'Salem's Lot(31)

On the third day of the search he came into the kitchen of Eva's ready to eat a can of ravioli and then fall into bed for a nap before writing. He found Susan Norton bustling around the kitchen stove and preparing some kind of hamburger casserole. The men just home from work were sitting around the table, pretending to talk, and ogling her - she was wearing a faded check shirt tied at the midriff and cut-off corduroy shorts, Eva Miller was ironing in a private alcove off the kitchen.

'Hey, what are you doing here?' he asked.

'Cooking you something decent before you fall away to a shadow,' she said, and Eva snorted laughter from behind the angle of the wall. Ben felt his ears burn.

'Cooks real good, she does,' Weasel said. 'I can tell. I been watchin'.'

'If you was watchin' any more, your eyes woulda fell outta their sockets,' Grover Verrill said, and cackled.

Susan covered the casserole, put it in the oven, and they went out on the back porch to wait for it. The sun was going down red and inflamed.

'Any luck?'

'No. Nothing.' He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one.

'You smell like you took a bath in Old Woodsman's,' she said.

'Fat lot of good it did.' He held out his arm and showed her number of puffed insect bites and half-healed scratches. 'Son of a bitching mosquitoes and goddamn pricker bushes.'

'What do you think happened to him, Ben?'

'God knows.' He exhaled smoke. 'Maybe somebody crept up behind the older brother, coshed him with a sock full of sand or something, and abducted the kid.'

'Do you think he's dead?'

Ben looked at her to see if she wanted an honest answer or merely a hopeful one. He took her hand and locked his fingers through hers. 'Yes,' he said briefly. 'I think the kid is dead. No conclusive proof yet, but I think so.'

She shook her head slowly. 'I hope you're wrong. My mom and some of the other ladies have been in to sit with Mrs Glick. She's out of her mind and so is her husband. And the other boy just wanders around like a ghost.'

'Um,' Ben said. He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.

' . . . night?'

'Hmm? Sorry.' He looked around at her.

'I said, my dad would like you to come over tomorrow night. Can you?'

'Will you be there?'

'Sure, I will,' she said, and looked at him.

'All right. Good.' He wanted to look at her - she was lovely in the sunset light - but his eyes were drawn towards the Marsten House as if by a magnet.

'It draws you, doesn't it?' she said, and the reading of his thought, right down to the metaphor, was nearly uncanny.

'Yes. It does.'

'Ben, what's this new book about'?

'Not yet,' he said. 'Give it time. I'll tell you as Soon as I can. It's . . . got to work itself out.'

She wanted to say I love you at that precise moment, say it with the ease and lack of self-consciousness with which the thought had risen to the surface of her mind, but she bit the words off behind her lips. She did not want to say it while he was looking . . . looking up there.

She got up. 'I'll check the casserole.'

When she left him, he was smoking and looking up at the Marsten House.

3

Lawrence Crockett was sitting in his office on the morning of the twenty-second, pretending to read his Monday cor?respondence and keeping an eye on his secretary's jahoob?ies, when the telephone rang. He had been thinking about his business career in 'salem's Lot, about that small, twink?ling car in the Marsten House driveway, and about deals with the devil.

Even before the deal with Straker had been consum?mated (that's some word, all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of his secretary's blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man in 'salem's Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it. The office was old, dusty, and lighted by two fly-specked yellow globes. The desk was an ancient roll-top, littered with papers, pens, and correspondence. A gluepot stood on one side of it and on the other was a square glass paperweight that showed pictures of his family on its different faces. Poised perilously on top of a stack of ledgers was a glass fish bowl filled with matches, and a sign on the front said, 'For Our Matchless Friends.' Except for three fireproof steel filing cabinets and the secretary's desk in a small enclosure, the office was barren.

There were, however, pictures.

Snapshots and photos were everywhere - tacked, stapled, or taped to every available surface. Some were new Polaroid prints, others were colored Kodak shots taken a few years back, still more were curled and yellow?ing black-and-whites, some going back fifteen years. Beneath each was a typed caption: Fine Country Living! Six Rms. or Hilltop Location! Taggart Stream Road, $32, 000 - Cheap! or Fit for a Squire! Ten-Rm. Farmhouse, Burns Road. It looked like a dismal, fly-by-night operation and so it had been until 1957, when Larry Crockett, who was regarded by the better element in Jerusalem's Lot as only one step above shiftless, had decided that trailers were the wave of the future. In those dim dead days, most people thought of trailers as those cute silvery things you hooked on the back of your car when you wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park and take pictures of your wife and kids standing in front of Old Faithful. In those dim dead days, hardly anyone - even the trailer manufacturers themselves - foresaw a day when the cute silvery things would be replaced by campers, which hooked right over the bed of your Chevy pickup or which could come com?plete and motorized in themselves.