"I just can't believe it. She seemed so much better-she really did. Remember me telling you about how she got up the courage to go into Needful Things all on her own last Thursday?"
"Yes."
She released him and rolled fretfully onto her back. Alan heard a small metallic chink! as she did so, and again thought nothing of it.
His mind was still examining what Polly had just told him, turning it this way and that, like a jeweller examining a suspect stone.
"I'll have to make the funeral arrangements," she said. "Nettle has got people in Yarmouth-a few, anyway-but they didn't want to have anything to do with her when she was alive, and they'll want to have even less to do with her now that she's dead. But I'll have to call them in the morning. Will I be able to go into Nettle's house, Alan?
I think she had an address book."
"I'll bring you. You won't be able to take anything away, at least not until Dr. Ryan has published his autopsy findings, but I can't see any harm in letting you copy down a few telephone numbers."
"Thank you."
A sudden thought occurred to him. "Polly, what time did Nettle leave here?"
"Quarter of eleven, I guess. It might have been as late as eleven o'clock. She didn't stay a whole hour, I don't think. Why?"
"Nothing," he said. He'd had a momentary flash: if Nettle had stayed long enough at Polly's, she might not have had time to go back home, find her dog dead, collect the rocks, write the notes, attach them to the rocks, go over to Wilma's, and break the windows. But if Nettle had left Polly's at quarter to eleven, that gave her better than two hours. Plenty of time.
Hey, Alan! the voice the falsely cheery one that usually restricted its input to the subject of Annie and Todd-spoke up. How come you're trying to bitch this up for yourself, good buddy?
And Alan didn't know. There was something else he didn't know, either-how had Nettle gotten that load of rocks over to the jerzyck house in the first place? She had no driver's license and didn't have a clue about operating a car.
Cut the crap, good buddy, the voice advised. She wrote the notes at her house-probably right down the hall from her dog's dead bodyand got the rubber bands from her own kitchen drawer, She didn't have to carry the rocks; there were Plenty of those in Wilma's back-yard garden.
Right?
Right. Yet he could not get rid of the idea that the rocks had been brought with the notes already attached. He had no concrete reason to think so, but it just seemed right... the kind of thing you'd expect from a kid or someone who thought like a kid.
Someone like Nettle Cobb.
Quit it... let it go!
He couldn't, though.
Polly touched his cheek. "I'm awfully glad you came, Alan. It must have been a horrible day for you, too."
"I've had better, but it's over now. You should let it go, too.
Get some sleep. You have a lot of arrangements to make tomorrow.
Do you want me to get you a pill?"
"No, my hands are a little better, at least. Alan-" She broke off, but stirred restlessly under the covers.
"What?"
"Nothing," she said. "It wasn't important. I think I can sleep, now that you're here. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, honey."
She rolled away from him, pulled the covers up, and was still.
For a moment he thought of how she had hugged him-the feel of her hands locked about his neck. If she was able to flex her fingers enough to do that, then she really was better. That was a good thing, maybe the best thing that had happened to him since Clut had phoned during the football game. If only things would stay better.
Polly had a slightly deviated septum and now she began to snore lightly, a sound Alan actually found rather pleasant. It was good to be sharing a bed with another person, a real person who made real sounds... and sometimes filched the covers. He grinned in the dark.
Then his mind turned back to the murders and the grin faded.
I think she'll leave me alone, anyway. I haven't seen her or heard from her, so I guess she finally got the message.
I haven't seen her or heardfrom her.
I guess she finally got the message.
A case like this one didn't need to be solved; even Seat Thomas could have told you exactly what had happened after a single look at the crime-scene through his trifocals. It had been kitchen implements instead of duelling pistols at dawn, but the result was the same: two bodies in the morgue at K.V.H. with autopsy Y-cuts in them. The only question was why it had happened. He had had a few questions, a few vague disquiets, but they would no doubt have blown away before Wilma and Nettle had been seen into the ground.
