Bag of Bones

CHAPTER 3

At nine o’clock the following morning I filled a squeeze-bottle with grapefruit juice and set out for a good long walk south along The Street. The day was bright and already hot. It was also silent—the kind of silence you experience only after a Saturday holiday, I think, one composed of equal parts holiness and hangover. I could see two or three fishermen parked far out on the lake, but not a single power boat burred, not a single gaggle of kids shouted and splashed. I passed half a dozen cottages on the slope above me, and although all of them were likely inhabited at this time of year, the only signs of life I saw were bathing suits hung over the deck rail at the Passendales’ and a half-deflated fluorescent-green seahorse on the Batchelders’ stub of a dock. But did the Passendales’ little gray cottage still belong to the Passendales? Did the Batchelders’ amusing circular summer-camp with its Cinerama picture-window pointing at the lake and the mountains beyond still belong to the Batchelders? No way of telling, of course. Four years can bring a lot of changes. I walked and made no effort to think—an old trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs I made my way past camps where Jo and I had once had drinks and barbecues and attended the occasional card-party, I soaked up the silence like a sponge, I drank my juice, I armed sweat offmy forehead, and I waited to see what thoughts might come. The first was an odd realization: that the crying child in the night seemed somehow more real than the call from Max Devore. Had I actually been phoned by a rich and obviously bad-tempered techno-mogul on my first full evening back on the TR? Had said mogul actually called me a liar at one point? (I was, considering the tale I had told, but that was beside the point.) I knew it had happened, but it was actually easier to believe in The Ghost of Dark Score Lake, known around some campfires as The Mysterious Crying Kiddie. My next thought—this was just before I finished my juice—was that I should call Mattie Devore and tell her what had happened. I decided it was a natural impulse but probably a bad idea. I was too old to believe in such simplicities as The Damsel in Distress Versus The Wicked Stepfather… or, in this case, Father-in-Law. I had my own fish to fry this summer, and I didn’t want to complicate my job by getting into a potentially ugly dispute between Mr. Computer and Ms. Doublewide. Devore had rubbed my fur the wrong way—and vigorously—but that probably wasn’t personal, only something he did as a matter of course. Hey, some guys snap bra-straps. Did I want to get in his face on this? No. I did not. I had saved Little Miss Red Sox, I had gotten myself an inadvertent feel of Mom’s small but pleasantly firm breast, I had learned that Kyra was Greek for ladylike. Any more than that would be gluttony, by God. I stopped at that point, feet as well as brain, realizing I’d walked all the way to Warrington’s, a vast barnboard structure which locals sometimes called the country club. It was, sort of—there was a six-hole golf course, a stable and riding trails, a restaurant, a bar, and lodging for perhaps three dozen in the main building and the eight or nine satellite cabins. There was even a two-lane bowling alley, although you and your competition had to take turns setting up the pins.

Warrington’s had been built around the beginning of World War I. That made it younger than Sara Laughs, but not by much. A long dock led out to a smaller building calle/unset Bar. It was there that Warrington’s summer guests would gather for drinks at the end of the day (and some for Bloody Marys at the beginning). And when I glanced out that way, I realized I was no longer alone. There was a woman standing on the porch to the left of the floating bar’s door, watching me.

She gave me a pretty good jump. My nerves weren’t in their best condition right then, and that probably had something to do with it…

but I think she would have given me a jump in any case. Part of it was her stillness. Part was her extraordinary thinness. Most of it was her face. Have you ever seen that Edvard Munch drawing, The Cry? Well, if you imagine that screaming face at rest, mouth closed and eyes watchful, you’ll have a pretty good image of the woman standing at the end of the dock with one long-fingered hand resting on the rail. Although I must tell you that my first thought was not Edvard Munch but Mrs. Danvers.

She looked about seventy and was wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. The combination looked strangely formal, a variation on the ever-popular little black cocktail dress. Her skin was cream-white, except above her nearly flat bosom and along her bony shoulders. There it swam with large brown age-spots. Her face was a wedge featuring prominent skull-like cheekbones and an unlined lamp of brow. Beneath that bulge, her eyes were lost in sockets of shadow. White hair hung scant and lank around her ears and down to the prominent shelf of her jaw.

