'Salem's Lot(133)

'What about the grammar schools?' Jimmy asked. 'They must teach drawing in the lower grades. And I'd bet a hundred dollars that colored chalk is one of the things they keep on hand.'

Matt said, 'The Stanley Street Elementary School was built with the same bond money as the high school. It is also modernistic, filled to capacity, and built on one level. Many glass windows to let in the sun. Not the kind of building our target would want to frequent at all. They like old buildings, full of tradition, dark, dingy, like - '

'Like the Brock Street School,' Mark said.

'Yes.' Matt looked at Ben. 'The Brock Street School is a wooden frame building, three stories and a basement, built at about the same time as the Marsten House. There was much talk in the town when the school bond issue was up for a vote that the school was a fire hazard. It was one reason our bond issue passed. There had been a schoolhouse fire in New Hampshire two or three years before - '

'I remember,' Jimmy murmured. 'In Cobbs' Ferry, wasn't it?'

'Yes. Three children were burned to death

'Is the Brock Street School still used?' Ben asked.

'Only the first floor. Grades one through four. The entire building is due to be phased out in two years, when they put the addition on the Stanley Street School.'

'Is there a place for Barlow to hide?'

'I suppose so,' Matt said, but he sounded reluctant. 'The second and third floors are full of empty classrooms. The windows have been boarded over because so many children threw stones through them.'

'That's it, then,' Ben said. 'It must be.'

'It sounds good,' Matt admitted, and he looked very tired indeed now. 'But it seems too simple. Too trans?parent.'

'Blue chalk,' Jimmy murmured. His eyes were far away.

'I don't know,' Matt said, sounding distracted. 'I just don't know.'

Jimmy opened his black bag and brought out a small bottle of pills. 'Two of these with water,' he said. 'Right now.'

'No. There's too much to go over. There's too much - '

'Too much for us to risk losing you,' Ben said firmly. 'If Father Callahan is gone, you're the most important of all of us now. Do as he says.'

Mark brought a glass of water from the bathroom, and Matt gave in with some bad grace.

It was quarter after ten.

Silence fell in the room. Ben thought that Matt looked fearfully old, fearfully used. His white hair seemed thinner, drier, and a lifetime of care seemed to have stamped itself on his face in a matter of days. In a way, Ben thought, it was fitting that when trouble finally came to him - great trouble - it should come in this dreamlike, darkly fantasti?cal form. A lifetime's existence had prepared him to deal in symbolic evils that sprang to light under the reading lamp and disappeared at dawn.

'I'm worried about him,' Jimmy said softly.

'I thought the attack was mild,' Ben said. 'Not really a heart attack at all.'

'It was a mild occlusion. But the next one won't be mild. It'll be major. This business is going to kill him if it doesn't end quickly.' He took Matt's hand and fingered the pulse gently, with love. 'That,' he said, 'would be a tragedy.'

They waited around his bedside, sleeping and watching by turns. He slept the night away, and Barlow did not put in an appearance. He had business elsewhere.

26

Miss Coogan was reading a story called 'I Tried to Strangle Our Baby' in Real Life Confessions when the door opened and her first customer of the evening came in.

She had never seen things so slow. Ruthie Crockett and her friends hadn't even been in for a soda at the fountain - not that she missed that crowd - and Loretta Starcher hadn't stopped in for The New York Times. It was still under the counter, neatly folded. Loretta was the only person in Jerusalem's Lot who bought the Times (she pronounced it that way, in italics) regularly. And the next day she would put it out in the reading room.

Mr Labree hadn't come back from his supper, either, although there was nothing unusual about that. Mr Labree was a widower with a big house out on Schoolyard Hill near the Griffens, and Miss Coogan knew perfectly well that he didn't go home for his supper. He went out to Dell's and ate hamburgers and drank beer. If he wasn't back by eleven (and it was quarter of now), she would get the key out of the cash drawer and lock up herself. Wouldn't be the first time, either. But they would-all be in a pretty pickle if someone came in needing medicine badly.  

She sometimes missed the after-movie rush that had always come about this time before they had demolished the old Nordica across the street - people wanting ice?cream sodas and frappés and malteds, dates holding hands and talking about homework assignments. It had been hard, but it had been wholesome, too. Those children hadn't been like Ruthie Crockett and her crowd, sniggering and flaunting their busts and wearing jeans tight enough to show the line of their panties - if they were wearing any. The reality of her feelings for those bygone patrons (who, although she had forgotten it, had irritated her just as much) was fogged by nostalgia, and she looked up eagerly when the door opened, as if it might be a member of the class of '64 and his girl, ready for a chocolate fudge sundae with extra nuts.

But it was a man, a grown-up man, someone she knew but could not place. As he carried his suitcase down to the counter, something in his walk or the motion of his head identified him for her.