SALEM'S LOT XI / DANNY GLICK AND OTHERS
1342 Words
“It needs a great deal of work,” Straker said. “But we have time.”
“I guess you do,” Parkins agreed. “Don’t suppose you seen any yow’uns up around there.”
Straker’s brow creased. “Yowwens?”
“Kids,” Parkins explained patiently. “You know how they sometimes like to devil new folks. Throw rocks or ring the bell an’ run away…that sort of thing.”
“No,” Straker said. “No children.”
“We seem to kind have misplaced one.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” Parkins said judiciously, “yes, it is. The thinkin’ now is that we may not find him. Not alive.”
“What a shame,” Straker said distantly.
“It is, kinda. If you should see anything…”
“I would of course report it to your office, posthaste.” He smiled his chilly smile again.
“That’s good,” Parkins said. He opened the door and looked resignedly out at the pouring rain. “You tell Mr Barlow that I’m lookin’ forward.”
“I certainly will, Constable Gillespie. Ciao.”
Parkins looked back, startled. “Chow?”
Straker’s smile widened. “Good-by, Constable Gillespie. That is the familiar Italian expression for good-by.”
“Oh? Well, you learn somethin’ new every day, don’t you? ’By.” He stepped out into the rain and closed the door behind him. “Not familiar to me, it ain’t.” His cigarette was soaked. He threw it away.
Inside, Straker watched him up the street through the show window. He was no longer smiling.
When Parkins got back to his office in the Municipal Building, he called, “Nolly? You here, Nolly?”
No answer. Parkins nodded. Nolly was a good boy, but a little bit short on brains. He took off his coat, unbuckled his galoshes, sat down at his desk, looked up a telephone number in the Portland book, and dialed. The other end picked up on the first ring.
“FBI, Portland. Agent Hanrahan.”
“This is Parkins Gillespie. Constable at Jerusalem’s Lot township. We’ve got us a missin’ boy up here.”
“So I understand,” Hanrahan said crisply. “Ralph Glick. Nine years old, four-three, black hair, blue eyes. What is it, kidnap note?”
“Nothin’ like that. Can you check on some fellas for me?”
Hanrahan answered in the affirmative.
“First one is Benjaman Mears. M-E-A-R-S. Writer. Wrote a book called Conway’s Daughter. The other two are sorta stapled together. Kurt Barlow. B-A-R-L-O-W. The other guy—”
“You spell that Kurt with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’?” Hanrahan asked.
“I dunno.”
“Okay. Go on.”
Parkins did so, sweating. Talking to the real law always made him feel like an asshole. “The other guy is Richard Throckett Straker. Two t’s on the end of Throckett, and Straker like it sounds. This guy and Barlow are in the furniture and antique business. They just opened a little shop here in town. Straker claims Barlow’s in New York on a buyin’ trip. Straker claims the two of them worked together in London an’ Hamburg. And I guess that pretty well covers it.”
“Do you suspect these people in the Glick case?”
“Right now I don’t know if there even is a case. But they all showed up in town about the same time.”
“Do you think there’s any connection between this guy Mears and the other two?”
Parkins leaned back and c****d an eye out the window. “That,” he said, “is one of the things I’d like to find out.”
The telephone wires make an odd humming on clear, cool days, almost as if vibrating with the gossip that is transmitted through them, and it is a sound like no other—the lonely sound of voices flying over space. The telephone poles are gray and splintery, and the freezes and thaws of winter have heaved them into leaning postures that are casual. They are not businesslike and military, like phone poles anchored in concrete. Their bases are black with tar if they are beside paved roads, and floured with dust if beside the back roads. Old weathered cleat marks show on their surfaces where linemen have climbed to fix something in 1946 or 1952 or 1969. Birds—crows, sparrows, robins, starlings—roost on the humming wires and sit in hunched silence, and perhaps they hear the foreign human sounds through their taloned feet. If so, their beady eyes give no sign. The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep in the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.
“…and he paid with an old twenty, Mabel, one of the big ones. Clyde said he hadn’t seen one of those since the run on the Gates Bank and Trust in 1930. He was…”
“…yes, he is a peculiar sort of man, Evvie. I’ve seen him through my binocs, trundling around behind the house with a wheelbarrer. Is he up there alone, I wonder, or…”
“…Crockett might know, but he won’t tell. He’s keeping shut about it. He always was a…”
“…writer at Eva’s. I wonder if Floyd Tibbits knows he’s been…”
“…spends an awful lot of time at the library. Loretta Starcher says she never saw a fella who knew so many…”
“…she said his name was…”
“…yes, it’s Straker. Mr R.T. Straker. Kenny Danles’s mom said she stopped by that new place downtown and there was a genuine DeBiers cabinet in the window and they wanted eight hundred dollars for it. Can you imagine? So I said…”
“…funny, him coming and that little Glick boy…”
“…you don’t think…”
“…no, but it is funny. By the way, do you still have that recipe for…”
The wires hum. And hum. And hum.
9/23/75
Name: Glick, Daniel Francis
Address: RFD #1, Brock Road, Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine 04270
Age: 12 s*x: Male Race: Caucasian
Admitted: 9/22/75 Admitting Person: Anthony H. Glick (Father)
Symptoms: Shock, loss of memory (partial), nausea, disinterest in food, constipation, general loginess
Tests (see attached sheet):
1. Tuberculosis skin patch: Neg.
2. Tuberculosis sputum and urine: Neg.
3. Diabetes: Neg.
4. White cell count: Neg.
5. Red cell count: 45% hemo.
6. Marrow sample: Neg.
7. Chest X-ray: Neg.
Possible diagnosis: Pernicious anemia, primary or secondary; previous exam shows 86% hemoglobin. Secondary anemia is unlikely; no history of ulcers, hemorrhoids, bleeding piles, et al. Differential cell count neg. Primary anemia combined with mental shock likely. Recommend barium enema and X-rays for internal bleeding on the off-chance, yet no recent accidents, father says. Also recommend daily dosage of vitamin B12 (see attached sheet).
Pending further tests, let’s release him.
G.M. Gorby
Attending Physician
At one o’clock in the morning, September 24, the nurse stepped into Danny Glick’s hospital room to give him his medication. She paused in the doorway, frowning. The bed was empty.
Her eyes jumped from the bed to the oddly wasted white bundle that lay collapsed by the foot. “Danny?” she said.
She stepped toward him and thought, He had to go to the bathroom and it was too much for him, that’s all.
She turned him over gently, and her first thought before realizing that he was dead was that the B12 had been helping; he looked better than he had since his admission.
And then she felt the cold flesh of his wrist and the lack of movement in the light blue tracery of veins beneath her fingers, and she ran for the nurses’ station to report a death on the ward.
- Writer
