“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 fuck her.”
“Brion McGinley gaped foolishly at his boss for a moment, then exploded into hearty guffaws of laughter. Principal jewett joined him. They were laughing so hard that neither of them heard Alice the first time she called Frank’s name. There was no problem the second time. The second time she nearly shrieked it.
Frank hurried over to her. “Alice? What-” Then he saw what, and a terrible, glassy fright filled him. His words dried up. He felt the flesh of his testicles crawling madly; his balls seemed to be trying to pull themselves back to where they had come from.
It was the magazines.
The secret magazines from the bottom drawer.
They had been spread all over the office like nightmare confetti: boys in uniforms, boys in haylofts, boys in straw hats, boys riding hobby-horses.
“What in God’s name?” The voice, hoarse with horror and fascination, came from Frank’s left. He turned his head in that direction (the tendons in his neck creaking like rusty screen-door springs) and saw Brion McGinley staring at the wild strew of magazines.
His eyes were all but falling out of his face.
A prank, he tried to say. A stupid prank, that’s all, those magazines are not mine. You only have to look at me to know that magazines like that would hold no… hold no interest for a man… a man of MY… MY…
His what?
He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter, anyway, because he had lost his ability to speak. Entirely lost it.
The three adults stood in shocked silence, staring into the office of Middle School Principal Frank Jewett. A magazine which had been precariously balanced on the edge of the visitor’s chair riffled its pages in response to a puff of hot air through the half-open window and then fell to the floor. Saucy Young Guys, the cover promised.
A prank, yes, I’ll say i’t was a prank, but will they believe me?
Suppose the desk drawer was forced? Will they believe me if it was?
“Mrs. Tanner?” a girl’s voice asked from behind them.
10
All three of them-jewett, Tanner, McGinley-whirled around guiltily. Two girls in red-and-white cheerleading outfits, eighthgraders, stood there. Alice Tanner and Brion McGinley moved almost simultaneously to block the view into Frank’s office (Frank Jewett himself seemed rooted to the spot, turned to stone), but they moved just a little too late. The cheerleaders’ eyes widened.
One of them-Darlene Vickery-clapped her hands to her small rosebud mouth and stared at Frank jewett unbelievingly.
Frank thought: Oh good. By noon tomorrow, every student in this school will know. By supper tomorrow night, everyone in town will know.
“You girls leave,” Mrs. Tanner said. “Someone has played a nasty joke on Mr. jewett-a very nasty joke-and you are not to say one word.
Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Erin McAvoy said; three minutes later she would be telling her best friend, Donna Beaulieu, that Mr. Jewett’s office had been decorated with pictures of boys wearing heavy metal bracelets and little else.
“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Darlene Vickery said; five minutes later she would be telling her best friend, Natalie Priest.
“Go on,” Brion McGinley said. He was trying to sound brisk, but his voice was still thick with shock. “Off you go.”
The two girls fled, cheerleader skirts flipping about their sturdy knees.
Brion turned slowly to Frank. “I think-” he began, but Frank paid no notice. He walked into his office, moving slowly, like a man in a dream. He closed the door with the word P R I N C I PA L lettered on it in neat black strokes, and slowly began picking up the magazines.
Why don’t you just give them a written confession? part of his mind screamed.
He ignored the voice. A deeper part of him, the primitive voice of survival, was also speaking, and this part told him that right now he was at his most vulnerable. If he talked to Alice or Brion now, if he tried to explain this, he would hang himself as high as Haman.
Alice was knocking on the door. Frank ignored her and continued his dream-walk around the office, picking up the magazines he had accumulated over the last nine years, writing away for them one by one and picking them up at the post office in Gates Falls, sure each time that the State Police or a team of Postal Inspectors would fall on him like a ton of bricks. None ever had. But now… this.
They won’t believe they belong to you, the primitive voice said.
They won’t allow themselves to believe it-to do that would upset too many of their comfy small-town conceptions of life. Once you get yourself under control, you should be able to put it over.
But… who would have done something like this? Who could have done something like this? (It never occurred to Frank to ask himself what mad compulsion had caused him to bring the magazines herehere, of all places-in the first place.) There was only one person Frank jewett could think of-the one person from The Rock with whom he’d shared his secret life.
