Needful Things - Stephen King [204]
I just can't."
"Well, I hope you find it. Stick a LOST notice up on the bulletin board, why don't you?"
"I will. And I'll get the rest of this mess cleaned up."
"I know you will, John. Take it easy."
Alan went out to the parking lot, shaking his head.
3
The small silver bell over the door of Needful Things tinkled and Babs Miller, member in good standing of the Ash Street Bridge Club, came in a little timidly.
"Mrs. Miller!" Leland Gaunt welcomed her, consulting the sheet of paper which lay beside his cash register. He made a small tickmark on it. "How good that you could come! And right on time!
It was the music box you were interested in, wasn't it? A lovely piece of work."
"I wanted to speak to you about it, yes," Babs said. "I suppose it's sold." It was difficult for her to imagine that such a lovely thing could not have been sold. She felt her heart break a little just at the thought. The tune it played, the one Mr. Gaunt claimed he could not remember she thought she knew just which one it must be.
She had once danced to that tune on the Pavillion at Old Orchard Beach with the captain of the football team, and later that same evening she had willingly given up her virginity to him under a gorgeous May moon.
He had given her the first and last orgasm of her life, and all the while it had been roaring through her veins, that tune had been twisting through her head like a burning wire.
"No, it's right here," Mr. Gaunt said. He took it from the glass case where it had been hiding behind the Polaroid camera and set it on top. Babs Miller's face lit up at the sight of it.
"I'm sure it's more than I could afford," Babs said, "all at once, that is, but I really like it, Mr. Gaunt, and if there was any chance that I could pay for it in installments any chance at all - -."
Mr. Gaunt smiled. It was an exquisite, comforting smile. "I think you're needlessly worried," said he. "You're going to be surprised at how reasonable the price of this lovely music box is, Mrs.
Miller.
Very surprised. Sit down. Let's talk about it."
She sat down.
He came toward her.
His eyes captured hers.
That tune started up in her head again.
And she was lost.
4
"I remember now," Jillian Mislaburski told Alan. "It was the Rusk boy. Billy, I think his name is. Or maybe it's Bruce."
They were standing in her living room, which was dominated by the Sony TV and a gigantic plaster crucified Jesus which hung on the wall behind it. Oprah was on the tube. judging from the way Jesus had His eyes rolled up under His crown of thorns, Alan thought He would maybe have preferred Geraldo. Or Divorce Court. Mrs. Mislaburski had offered Alan a cup of coffee, which he had refused.
"Brian," he said.
"That's right!" she said. "Brian!"
She was wearing her bright green wrapper but had dispensed with the red doo-rag this morning. Curls the size of the cardboard cylinders one finds at the centers of toilet-paper rolls stood out around her head in a bizarre corona.
"Are you sure, Mrs. Mislaburski?"
"Yes. I remembered who he was this morning when I got up.
His father put the aluminum siding on our house two years ago.
The boy came over and helped out for awhile. He seemed like a nice boy to me."
"Do you have any idea what he might have been doing there?"
"He said he wanted to ask if they'd hired anyone to shovel their driveway this winter. I think that was it. He said he'd come back later, when they weren't fighting. The poor kid looked scared to death, and I don't blame him." She shook her head. The large curls bounced softly. "I'm sorry she died the way she did " Jill Mislaburski lowered her voice confidentially. "But I'm happy for Pete.
No one knows what he had to put up with, married to that woman.
No one." She looked meaningfully at Jesus on the wall, then back at Alan again.
"Uh-huh," Alan said. "Did you notice anything else, Mrs.
Mislaburski? Anything about the house, or the sounds, or the boy?"
She put a finger against her nose and cocked her head. "Well, not really. The boy-Brian Rusk-had a cooler in his bike