Gerald's Game(70)

But this voice wouldn't stop; wouldn't even acknowledge her It just went on and on, whispering directly into her mind from someplace far down on her brain-stem. Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

They'll take you to Augusta and the State Medical Examiner will cut you open so he can inventory your guts. That's the rule in cases of unattended or questionable death, and yours is going to be both. He'll have a peek at what's left of your last meal-the salami-and-cheese sub from Amato's in Gorham-and take a little section of brain to look at under his microscope, and in the end he'll call it death by misadventure. "The lady and gentleman were playing an ordinarily harmless game," he'll say, "only the gentleman had the had taste to have a heart attack at a critical moment and the woman was left to... well, it's best not to go into it. Best not to even think about it any more than is strictly necessary. Suffice it to say that the lady died hard-you only have to took at her to see that." That's how it's going to shake out, Jess. Maybe someone will notice your wedding ring is gone, but they won't hunt for it long, if at all. Nor will the ME notice that one of your bones-an unimportant one, the third phalange in your right foot, let's say-is gone. But we'll know, won't we, Jessie? In fact, we know already. We'll know that it took them. The cosmic stranger; the space cowboy. We'll know-

Jessie drove her head back against the headboard hard enough to send a school of big white fish exploding across her field of vision. It hurt-it hurt a lot-but the mind-voice cut out like a radio in a power-failure, and that made it worth it.

"There," she said. "And if you start up again, I'll do that again. I'm not kidding, either. I'm tired of listening to-"

Now it was her own voice, speaking unselfconsciously aloud in the empty room, that cut out like a radio in a power-failure. As the spots before her eyes began to fade, she saw the morning sunlight glinting off something which lay about eighteen inches beyond Gerald's outstretched hand. It was a small white object with a narrow thread of gold twisting up through the center, making it look like the yin-yang symbol. At first Jessie thought it was a finger-ring, but it was really too small for that. Not a finger-ring but a pearl earring. It had dropped to the floor while her visitor had been stirring the contents of its case around, showing them off to her.

"No," she whispered. "No, not possible."

But it was there, glinting in the morning sunshine and every bit as real as the dead man who seemed almost to be pointing at it: a pearl earring spliced with a delicate glint of gold.

It's one of mine! It spilled out of my jewelry box, it's been there since the summer, and I'm just noticing it now!

Except that she only owned one set of pearl earrings, they had no gold highlights, and they were back in Portland, anyway.

Except that the men from Skip's had been in to wax the floors the week after Labor Day, and if there had been an earring left on the floor, one of them would have picked it up and put it either on the bureau or in his own pocket.

Except there was something else, too.

No there's not. There's not, and don't you dare say there is.

It was just beyond the orphan earring.

Even if there was, I wouldn't look at it.

Except she couldn't not look at it. Her eyes moved past the earring of their own accord and fixed on the floor just inside the door to the front hall. There was a little spot of dried blood there, but it wasn't the blood which had caught her attention. The blood belonged to Gerald. The blood was all right. It was the footprint beside it that worried her.

If there was a track there, it was there before!

Much as Jessie wished she could believe that, the track had not been there before. Yesterday there hadn't been a single scuff on this floor, let alone a foot-track. Nor had she or Gerald left the one she was looking at. That was a shoe-shaped ring of dried mud, probably from the overgrown path that meandered along the shore of the lake for a mile or so before cutting back into the woods and heading south, toward Motton.

Someone had been in the bedroom with her last night after all, it seemed.

As this thought settled inexorably into Jessie's overstrained mind, she began to scream. Outside, on the back stoop, the stray lifted its scuffed, scratched muzzle from its paws for a moment. It cocked its good ear. Then it lost interest and lowered its head again. It wasn't as if the noise were being made by anything dangerous, after all; it was only the bitchmaster. Besides, the smell of the dark thing which had come in the night was on her now. It was one the stray was very familiar with. It was the smell of death.

The former Prince closed its eyes and went back to sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

At last she began to get herself under some kind of control again. She did this, absurdly enough, by reciting Nora Callighan's little mantra.

"One is for feet," she said, her dry voice cracking and wavering in the empty bedroom, "ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row. Two is for legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, where everything's wrong."

She pushed steadily on, reciting the couplets she could remember, skipping the ones she couldn't, keeping her eyes closed. She went through the whole thing half a dozen times. She was aware that her heartbeat was slowing down and the worst of her terror was once more draining away, but she had no conscious awareness of the radical change she had made in at least one of Nora's jangly little couplets.