Wilma and Nettle. Henry and Hugh. Lester and John. Someone had wired them together like packets of high explosive. "I don't know, Clut, but we're going to find out."
He hung up and dialled Polly's number again. His urge to make things right with her, to understand what had happened to make her so furious with him, was fading. The replacement feeling which had begun to creep over him was even less comforting: a deep, unfocused dread; a growing feeling that she was in danger.
Ring, ring, ring... but no answer.
Polly, I love you and we need to talk. Please pick up the phone.
Polly, I love you and we need to talk. Please pick up the phone.
Polly, I love you the litany ran around in his head like a wind-up toy.
He wanted to call Clut back and ask him to check on her right away, before he did anything else, but couldn't. That would be very wrong when there might be other packets of explosive still waiting to explode in The Rock.
Yes, but Alan... suppose Polly's one of them?
That thought poked some buried association loose, but he was unable to grasp it before it floated away.
Alan slowly hung up the telephone, cutting it off in mid-ring as he settled it into its cradle.
3
Polly could stand it no longer. She rolled on her side, reached for the telephone... and it stilled in mid-ring.
Good, she thought. But was it?
She was lying on her bed, listening to the sound of approaching thunder. It was hot upstairs-as hot as the middle of July-but opening the windows was not an option, because she'd had Dave Phillips, one of the local handymen and caretakers, put on her storm windows and doors just the week before. So she had taken off the old jeans and shirt she had worn on her expedition to the country and folded them neatly over the chair by the door. Now she lay on the bed in her underwear, wanting a little nap before she got up and showered, but unable to go to sleep.
Some of it was the sirens, but more of it was Alan; what Alan had done. She could not comprehend this grotesque betrayal of all she had believed and all she had trusted, but neither could she escape it. Her mind would turn to something else (those sirens, for instance, and how they sounded like the end of the world) and then suddenly it would be there again, how he had gone behind her back, how he had sneaked. It was like being poked by the splintery end of a board in some tender, secret place.
Oh Alan, how could you? she asked him-and herself-again.
The voice which replied surprised her. It was Aunt Evvie's voice, and beneath the dry lack of sentiment that had always been her way, Polly felt a disquieting, powerful anger.
If you had told him the truth in the first place, girl, he never would have had to.
Polly sat up quickly. That was a disturbing voice, all right, and the most disturbing thing about it was the fact that it was her own voice. Aunt Evvie was many years dead. This was her own subconscious, using Aunt Evvie to express its anger the way a shy ventriloquist might use his dummy to ask a pretty girl for a date, andStop it, girl-didn't I once tell you this town "sfull of ghosts? Maybe it is me. Maybe it is.
Polly uttered a whimpering, frightened cry and then pressed her hand against her mouth.
Or maybe it isn't. In the end, who it is don't matter much, does it?
The question is this, Trisha: Who sinned first? Who lied first?
Who covered up first? Who cast the first stone?
"That's not fair!" Polly shouted into the hot room, and then looked at her own frightened, wide-eyed reflection in the bedroom mirror. She waited for the voice of Aunt Evvie to come back, and when it didn't, she slowly lay back down again.
Perhaps she had sinned first, if omitting part of the truth and telling a few white lies was sinning. Perhaps she had covered up first. But did that give Alan the right to open an investigation on her, the way a law officer might open an investigation on a known felon? Did it give him the right to put her name on some interstate law-enforcement wire... or send out a tracer on her, if that was what they called it... or... or...
Never mind, Polly, a voice-one she knew-whispered. Stop tearing yourself apart over what was very proper behavior on your part. I mean, after all! You heard the guilt in his voice, didn't you?
"Yes!" she muttered fiercely into the pillow. "That's right, I did!
What about that, Aunt Evvie?" There was no answer... only a queer, light tugging (the question is this Trisha) at her subconscious mind. As if she had forgotten something, left something out (would you like a sweet Trisha) of the equation.
Polly rolled restlessly onto her side, and the azka tumbled across the fullness of one breast. She heard something inside scratch delicately at the silver wall of its prison.
No, Polly thought, it's just something shifting. Something inert.
This idea that there really is something alive in there... it's)just your imagination.
Scratch-scritch-scratch.
The silver ball jiggled minutely between the white cotton cup of her bra and the coverlet of the bed.