Needful Things - Stephen King [144]
"Yeah-as much as I can believe anyone without actually talking to them face-to-face, that is."
"What's the stuff he dropped into her tea? Dope?"
"A tranquilizer. jerzyck told CID he'd used it a couple of times before when she got hot, and it cooled her out pretty well. He said he thought it did this time, too."
"But it didn't."
"I think it did at first. Wilma didn't just go over and start chewing Nettle's ass, at least. But I'm pretty sure she went on harassing Nettle; it's the pattern she established when it was just the dog they were fighting over. Making phone-calls. Doing drive-bys.
That sort of thing. Nettle's skin was pretty thin. Stuff like that would have really gotten to her. John LaPointe and the CID team I stuck him with went to see Polly around seven o'clock. Polly said she was pretty sure that Nettle was worried about something. She was over to see Polly this morning, and let something slip then. Polly didn't understand it at the time." Alan sighed. "I guess now she wishes she'd listened a little more closely."
"How's Polly taking it, Alan?"
"Pretty well, I think." He had spoken to her twice, once from a house near the crime scene, and a second time from here at K.V.H just after he and Norris had arrived. On both occasions her voice had been calm and controlled, but he had sensed the tears and confusion just under the carefully maintained surface. He wasn't entirely surprised during the first call to find she already knew most of what had happened; news, particularly bad news, travels fast in small towns.
"What set off the big bang?"
Alan looked at Norris, surprised, and then realized he didn't know yet. Alan had gotten a more or less complete report from John LaPointe between the autopsies, while Norris had been on another phone, talking to Sheila Brigham and compiling lists of complaints involving the two women.
"One of them decided to escalate," he said. "My guess is Wilma, but the details of the picture are still hazy. Apparently Wilma went over to Nettle's while Nettle was visiting Polly this morning. Nettle must have left without locking her door, or even latching it securely, and the wind blew it open-you know how windy it was today."
"Yeah."
"So maybe it started out to be just another drive-by to keep Nettle's water hot. Then Wilma saw the door standing open and the drive-by turned into something else. Maybe it wasn't quite that way, but it feels right to me."
The words weren't even out of his mouth before he recognized them as a lie. It didn't feel right, that was the trouble. It should have felt right, he wanted it to feel right, and it didn't. What was driving him crazy was that there was no reason for that sense of wrongness, at least none he could put his finger on. The closest he could come was to wonder if Nettle would have been careless not only about locking her door but about shutting it tightly if she was as paranoid about Wilma jerzyck as she had seemed and that wasn't enough to hang a suspicion on. It wasn't enough because not all of Nettle's gear was stowed tightly, and you couldn't make any assumptions about what such a person would and wouldn't do. Still
"What did Wilma do?" Norris asked. "Trash the place?"
"Killed Nettle's dog."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Jesus! What a bitch!"
"Well, but we knew that about her, didn't we?"
"Yeah, but still - -."
There it was again. Even from Norris Ridgewick, who could be depended on, even after all these years, to fill out at least twenty per cent of his paperwork bass-ackwards: Yeah, but still.
"She did it with a Swiss Army knife. Used the corkscrew attachment and stuck a note on it, saying it was payback for Nettle slinging mud at her sheets. So Nettle went over to Wilma's with a bunch of rocks. She wrapped notes of her own around them with rubber bands. The notes said the rocks were Wilma's last warning.
She threw them through all of the jerzycks' downstairs windows."
"Mother-a-God," Norris said, not without some admiration.
"The jerzycks left for eleven o'clock Mass at ten-thirty or so.
After Mass they had lunch with the