Needful Things - Stephen King [153]
Polly thought it over. "Well, I didn't know it was about Wilmanot then, anyway. Nettle brought over a lasagna. And my hands my hands were really bad. She saw it right away. Nettle is-wasmay have been-I don't know-vague about some things, but I couldn't hide a thing from her."
"She loved you very much," Alan said gravely, and this brought on a fresh spate of sobbing. He had known it would, just as he knew that some tears have to be cried no matter what the houruntil they are, they simply rave and burn inside.
After awhile, Polly was able to go on. Her hands crept back around Alan's neck as she spoke.
"She got those stupid thermal gloves out, only this time they really helped-the current crisis seems to have passed, anywayand then she made coffee. I asked her if she didn't have things to do at home and she said she didn't. She said Raider was on guard and then she said something like, 'i think she'll leave me alone, anyway. I haven't seen her or heard from her, so I guess she finally got the message.'
That isn't exact, Alan, but it's pretty close."
"What time did she come by?"
"Around quarter past ten. It might have been a little earlier or a little later, but not much. Why, Alan? Does it mean anything?"
When Alan slid between the sheets, he felt that he would be asleep ten seconds after his head hit the pillow. Now he was wide awake again, and thinking hard.
"No," he said after a moment. "I don't think it means anything, except that Nettle had Wilma on her mind."
"I just can't believe it. She seemed so much better-she really did. Remember me telling you about how she got up the courage to go into Needful Things all on her own last Thursday?"
"Yes."
She released him and rolled fretfully onto her back. Alan heard a small metallic chink! as she did so, and again thought nothing of it.
His mind was still examining what Polly had just told him, turning it this way and that, like a jeweller examining a suspect stone.
"I'll have to make the funeral arrangements," she said. "Nettle has got people in Yarmouth-a few, anyway-but they didn't want to have anything to do with her when she was alive, and they'll want to have even less to do with her now that she's dead. But I'll have to call them in the morning. Will I be able to go into Nettle's house, Alan?
I think she had an address book."
"I'll bring you. You won't be able to take anything away, at least not until Dr. Ryan has published his autopsy findings, but I can't see any harm in letting you copy down a few telephone numbers."
"Thank you."
A sudden thought occurred to him. "Polly, what time did Nettle leave here?"
"Quarter of eleven, I guess. It might have been as late as eleven o'clock. She didn't stay a whole hour, I don't think. Why?"
"Nothing," he said. He'd had a momentary flash: if Nettle had stayed long enough at Polly's, she might not have had time to go back home, find her dog dead, collect the rocks, write the notes, attach them to the rocks, go over to Wilma's, and break the windows. But if Nettle had left Polly's at quarter to eleven, that gave her better than two hours. Plenty of time.
Hey, Alan! the voice the falsely cheery one that usually restricted its input to the subject of Annie and Todd-spoke up. How come you're trying to bitch this up for yourself, good buddy?
And Alan didn't know. There was something else he didn't know, either-how had Nettle gotten that load of rocks over to the jerzyck house in the first place? She had no driver's license and didn't have a clue about operating a car.
Cut the crap, good buddy, the voice advised. She wrote the notes at her house-probably right down the hall from her dog's dead bodyand got the rubber bands from her own kitchen drawer, She didn't have to carry the rocks; there were Plenty of those in Wilma's back-yard garden.
Right?
Right. Yet he could not get rid of the idea that the rocks had been brought with the notes already attached. He had no concrete reason to think so, but it just