God, she’s thin, I thought. She’s nothing but a bag of- A shudder twisted through me at that. It was a strong one, as if someone were spinning a wire in my flesh. I didn’t want her to notice it—what a way to start a summer day, by revolting a guy so badly that he stood there shaking and grimacing in front of you—so I raised my hand and waved. I tried to smile, as well. Hello there, lady standing out by the floating bar. Hello there, you old bag of bones, you scared the living shit out of me but it doesn’t take much these days and I forgive you. How the fuck ya doin? I wondered if my smile looked as much like a gri mace to her as it felt to me.

She didn’t wave back.

Feeling quite a bit like a fooi—THERE’s NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TA: Tt3Veas—I ended my wave in a kind of half-assed salute and headed back the way I’d come. Five steps and I had to look over my shoulder; the sensation of her watching me was so strong it was like a hand pressing between my shoulderblades.

The dock where she’d been was completely deserted. I squinted my eyes, at first sure she must have just retreated deeper into the shadow thrown by the little boozehaus, but she was gone. As if she had been a ghost herself.

She stepped into the bar, hon, Jo said. You know that, don’t you? I mean… you do know it, right?

“Right, right,” I murmured, setting off north along The Street toward home. “Of course I do. Where else?” Except it didn’t seem to me that there had been time; it didn’t seem to me that she could have stepped in, even in her bare feet, without me hearing her. Not on such a quiet morning.

Jo again: Perhaps she’s stealthy.

“Yes,” I murmured. I did a lot of talking out loud before that summer was over. “Yes, perhaps she is. Perhaps she’s stealthy.” Sure. Like Mrs. Danvers.

I stopped again and looked back, but the right-of-way path had followed the lake around a little bit of cu(ve, and I could no longer see either Warrington’s or The Sunset Bar. And really, I thought, that was just as well. On my way back, I tried to list the oddities which had preceded and then surrounded my return to Sara Laughs: the repeating dreams; the sunflowers; the radio-station sticker; the weeping in the night. I supposed that my encounter with Mattie and Kyra, plus the follow-up phone-call from Mr. Pixel Easel, also qualified as passing strange… but not in the same way as a child you heard sobbing in the night.

And what about the fact that we had been in Derry instead of on Dark Score when Johanna died? Did that qualify for the list? I didn’t know. I couldn’t even remember why that was. In the fall and winter of 1993 I’d been fiddling with a screenplay for The Red-Shirt Man. In February of ’94 I got going on All the Vy from the 7bp, and that absorbed most of my attention. Besides, deciding to go west to the TR, west to Sara…

“That was Jo’s job,” I told the day, and as soon as I heard the words I understood how true they were. We’d both loved the old girl, but saying “Hey Irish, let’s get our asses over to the TR for a few days” had been Jo’s job. She might say it any time… except in the year before her death she hadn’t said it once. And I had never thought to say it for her. Had somehow forgotten all about Sara Laughs, it seemed, even when summer came around. Was it possible to be that absorbed in a writing project? It didn’t seem likely… but what other explanation was there?

Something was very wrong with this picture, but I didn’t know what it was. Not from nothin. That made me think of Sara Tidwell, and the lyrics to one of her songs. She had never been recorded, but I owned the Blind Lemon Jefferson version of this particular tune. One verse went:

It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round Let me kiss you on your sweet lips sugar You the good thing that I Jund.

I loved that song, and had always wondered how it would have sounded coming out of a woman’s mouth instead of from that whiskey-voiced old troubadour. Out of Sara Tidwell’s mouth. I bet she sang sweet. And boy, I bet she could swing it. I had gotten back to my own place again. I looked around, saw no one in the immediate vicinity (although I could now hear the day’s first ski-boat burring away downwater), stripped to my underpants, and swam out to the float. I didn’t climb it, only lay beside it holding onto the ladder with one hand and lazily kicking my feet. It was nice enough, but what was I going to do with the rest of the day? I decided to spend it cleaning my work area on the second floor. When that was done, maybe I’d go out and look around in Jo’s studio. if I didn’t lose my courage, that was. I swam back, kicking easily along, raising my head in and out of water which flowed along my body like cool silk. I felt like an otter. I was most of the way to the shore when I raised my dripping face and saw a woman standing on The Street, watching me. She was as thin as the one I’d seen down at Warrington’s… but this one was green. Green and pointing north along the path like a dryad in Some old legend. I gasped, swallowed water, coughed it back out. I stood up in chest-deep water and wiped my streaming eyes. Then I laughed (albeit a little doubtfully).

