Needful Things - Stephen King [155]
Would she have done that if Wilma was still stoking the fires?
Alan didn't think so.
Then there was the matter of the rocks which had been thrown through Wilma's windows. Each of the attached notes said the same thing: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. A warning usually means that the person being warned has more time to change his or her ways, but time had been up for Wilma and Nettle.
They had met on that street-corner only two hours after the rocks had been thrown.
He supposed he could get around that one if he had to. When Nettle found her dog, she would have been furious. Ditto Wilma when she got home and saw the damage to her house. All it would have taken to strike the final spark was a single telephone call. One of the two women had made that call gone up.
Alan turned over on his side, wishing that these were the old days, when you could still obtain records of local calls. If he could have documented the fact that Wilma and Nettle had spoken before their final meeting, he would have felt a lot better. Still-take the final phone-call as a given. That still left the notes themselves.
This is how it must have happened, he thought. Nettle comes home from Polly's and finds her dog dead on the hallfloor. She reads the note on the corkscrew. Then she writes the same message on fourteen or sixteen sheets of Paper and puts them in the Pocket of her coat. She also gets a bunch of rubber bands. When she gets to Wilma's, she goes into the back yard. She Piles up fourteen or sixteen rocks and uses the elastic bands to attach the notes. She must have done all that prior to throwing any rocks-it would have taken too long if she had to stop in the middle of the festivities to pick out more rocks and attach more notes. And when she's done, she goes home and broods over her dead pet some more.
It felt all wrong to him.
It felt really lousy.
It presupposed a chain of thought and action that just didn't fit what he knew of Nettle Cobb. The murder of her husband had and the balloon had been the outcome of long cycles of abuse, but the murder itself had been an impulse crime committed by a woman whose sanity had broken.
If the records in George Bannerman's old files were correct, Nettle sure hadn't written Albion Cobb any warning notes beforehand.
What felt right to him was much simpler: Nettle comes home from Polly's. She finds her dog dead in the hallway. She gets a cleaver from the kitchen drawer and heads up the street to cut herself a wide slice of Polish butt.
But if that was the case, who had broken Wilma jerzyck's windows?
"Plus the times are all so weird," he muttered, and rolled restlessly over onto his other side.
John LaPointe had been with the CID team which had spent Sunday afternoon and evening tracing Nettle's movements-what movements there had been. She had gone to Polly's with the lasagna.
She told Polly that she would probably go by the new shop, Needful Things, on her way home and speak to the owner, Leland Gaunt, if he was in-Polly said Mr. Gaunt had invited her to look at an item that afternoon and Nettle was going to tell Mr. Gaunt that Polly would probably show up, even though her hands were paining her quite badly.
If Nettle had gone into Needful Things, if Nettle had spent some time there-browsing, talking to the new shopkeeper that everyone in town thought was so fascinating and whom Alan kept not meeting-that might have bitched up her window of opportunity and re-opened the possibility of a mystery rock-thrower. But she hadn't. The shop had been closed. Gaunt had told both Polly, who had indeed dropped by later on, and the CID boys that he had seen neither hide nor hair of Nettle since the day she came in and bought her carnival glass lampshade. In any case, he had spent the morning in the back room, listening to classical music and cataloguing items. If someone had knocked, he probably wouldn't have heard anyway.