Now the disquiets were more urgent, and some of them (I guess she finally got the message) had names.
To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be large, with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite awhile before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren't afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.
Sometimes the gate was a piece of evidence found at a crimescene.
Sometimes it was a witness. Sometimes it was an assumption firmly based on events and logic. The assumptions he'd made in this case were: one, that Wilma had been following a longestablished pattern of harassment and f**kery; two, that this time she had chosen the wrong person with whom to play mind-games; three, that Nettle had snapped again as she had when she'd killed her husband. But...
I haven't seen her or heard from her.
If Nettle had really said that, how much did it change? How many assumptions did that single sentence knock into cocked hats?
Alan didn't know.
He stared into the darkness of Polly's bedroom and wondered if he'd found the gate after all.
Maybe Polly hadn't heard what Nettle had said correctly.
It was technically possible, but Alan didn't believe it. Nettle's actions, at least up to a certain point, supported what Polly claimed to have heard. Nettle hadn't come to work at Polly's on Friday. she'd said she was ill. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just scared of Wilma. That made sense; they knew from Pete Jerzyck that Wilma, after discovering that her sheets had been vandalized, had made at least one threatening call to Nettle. She might have made others the next day that Pete didn't know about. But Nettle had come to see Polly with a gift of food on Sunday morning.
Would she have done that if Wilma was still stoking the fires? Alan didn't think so.
Then there was the matter of the rocks which had been thrown through Wilma's windows. Each of the attached notes said the same thing: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. A warning usually means that the person being warned has more time to change his or her ways, but time had been up for Wilma and Nettle.
They had met on that street-corner only two hours after the rocks had been thrown.
He supposed he could get around that one if he had to. When Nettle found her dog, she would have been furious. Ditto Wilma when she got home and saw the damage to her house. All it would have taken to strike the final spark was a single telephone call. One of the two women had made that call gone up.
Alan turned over on his side, wishing that these were the old days, when you could still obtain records of local calls. If he could have documented the fact that Wilma and Nettle had spoken before their final meeting, he would have felt a lot better. Still-take the final phone-call as a given. That still left the notes themselves.
This is how it must have happened, he thought. Nettle comes home from Polly's and finds her dog dead on the hallfloor. She reads the note on the corkscrew. Then she writes the same message on fourteen or sixteen sheets of Paper and puts them in the Pocket of her coat. She also gets a bunch of rubber bands. When she gets to Wilma's, she goes into the back yard. She Piles up fourteen or sixteen rocks and uses the elastic bands to attach the notes. She must have done all that prior to throwing any rocks-it would have taken too long if she had to stop in the middle of the festivities to pick out more rocks and attach more notes. And when she's done, she goes home and broods over her dead pet some more.
It felt all wrong to him.
It felt really lousy.
It presupposed a chain of thought and action that just didn't fit what he knew of Nettle Cobb. The murder of her husband had and the balloon had been the outcome of long cycles of abuse, but the murder itself had been an impulse crime committed by a woman whose sanity had broken.
If the records in George Bannerman's old files were correct, Nettle sure hadn't written Albion Cobb any warning notes beforehand.
What felt right to him was much simpler: Nettle comes home from Polly's. She finds her dog dead in the hallway. She gets a cleaver from the kitchen drawer and heads up the street to cut herself a wide slice of Polish butt.
But if that was the case, who had broken Wilma jerzyck's windows?
"Plus the times are all so weird," he muttered, and rolled restlessly over onto his other side.
John LaPointe had been with the CID team which had spent Sunday afternoon and evening tracing Nettle's movements-what movements there had been. She had gone to Polly's with the lasagna.
She told Polly that she would probably go by the new shop, Needful Things, on her way home and speak to the owner, Leland Gaunt, if he was in-Polly said Mr. Gaunt had invited her to look at an item that afternoon and Nettle was going to tell Mr. Gaunt that Polly would probably show up, even though her hands were paining her quite badly.