She opened the top desk drawer and removed a pair of heavy scissors. She bent and yanked on the lower left-hand drawer. It was locked. Mr. Gaunt had told her that would probably be the case.
Sally glanced into the outer office, saw it was still empty, the door to the hallway still shut. Good. Great. She jammed the tips of the scissors into the crack at the top of the locked drawer and levered them up, hard. Wood splintered, and Sally felt her ni**les grow strangely, pleasantly hard. This was sort of fun. Scary, but fun.
She re-seated the scissors-the points went in farther this time and levered them up again. The lock snapped and the drawer rolled open on its casters, revealing what was inside. Sally's mouth dropped open in shocked surprise. Then she began to giggle-breathy, stifled sounds that were really closer to screams than to laughter.
"Oh Mr. Jewett! What a naughty boy you are!"
There was a stack of digest-sized magazines inside the drawer, and Naughty Boy was, in fact, the name of the one on top. The blurry picture on the cover showed a boy of about nine. He was wearing a '50's-style motorcycle cap and nothing else.
Sally reached into the drawer and pulled out the magazinesthere were a dozen of them, maybe more. Happy Kids. Nude Cuti'es.
Blowing in the Wind. Bobby's Farm World. She looked into one and could barely believe what she was seeing. Where did things like this come from? They surely didn't sell them down at the drugstore, not even on the top rack Rev. Rose sometimes preached about in church, the one with the sign that said ONLY EYES 18 YRS AND OLDER PLEASE.
A voice she knew very well suddenly spoke up in her head.
Hurry, Sally. The meeting's almost over, and you don't want to be caught in here, do you?
And then there was another voice as well, a woman's voice, one Sally could almost put a name to. Hearing this second voice was like being on the telephone with someone while someone else spoke in the background on the other end of the line.
More than fair, this second voice said. It seems divine.
Sally tuned the voice out and did what Mr. Gaunt had told her to do: she scattered the dirty magazines all over Mr. jewett's office.
Then she replaced the scissors and left the room quickly, pulling the door shut behind her. She opened the door of the outer office and peeked out. No one there... but the voices from Room 6 were louder now, and people were laughing. They were getting ready to break up; it had been an unusually short meeting.
Thank God for Mr. Gaunt! she thought, and slipped out into the hall. She had almost reached the front doors when she heard them coming out of Room 6 behind her. Sally didn't look around.
It occurred to her that she hadn't thought of Mr. Lester Big-Prick Pratt for the last five minutes, and that was really fine.
She thought she might go home and draw herself a nice bubble-bath and get into it with her wonderful splinter and spend the next two hours not thinking about Mr. Lester Big-Prick Pratt, and what a lovely change that would be! Yes, indeed! Yes, indWhat did you do in there?
What was in that envelope? Who put it there, outside the cafeteria?
When? And, most important of all, Sally, what are you starting?
She stood still for a moment, feeling little beads of sweat form on her forehead and in the hollows of her temples. Her eyes went wide and startled, like the eyes of a frightened doe. Then they narrowed and she began to walk again. She was wearing slacks, and they chafed at her in a strangely pleasant way that made her think of her frequent necking sessions with Lester.
I don't care what I did, she thought. In fact, I hope it's something really mean. He deserves a mean trick, looking like Mr.
Weatherbee but having all those disgusting magazines. I hope he chokes when he walks into his office.
"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."
"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.