Myrtle Keeton, who’d had her own errand to run that afternoon, was lying on her bed upstairs in a troubled semi-doze when the horn began to blow. She sat bolt upright, eyes bulging in terror. “I did it!”

she gasped. “I did what you told me to do, now please leave me alone!”

She realized that she had been dreaming, that Mr. Gaunt was not here, and let out her breath in a long, trembling sigh.

WHONK! WHONK! WHOOOONNNNNNK!

It sounded like the Cadillac’s horn. She picked up the doll which lay next to her on the bed, the beautiful doll she had gotten at Mr.

Gaunt’s shop, and hugged it to her for comfort. She had done something this afternoon, something which a dim, frightened part of her believed to be a bad thing, a very bad thing, and since then the doll had become inexpressibly dear to her. Price, Mr. Gaunt might have said, always enhances value… at least in the eyes of the purchaser.

WHOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNKK!

It was the Cadillac’s horn. Why was Danforth sitting in the garage, blowing his horn? She supposed she had better go see.

“But he better not hurt my doll,” she said in a low voice. She placed it carefully in the shadows under her side of the bed. “He just better not, because that’s where I draw the line.”

Myrtle was one of a great many people who had visited Needful Things that day, just another name with a check-mark beside it on Mr.

Gaunt’s list. She had come, like many others, because Mr.

Gaunt had told her to come. She got the message in a way her husband would have understood completely: she heard it in her head.

Mr. Gaunt told her the time had come to finish paying for her doll… if she wanted to keep it, that was. She was to take a metal box and a sealed letter to the Daughters of Isabella Hall, next to Our Lady of Serene Waters. The box had grilles set in every side but the bottom. She could hear a faint ticking noise from inside.

She had tried to look into one of the round grilles-they looked like the speakers in old-fashioned table radios-but she had been able to see only a vague cube-shaped object. And in truth, she hadn’t looked very hard. It seemed better-safer-not to.

There had been one car in the parking lot of the little church complex when Myrtle, who was on foot, arrived. The parish hall itself had been empty, though. She peeked over the sign taped to the window set in the top half of the door to make sure, then read the sign.

DAUGHTERS OF ISABELLA MEET TUESDAY AT 7 P.M.

HELP US PLAN “CASINO NITE"!

Myrtle slipped inside. To her left was a stack of brightly painted compartments standing against the wall-this was where the daycare children kept their lunches and where the Sunday School children kept their various drawings and work projects. Myrtle had been told to put her item into one of these compartments, and she did so. It just fit. At the front of the room was the Chairwoman’s table, with an American flag on the left and a banner depicting the Infant of Prague on the right. The table was already set up for the evening meeting, with pens, pencils, Casino Nite sign-up sheets, and, in the middle, the Chairwoman’s agenda. Myrtle had put the envelope Mr.

Gaunt had given her under this sheet so Betsy Vigue, this year’s Daughters of Isabella Activities Chairwoman, would see it as soon as she picked up her agenda.

READ THIS RIGHT AWAY YOU POPE WHORE

was typed across the front of the envelope in capital letters.

Heart bumping rapidly in her chest, her blood-pressure somewhere over the moon, Myrtle had tiptoed out of the Daughters of Isabella Hall. She paused for a moment outside, hand pressed above her ample bosom, trying to catch her breath.

And saw someone hurrying out of the Knights of Columbus Hall beyond the church.

It wasjune Gavineaux. She looked as scared and guilty as Myrtle felt. She raced down the wooden steps to the parking lot so fast she almost fell and then walked rapidly toward that single parked car, low heels tip-tapping briskly on the hot-top.

She looked up, saw Myrtle, and paled. Then she looked more closely at Myrtle’s face… and understood.

“You too?” she asked in a low voice. A strange grin, both jolly and nauseated, rose on her face. It was the expression of a normally well-behaved child who has, for reasons she does not understand herself, put a mouse in her favorite teacher’s desk drawer.

Myrtle felt an answering grin of exactly the same type rise on her own face. Yet she tried to dissemble. “Mercy’s sake! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Yes you do.” June had looked around quickly, but the two women had this corner of that strange afternoon to themselves.

“Mr. Gaunt.”

Myrtle nodded and felt her cheeks heat in a fierce, unaccustomed blush.

“What did you get?” June asked.

“A doll. What did you get?”

“A vase. The most beautiful cloisonne vase you ever saw.”

“What did you do?”

Smiling slyly, June countered: “What did you do?”

“Never mind.” Myrtle looked back toward the Daughters of Isabella Hall and then sniffed. “It doesn’t matter anyway. They’re only Catholics.”

“That’s right,” June (who was a lapsed Catholic herself) replied.

Then she had gone to her car. Myrtle had not asked for a ride and June Gavineaux did not offer one. Myrtle had walked rapidly out of the parking lot. She had not looked up when June shot by her in her white Saturn. All Myrtle had wanted was to go home, take a nap while she cuddled her lovely doll, and forget what she had done.

That, she was now discovering, was not going to be as easy as she had hoped.

WHHHHHHOOOOOOO Buster planted his palm on the horn and held it down. The blare rang and blasted in his ears. Where in hell’s name was that bitch?

At last the door between the garage and the kitchen opened.

Myrtle poked her head through. Her eyes were large and frightened.

“Well, finally,” Buster said, letting go of the horn. “I thought you’d died on the john.”

“Danforth? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Things are better than they’ve been for two years. I just need a little help, that’s all.”

Myrtle didn’t move.

“Woman, get your fat ass over here!”

She didn’t want to go-he scared her-but the habit was old and deep and hard to break. She came around to where he stood in the wedge of space behind the car’s open door. She walked slowly, her slippers scuffing the concrete floor in a way that made Buster grind his teeth together.

She saw the handcuffs, and her eyes widened. “Danforth, what happened?”

“Nothing I can’t handle. Pass me that hacksaw, Myrt. The one on the wall. No-on second thought, never mind the hacksaw right now.

Give me the big screwdriver instead. And that hammer.”

She started to draw away from him, her hands going up to her chest and joining there in an anxious knot. Quick as a snake, moving before she could back out of his reach, Buster shot his free hand through the open window and seized her by the hair.

“Ow!” she screamed, grabbing futilely at his fist. “Danforth, ow!

owww!”

Buster dragged her toward him, his face clenched in a horrible grimace. Two large veins pulsed in his forehead. He felt her hand beating against his fist no more than he would have felt a bird’s wing.

“Get what I tell you!” he cried, and pulled her head forward.

He thumped it against the top of the open door once, twice, three times. “Were you born foolish or did you just grow that way? Get it, get i’t, get it!”

“Danforth, you’re hurting me!”

“Right!” he screamed back, and thumped her head once more against the top of the Cadillac’s open door, much harder this time.

The skin of her forehead split and thin blood began to flow down the left side of her face. “Are you going to mind me, woman?”