“What have you got in there?” Alan asked, hopping away with his left foot in his hand. “Half of Castle Land Quarry?”
“I guess it has been awhile since I cleaned em out.” John smiled guiltily and began stuffing papers and office supplies helter-skelter back into the drawers. His conventionally handsome face was flaming scarlet. He was on his knees, and when he pivoted to get the paper-clips and staples which had gone under Clut’s desk, he kicked over a tall stack of forms and reports that he had stacked on the floor. Now the bullpen area of the Sheriff’s Office was beginning to resemble a tornado zone.
“Whoops!” John said.
“Whoops,” Alan said, sitting on Norris Ridgewick’s desk and trying to massage his toes through his heavy black police-issue shoes. “Whoops is good, John. A very accurate description of the situation. This is a whoops if I ever saw one.”
“Sorry,” John said again, and actually wormed under his desk on his stomach, sweeping errant clips and staples toward him with the sides of his hands. Alan was not sure if he should laugh or cry.
John’s feet were wagging back and forth as he moved his hands, spreading the papers on the floor widely and evenly.
“John, get out of there!” Alan yelled. He was trying hard not to laugh, but he could tell already it was going to be a lost cause.
LaPointe jerked. His head honked briskly against the underside of his desk. And another stack of papers, one which had been deposited on the very edge of gravity to make room for the drawers, fell over the side. Most floomped straight to the floor, but dozens went seesawing lazily back and forth through the air.
He’s gonna be filing those all day, Alan thought resignedly.
Maybe all week.
Then he could hold on no longer. He threw back his head and bellowed laughter. Andy Clutterbuck, who had been in the dispatcher’s office, came out to see what was going on.
“Sheriff?” he asked. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Alan said. Then he looked at the reports and forms, scattered hell to breakfast, and began to laugh again. “John’s doing a little creative paperwork here, that’s all.”
John crawled out from under his desk and stood up. He looked like a man who wishes mightily that someone would ask him to stand at attention, or maybe hit the deck and do forty pushupsThe front of his previously immaculate uniform was covered with dust, and in spite of his amusement, Alan made a mental note it had been a long time since Eddie Warburton had taken care of the floor under these bullpen desks.
Then he began laughing again.
There was simply no help for it. Clut looked from John to Alan and then back to John again, puzzled.
“Okay,” Alan said, getting himself under control at last. “What were you looking for, John? The Holy Grail? The Lost Chord?
What?”
“My wallet,” John said, brushing ineffectually at the front of his uniform. “I can’t find my goddam wallet.”
“Did you check your car?”
“Both of them,” John said. He passed a disgusted glance over the asteroid belt of junk around his desk. “The cruiser I was driving last night and my Pontiac. But sometimes when I’m here I stick it in a desk drawer because it makes a lump against my butt when I sit down. So I was checking-”
“It wouldn’t bust your ass like that if you didn’t keep your whole goddam life in there, John,” Andy Clutterbuck said reasonably.
“Clut,” Alan said, “go play in the traffic, would you?”
“Huh?”
Alan rolled his eyes. “Go find something to do. I think John and I can handle this; we’re trained investigators. If it turns out we can’t, we’ll let you know.”
“Oh, sure. just trying to help, you know. I’ve seen his wallet.
It looks like he’s got the whole Library of Congress in there. In fact-”
“Thanks for your input, Clut. We’ll see you.”
“Okay,” Clut said. “Always glad to help. Later, dudes.”
Alan rolled his eyes. He felt like laughing again, but controlled himself. It was clear from John’s unhappy expression that it was no joke to him. He was embarrassed, but that was only part of it. Alan had lost a wallet or two in his time, and he knew w@at a shitty feeling it was. Losing the money in it and the hassle of reporting credit cards gone west was only part of it, and not necessarily the worst part, either. You kept remembering stuff you had tucked away in there, stuff that might seem like junk to someone else but was irreplaceable to you.
John was hunkered down on his hams, picking up papers, sorting them, stacking them, and looking disconsolate. Alan helped.
“Did you really hurt your toes, Alan?”
“Nah. You know these shoes-it’s like wearing Brinks trucks on your feet. How much was in the wallet, John?”
“Aw, no more’n twenty bucks, I guess. But I got my hunting license last week, and that was in there. Also my MasterCard. I’ll have to call the bank and tell them to cancel the number if I can’t find the damned wallet. But what I really want are the pictures.
Mom and Dad, my sisters… you know. Stuff like that.”
But it wasn’t the picture of his mother and father or the ones of his sisters that John really cared about; the really important one was the picture of him and Sally Ratcliffe. Clut had taken it at the Fryeburg State Fair about three months before Sally had broken up with John in favor of that stonebrain Lester Pratt.
“Well,” Alan said, “it’ll turn up. The money and the plastic may be gone, but the wallet and pictures will probably come home, John. They usually do. You know that.”
“Yeah,” John said with a sigh. “It’s just that damn, I keep trying to remember if I had it this morning when I came in to work.
I just can’t.”
“Well, I hope you find it. Stick a LOST notice up on the bulletin board, why don’t you?”
“I will. And I’ll get the rest of this mess cleaned up.”
“I know you will, John. Take it easy.”
Alan went out to the parking lot, shaking his head.
3
The small silver bell over the door of Needful Things tinkled and Babs Miller, member in good standing of the Ash Street Bridge Club, came in a little timidly.
“Mrs. Miller!” Leland Gaunt welcomed her, consulting the sheet of paper which lay beside his cash register. He made a small tickmark on it. “How good that you could come! And right on time!
It was the music box you were interested in, wasn’t it? A lovely piece of work.”
“I wanted to speak to you about it, yes,” Babs said. “I suppose it’s sold.” It was difficult for her to imagine that such a lovely thing could not have been sold. She felt her heart break a little just at the thought. The tune it played, the one Mr. Gaunt claimed he could not remember… she thought she knew just which one it must be.
She had once danced to that tune on the Pavillion at Old Orchard Beach with the captain of the football team, and later that same evening she had willingly given up her virginity to him under a gorgeous May moon.
He had given her the first and last orgasm of her life, and all the while it had been roaring through her veins, that tune had been twisting through her head like a burning wire.
“No, it’s right here,” Mr. Gaunt said. He took it from the glass case where it had been hiding behind the Polaroid camera and set it on top. Babs Miller’s face lit up at the sight of it.
“I’m sure it’s more than I could afford,” Babs said, “all at once, that is, but I really like it, Mr. Gaunt, and if there was any chance that I could pay for it in installments… any chance at all - -.”
Mr. Gaunt smiled. It was an exquisite, comforting smile. “I think you’re needlessly worried,” said he. “You’re going to be surprised at how reasonable the price of this lovely music box is, Mrs.
Miller.
Very surprised. Sit down. Let’s talk about it.”
She sat down.
He came toward her.
His eyes captured hers.
That tune started up in her head again.
And she was lost.
4
“I remember now,” Jillian Mislaburski told Alan. “It was the Rusk boy. Billy, I think his name is. Or maybe it’s Bruce.”
They were standing in her living room, which was dominated by the Sony TV and a gigantic plaster crucified Jesus which hung on the wall behind it. Oprah was on the tube. judging from the way Jesus had His eyes rolled up under His crown of thorns, Alan thought He would maybe have preferred Geraldo. Or Divorce Court. Mrs. Mislaburski had offered
