bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo.”
“Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone,” Jake said. ‘Tunneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol.”
Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under other circumstances. “Pop Mose’d never do such a thing! Why, he’s my godfather!”
Jake looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain—
and stuff like that happens in them all the time.”
“Besides,” Eddie said, “big money can do weird things to people.”
She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn’t, thought it a frog-squeezing look. “How would you know?” she asked. And then, almost at once, “Oh, sugar, I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for.”
“It’s okay,” Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. “Heat of the moment.” He reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie’s face grew a little, started to look as if it belonged there.
“It’s just that I know Moses Carver. He’s as honest as the day is long.”
Eddie raised his hand—not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.
“Let me see if I understand your idea,” Roland said. “First, it depends upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one point of when, but two.”
There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded. “Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah’s been gone a couple of months, but nobody’s given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in, everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough, which might take a little time—”
“The hard part’s apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it,” Susannah said. “When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip. And I’m pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years old.”
“But legally it’s yours, right?” Eddie asked. Roland could see that he was still proceeding with some caution.
Hadn’t quite got over that crack—How would you know?—just yet. And the look that had gone with it. “I mean, he can’t stop you from taking it, can he?”
“No, honey,” she said. “My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five.” She turned her eyes—dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression—upon him. “There. You don’t need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can subtract, you can figure it out for yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eddie said. “Time is a face on the water.”
Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere— perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here—a rustie had just walked over his grave.
SIX
“Has to be cash,” Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.
“Huh?” Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.
“Cash,” Jake repeated. “No one’d honor a check, even a cashier’s check, that was thirteen years old.
Especially not one for millions of dollars.”
“How do you know stuff like that, sug?” Susannah asked.
Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn’t), he was Elmer Chambers’s son. Elmer Chambers wasn’t one of the world’s good guys—Roland would never call him part of the White—but he had been a master of what network execs called “the kill.” A Big Coffin Hunter in TVLand, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn’t forgotten the face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn’t so.
“Cash, by all means cash,” Eddie said, breaking the silence. “A deal like this has to be cash. If there’s a check, we cash it in 1964, not 1977. Stick it in a gym-bag—did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze? Never mind.
Doesn’t matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977. Doesn’t have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close.”
“And it can’t be after July fifteenth of ’77,” Jake put in.
“God, no,” Eddie agreed. “We’d be all too likely to find Balazar’d persuaded Tower to sell, and there we’d be, bag of cash in one hand, thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of day.”
There was a moment of silence—perhaps they were considering this lurid image—and then Roland said,
“You make it sound very easy, and why not? To you three, the concept of doorways between this world and your world of tack-sees and astin and fottergrafs seems almost as mundane as riding a mule would to me. Or strapping on a sixgun. And there’s good reason for you to feel that way. Each of you has been through one of these doors. Eddie has actually gone both ways—into this world and then back into his own.”
“I gotta tell you that the return trip to New York wasn’t much fun,” Eddie said. “Too much gunplay.” Not to mention my brother’s severed head rolling across the floor ofBalazar’s office.
“Neither was getting through the door on Dutch Hill,” Jake added.
Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own. “All my life I’ve accepted what you said the first time I knew you, Jake—what you said when you were dying.”
Jake looked down, pale and without answer. He did not like to recall that (it was mercifully hazy in any case), and knew that Roland didn’t, either. Good! he thought. You shouldn’t want to remember! You let me drop! You let me die!
“You said there were other worlds than these,” Roland said, “and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or—”
“Or it’s another door,” Susannah murmured. “One that opens on the Dark Tower itself.”
Roland nodded. “The idea has done more than cross my mind. In any case, the Manni know of these other worlds, and in some fashion have dedicated their lives to them. They believe todash to be the holiest of rites
and most exalted of states. My father and his friends have long known of the glass balls; this I have told you.
That the Wizard’s Rainbow, todash, and these magical doors may all be much the same is something we have guessed.”
“Where you going with this, sug?” Susannah asked.
“I’m simply reminding you that I have wandered long,” Roland said. “Because of changes in time—a softening of time which I know you all have felt—I’ve quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had no idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o’ the rainbow.”
Roland looked at them earnestly.
“You speak as though my world were as filled with magical doorways as yours is with…” He thought about it. “… with airplanes or stage-buses. That’s not so.”
“Where we are now isn’t the same as anywhere you’ve been before, Roland,” Susannah said. She touched his deeply tanned wrist, her fingers gentle. “We’re not in your world anymore. You said so yourself, back in that version of Topeka where Blaine finally blew his top.”
“Agreed,” Roland said. “I only want you to realize that such doors may be far more rare than you realize. And now you’re speaking not of one but two. Doors you can aim in time, the way you’d aim a gun.”
I do not aim with my hand, Eddie thought, and shivered a little. “When you put it that way, Roland, it does sound a little iffy.”
“Then what do we do next?” Jake asked.
“I might be able to help you with that,” a voice said.
They all turned, only Roland without surprise. He had heard the stranger when he arrived, about halfway through their palaver. Roland did turn with interest, however, and one look at the man standing twenty feet from them on the edge of the road was enough to tell him that the newcomer was either from the world of his new friends, or from one right next door.