Gerald's Game - Stephen King [69]
Go ahead, toots, Ruth said. Make fun of me all you want — maybe I even deserve it — but don't kid yourself. There was no one here. Your imagination put on a little slide-show, that's all. That's all there was to it.
You're wrong, Ruth, Goody responded calmly. Someone was here, all right, and Jessie and I both know who it was. It didn't exactly look like Daddy, but that was only because he had his eclipse face on, The face wasn't the important part, though, or how tall he looked — be might have had on hoots with special high heels, or maybe he was wearing shoes with lifts in them. For all I know, be could have been on stilts.
Stilts! Ruth cried, amazed. Oh dear God, now I've heard evvverything! Never mind the fact that the man died before Reagan's Inauguration Day tux got back from the cleaners; Tom Mahout was so clumsy be should have had walking-downstairs insurance. Stilts? Oh babe, you have got to be putting me on!
That part doesn't matter, Goody said with a kind of serene stubbornness. It was him. I'd know that smell anywhere — that thick, bloodwarm smell. Not the smell of oysters or pennies. Not even the smell of blood. The smell of . . .
The thought broke up and drifted away.
Jessie slept.
C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
She ended up alone with her father at Sunset Trails on the afternoon of July 20th, 1963, for two reasons. One was a cover for the other. The cover was her claim that she was still a little frightened of Mrs Gilette, even though it had been at least five years (and probably closer to six) since the incident of the cookie and the slapped hand. The real reason was simple and uncomplicated: it was her Daddy she wanted to be with during such a special, once-in-a-lifetime event.
Her mother had suspected as much, and being moved around like a chesspiece by her husband and her ten-year-old daughter hadn't pleased her, but by then the matter was practically afait accompli. Jessie had gone to her Daddy first. She was still four months away from her eleventh birthday, but that didn't make her a fool. What Sally Mahout suspected was true: Jessie had launched a conscious, carefully thought-out campaign which would allow her to spend the day of the eclipse with her father. Much later Jessie would think that this was yet another reason to keep her mouth shut about what had happened on that day; there might be those — her mother, for instance — who would say that she had no right to complain; that she had in fact gotten about what she deserved.
On the day before the eclipse, Jessie had found her father sitting on the deck outside his den and reading a paperback copy of Profiles in Courage while his wife, son, and elder daughter laughed and swam in the lake below. He smiled at her when she took the seat next to him, and Jessie smiled back. She had brightened her mouth with lipstick for this interview — Peppermint Yum-Yum, in fact, a birthday present from Maddy. Jessie hadn't liked it when she first tried it on — she thought it a baby shade, and that it tasted like Pepsodent — but Daddy had said he thought it was pretty, and that had transformed it into the most valuable of her few cosmetic resources, something to be treasured and used only on special occasions like this one.
He listened carefully and respectfully as she spoke, but he made no particular attempt to disguise the glint of amused skepticism in his eyes. Do you really mean to tell me you're still afraid of Adrienne Gilette? he asked when she had finished rehashing the oft-told tale of how Mrs Gilette had slapped her hand when she had reached for the last cookie on the plate. That must have been back in . . . I don't know, but I was still working for Dunninger, so it must have been before 1959. And you're still spooked all these years later? How absolutely Freudian, my dear!
Well-Ill . . . you know . . . just a little. She widened her eyes, trying to communicate the idea that she was saying a little but meaning a lot. In truth she didn't know if she was still scared of old Pooh-pooh