Needful Things - Stephen King [41]
Go on, Nettle. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.
Then Nettle smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest and went inside.
The door closed behind her.
Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.
"Way to go, Nettle!" Rosalie said.
"Two points for our side!" Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.
2
Five minutes later, Nettle Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers's cake container on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettle Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop.
Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.
"A deed," she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr.
Gaunt's more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.
"Yes, that's right. It's really just a small matter. You know Mr.
Keeton, don't you?"
"Oh yes," Nettle said. "Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?"
"The younger," Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. "The Head Selectman."
"They call him Buster behind his back," Nettle said, and giggled.
It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettle's not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. "They have ever since he was a little boy."
"I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster."
"Trick?" Nettle looked vaguely alarmed.
Gaunt smiled. "Just a harmless prank. And he'll never know it was you. He'll think it was someone else."
"Oh." Nettle looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze-greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and Pleasure. "Well..
"It will be all right, Nettle. No one will ever know and you'll have the lampshade."
Nettle spoke slowly and thoughtfully. "My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else." She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm.
"If it doesn't hurt him. I don't want to hurt him. I hurt my husband, you know."
"It won't hurt him," Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettle's hands.
"It won't hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house."
"How could I get in Buster's-" "Here."
He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.
"When?" Nettle asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.
"Soon." He released her hands am stood up. "And now, Nettle, I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you.
Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in-" He glanced at his watch. "Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can't begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days-most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts."
Nettle also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. "It is lovely,