Needful Things - Stephen King [112]
Polly, this is not a question of what belongs to the town, and you know it. It's a question of what belongs to Alan.
She shook her head back and forth as she sat in the rocker, completely unaware she was making this gesture of negation. She supposed she had spent too many sleepless three o'clocks on too many endless dark mornings to give away her inner landscape without a fight.
In time she would tell Alan everything-she had not meant to keep the complete truth a secret even this long-but the time wasn't yet.
Surely not especially when her hands were telling her that in the next few days she would not be able to think about much of anything at all except them.
The phone began to ring. That would be Alan, back from patrol and checking in with her. Polly got up and crossed the room to it.
She picked it up carefully, using both hands, ready to tell him the things she believed he wanted to hear. Aunt Evvie's voice tried to intrude, tried to tell her this was bad behavior, childishly selfindulgent behavior, perhaps even dangerous behavior. Polly pushed that voice aside quickly and roughly.
"Hello?" she said brightly. "Oh, hi, Alan! How are you?
Good."
She listened briefly, then smiled. If she had looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror, she would have seen a woman who appeared to be screaming but she did not look.
"Fine, Alan," she said. "I'm just fine."
14
It was almost time to leave for the Raceway.
Almost.
"Come on," Danforth Keeton whispered. Sweat ran down his face like oil. "Come on, come on, come on."
He was sitting hunched over Winning Ticket-he had swept everything off his desk to make room for it, and he had spent most of the day playing with it. He had started with his copy of Bluegrass History.Forty Years of kentucky Derby. He had run at least two dozen Derbys, giving the tin Winning Ticket horses the names of the entrants in exactly the manner Mr. Gaunt had described. And the tin horses which got the names of the winning Derby horses from the book kept coming in first. It happened time after time. It was amazing-so amazing that it was four o'clock before he realized that he had spent the day running long-ago races when there were ten brand-new ones to be run at Lewiston Raceway that very evening.
Money was waiting to be made.
For the last hour, today's Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, had lain to the left of the Winning Ticket board. To the right was a sheet of paper he had torn from his pocket notebook.
Listed on the sheet in Keeton's large, hasty scrawl was this: It was only already running the last race of the night. The horses rattled and swayed around the track. One of them led by six lengths, and crossed the finish line far ahead of the others.
Keeton snatched up the newspaper and studied the evening's Raceway card again. His face shone so brightly that he looked sanctified.
"Malabar!" he whispered, and shook his fists in the air.
The pencil caught in one of them darted and plunged like a runaway sewing needle. "It's Malabar! Thirty-to-one! Thirty-to-one at least!
Malabar, by God!"
He scribbled on the sheet of paper, panting raggedly as he did so.
Five minutes later the Winning Ticket game was locked in his study closet and Danforth Keeton was on his way to Lewiston in his Cadillac.
1st Race: BAZOOKAJOAN
2nd Race: FILLY DELFIA
3rd Race: TAMMY'S WONDER
4th Race: I'M AMAZED
5th Race: BY GEORGE
6th Race: PUCKY BOY
7th Race: CASCO THUNDER
8th Race: DELIGHTFUL SON
9th Race: TIKO-TIKO
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