"When I was seventeen," she said, "my mother hired this boy from down the road-Richard Henderson, his name was-to do chores around our place.
There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him... and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean."
"Of course I do, She was matchmaking."
"Uh-huh, but at least she wasn't doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn't care a fig for Richie at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she'd have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. if I was feeding the chickens, she'd have Richie cutting side-bay next to the dooryard.
She wanted me to see him around... to get used to him... and if we got to like each other's company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. it was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that's what this is like."
"The pushes don't feel all that gentle to me Ralph said. His hand went nvoluntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.
"No, of course they don't. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?"
Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some (entity) force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force-or being-would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?"
"And what do we do now?" she added.
Ralph could only shake his head.
She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone.
"Almost three-thirty! My goodness!"
Ralph touched her hand. "Who are you calling?"
"Simone Castonguay. I'd made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon -there's a card-party at the Grangebut I can't go after all this. I'd lose my shirt." She laughed, then colored prettily. just a figure of speech."
Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver.
"Go on to your card-party, Lois."
"Really?" She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.
"Yes." He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn't see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.
Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.
Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. The), might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers... but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois's being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition-or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition-that Doc #3 couldn't follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.
You can't know any such thing, Ralph.
Maybe not, but itfelt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras,