Needful Things - Stephen King [156]
Wilma Jersyck's window of opportunity was even narrower. Her husband had some woodworking equipment in the basement; he had been down there Sunday morning from eight until just past ten. He saw it was getting late, he said, so he'd shut down the machinery and gone upstairs to dress for eleven o'clock Mass.
Wilma, he told the officers, had been in the shower when he entered the bedroom, and Alan had no reason to doubt the new widower's testimony.
It must have gone like this: Wilma leaves her house on a driveby mission at nine-thirty-five or nine-forty. Pete's in the basement, making birdhouses or whatever, and doesn't even know she's gone.
Wilma gets to Nettle's at about quarter to ten-just minutes after Nettle must have left for Polly's-and sees the door standing open.
To Wilma, this is as good as a gilt-edged invitation. She parks, goes inside, kills the dog and writes the note on impulse, and leaves again. None of the neighbors remembered seeing Wilma's bright yellow Yugo-inconvenient, but hardly proof it hadn't been there.
Most of the neighbors had been gone, anyway, either to church or visiting out of town.
Wilma drives back to her house, goes upstairs while Pete is shutting down his planer or jigsaw or whatever, and gets undressed.
When Pete enters the master bathroom to wash the sawdust off his hands before putting on a coat and tie, Wilma has just stepped into the shower; in fact, she's probably still dry on one side.
Pete jerzyck's finding his wife in the shower was the only thing in the whole mess that made perfect sense to Alan. The corkscrew which had been used on the dog was a lethal enough weapon, but a short one.
She'd have wanted to wash off any bloodstains on her hands and arms.
Wilma just misses Nettle on one end and just misses her husband on the other. Was it possible? Yes. Only by a squeak and a gasp, but it was possible.
So let it go, Alan. Let it go and go to sleep.
But he still couldn't, because it still sucked. It sucked hard.
Alan rolled onto his back once more. Downstairs he heard the clock in the living room softly chiming four. This was getting him nowhere at all, but he couldn't seem to turn his mind off.
He tried to imagine Nettle sitting patiently at her kitchen table, writing THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING overand overagain while, less than twenty feet away, her beloved little dog lay dead. He couldn't do it no matter how he tried. What had seemed like a gate into this particular garden now seemed more and more like a clever painting of a gate on the high, unbroken wall. A trompe Poeil.
Had Nettle walked over to Wilma's house on Willow Street and broken the windows? He didn't know, but he did know that Nettle Cobb was still a figure of interest in Castle Rock the crazy lady who had killed her husband and then spent all those years in juniper Hill.
On the rare occasions when she deviated from the path of her usual routine, she was noticed. If she had gone stalking over to Willow Street on Sunday morning-perhaps muttering to herself as she went and almost certainly crying-she would have been noticed. Tomorrow Alan would start knocking on the doors between the two houses and asking questions.
He began to slip off to sleep at last. The image that followed him down was a pile of rocks with a sheet of note-paper banded around each one. And he thought again: If Nettle didn't throw them, then who did?
9
As the small hours of Monday morning crept toward dawn and the beginning of a new and interesting week, a young man named Ricky Bissonette emerged from the hedge surrounding the Baptist parsonage.
Inside this neat-as-a-pin building, the Reverend William Rose slept the sleep of the just and the righteous.
Ricky, nineteen and not overburdened with brains, worked down at Sonny's Sunoco. He had closed up hours ago but had hung around in the office, waiting until it was late enough (or early enough) to play a little prank on Rev. Rose. On Friday afternoon, Ricky