a tap at the door, and Jessie's first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost . . . but not quite.
'Meggie? That you?'
'None other, ma'am.'
'Come on in.'
Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass,