Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(78)

11

He let himself into his turret room shortly after six, carrying a tray of food from the caf. He looked first at the blackboard, and smiled at what was printed there:

Thank you for believing me.

As if I had any choice, hon.

He erased Abra’s message, then sat down at his desk with his dinner. After leaving the rest area, his thoughts had turned back to Dick Hallorann. He supposed it was natural enough; when someone finally asked you to teach them, you went to your own teacher to find out how to do it. Dan had fallen out of touch with Dick during the drinking years (mostly out of shame), but he thought it might just be possible to find out what had happened to the old fellow. Possibly even to get in touch, if Dick was still alive. And hey, lots of people lived into their nineties, if they took care of themselves. Abra’s great-gramma, for instance—she had to be really getting up there.

I need some answers, Dick, and you’re the only person I know who might have a few. So do me a favor, my friend, and still be alive.

He fired up his computer and opened Firefox. He knew that Dick had spent his winters cooking at a series of Florida resort hotels, but he couldn’t remember the names or even which coast they had been on. Probably both—Naples one year, Palm Beach the next, Sarasota or Key West the year after that. There was always work for a man who could tickle palates, especially rich palates, and Dick had been able to tickle them like nobody’s business. Dan had an idea that his best shot might be the quirky spelling of Dick’s last name—not Halloran but Hallorann. He typed Richard Hallorann and Florida into the search box, then punched ENTER. He got back thousands of hits, but he was pretty sure the one he wanted was third from the top, and a soft sigh of disappointment escaped him. He clicked the link, and an article from The Miami Herald appeared. No question. When the age as well as the name appeared in the headline, you knew exactly what you were looking at.

Noted South Beach Chef Richard “Dick” Hallorann, 81.

There was a photo. It was small, but Dan would have recognized that cheerful, knowing face anywhere. Had he died alone? Dan doubted it. The man had been too gregarious . . . and too fond of women. His deathbed had probably been well attended, but the two people he’d saved that winter in Colorado hadn’t been there. Wendy Torrance had a valid excuse: she’d predeceased him. Her son, however . . .

Had he been in some dive, full of whiskey and playing truck-driving songs on the jukebox, when Dick passed on? Maybe in jail for the night on a drunk-and-disorderly?

Cause of death had been a heart attack. He scrolled back up and checked the date: January 19, 1999. The man who had saved Dan’s life and the life of his mother had been dead almost fifteen years. There would be no help from that quarter.

From behind him, he heard the soft squeak of chalk on slate. He sat where he was for a moment, with his cooling food and his laptop before him. Then, slowly, he turned around.

The chalk was still on the ledge at the bottom of the blackboard, but a picture was appearing, anyway. It was crude but recognizable. It was a baseball glove. When it was done, her chalk—invisible, but still making that low squeaking sound—drew a question mark in the glove’s pocket.

“I need to think about it,” he said, but before he could do so, the intercom buzzed, paging Doctor Sleep.

CHAPTER NINE

THE VOICES OF OUR DEAD FRIENDS

1

At a hundred and two, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House in that fall of 2013, old enough so her last name had never been Americanized. She answered not to Wil-LET but to a much more elegant French pronunciation: Oooh-LAY. Dan sometimes called her Miss Oooh-La-La, which always made her smile. Ron Stimson, one of four docs who made regular day-rounds at the hospice, once told Dan that Eleanor was proof that living was sometimes stronger than dying. “Her liver function is nil, her lungs are shot from eighty years of smoking, she has colorectal cancer—moving at a snail’s pace, but extremely malignant—and the walls of her heart are as thin as a cat’s whisker. Yet she continues.”

If Azreel was right (and in Dan’s experience, he was never wrong), Eleanor’s long-term lease on life was about to expire, but she certainly didn’t look like a woman on the threshold. She was sitting up in bed, stroking the cat, when Dan walked in. Her hair was beautifully permed—the hairdresser had been in just the day before—and her pink nightie was as immaculate as always, the top half giving a bit of color to her bloodless cheeks, the bottom half spread away from the sticks of her legs like a ballgown.

Dan raised his hands to the sides of his face, the fingers spread and wiggling. “Ooh-la-la! Une belle femme! Je suis amoureux!”

She rolled her eyes, then cocked her head and smiled at him. “Maurice Chevalier you ain’t, but I like you, cher. You’re cheery, which is important, you’re cheeky, which is more important, and you’ve got a lovely bottom, which is all-important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive. Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my frontside and backside efforts.”

Her voice, hoarse but cadenced, managed to render this image charming rather than vulgar. To Dan, Eleanor’s cigarette rasp was the voice of a cabaret singer who had seen and done it all even before the German army goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées in the spring of 1940. Washed up, maybe, but far from washed out. And while it was true she looked like the death of God in spite of the faint color reflected onto her face by her craftily chosen nightgown, she had looked like the death of God since 2009, the year she had moved into Room 15 of Rivington One. Only Azzie’s attendance said that tonight was different.