Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,186

throws. “There’s nothing between em. I’d know. Children of such an age have no more discretion than . . . than the drunks in the Rest.”

But the way they had smiled. The way they had smiled at each other.

“Perfectly normal,” she whispered, chopping and throwing. She cut a sharproot nearly in half, ruining it, not noticing. The whispering was a habit she’d picked up only recently, as Reap Day neared and the stresses of coping with her brother’s troublesome daughter mounted. “Folks smile at each other, that’s all.”

The same for the salute and Susan’s returning wave. Below, the handsome cavalier, acknowledging the pretty maid; above, the maid herself, pleased to be acknowledged by such as he. It was youth calling to youth, that was all. And yet . . .

The look in his eyes . . . and the look in hers.

Nonsense, of course. But—

But you saw something else.

Yes, perhaps. For a moment it had seemed to her that the young man was going to blow Susan a kiss . . . then had remembered himself at the last moment and turned it into a salute, instead.

Even if ye did see such a thing, it means nothing. Young cavaliers are saucy, especially when out from beneath the gaze of their fathers. And these three already have a history, as ye well know.

All true enough, but none of it removed that chilly splinter from her heart.

5

Jonas answered Roland’s knock and let the two boys into the Sheriff’s office. He was wearing a Deputy’s star on his shirt, and looked at them with expressionless eyes. “Boys,” he said. “Come in out of the wet.”

He stepped back to allow them entrance. His limp was more pronounced than Roland had ever seen it; the wet weather was playing it up, he supposed.

Roland and Cuthbert stepped in. There was a gas heater in the corner—filled from “the candle” at Citgo, no doubt—and the big room, which had been cool on the day they had first come here, was stuporously hot. The three cells held five woeful-looking drunks, two pairs of men and a woman in the center cell by herself, sitting on the bunk with her legs spread wide, displaying a broad expanse of red drawers. Roland feared that if she got her finger any farther up her nose, she might never retrieve it. Clay Reynolds was leaning against the notice-board, picking his teeth with a broomstraw. Sitting at the rolltop desk was Deputy Dave, stroking his chin and frowning through his monocle at the board which had been set up there. Roland wasn’t at all surprised to see that he and Bert had interrupted a game of Castles.

“Well, look here, Eldred!” Reynolds said. “It’s two of the In-World boys! Do your mommies know you’re out, fellas?”

“They do,” Cuthbert said brightly. “And you’re looking very well, sai Reynolds. The wet weather’s soothed your pox, has it?”

Without looking at Bert or losing his pleasant little smile, Roland shot an elbow into his friend’s shoulder. “Pardon my friend, sai. His humor regularly transgresses the bounds of good taste; he doesn’t seem able to help it. There’s no need for us to scratch at one another—we’ve agreed to let bygones be bygones, haven’t we?”

“Aye, certainly, all a misunderstanding,” Jonas said. He limped back across to the desk and the game-board. As he sat down on his side of it, his smile turned to a sour little grimace. “I’m worse than an old dog,” he said. “Someone ought to put me down, so they should. Earth’s cold but painless, eh, boys?”

He looked back at the board and moved a man around to the side of his Hillock. He had begun to Castle, and was thus vulnerable . . . although not very, in this case, Roland thought; Deputy Dave didn’t look like much in the way of competition.

“I see you’re working for the Barony salt now,” Roland said, nodding at the star on Jonas’s shirt.

“Salt’s what it amounts to,” Jonas said, companionably enough. “A fellow went leg-broke. I’m helping out, that’s all.”

“And sai Reynolds? Sai Depape? Are they helping out as well?”

“Yar, I reckon,” Jonas said. “How goes your work among the fisherfolk? Slow, I hear.”

“Done at last. The work wasn’t so slow as we were. But coming here in disgrace was enough for us—we have no intention of leaving that way. Slow and steady wins the race, they say.”

“So they do,” Jonas agreed. “Whoever ‘they’ are.”

From somewhere deeper in the building there came the whoosh of a water-stool