2
The silver bell jingled.
Cora Rusk came in, determined to buy the picture of The King, and was extremely upset when Mr. Gaunt told her it had been sold.
Cora wanted to know who had bought it. “I’m sorry,” Mr. Gaunt said, “but the lady was from out of state. There was an Oklahoma plate on the car she was driving.”
“Well, I’ll be butched!” Cora cried in tones of anger and real distress. She hadn’t realized just how badly she wanted that picture until Mr. Gaunt informed her that it was gone.
Henry Gendron and his wife, Yvette, were in the shop at that time, and Mr. Gaunt asked Cora to wait a minute while he saw to them. He believed he had something else, he told her, which she would find of equal or perhaps even greater interest. After he had sold the Gendrons a stuffed teddy bear-a present for their daughter-and seen them out, he asked Cora if she could wait a moment longer while he looked for something in the back room. Cora waited, but not with any real interest or expectation. A deep gray depression had settled over her.
She had seen hundreds of pictures of The King, maybe thousands, and owned half a dozen herself, but this one had seemed… special, somehow. She hated the woman from Oklahoma.
Then Mr. Gaunt came back with a small lizard-skin spectacles case. He opened it and showed Cora a pair of aviator glasses with lenses of a deep smoky gray. Her breath caught in her throat; her right hand rose to her quivering neck.
“Are those-” she began, and could say no more.
“The King’s sunglasses,” Mr. Gaunt agreed gravely. “One of sixty pairs. But I’m told these were his favorites.”
Cora bought the sunglasses for nineteen dollars and fifty cents.
“I’d like a little information, as well.” Mr. Gaunt looked at Cora with twinkling eyes. “Let’s call it a surcharge, shall we?”
“Information?” Cora asked doubtfully. “What sort of information?”
“Look out the window, Cora.”
Cora did as she was asked, but her hands never left the sunglasses. Across the street, Castle Rock’s Unit I was parked in front of The Clip joint. Alan Pangborn stood on the sidewalk, talking to Bill Fullerton.
“Do you see that fellow?” Gaunt asked.
“Who? Bill Ful-”
“No, you dummy,” Gaunt said. “The other one.”
“Sheriff Pangborn?”
“Right.”
“Yes, I see him.” Cora felt dull and dazed. Gaunt’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. She could not stop thinking about her purchase the wonderful sunglasses. She wanted to get home and try them on right away… but of course she couldn’t leave until she was allowed to leave, because the dealing wasn’t done until Mr. Gaunt said the dealing was done.
“He looks like what folks in my line of work call a tough sell,” Mr. Gaunt said. “What do you think about him, Cora?”
“He’s smart,” Cora said. “He’ll never be the Sheriff old George Bannerman was-that’s what my husband says-but he’s smart as a whip.”
“Is he?” Mr. Gaunt’s voice had taken on that nagging, tired edge again. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and they never left Alan Pangborn. “Well, do you want to know a secret, Cora? I don’t much care for smart people, and I hate a tough sell. In fact, I loathe a tough sell. I don’t trust people who always want to turn things over and look for cracks before they buy them, do you?”
Cora said nothing. She only stood with The King’s sunglasses case in her left hand and stared blankly out the window.
“If I wanted someone to keep an eye on smart old Sheriff Pangborn, Cora, who would be a good choice?”
“Polly Chalmers,” Cora said in her drugged voice. “She’s awful sweet on him.”
Gaunt shook his head at once. His eyes never left the Sheriff as Alan walked to his cruiser, glanced briefly across the street at Needful Things, then got in and drove away. “Won’t do.”
“Sheila Brigham?” Cora asked doubtfully. “She’s the dispatcher down at the Sheriff’s Office.”
“A good idea, but she won’t do, either. Another tough sell.
There are a few in every town, Cora-unfortunate, but true.”
Cora thought it over in her dim, distant way. “Eddie Warburton?”
she asked at last. “He’s the head custodian at the Municipal Building.”
Gaunt’s face lit up. “The janitor!” he said. “Yes! Excellent!
Fifth Business! Really excellent!” He leaned over the counter and planted a kiss on Cora’s cheek.
She drew away, grimacing and rubbing frantically at the spot.
A brief gagging noise came from her throat, but Gaunt appeared not to notice. His face was wreathed in a large, shining smile.
Cora left (still rubbing her cheek with the heel of her hand) as Stephanie Bonsaint and Cyndi Rose Martin of the Ash Street Bridge Club came in. Cora almost bowled Steffie Bonsaint over in her hurry; she felt a deep desire to get home as fast as she could. To get home and actually try those glasses on. But before she did, she wanted to wash her face and rid herself of that loathsome kiss. She could feel it burning in her skin like a low fever. Over the door, the silver bell tinkled.
3
While Steffie stood by the window, absorbed in the shifting patterns of the old-fashioned kaleidoscope she had found, Cyndi Rose approached Mr. Gaunt and reminded him of what he had told her on Wednesday: that he might have a Lalique vase to match the one she had already bought.
“Well,” Mr. Gaunt said, smiling at her in a can-you-keep-a-secret sort of way, “I just might. Can you get rid of your friend for a minute or two?”
Cyndi Rose asked Steffie to go on ahead to Nan’s and order coffee for her; she would be right along, she said. Steffie went, but with a puzzled look on her face.
Mr. Gaunt went into the back room and came out with a Lalique vase. It did not just match the other; it was an identical twin.
“How much?” Cyndi Rose asked, and caressed the sweet curve of the vase with a finger which was not quite steady. She remembered her satisfaction at the bargain she had struck on Wednesday with some rue.
He had only been planting the hook, it seemed.
Now he would reel her in. This vase would be no thirty-one-dollar bargain; this time he would really sock it to her. But she wanted it to balance off the other on the mantelpiece in the living room; she wanted it very badly.
She could hardly believe her ears at Leland Gaunt’s reply.
“Because this is my first week, why don’t we call it two for the price of one? Here you are, my dear-enjoy it.”
Her shock was so great that she almost dropped the vase on the floor when he put it in her hand.
“What… I thought you said…”
“You heard me correctly,” he said, and she suddenly found she could not take her eyes away from his. Francae was wrong about them, she thought in a distant, preoccupied sort of way. They’re not green at all. They’re gray. Dark gray. “There is one other thing, though.”
“Is there?”
“Yes-do you know a Sheriff’s Deputy named Norris Ridgewick?”
The little silver bell tinkled.
Everett Frankel, the Physician’s Assistant who worked with Dr.
Van Allen, bought the pipe Brian Rusk had noticed on his advance visit to Needful Things for twelve dollars and a prank to be played on Sally Ratcliffe. Poor old Slopey Dodd, the stutterer who attended speech therapy on Tuesday afternoons with Brian, bought a pewter teapot for his mom’s birthday. It cost him seventy-one cents… and a promise, freely given, that he would play a funny trick on Sally’s boyfriend, Lester Pratt. Mr. Gaunt told Slopey he would supply him the few items he would need to play this trick when the time came, and Slopey said that would be rub-rub-real g-g-ggood. June Gavineaux, wife of the town’s most prosperous dairy farmer, bought a cloisonne vase for ninety-seven dollars and a promise to play a funny trick on Father Brigham of Our Lady of Serene Waters. Not long after she left, Mr. Gaunt arranged for a somewhat similar trick to be played on the Reverend Willie.