Firestarter(146)

At that Charlie's face relaxed; an expression of almost indescribable relief flowed across it.

"I'll tell you," she said then. "I'll tell you everything." She began to speak and was still speaking when Norma returned an hour later. Norma stopped in the doorway, listening, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and took it off: She put her purse down. And still Charlie's young but somehow old voice droned, on and on, telling it, telling it all.

And by the time she was done, both of them understood just what the stakes were, and how enormous they had become.

9

Winter came with no firm decision made. Irv and Norma began to go to church again, leaving Charlie alone in the house with strict instructions not to answer the telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz's words, like a parrot in a cage, haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks-in Albanyand-took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes... a question for which Irv had no answer.

The New Year came; February; March. Charlie's birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn't sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn't know.

There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn't get the kitchen stove lit.

"Stand back a second," Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope on her face. "I helped you, didn't I?" she said in a voice that was not quite steady. "It wasn't really bad, was it?"

"No," he said. "Not if you can control it, Charlie."

"I can control the little ones."

"Just don't do it around Norma, girl. She'd drop her teddies."

Charlie smiled a little.

Irv hesitated and then said, "For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I've never been any good at it."

"I will," she said, smiling more now. "And I'll be careful." "Sure. Sure you will," he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out. Charlie's healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called "peckish."

Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering suddenness, not so much pulled from sleep as ejected from it, like a fighter pilot from his plane. This happened to her one night during the second week of April; at one moment she was asleep, and at the next she was wide awake in her narrow bed in the back room, her body coated with sweat. For a moment the nightmare remained with her, vivid and terrible (the sap was running freely in the maples now, and Irv had taken her with him that afternoon to change the buckets; in her dream they had been sapping again, and she had heard something behind and had looked back to see John Rainbird creeping up on them, flitting from tree to tree, barely visible; his one eye glittered with a baleful lack of mercy, and his gun, the one he had shot her daddy with, was in one hand, and he was gaining). And then it slipped away. Mercifully, she could remember none of the bad dreams for long, and she rarely screamed anymore upon awakening from them, frightening Irv and Norma into her room to see what was wrong.

Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.

"-going to do?" Norma asked.

It was wrong to eavesdrop, but how could she help it? And they were talking about her; she knew it.

"I don't know," Irv said.

"Have you thought anymore about the paper?"

Papers, Charlie thought. Daddy wanted to talk to the papers. Daddy said it would be all right then. "Which one?" Irv asked. "The Hastings Bugle? They can put it right next to the A amp;P ad and this week's shows at the Bijou." "It was what her father was planning to do." "Norma," he said. "I could take her to New York City. I could take her to the Times. And what would happen if four guys pulled guns and started shooting in the lobby?" Charlie was all ears now. Norma's footfalls crossed the kitchen; there was the rattle of the teapot's lid, and what she said in reply was mostly lost under running water.

Irv said, "Yeah, I think it might happen. And I tell you what might be even worse, as much as I love her. She might get the drop on them. And if it got out of control, like it did at that place where they kept her... well, there's pretty nearly eight million people in New York City, Norma. I just feel like I'm too old to take a risk like that."

Norma's footfalls crossed back to the table again, the old flooring of the farmhouse creaking comfortably beneath them. "But, Irv, listen to me now," she said. Norma spoke carefully and slowly, as if she had been thinking this out carefully over a long period of time. "Even a little paper, even a little weekly like the Bugle, they're hooked into those AP tickers. News comes from everyplace these days. Why, just two years ago a little paper in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for some news story, and they had a circulation of under fifteen hundred!"