The irritation boiled over into the old, goaded anger. 'What in the name of God ever gave you that idea? Have I ever told you that?'
'I assumed - '
'You assumed wrong,' she said hotly and not entirely truthfully. But she had been cooling toward Floyd by slow degrees over a period of weeks.
'I assumed that when you date the same boy for a year and a half,' her mother continued softly and implacably, 'that it must mean things have gone beyond the hand?holding stage.'
'Floyd and I are more than friends,' Susan agreed evenly. Let her make something of that.
An unspoken conversation hung suspended between them.
Have you been sleeping with Floyd?
None of your business.
What does this Ben Mears mean to you?
None of your business.
A re you going to fall for him and do something foolish?
None of your business.
I love you, Susie. Your dad and I both love you.
And to that no answer. And no answer. And no answer. And that was why New York - or someplace - was impera?tive. In the end you always crashed against the unspoken barricades of their love, like the walls of a padded cell. The truth of their love rendered further meaningful discussion impossible and made what had gone before empty of meaning.
'Well,' Mrs Norton said softly. She stubbed her cigarette out on the perch's lip and dropped it into his belly.
'I'm going upstairs,' Susan said.
'Sure. Can I read the book when you're finished?'
'If you want to.'
'I'd like to meet him,' she said.
Susan spread her hands and shrugged.
'Will you be late tonight?'
'I don't know.'
'What shall I tell Floyd Tibbits if he calls?'
The anger flashed over her again. 'Tell him what you want.' She paused. 'You will anyway.'
'Susan!'
She went upstairs without looking back.
Mrs Norton remained where she was, staring out the window and at the town without seeing it. Overhead she could hear Susan's footsteps and then the clatter of her easel being pulled out.
She got up and began to iron again. When she thought Susan might be fully immersed in her work (although she didn't allow that idea to do more than flitter through a corner of her conscious mind), she went to the telephone in the pantry and called up Mabel Werts. In the course of the conversation she happened to mention that Susie had told her there was a famous author in their midst and Mabel sniffed and said well you must mean that man who wrote Conway's Daughter and Mrs Norton said yes and Mabel said that wasn't writing but just a sexbook, pure and simple. Mrs Norton asked if he was staying at a motel or -
As a matter of fact, he was staying downtown at Eva's Rooms, the town's only boardinghouse. Mrs Norton felt a surge of relief. Eva Miller was a decent widow who would put up with no hanky-panky. Her rules on women in the rooms were brief and to the point. If she's your mother or your sister, all right. If she's not, you can sit in the kitchen. No negotiation on the rule was entertained.
Mrs Norton hung up fifteen minutes later, after artfully camouflaging her main objective with small talk.
Susan, she thought, going back to the ironing board. Oh, Susan, I only want what's best for you. Can't you see that?
6
They were driving back from Portland along 295, and it was not late at all - only a little after eleven. The speed limit on the expressway after it got out of Portland's suburbs was fifty-five, and he drove well. The Citro?n's headlights cut the dark smoothly.
They had both enjoyed the movie, but cautiously, the way people do when they are feeling for each other's boundaries. Now her mother's question occurred to her and she said, 'Where are you staying? Are you renting a place?'
'I've got a third-floor cubbyhole at Eva's Rooms, on Railroad Street.'
'But that's awful! It must be a hundred degrees up there!'
'I like the heat,' he said. 'I work well in it. Strip to the waist, turn up the radio, and drink a gallon of beer. I've been putting out ten pages a day, fresh copy. There's some interesting old codgers there, too. And when you finally go out on the porch and catch the breeze . . . heaven.'
'Still,' she said doubtfully.
'I thought about renting the Marsten House,' he said casually. 'Even went so far as to inquire about it. But it's been sold.'
'The Marsten House?' She smiled. 'You're thinking of the wrong place.'
'Nope. Sits up on that first hill to the northwest of town. Brooks Road.'
'Sold? Who in the name of heaven - ?'
'I wondered the same thing. I've been accused of having a screw loose from time to time, but even I only thought of renting it. The real estate man wouldn't tell me. Seems to be a deep, dark secret.'
'Maybe some out-of-state people want to turn it into a summer place,' she said. 'Whoever it is, they're crazy. Renovating a place is one thing - I'd love to try it - but that place is beyond renovation. The place was a wreck even when I was a kid. Ben, why would you ever want to stay there?'
'Were you ever actually inside?'
'No, but I looked in the window on a dare. Were you?'
'Yes. Once.'
'Creepy place, isn't it?'
They fell silent, both thinking of the Marsten House. This particular reminiscence did not have the pastel nostal?gia of the others. The scandal and violence connected with the house had occurred before their births, but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.
The story of Hubert Marsten and his wife, Birdie, was the closest thing the town had to a skeleton in its closet. Hubie had been the president of a large New England trucking company in the 1920s - a trucking company which, some said, conducted its most profitable business after midnight, running Canadian whisky into Massachusetts.
He and his wife had retired wealthy to 'salem's Lot in 1929, and had lost a good part of that wealth (no one, not even Mabel Werts, knew exactly how much) in the stock market crash of 1929.
