Sally was also looking forward to marriage and an end to sexual frustration… although these last few days, Lester’s embraces had seemed a little less important to her. She had debated telling him about the splinter of wood from the Holy Land she had purchased at Needful Things, the splinter with the miracle inside it, and in the end she hadn’t. She would, of course; miracles should be shared.

It was undoubtedly a sin not to share them. But she had been surprised (and a little dismayed) by the feeling of jealous possessiveness which rose up in her each time she thought of showing Lester the splinter and inviting him to hold it.

No! an angry, childish voice had cried out the first time she had considered this. No, it’s mine! It wouldn’t mean as much to him as it does to me! It couldn’t!

The day would come when she would share it with him, just as the day would come when she would share her body with himbut it was not time for either of those things to happen yet.

This hot October day belonged strictly to her.

There were only a few cars in the faculty lot, and Lester’s Mustang was the newest and nicest of them. She’d been having lots of problems with her own car-something in the drive-train kept breaking down-but that was no real problem. When she had called Les this morning and asked if she could have his car yet again (she’d only returned it after a six-day loan at noon the day before), he agreed to drive it over right away. He could jog back, he said, and later he and a bunch of The Guys were going to play touch football.

She guessed he would have insisted that she take the car even if he had needed it, and that seemed perfectly all right to her. She was aware-in a vague, unfocused way that was the result of intuition rather than experience-that Les would jump through hoops of fire if she asked him to, and this established a chain of adoration which she accepted with naive complacency. Les worshipped her; they both worshipped God; everything was as it should be; world without end, amen.

She slipped into the Mustang, and as she turned to put her purse on the console, her eye happened on something white sticking out from beneath the passenger seat. It looked like an envelope.

She bent over and plucked it up, thinking how odd it was to find such a thing in the Mustang; Les usually kept his car as scrupulously neat as his person. There was one word on the front of the envelope, but it gave Sally Ratcliffe a nasty little jolt. The word was Lovey, written in lightly flowing script.

Feminine script.

She turned it over. Nothing written on the back, and the envelope was sealed.

“Lovey?” Sally asked doubtfully, and suddenly realized she was sitting in Lester’s car with all the windows still rolled up, sweating like mad. She started the engine, rolled down the driver’s window, then leaned across the console to roll down the passenger window.

She seemed to catch a faint whiff of perfume as she did it. If so, it wasn’t hers; she didn’t wear perfume, or make-up either. Her religion taught her that such things were the tools of harlots. (And besides, she didn’t need them.) It wasn’t perfume, anyway. just the last of the honeysuckle growing along the playground fence-that’s all you smelled.

“Lovey?” she said again, looking at the envelope.

The envelope said nothing. It just lay there smugly in her hands.

She fluttered her fingers over it, then bent it back and forth.

There was a piece of paper in there, she thought-at least oneand something else, too. The something else felt like it might be a photograph.

She held the envelope up to the windshield, but that was no good; the sun was going the other way now. After a moment’s debate she got out of the car and held the envelope up in front of the sun. She could only make out a light rectangle the letter, she thought-and a darker square shape that was probably an enclosed photo from (Lovey) whoever had sent Les the letter.

Except, of course, it hadn’t been sent-not through the mails, anyway. There was no stamp, no address. Just that one troubling word.

It hadn’t been opened, either, which meant… what? That someone had slipped it into Lester’s Mustang while Sally had been working on her files?

That might be. It might also mean that someone had slipped it into the car last night-even yesterday-and Lester hadn’t seen it.

After all, only a corner had been sticking out; it might have slid forward a little from its place under the seat while she had been driving to school this morning.

“Hi, Miss Ratcliffe!” someone called. Sally jerked the envelope down and hid it in the folds of her skirt. Her heart bumped guiltily.

It was little Billy Marchant, cutting across the playground with his skateboard under his arm. Sally waved to him and then got quickly back into the car. Her face felt hot. She was blushing. It was silly-no, crazy-but she was behaving almost as if Billy had caught her doing something she shouldn’t.

Well, weren’t you? Weren’t you trying to peek at a letter that isn’t yours?

She felt the first twinges of jealousy then. Maybe it was hers; a lot of people in Castle Rock knew she had been driving Lester’s car as much as she had been driving her own these past few weeks.

And even if it wasn’t hers, Lester Pratt was. Hadn’t she just been thinking, with the solid, pleasant complacency which only Christian women who are young and pretty feel so exquisitely, that he would jump through hoops of fire for her?

Lovey.

No one had left that envelope for her, she was sure of that much.

She didn’t have any women friends who called her Sweetheart or Darling or Lovey. It had been left for Lester. AndThe solution suddenly struck her, and she collapsed against the powder-blue bucket seat with a little sigh of relief. Lester taught Phys Ed at Castle Rock High. He only had the boys, of course, but lots of girls-young girls, impressionable girls-saw him every day.

And Les was a good-looking young man.

Some little high school girl with a crush slipped a note into his car.

That’s all it is. She didn’t even dare leave it on the dashboard where he would see i’t right away.

“He wouldn’t mind if I opened it,” Sally said aloud, and tore off the end of the envelope in a neat strip which she put in the ashtray where no cigarette had ever been parked. “We’ll have a good laugh about it tonight.”

She tilted the envelope, and a Kodak print fell out into her hand.

She saw it, and her heart stuttered to a stop for a moment.

Then she gasped. Bright red suffused her cheeks, and her hand covered her mouth, which had pursed itself into a small, shocked O of dismay.

Sally had never been in The Mellow Tiger and so she didn’t know that was the background, but she wasn’t a total innocent; she had watched enough TV and been to enough movies to know a bar when she saw one. The photo showed a man and a woman sitting at a table in what appeared to be one corner (a cozy corner, her mind insisted on calling it) of a large room. There was a pitcher of beer and two Pilsner glasses on the table. Other people were sitting at other tables behind and around them. In the background was a dance-floor.

The man and the woman were kissing.

She was wearing a sparkly sweater top which left her midriff exposed and a skirt of what appeared to be white linen. A very short skirt. One of the man’s hands pressed familiarly against the skin of her waist. The other was actually under her skirt, pushing it up even further. Sally could see the blur of the woman’s panties.

That little chippie, Sally thought with angry dismay.

The man’s back was to the photographer; Sally could make out only his chin and one ear. But she could see that he was very muscular, and that his black hair was mown into a rigorously short crewcut. He was wearing a blue tee-shirt-what the schoolkids called a muscle-shirt-and blue sweatpants with a white stripe on the side.