Insomnia (49 page)

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe something
did
use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?’

‘And what do we do now?’ she added.

Ralph could only shake his head.

She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say
Twenty-three skidoo
any old time, then reached for the phone. ‘Almost three-thirty! My goodness!’

Ralph touched her hand. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘Simone Castonguay. I’d made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon – there’s a card-party at the Grange – but I can’t go after all this. I’d lose my shirt.’ She laughed, then colored prettily. ‘Just a figure of speech.’

Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver. ‘Go on to your card-party, Lois.’

‘Really?’ She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.

‘Yes.’ He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being
carried,
the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn’t see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.

Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. They might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers . . . but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition – or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition – that Doc #3 couldn’t follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.

Maybe not, but it
felt
right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he
did
know was that Doc #3 hadn’t cut Lois’s balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3 – Crazy Doc –
intended
to cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.

He didn’t know. But he knew he needed time to think, and he also knew that constructive thinking would be hard to do until he was fairly sure that Lois was safe, at least for awhile.

‘Ralph? You’re getting that moogy look again.’

‘That
what
look?’

‘Moogy.’ She tossed her hair pertly. ‘That’s a word I made up to describe how Mr Chasse looked when he was pretending to listen to me but was actually thinking about his coin collection. I know a moogy look when I see one, Ralph. What are you thinking about?’

‘I was wondering what time you think you’ll get back from your card-game.’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether or not we stop at Tubby’s for chocolate frappés.’ She spoke with the air of a woman revealing a secret vice.

‘Suppose you come straight back.’

‘Seven o’clock. Maybe seven-thirty.’

‘Call me as soon as you get home. Would you do that?’

‘Yes. You
want
me out of town, don’t you? That’s what that moogy look really means.’

‘Well . . .’

‘You think that nasty bald thing means to hurt me, don’t you?’

‘I think it’s a possibility.’

‘Well, he might hurt you, too!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

But so far as I can tell, Lois, he’s not wearing any of
my
fashion accessories
.

‘But
what
?’

‘I’m going to be okay until you get back, that’s all.’ He remembered her deprecating remark about modern men hugging each other and bawling and tried for a masterful frown. ‘Go play cards and leave this business to me, at least for the time being. That’s an order.’

Carolyn would have either laughed or gotten angry at such comic-opera macho posturing. Lois, who belonged to an entirely different school of feminine thought, only nodded and looked grateful to have the decision taken out of her hands. ‘All right.’ She tilted his chin down so she could look directly into his eyes. ‘Do you know what you’re doing, Ralph?’

‘Nope. Not yet, anyway.’

‘All right. Just as long as you admit it.’ She placed a hand on his forearm and a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the corner of his mouth. Ralph felt an entirely welcome prickle of heat in his groin. ‘I’ll go to Ludlow and win five dollars playing poker with those silly women who are always trying to fill their inside straights. Tonight we’ll talk about what to do next. Okay?’

‘Yes.’

Her small smile – a thing more in the eyes than of the mouth – suggested that they might do a little more than just talk, if Ralph was bold . . . and at that moment he felt quite bold, indeed. Not even Mr Chasse’s stern gaze from his place atop the TV affected that feeling very much.

It was quarter to four by the time Ralph crossed the street and walked the short distance back up the hill to his own building. Weariness was stealing over him again; he felt as if he had been up for roughly three centuries. Yet at the same time he felt better than he had since Carolyn had died. More together. More
himself
.

All right,
he thought,
so maybe I’m a little confused right now.

Indeed he was. Also frightened, exhilarated, disoriented, and a touch horny. Yet one clear idea came through this mix of emotions, one thing he needed to do before he did anything else: he had to make up with Bill. If that meant apologizing, he could do that. Maybe an apology was even in order. Bill, after all, hadn’t come to
him,
saying, ‘Gee, old buddy, you look terrible, tell me all about it.’ No,
he
had gone to
Bill
. He had done so with misgivings, true, but that didn’t change the fact, and—

Ah, Ralph, jeez, what am I going to do with you?
It was Carolyn’s amused voice, speaking to him as clearly as it had during the weeks following her death, when he’d handled the worst of his grief by discussing everything with her inside his head . . . and sometimes aloud, if he happened to be alone in the apartment.
Bill was the one who blew his top, sweetie, not you. I see you’re just as determined to be hard on yourself now as you were when I was alive. I guess some things never change
.

Ralph smiled a little. Yeah, okay, maybe some things never
did
change, and maybe the argument
had
been more Bill’s fault than his. The question was whether or not he wanted to cut himself off from Bill’s companionship over a stupid quarrel and a lot of stiff-necked horseshit about who had been right and who had been wrong. Ralph didn’t think he did, and if that meant making an apology Bill didn’t really deserve, what was so awful about that? So far as he knew, there were no bones in the three little syllables that made up
I’m sorry
.

