Doctor Sleep
you’re the first True to be sent into exile since Little Big Horn.”
Walnut paled a little. Good. She had no intention of exiling anyone, but she still resented being interrupted.
“We’ll get the drugto Sturbridge, and Nut will know how to use it,” Crow said. “No problem.”
“There’s nothing simpler? Something we can get around here?”
Nut said, “Not if you want to be sure she doesn’t go Michael Jackson on us. This stuff is safe, and it hits fast. If she’s as powerful as you seem to think, fast is going to be impor—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. Are we done here?”
“There’s one more thing,” Walnutsaid. “I suppose it could wait, but . . .”
She looked out the window and, ye gods and little fishes, here came Jimmy Numbers, bustling across the parking lot adjacent to the Overlook Lodge with his own sheet of paper. Why had she hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her doorknob? Why not one that said Y’ALL COME?
Rose gathered all her bad temper, stuffed it in a sack, stored it at the back of hermind, and smiled gamely. “What is it?”
“Grampa Flick,” Crow said, “is no longer holding his fudge.”
“He hasn’t been able to hold it for the last twenty years,” Rose said. “He won’t wear diapers, and I can’t make him. No one can make him.”
“This is different,” Nut said. “He can barely get out of bed. Baba and Black-Eyed Susie are taking care of him as well as they can, but that camper of hissmells like the wrath of God—”
“He’ll get better. We’ll feed him some steam.” But she didn’t like the look on Nut’s face. Tommy the Truck had passed two years ago, and by the way the True measured time, that might have been two weeks ago. Now Grampa Flick?
“His mind’s breaking down,” Crow said bluntly. “And . . .” He looked at Walnut.
“Petty was taking care of him this morning, and she saysshe thinks she saw him cycle.”
“Thinks,” Rose said. She didn’t want to believe it. “Has anyone else seen it happen? Baba? Sue?”
“No.”
She shrugged as if to say there you are . Jimmy knocked before they could discuss it farther, and this time she was glad for the interruption.
“Come in!”
Jimmy poked his head through. “Sure it’s okay?”
“Yes! Why don’t you bring the Rockettes and the UCLA marchingband while you’re at it? Hell, I was only trying to get in a meditation groove after a few pleasant hours of spewing my guts.”
Crow was giving her a look of mild reproof, and maybe she deserved it— probably she deserved it, these people were only doing the True’s work as she had asked them to do it—but if Crow ever stepped up to the captain’s chair, he’d understand. Never a moment to yourself,unless you threatened them with pain of death. And in many cases, not even then.
“I got something you may want to see,” Jimmy said. “And since Crow and Nut were already here, I figured—”
“I know what you figured. What is it?”
“I went hunting around on the internet for news about those two towns you zeroed in on—Fryeburg and Anniston. Found this in the Union Leader . It’s from last Thursday’spaper. Maybe it’s nothing.”
She took the sheet. The main item was about some podunk school shutting down their football program because of budget cuts. Beneath it was a shorter item, which Jimmy had circled.
“POCKET EARTHQUAKE” REPORTED IN ANNISTON
How small can an earthquake be? Pretty small, if the people of Richland Court, a short Anniston street that dead-ends at the Saco River, are to be believed. Late Tuesday afternoon, several residents of the street reported a tremor that rattled windows, shook floors, and sent glassware tumbling from shelves. Dane Borland, a retiree who lives at the end of the street, pointed out a crack running the width of his newly asphalted driveway. “If you want proof, there it is,” he said.
Although the Geological Survey Center in Wrentham, MA, reports there were no temblors in New England last Tuesday afternoon, Matt and Cassie Renfrew took the opportunity to throw an “earthquake party,” which most of the street’s residents attended.
Andrew Sittenfeld of the Geological Survey Center says the shaking felt by Richland Court residents might have been a surge of water through the sewer system, or possibly a military plane breaking the sound barrier. When these suggestions were made to Mr. Renfrew, he laughed cheerfully. “We know what we felt,” he said. “It was an
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