In the ten years between the fall of the market and the rise of Hitler, Marsten and his wife lived in their house like hermits. The only time they were seen was on Wednesday afternoons when they came to town to do their shopping. Larry McLeod, who was the mailman during those years, reported that Marsten got four daily papers, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. He also got a check once a month from the trucking company, which was based in Fall River, Massachusetts. Larry said he could tell it was a check by bending the envelope and peeking into the address window.
Larry was the one who found them in the summer of 1939. The papers and magazines - five days' worth - had piled up in the mailbox until it was impossible to cram in more. Larry took them all up the walk with the intention of putting them in between the screen door and the main door.
It was August and high summer, the beginning of dog days, and the grass in the Marsten front yard was calf-high, green and rank. Honeysuckle ran wild over the trellis on the west side of the house, and fat bees buzzed indolently around the wax-white, redolent blossoms. In those days the house was still a fine-looking place in spite of the high grass, and it was generally agreed that Hubie had built the nicest house in 'salem's Lot before going soft in the attic.
Halfway up the walk, according to the story that was eventually told with breathless horror to each new Ladies' Auxiliary member, Larry had smelled something bad, like spoiled meat. He knocked on the front door and got no answer. He looked through the door but could see nothing in the thick gloom. He went around to the back instead of walking in, which was lucky for him. The smell was worse in back. Larry tried the back door, found it unlocked, and stepped into the kitchen. Birdie Marsten was sprawled in a corner, legs splayed out, feet bare. Half her head had been blown away by a close-range shot from a thirty-?ought-six.
. ('Flies,' Audrey Hersey always said at this point, speak?ing with calm authority. 'Larry said the kitchen was full of em. Buzzing around, lighting on the . . . you know, and taking off again. Flies.')
Larry McLeod turned around and went straight back to town. He fetched Norris Varney, who was constable at the time, and three or four of the hangers-on from Crossen's Store - Milt's father was still running the place in those days. Audrey's eldest brother, Jackson, had been among them. They drove back up in Norris's Chevrolet and Larry's mail truck.
No one from town had ever been in the house, and it was a nine days' wonder. After the excitement died down, the Portland Telegram had done a feature on it. Hubert Marsten's house was a piled, jumbled, bewildering rat's nest of junk, scavenged items, and narrow, winding pass?ageways which led through yellowing stacks of newspapers and magazines and piles of moldering white-elephant books. The complete sets of Dickens, Scott, and Mariatt had been scavenged for the Jerusalem's Lot Public Library by Loretta Starcher's predecessor and still remained in the stacks.
Jackson Hersey picked up a Saturday Evening Post, began to flip through it, and did a double-take. A dollar bill had been taped neatly to each page.
Norris Varney discovered how lucky Larry had been when he went around to the back door. The murder weapon had been lashed to a chair with its barrel pointing directly at the front door, aimed chest-high. The gun was cocked, and a string attached to the trigger ran down the hall to the doorknob.
('Gun was loaded, too,' Audrey would say at this point. 'One tug and Larry McLeod would have gone straight up to the pearly gates.')
There were other, less lethal booby traps. A forty-pound bundle of newspapers had been rigged over the dining room door. One of the stair risers leading to the second floor had been hinged and could have cost someone a broken ankle. It quickly became apparent that Hubie Marsten had been something more than Soft; he had been a full-fledged Loony.
They found him in the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall, dangling from a rafter.
(Susan and her girt friends had tortured themselves deliciously with the stories they had gleaned from their elders; Amy Rawcliffe had a log playhouse in her back yard and they would lock themselves in and sit in the dark, scaring each other about the Marsten House, which gained its proper noun status for all time even before Hitler invaded Poland, and repeating their elders' stories with as many grisly embellishments as their minds could conceive. Even now, eighteen years later, she found that just think?ing of the Marsten House had acted on her like a wizard's spell, conjuring up the painfully clear images of little girls crouched inside Amy's playhouse, holding hands, and Amy saying with impressive eeriness: 'His face was all swole up and his tongue turned black and popped out and there was flies crawling on it. My momma tole Mrs Werts.')
' . . . place.'
'What? I'm sorry.' She came back to the present with an almost physical wrench. Ben was pulling off the turnpike and onto the 'salem's Lot exit ramp.
'I said, it was a spooky old place.'
Tell me about when you went in.'
He laughed humorlessly and flicked up his high beams. The two-lane blacktop ran straight ahead through an alley of pine and spruce, deserted. 'It started as kid's stuff. Maybe that's all it ever was. Remember, this was in 1951, and little kids had to think up something to take the place of sniffing airplane glue out of paper bags, which hadn't been invented yet. I used to play pretty much with the Bend kids, and most of them have probably moved away by now . . . do they still call south 'salem's Lot the Bend?'
'Yes.'
'I messed around with Davie Barclay, Charles James ?only all the kids used to call him Sonny Harold Rauberson, Floyd Tibbits - '
'Floyd?' she asked, startled.
'Yes, do you know him?'
'I've dated him,' she said, and afraid her voice sounded strange, hurried on: 'Sonny James is still around, too. He runs the gas station on Jointner Avenue. Harold Rauberson is dead. Leukemia.'