The Carolyn inside his head responded to this idea with wordless incredulity.

Never mind,
he told her as he started up the walk.
I’m doing this for me, not for him. Or for you, as far as that goes
.

He was amazed and amused to discover how guilty that last thought made him feel – almost as if he had committed an act of sacrilege. But that didn’t make the thought any less true.

He was feeling around in his pocket for his latchkey when he saw a note thumbtacked to the door. Ralph felt for his glasses, but he had left them upstairs on the kitchen table. He leaned back, squinting to read Bill’s scrawling hand:

Bill

Ralph straightened up with a feeling of relief and gratitude. If only everything else that had been happening to him lately could straighten itself out as easily as this part had done!

He went upstairs, shook the teakettle, and was filling it at the sink when the telephone rang. It was John Leydecker. ‘Boy, I’m glad I finally got hold of you,’ he said. ‘I was getting a little worried, old buddy.’

‘Why?’ Ralph asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Maybe nothing, maybe something. Charlie Pickering made bail after all.’

‘You told me that wouldn’t happen.’

‘I was wrong, okay?’ Leydecker said, clearly irritated. ‘It wasn’t the only thing I was wrong about, either. I told you the judge’d probably set bail in the forty-thousand-dollar range, but I didn’t know Pickering was going to draw Judge Steadman, who has been known to say that he doesn’t even
believe
in insanity. Steadman set bail at eighty grand. Pickering’s court-appointed bellowed like a calf in the moonlight, but it didn’t make any difference.’

Ralph looked down and saw he was still holding the teakettle in one hand. He put it on the table. ‘And he
still
made bail?’

‘Yep. Remember me telling you that Ed would throw him away like a paring knife with a broken blade?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, score it as another strikeout for John Leydecker. Ed marched into the bailiff’s office at eleven o’clock this morning with a briefcase full of money.’

‘Eight thousand dollars?’ Ralph asked.

‘I said briefcase, not envelope,’ Leydecker replied. ‘Not eight but eighty. They’re still buzzing down at the courthouse. Hell, they’ll be buzzing about it even after the Christmas tinsel comes down.’

Ralph tried to imagine Ed Deepneau in one of his baggy old sweaters and a pair of worn corduroys – Ed’s mad-scientist outfits, Carolyn had called them – pulling banded stacks of twenties and fifties out of his briefcase and couldn’t do it. ‘I thought you said ten per cent was enough to get out.’

‘It is, if you can also escrow something – a house or a piece of property, for instance – that stacks up somewhere near the total bail amount. Apparently Ed couldn’t do that, but he
did
have a little rainy-day cash under the mattress. Either that or he gave the tooth-fairy one hell of a blowjob.’

Ralph found himself remembering the letter he had gotten from Helen about a week after she had left the hospital and moved out to High Ridge. She had mentioned a check she’d gotten from Ed – seven hundred and fifty dollars.
It seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities,
she had written. Ralph wondered if Helen would still feel that way if she knew that Ed had walked into the Derry County Courthouse with enough money to send his daughter sailing through the first fifteen years of her life . . . and pledged it to free a crazy guy who liked to play with knives and Molotov cocktails.

‘Where in God’s name
did
he get it?’ he asked Leydecker.

‘Don’t know.’

‘And he isn’t required to say?’

‘Nope. It’s a free country. I understand he said something about cashing in some stocks.’

Ralph thought back to the old days – the good old days before Carolyn had gotten sick and died and Ed had just gotten sick. Thought back to meals the four of them had had together once every two weeks or so, take-out pizza at the Deepneaus’ or maybe Carol’s chicken pot-pie in the Robertses’ kitchen, and remembered Ed saying on one occasion that he was going to treat them all to prime rib at the Red Lion in Bangor when his stock accounts matured.
That’s right,
Helen had replied, smiling at Ed fondly. She had been pregnant then, just beginning to show, and looking all of fourteen with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing a checkered smock that was still yards too big for her.
Which do you think will mature first, Edward? The two thousand shares of United Toejam or the six thousand of Amalgamated Sourballs?
And he had growled at her, a growl that had made them all laugh because Ed Deepneau didn’t have a mean bone in his body, anyone who had known him more than two weeks knew that Ed wouldn’t hurt a fly. Except Helen might have known a little different – even back then Helen had almost surely known a little different, fond look or no fond look.

‘Ralph?’ Leydecker asked. ‘Are you still there?’