“What do you mean “Nettle got my cake-box, and there was a note inside it. From Mr. Gaunt.” She pushed her handbag across the table to him. “Take a look-I don’t feel up to the clasp this afternoon.”
He ignored the handbag for the moment. “How bad is it, Polly?”
“Bad,” she said simply. “It’s been worse, but I’m not going to lie to you; it’s never been much worse. All this week, since the weather changed.”
“Are you going to see Dr. Van Allen?”
She sighed. “Not yet. I’m due for a respite. Every time it gets bad like this, it lets up just when I feel like I’m going to go crazy any minute. At least, it always has. I suppose that one of these times the respite just won’t come. If it’s not better by Monday, I’ll go see him. But all he can do is write prescriptions. I don’t want to be a junkie if I can help it, Alan.”
“But-”
“Enough,” she said softly. “Enough for now, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, a little unwillingly.
“Look at the note. It’s very sweet… and sort of cute.”
He undid the clasp of her handbag and saw a slim envelope lying on top of her billfold. He took it out. The paper had a rich, creamy feel. Written across the front, in a hand so perfectly oldfashioned it looked like something from an antique diary, was Ms.
Polly Chalmers.
“That style is called copperplate,” she said, amused. “I think they stopped teaching it not long after the Age of the Dinosaurs.”
He took a single sheet of deckle-edged stationery from the envelope. Printed across the top was NEEDFUL THINGS Castle Rock, Maine Leland Gaunt, Proprietor The handwriting here was not as formally fancy as that on the envelope, but both it and the language itself still had a pleasingly old-fashioned quality.
Dear Polly, Thank you once again for the devil’s-food cake. It is my favorite, and it was delicious! I also want to thank you for your kindness and thoughtfulness-I suppose you knew how nervous I must be on my opening day, and in the off-season as well.
I have an item, not yet in stock but coming with a number of other things via air freight, which I believe might interest you a great deal. I don’t want to say more; I’d rather you viewed it yourself.
It’s actually not much more than a knickknack, but I thought of it almost the moment you left, and over the years I’ve rarely been wrong in my intuitions. I expect it to come in either Friday or Saturday.
If you have a chance, why not stop in Sunday afternoon? I’ll be in all day, cataloguing stock, and would be delighted to show it to You. I don’t want to say more just now; the item either will or will not explain itself. At least let me repay your kindness with a cup of tea!
I hope Nettle enjoys her new lampshade. She is a very dear lady, and it seemed to please her very much.
Yours sincerely,
Leland Gaunt
“Mysterious!” Alan said, folding the note back into the envelope and putting the envelope back in her purse. “Are you going to check it out, as we say in the police biz?”
“With a build-up like that-and after seeing Nettle’s lampshade-how could I refuse? Yes, I think I’ll drop by… if my hands feel better.
Want to come, Alan? Maybe he’ll have something for you, toO.”
“Maybe. But maybe I’ll just stick with the Patriots. They’re bound to win one eventually.”
“You look tired, Alan. Dark circles under the eyes.”
“It’s been one of those days. It started with me just barely keeping the Head Selectman and one of my deputies from beating each other to a bloody pulp in the little boys’ room.”
She leaned forward, concerned. “What are you talking about?”
He told her about the dust-up between Keeton and Norris Ridgewick, finishing with how odd Keeton had seemed-his use of that word persecution had kept recurring to him at odd moments all day. When he finished, Polly was quiet for a long time.
“So?” he asked her finally. “What do you think?”
“I was thinking that it’s still going to be a lot of years before you know everything about Castle Rock that you need to know.
That probably goes for me, too-I was away a long time, and I don’t talk about where I was or what became of my ’little problem, and I think there are a lot of people in town who don’t trust me.
But you pick things up, Alan, and you remember things. When I came back to The Rock, do you know what it felt like?”
He shook his head, interested. Polly was not a woman to dwell on the past, even with him.
“It was like tuning into a soap opera you’ve fallen out of the habit of watching. Even if you haven’t watched in a couple of years, you recognize the people and their problems at once, because they never really change. Watching a show like that again is like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.”
“What are you saying?”
“That there’s a lot of soap-opera history here you haven’t caught up on yet. Did you know that Danforth Keeton’s uncle was in juniper Hill at the same time Nettle was?”
“No.”
She nodded. “Around the age of forty he started to have mental problems. My mother used to say Bill Keeton was a schizophrenic.
I don’t know if that’s the proper term or just the one Mom heard most often on TV, but there sure as hell was something wrong with him.
I remember seeing him grab people on the street and start to hector them on one thing or another-the national debt, how john Kennedy was a Communist, I don’t know whatall else. I was only a little girl. It frightened me, though, Alan-I knew that.”
“Well, of course it did.”
“Or sometimes he’d walk along the street with his head down, talking to himself in a voice that was loud and muttery at the same time. My mother told me I was never to speak to him when he was behaving like that, not even if we were on our way to church and he was, too. Finally he tried to shoot his wife. Or so I heard, but you know how long-time gossip distorts things. Maybe all he did was wave his service pistol at her. Whatever he did, it was enough to get him carted off to county jail. There was some sort of competency hearing, and when it was over they parked him at juniper Hill. “Is he still there?”
“Dead now. His state of mind degenerated pretty fast, once they had him institutionalized. He was catatonic when he finally went. Or so I’ve heard.”
“Jesus.”
“But that’s not all. Ronnie Keeton, Danforth’s father and Bill Keeton’s brother, spent four years in the mental wing at the VA hospital in Togus during the mid-seventies. Now he’s in a nursing home. Alzheimer’s. And there was a great-aunt or a cousin-I’m not sure which-who killed herself in the fifties after some sort of scandal. I’m not sure what it was, but I heard once she liked the ladies a little better than she liked the men.”
“It runs in the family, is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” she said. “There’s no moral to this, no theme. I know a little town history you don’t, that’s all-the kind they don’t recount during the Town Common speech-making on the Fourth of July.
I’m just passing it on. Drawing conclusions is a job for the police.”
She said this last so primly that Alan laughed a little but he felt uneasy, just the same. Did insanity run in families? He had been taught in high school psychology that the idea was an old wives’ tale.
Years later, at Albany Police Academy, a lecturer had said it was true, or could be, at least, in certain cases: that some mental diseases could be traced through family trees as clearly as physical traits like blue eyes and double-’ointedness. One of the examples he’d used had been alcoholism. Had he said something about schizophrenia as well?
Alan couldn’t remember. His academy days had been a good many years ago.
“I guess I better start asking around about Buster,” Alan said heavily. “I’ll tell you, Polly, the idea that Castle Rock’s Head Selectman could be turning into a human hand grenade does not exactly make my day.”