Needful Things - Stephen King [154]
Someone like Nettle Cobb.
Quit it let it go!
He couldn't, though.
Polly touched his cheek. "I'm awfully glad you came, Alan. It must have been a horrible day for you, too."
"I've had better, but it's over now. You should let it go, too.
Get some sleep. You have a lot of arrangements to make tomorrow.
Do you want me to get you a pill?"
"No, my hands are a little better, at least. Alan-" She broke off, but stirred restlessly under the covers.
"What?"
"Nothing," she said. "It wasn't important. I think I can sleep, now that you're here. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, honey."
She rolled away from him, pulled the covers up, and was still.
For a moment he thought of how she had hugged him-the feel of her hands locked about his neck. If she was able to flex her fingers enough to do that, then she really was better. That was a good thing, maybe the best thing that had happened to him since Clut had phoned during the football game. If only things would stay better.
Polly had a slightly deviated septum and now she began to snore lightly, a sound Alan actually found rather pleasant. It was good to be sharing a bed with another person, a real person who made real sounds and sometimes filched the covers. He grinned in the dark.
Then his mind turned back to the murders and the grin faded.
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.
I haven't seen her or heardfrom her.
I guess she finally got the message.
A case like this one didn't need to be solved; even Seat Thomas could have told you exactly what had happened after a single look at the crime-scene through his trifocals. It had been kitchen implements instead of duelling pistols at dawn, but the result was the same: two bodies in the morgue at K.V.H. with autopsy Y-cuts in them. The only question was why it had happened. He had had a few questions, a few vague disquiets, but they would no doubt have blown away before Wilma and Nettle had been seen into the ground.
Now the disquiets were more urgent, and some of them (I guess she finally got the message) had names.
To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be large, with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite awhile before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren't afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.
Sometimes the gate was a piece of evidence found at a crimescene.
Sometimes it was a witness. Sometimes it was an assumption firmly based on events and logic. The assumptions he'd made in this case were: one, that Wilma had been following a longestablished pattern of harassment and fuckery; two, that this time she had chosen the wrong person with whom to play mind-games; three, that Nettle had snapped again as she had when she'd killed her husband. But
I haven't seen her or heard from her.
If Nettle had really said that, how much did it change? How many assumptions did that single sentence knock into cocked hats?
Alan didn't know.
He stared into the darkness of Polly's bedroom and wondered if he'd found the gate after all.
Maybe Polly hadn't heard what Nettle had said correctly.
It was technically possible, but Alan didn't believe it. Nettle's actions, at least up to a certain point, supported what Polly claimed to have heard. Nettle hadn't come to work at Polly's on Friday. she'd said she was ill. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just scared of Wilma. That made sense; they knew from Pete Jerzyck that Wilma, after discovering that her sheets had been vandalized, had made at least one threatening