Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They're very serious questions. I'm afraid if you don't come right down to answer them, I'll have to come and get you. I'll have to come in my police car.
Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, "This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb."
"Huh-huh-who is it?" he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.
"I dunno!" Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. "I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that."
Crowfix?
Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.
Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.
Not Crowfix.
Koufax.
Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.
He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.
"Hello, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said softly.
"Huh-Huh-Hello," Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.
"You don't have a thing to worry about," Mr. Gaunt said. "If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn't have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?"
"How do you know about that?" Brian again felt like throwing up.
"That doesn't matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they'll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.
They'll think you didn't see him because he was behind the house."
Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn't snooping. He wasn't; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.
"I can't lie!" he whispered into the telephone. "I always get caught out when I lie!"
"Not this time, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said. "This time you're going to do it like a champ."
And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.
Gaunt knew best about this, too.
2
While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.
Except it wasn't her bedroom.
When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.
She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing "My Wish Came True" in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.
The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another.
Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.
The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing "Blue Hawaii," and Cora hulahulaed into the jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the br**sts of living pheasants.
She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.