Insomnia (50 page)

‘Ed didn’t have any stocks,’ Ralph said. ‘He was a research chemist, for Christ’s sake, and his father was foreman in a bottling plant in some crazy place like Plaster Rock, Pennsylvania. No dough there.’

‘Well, he got it somewhere, and I’d be lying if I said I liked it.’

‘From the other Friends of Life, do you think?’

‘No, I don’t. First, we’re not talking rich folks here – most of the people who belong to The Friends are blue-collar types, working-class heroes. They give what they can, but this much? No. They could have gotten together enough property deeds among them to spring Pickering, I suppose, but they didn’t. Most of them wouldn’t, even if Ed had asked. Ed’s all but
persona non grata
with them now, and I imagine they wish they’d never heard of Charlie Pickering. Dan Dalton’s taken back the leadership of The Friends of Life, and to most of them, that’s a big relief. Ed and Charlie and two other people – a man named Frank Felton and a woman named Sandra McKay – seem to be operating very much on their own hook now. Felton I don’t know anything about and there’s no jacket on him, but the McKay woman has toured some of the same fine institutions as Charlie. She’s unmissable, too – pasty complexion, lots of acne, glasses so thick they make her eyes look like poached eggs, goes about three hundred pounds.’

‘You joking?’

‘No. She favors stretch pants from Kmart and can usually be observed travelling in the company of assorted Ding-Dongs, Funny Bones, and Hostess Twinkies. She often wears a big sweatshirt with the words
BABY FACTORY
on the front. Claims to have given birth to fifteen children. She’s never actually had any, and probably can’t.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

‘Because I want you to watch out for these people,’ Leydecker said. He spoke patiently, as if to a child. ‘They may be dangerous. Charlie is for sure, that you know without me telling you, and Charlie is out. Where Ed got the money to spring him is secondary – he got it, that’s what matters. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he came after you again. Him, or Ed, or the others.’

‘What about Helen and Natalie?’

‘They’re with their friends – friends who are very hip to the dangers posed by screwloose hubbies. I filled Mike Hanlon in, and he’ll also keep an eye on her. The library is being watched very closely by our men. We don’t think Helen’s in any real danger at the present time – she’s still staying at High Ridge – but we’re doing what we can.’

‘Thank you, John. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the call.’

‘I appreciate that you appreciate it, but I’m not quite done yet. You need to remember who Ed called and threatened, my friend – not Helen but
you
. She doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to him anymore, but you linger on his mind, Ralph. I asked Chief Johnson if I could assign a man – Chris Nell would be my pick – to keep an eye on you, at least until after WomanCare’s Rent-A-Bitch has come and gone. I was turned down. Too much going on this week, he said . . . but the
way
I was turned down suggests to me that if
you
asked, you’d get someone to watch your back. So what do you say?’

Police protection,
Ralph thought.
That’s what they call it on the TV cop shows and that’s what he’s talking about – police protection
.

He tried to consider the idea, but too many other things got in the way; they danced in his head like weird sugarplums. Hats, docs, smocks, spray-cans. Not to mention knives, scalpels, and a pair of scissors glimpsed in the dusty lenses of his old binoculars.
Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else,
Ralph thought, and on the heels of that:
It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff
.

‘No,’ he said.

Ralph closed his eyes and saw himself picking up this same phone and calling to cancel his appointment with the pin-sticker man. This was the same thing all over again, wasn’t it? Yes. He could get police protection from the Pickerings and the McKays and the Feltons, but that wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. He knew that, felt it in every beat of his heart and pulse of his blood.

‘You heard me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want police protection.’

‘For God’s sake,
why
?’

‘I can take care of myself,’ Ralph said, and grimaced a little at the pompous absurdity of this sentiment, which he had heard expressed in John Wayne Westerns without number.

‘Ralph, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but you’re old. You got lucky on Sunday. You might not get lucky again.’

I didn’t just get lucky,
Ralph thought.
I’ve got friends in high places. Or maybe I should say entities in high places
.

‘I’ll be okay,’ he said.

Leydecker sighed. ‘If you change your mind, will you call me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if you see either Pickering or a large lady with thick glasses and stringy blonde hair hanging around—’

‘I’ll call you.’

‘Ralph, please think this over. Just a guy parked down the street is all I’m talking about.’

‘Done-bun-can’t-be-undone,’ Ralph said.

‘Huh?’

‘I said I appreciate it, but no. I’ll be talking to you.’

Ralph gently replaced the telephone in its cradle. Probably John was right, he thought, probably he was crazy, yet he had never felt so completely sane in his life.

‘Tired,’ he told his sunny, empty kitchen,‘but sane.’ He paused, then added: ‘Also halfway to being in love, maybe.’

That made him grin, and he was still grinning when he finally put the kettle on to heat.

He was on his second cup of tea when he remembered what Bill had said in his note about owing him a meal. He decided on the spur of the moment to ask Bill to meet him at Day Break, Sun Down for a little supper. They could start over.

I think we have to start over,
he thought,
because that little psycho has got his hat, and I’m pretty sure that means he’s in trouble
.

Well, no time like the present. He picked up the phone and dialed a number he had no trouble remembering: 941–5000. The number of Derry Home Hospital.

The hospital receptionist connected him with Room 313. The clearly tired woman who answered the phone was Denise Polhurst, the dying man’s niece. Bill wasn’t there, she told him. Four other teachers from what she termed ‘Unc’s glory days’ had shown up around one, and Bill had proposed lunch. Ralph even knew how his downstairs tenant would have put it: better belated than never. It was one of his favorites. When Ralph asked her if she expected him back soon, Denise Polhurst said she did.

‘He’s been so faithful. I don’t know what I would have done without him, Mr Robbins.’

