Thinner - Stephen King [122]
'What did you say to her?' Billy asked.
'I told her to stick an umbrella up her ass,' Linda said, and Billy laughed until tears squirted out of his eyes but part of him felt sad, too. He had been gone not quite three weeks, and his daughter sounded as if she had aged three years.
Linda had then gone directly home to ask Heidi if what Samantha Houston had said was true.
'What happened?' Billy asked.
'We had a really bad fight and then afterward I said I wanted to go back to Aunt Rhoda's and she said well, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.'
Billy paused for a moment, and then said, 'I don't know if you need me to tell you this or not, Lin, but I'm not crazy.'
'Oh, Daddy, I know that,' she said, almost scoldingly.
'And I'm getting better. Putting on weight.'
She squealed so loudly he had to pull the telephone away from his ear. 'Are you? Are you really?'
'I am, really.'
'Oh, Daddy, that's great! That's Are you telling the truth? Are you really?'
'Scout's honor,' he said, grinning.
'When are you going home?' she asked.
And Billy, who expected to leave Northeast Harbor tomorrow morning and to walk in his own front door not much later than ten o'clock tomorrow night, answered: 'It'll still be a week or so, hon. I want to put on some more weight first. I still look pretty gross.'
'Oh,' Linda said, sounding deflated. 'Oh, okay.'
'But when I come I'll call you in time for you to get there at least six hours before me,' he said. 'You can make another lasagna, like when we came back from Mohonk, and fatten me up some more.'
'Bitchin'!' she said, laughing, and then, immediately: 'Whoops. Sorry, Daddy.'
'Forgiven,' he said. 'In the meantime, you stay right there at Rhoda's, kitten. I don't want any more yelling between you and Mom.'
'I don't want to go back until you're there anyway,' she said, and he heard bedrock in her voice. Had Heidi sensed that adult bedrock in Linda? He suspected she had - it accounted for some of her desperation on the phone last night.
He told Linda he loved her and rang off. Sleep came easier that second night, but the dreams were bad. In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn't Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.
'Purpurfargade ansiktet,' it said in a whining, inhuman voice, and Billy had awakened, trembling, in the cold gray Atlantic-seacoast dawn.
He checked out twenty minutes later and had headed south again. He stopped at a quarter of eight for a huge country breakfast and then could eat almost none of it when he opened the newspaper he had bought in the dispenser out front.
Didn't interfere with my lunch, though, he thought now as he walked back to the rental car. Because putting on weight again is also what it's really all about.
The pie sat on the seat beside him, pulsing, warm. He spared it a glance and then keyed the engine and backed out of the slanted parking slot. He realized that he would be home in less than an hour, and felt a strange, unpleasant emotion. He had gone twenty miles before he realized what it was: excitement.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Gypsy Pie
He parked the rental car in the driveway behind his own Buick, grabbed the Kluge bag which had been his only luggage, and started across the lawn. The white house with its bright green shutters, always a symbol of comfort and goodness and security to him, now looked strange - so strange it was really almost alien.
The white man from town lived