Ace Merrill—Reginald Merrill

Ace Merrill’s relationship with his uncle, Reginald “Pop” Merrill, is shaped first by a denied loan and later by a tantalizing possibility: that Pop left behind a hidden fortune. Pop’s refusal makes their financial and moral divide explicit, while his name on a treasure book and the marked map Gaunt shows Ace transform the uncle’s legacy into a motive for Ace’s return to Castle Rock.

A Loan Refused

When Ace was short of money, he approached Pop, a well-known lender who had loaned money to many people in town. Ace assumed that youth, prospects, and family ties should make him eligible. Pop saw the matter differently: he refused to lend to a nephew whose money came from cocaine. His judgment was practical as well as personal; he warned that people who use and sell the drug become careless, and that carelessness can end in prison or death. The exchange left Ace with no loan and no reassurance that being family would outweigh the danger Pop associated with his business.

That refusal belongs to the same history as Ace’s earlier arrest. Alan Pangborn caught Ace trying to break into an office at The Mellow Tiger, and Ace served time before leaving for Mechanic Falls. The encounter with Pop had already made prison a foreseeable consequence of Ace’s choices, but it did not turn the loan into support or bring the two men closer. When Ace later returns to Castle Rock, he has neither a job nor an uncomplicated family reason to explain his arrival: Pop has died, and the junkshop where his uncle had been is gone.

The Uncle’s Unfinished Legacy

In the window of Needful Things, Ace notices a book titled Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. Its cover shows two men digging, and its author is Reginald Merrill. The name changes the book from an odd shop-window item into a possible link to the uncle whose fortune and habits have long been the subject of local speculation. Inside, the title briefly changes, then returns to the one Ace saw in the window. The shifting presentation unsettles him, but the author’s name makes the book personally compelling.

Gaunt presses on the contradiction between Pop’s reputation and the evidence of his death. Ace says Pop left him no money: less than four thousand dollars remained in the bank, and that sum went toward the burial and the expenses of cleaning up what Pop left behind. The safe-deposit box held trading stamps, not a fortune. To Ace, this confirms the humiliating gap between the wealthy, formidable uncle people imagined and the poor man who actually died. Gaunt offers another possibility: perhaps Pop did not trust banks and buried his money. Ace’s anger begins to give way to the prospect that the story is not finished.

The Map and the Return to Castle Rock

A map supplied in the shop carries several crosses, which Ace connects to places that might have belonged to Pop or been connected to him. One lies on swampy ground associated with the late Treblehorn, land Ace recalls hearing Pop had received as repayment for a loan. Others mark locations near the Nature Conservancy, along Town Road No. 3 by the old Camber place, and on land supposedly owned by Diamond Match near Castle Lake. The crosses do not prove that Pop buried money there; even Gaunt declines to confirm Ace’s interpretation. Their force lies in making the hidden-treasure theory seem geographically possible.

Ace asks whether the crosses show where Pop buried his money and imagines that his uncle may have used a blind trust to keep the relevant land out of other people’s hands. The map converts an uncertain family story into a set of apparent leads, while Gaunt’s questions encourage Ace to treat possibility as a reason to act. The prospect of treasure also fits Pop’s known interest in money, though it cannot establish that any cache exists. Ace’s return to Castle Rock thus becomes tied to a search for the fortune Pop never gave him.

A Posthumous Bargain

The relationship’s defining reversal is that Pop refuses Ace a loan while his name, after his death, becomes the means by which Gaunt draws Ace into a new arrangement. The book and map do not reconcile the two men or reveal a confirmed inheritance; they offer Ace a powerful hope built from a real grievance and an unverified possibility. In Gaunt’s shop, objects take on the shapes of what haunts or draws their customers, and Pop’s reputation for money gives the treasure book its particular hold over Ace.

Their connection therefore persists less as a settled family bond than as an unresolved question of what Pop possessed, what he withheld, and whether anything remains to be found. Ace cannot obtain the direct help he sought from his uncle, but Gaunt redirects that disappointment into a hunt. The map’s scattered crosses make Pop’s absent presence seem to extend across the landscape around Castle Rock, turning a failed request for cash into the lure of a much larger, uncertain inheritance.