"Yes, I hope he f**king chokes," she whispered. It was the first time in her life she had actually said the f-word out loud, and her ni**les tightened and began to tingle again. Sally began to walk faster, thinking in some vague way that there might be something else she could do in the bathtub. It suddenly seemed to her that she had a need or two of her own. She wasn't sure exactly how to satisfy them... but she had an idea she could find out.
The Lord, after all, helped those who helped themselves.
8
"Does that seem like a fair price?" Mr. Gaunt asked Polly.
Polly started to reply, then paused. Mr. Gaunt's attention suddenly seemed to be diverted; he was gazing off into space and his lips were moving soundlessly, as if in prayer.
"Mr. Gaunt?"
He started slightly. Then his eyes returned to her and he smiled.
"Pardon me, Polly. My mind wanders sometimes."
"The price seems more than fair," Polly told him. "It seems divine." She took her checkbook from her purse and began to write.
Every now and then she would wonder vaguely just what she was up to here, and then she would feel Mr. Gaunt's eyes call hers.
When she looked up and met them, the questions and doubts subsided again.
The check she handed to him was drawn in the amount of forty-six dollars. Mr. Gaunt folded it neatly and tucked it into the lapel pocket of his sport-jacket.
"Be sure to fill out the counterfoil," Mr. Gaunt said. "Your snoopy friend will undoubtedly want to see it."
"He's coming to see you," Polly said, doing exactly as Mr. Gaunt had suggested. "He thinks you're a confidence man."
"He's got lots of thoughts and lots of plans," Mr. Gaunt said, "but his plans are going to change and his thoughts are going to blow away like fog on a windy morning. Take my word for it."
"You... you're not going to hurt him, are you?"
"Me? You do me a very great wrong, Patricia Chalmers. I am a pacifist-one of the world's great pacifists. I wouldn't raise a hand against our Sheriff. I just meant that he's got business on the other side of the bridge this afternoon. He doesn't know it yet, but he does. "Oh."
"Now, Polly?"
"Yes?"
"Your check does not constitute complete payment for the azka. "It doesn't?"
"No." He was holding a plain white envelope in his hands. Polly didn't have the slightest idea where it had come from, but that seemed perfectly all right. "In order to finish paying for your amulet, Polly, you have to help me play a little trick on someone."
"Alan?" Suddenly she was as alarmed as a woods-rabbit which gets a dry whiff of fire on a hot summer afternoon. "Do you mean Alan?"
"I most certainly do not," he said. "Asking you to play a trick on someone you know, let alone someone you think you love, would be unethical, my dear."
"It would?"
"Yes... although I believe you really ought to think carefully about your relationship with the Sheriff, Polly. You may find that it all comes down to a fairly simple choice: a little pain now to save a great deal of pain later. Put another way, those who marry in haste often live to repent in leisure."
"I don't understand you."
"I know you don't. You'll understand me better, Polly, after you check your mail. You see, I'm not the only one who has attracted his snooping, sniffy nose. For now, let us discuss the small prank I want you to play. The butt of this joke is a fellow whom I have just recently employed. His name is Merrill."
"Ace Merrill?"
His smile faded. "Don't interrupt me, Polly. Don't ever interrupt me when I am speaking. Not unless you want your hands to swell up like innertubes filled with poison gas."
She shrank away from him, her dreamy, dreaming eyes wide.
"I... I'm sorry."
"All right. Your apology is accepted... this time. Now listen to me. Listen very carefully."
9
Frank Jewett and Brion McGinley, the Middle School's geography teacher and basketball coach, walked from Room 6 into the outer office)just behind Alice Tanner. Frank was grinning and telling Brion a joke he'd heard earlier that day from a textbook salesman. It had to do with a doctor who was finding it difficult to diagnose a woman's illness. He had narrowed it down to two possibles-AIDS or Alzheimer's-but that was as far as he could go.
"So the gal's husband takes the doctor aside," Frank went on as they walked into the outer office. Alice was bending over her desk, thumbing through a little pile of messages there, and Frank lowered his voice. Alice could be quite the stick when it came to jokes which were even slightly off-color.
"Yeah?" Now Brion was also beginning to grin.
"Yeah." He's real upset. He says, "Jeer, Doc-is that the best you can do? Isn't there some way we can figure out which one she has?"
"Alice selected two of the pink message forms and started into the inner office with them. She got as far as the doorway and then stopped short, as if she'd walked into an invisible stone wall. Neither of the grinning middle-aged small-town white guys noticed.
"Sure, it's easy," the doc says. "Take her about twenty-five miles into the woods and leave her there. If she finds her way back, don't f**k her."