The Hotel Eden(30)

I’m in charge of the buildings and grounds at the Institute, and I like my work there; it’s been a good place to me.

SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

THE MOST FREQUENTLY asked question is “When you bust a beer bust, do you keep the beer?” For Pete’s sake. Every weekend I roust one or two of these high school beer parties, most often on the hill or down at Ander’s Landing. Sometimes, though, there’ll be a complaint and I’ll be called to a private residence. A lot of these kids know me by now, and they know that about eleven-thirty old Sheriff Mansarack will slip up in his cruiser and flash the lights long enough for every drunk sophomore to run into the bushes so that I can cite the two or three seniors too drunk to flee.

I was in the middle of such a raid last Saturday night, Halloween, a night when I know for a sure fact that there is going to be trouble, and I got the call from Oleena Weenz, our dispatcher. There had been, in her words, a “vicious assault by a pervert,” and she directed me to the address on Eider Street where I found Mr. Rick Royaltuber and the two young people and heard the story. I knew the boy, Jack Cramble, and had seen him play football earlier that night when Griggs beat Bark City, and I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t down with the rest of the team drinking beer at the Landing. I also knew Mr. Royaltuber, as I had taken the call when his wife went off the deep end a year ago. When a guy helps you subdue his wife and pries her fingers off a rusty pair of kitchen scissors while you hold her kicking and screaming on your lap on the front porch in front of all the neighborhood, you remember him. That was a bad deal, embarrassing for me to get caught off guard. I mean, she looked normal. I hadn’t seen the scissors. And it was bad for old Royaltuber too, with her shrieking out about him porking what’s-her-name, the wife of old Dr. Dizzy up at the loony bin, and rattling those scissors at us. Hey, sometimes kitchen tools are the worst. And she was strong.

Anyway, I spoke to Mr. Royaltuber and I saw the hook there on the car door. It was a regular artificial arm, straps and all, one of them torn, and it scared me too. I mean, when that thing came off, it had to hurt. I took the report, but it wasn’t all in line, and to tell the truth neither was the front of the Royaltuber girl’s shirt. She was misbuttoned the way you are after putting away your playthings in a hurry.

The Cramble boy kept at me to get back up there right away before the pervert got somebody else, saying things like Wasn’t I the sheriff? Wasn’t I supposed to do something? Well, I could see he wanted to do something, something that had been interrupted up at Passion Point, so I just told them all it was going to be all right, which it was, and I headed back to the Landing, where I was able to run off about ten kids and confiscate a case and a half of Castle Moat, which is not my favorite, but it’ll do.

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

I NEVER MARRIED. Years ago, after my accident, I changed my plans about a career in tennis and went up to college near Brippert and got into their vocational-ed program in hotel management.

I was pretty numbed out after Cassie’s family moved who knows where. This is a long time ago now. Her girlfriend Maggie Rayne hung around with me for a while, and then I think she saw the limits of a man with one hand and moved on. Her father was a professor at the medical school, and I was clearly outclassed. So, anyway, I never married. I didn’t realize the torch was still lit—or really how alive I could feel—until I saw Cassie again a year ago, when she was carried up here kicking and screaming, spitting and cursing, her eyes red and her hair wild, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in, let’s see, seventeen years.

MRS. MARGARET RAYNE NARKENPIE

I HAD NOT planned on a mountaintop in Bushville. I had not actually thought I would—after seven years of graduate study and three years at the Highborn Academy—find myself banished to the left-hand districts of Forsaken Acres, dressing for dinner at the macaroni-and-cheese outlet, opting for the creamed tuna on special nights. I had lived in a wasteland as a girl, and I thought I was through with it. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that marrying the highest-ranking doctor in my father’s finest class, a tall, good-looking psychiatrist of sterling promise who could have written his ticket anywhere in the civilized world, I was expecting to live in a place where there was more than one Quicky Freeze and a Video Hut. I had dared to think London, New York, even Albuquerque. I had not imagined Griggs. My husband—who has his Institute and his staff and his many duties and all his important vision for psychiatric health care—can’t even see Griggs. So, the way I live here and whom I associate with in this outpost of desolation is, it would seem to me, my business.