‘Roberts,’ he said. ‘Bill made Mr Polhurst sound like a wonderful man.’

‘Yes, they all feel that way. But of course the bills won’t be coming to his
fan club,
will they?’

‘No,’ Ralph said uncomfortably. ‘I suppose not. Bill’s note said your uncle is very low.’

‘Yes. The doctor says he probably won’t last the day, let alone the night, but I’ve heard
that
song before. God forgive me, but sometimes it’s like Uncle Bob’s one of those ads from Publishers Clearing House – always promising, never delivering. I suppose that sounds awful, but I’m too tired to care. They turned off the life-support stuff this morning – I couldn’t have taken the responsibility all by myself, but I called Bill and he said it was what Unc would have wanted. “It’s time for Bob to explore the next world,” he said. “He’s mapped this one to a nicety.” Isn’t that poetic, Mr Robbins?’

‘Yes. It’s
Roberts,
Ms Polhurst. Will you tell Bill that Ralph Roberts called and would like him to call ba—’

‘So we turned it off and I was all prepared – nerved up, I guess you’d say – and then he didn’t die. I can’t understand it. He’s ready,
I’m
ready, his life’s work is done . . . so why won’t he die?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Death is very stupid,’ she said, speaking in the nagging and unlovely voice which only the very tired and the deeply heartsick seem to employ. ‘An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cord would be fired for malpractice.’

Ralph’s mind had a tendency to drift these days, but this time it snapped back in a hurry. ‘What did you say?’

‘Beg your pardon?’ She sounded startled, as if her own mind had been drifting.

‘You said something about cutting the cord.’

‘I didn’t
mean
anything,’ she said. That nagging tone had grown stronger . . . except it wasn’t nagging, Ralph realized; it was whining, and it was frightened. Something was wrong here. His heartbeat suddenly speeded up. ‘I didn’t mean anything at
all,
’ she insisted, and suddenly the phone Ralph was holding turned a deep and sinister shade of blue in his hand.

She’s been thinking about killing him, and not just idly, either – she’s been thinking about putting a pillow over his face and smothering him with it
. It wouldn’t take long,
she thinks
. A mercy,
she thinks
. Over at last,
she thinks
.

Ralph pulled the phone away from his ear. Blue light, cold as a February sky, rose in pencil-thin rays from the holes in the earpiece.

Murder is blue,
Ralph thought, holding the phone at arm’s length and staring with wide-eyed unbelief as the blue rays began to bend and drip toward the floor. He could hear, very faintly, the quacking, anxious voice of Denise Polhurst.
It wasn’t anything I ever wanted to know, but I guess I know it anyway: murder is blue
.

He brought the handset toward his mouth again, cocking it to keep the top half, with its freight of icicle aura, away from him. He was afraid that if that end of the handset got too close to his ear, it might deafen him with her cold and furious desperation.

‘Tell Bill that Ralph called,’ he said. ‘
Roberts,
not Robbins.’ He hung up without waiting for a reply. The blue rays shattered away from the phone’s earpiece and tumbled toward the floor. Ralph was again reminded of icicles; this time of how they fell in a neat row when you ran your gloved hand along the underside of an eave after a warm winter day. They disappeared before they hit the linoleum. He glanced around. Nothing in the room glowed, shimmered, or vibrated. The auras were gone again. He began to let out a sigh of relief and then, from outside on Harris Avenue, a car backfired.

In the empty second-floor apartment, Ralph Roberts screamed.

He didn’t want any more tea, but he was still thirsty. He found half a Diet Pepsi – flat but wet – in the back of the fridge, poured it into a plastic cup with a faded Red Apple logo on it, and took it outside. He could no longer stand to be in the apartment, which seemed to smell of unhappy wakefulness. Especially not after what had happened with the phone.

The day had become even more beautiful, if that was possible; a strong, mild wind had developed, rolling bands of light and shadow across the west side of Derry and combing the leaves from the trees. These the wind sent hurrying along the sidewalks in rattling dervishes of orange and yellow and red.

Ralph turned left not because he had any conscious desire to revisit the picnic area up by the airport but only because he wanted the wind at his back. Nevertheless, he found himself entering the little clearing again some ten minutes later. This time it was empty, and he wasn’t surprised. There was no edge in the wind that had sprung up, nothing to make old men and women scurry indoors, but it was hard work keeping cards on the table or chess-pieces on the board when the puckish wind kept trying to snatch them away. As Ralph approached the small trestle table where Faye Chapin usually held court, he was not exactly surprised to see a note held down by a rock, and he had a good idea what the subject would be even before he put down his plastic Red Apple cup and picked it up.

He didn’t know what he thought . . . but Bill’s note had been a kind of obituary-in-progress, and he had absolutely no doubt that Faye’s was the same thing. That sense of being carried forward, effortlessly and without hesitation, was simply too strong to doubt; it was like awakening on some alien stage to find oneself speaking lines (or stumbling through them, anyway) in a drama for which one could not remember having rehearsed, or seeing a coherent shape in what had up until then looked like complete nonsense, or discovering . . .

Discovering what?

‘Another secret city, that’s what,’ he murmured. ‘The Derry of Auras.’ Then he bent over Faye’s note and read it while the wind played prankishly with his thinning hair.

Ralph read the note twice, put it back on the table with the rock on top to weight it down for the next Old Crock to happen along, then simply stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head down, gazing out at Runway 3 from beneath the bushy tangle of his brows. A crisp leaf, orange as one of the Halloween pumpkins which would soon decorate the street, came flipping down from the deep blue sky and landed in his sparse hair. Ralph brushed it away absently and thought of two hospital rooms on Home’s ICU floor, two rooms side by side. Bob Polhurst in one, Jimmy V in the other. And the next room up the hall? That one was 317, the room in which his wife had died.