The woman was green because she was a birch growing a little to the north of where my set of railroad-tie steps ended at The Street. And even with my eyes clear of water, there was something creepy about how the leaves around the ivory-streaked-with-black trunk almost made a peering face. The air was perfectly still and so the face was perfectly still (as still as the face of the woman in the black shorts and bathing suit had been), but on a breezy day it would seem to smile or frown… or perhaps to laugh. Behind it there grew a sickly pine. One bare branch jutted off to the north. It was this I had mistaken for a skinny arm and a bony, pointing hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d spooked myself like that. I see things, that’s all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint, every line in the dirt like a secret message. Which did not, of course, ease the task of deciding what was really peculiar at Sara Laughs and what was peculiar only because my mind was peculi r. I glanced around, saw I still had this part of the [ake to myself (although not for much longer; the bee-buzz of the first pber boat had been joined by a second and third), and stripped off my soggy underpants. I wrung them out, put them on top of my shorts and tee-shirt, and walked naked up the railroad-tie steps with my clothes held against my chest. I pretended I was Bunter, bringing breakfast and the morning paper to Lord Peter Wimsey. By the time I got back inside the house I was grinning like a fool.

The second floor was stifling in spite of the open windows, and I saw why as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. Jo and I had shared space up here, she on the left (only a little room, really just a cubby, which was all she needed with the studio north of the house), me on the right.

At the far end of the hall was the grilled snout of the monster air-conditioning unit we’d bought the year after we bought the lodge.

Looking at it, I realized I had missed its characteristic hum without even being aware of it. There was a sign taped to it which said, Mr. Noonan: Broken. Blows hot air when you turn it on & sounds full of broken glass. Dean says the part it needs is promised Fom lstern Auto in Castle Rock. I’ll believe it when I see it. B. Meserve. I grinned at that last—it was Mrs. M. right down to the ground—and then i tried the switch. Machinery often responds favorably when it senses a penis-equipped human in the vicinity, Jo used to claim, but not this time. I listened to the air conditioner grind for five seconds or so, then snapped it off. “Damn thing shit the bed,” as TR folks like to say. And until it was fixed, I wouldn’t even be doing crossword puzzles up here. I looked in my office just the same, as curious about what I might feel as about what I might find. The answer was next to nothing. There was the desk where I had finished The Red-Shirt Man, thus proving to myself that the first time wasn’t a fluke; there was the photo of Richard Nixon, arms raised, flashing the double V-for-Victory sign, with the caption WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN? running beneath; there was the rag rug Jo had hooked for me a winter or two before she had discovered the wonderful world of afghans and pretty much gave up hooking. It wasn’t quite the office of a stranger, but every item (most of all, the weirdly empty surface of the desk) said that it was the work-space of an earlier-generation Mike Noonan. Men’s lives, I had read once, are usually defined by two primary forces: work and marriage. In my life the marriage was over and the career on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. Given that, it didn’t seem strange to me that now the space where I’d spent so many days, usually in a state of real happiness as I made up various imaginary lives, seemed to mean nothing. It was like looking at the office of an employee who had been fired… or who had died suddenly. I started to leave, then had an idea. The filing cabinet in the corner was crammed with papers—bank statements (most eight or ten years out of date), correspondence (mostly never answered), a few story fragments-but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I moved on to the closet, where the temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten degrees, and in a cardboard box which Mrs. M. had marked G^DOE’rs, I unearthed it—a Sanyo Memo-Scriber Debra Weinstock gave me at the conclusion of our work on the first of the Putnam books. It could be set to turn itself on when you started to talk; it dropped into its? ^use mode when you stopped to think. I never asked Debra if the thing just caught her eye and she thought, “Why, I’ll bet any self-respecting popular novelist would enjoy owning one of these babies,” or if it was something a little more specific… some sort of hint, perhaps?

Verbalize those little faxes from your subconscious while they’re still fresh, Noonan? I hadn’t known then and didn’t now. But I had it, a genuine pro-quality dictating-machine, and there were at least a dozen cassette tapes in my car, home dubs I’d made to listen to while driving.

I would insert one in the Memo-Scriber tonight, slide the volume control as high as it would go, and put the machine in its DICTATE mode. Then, if the noise I’d heard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what he thought it was. What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on? “Well then, I’ll know something else,” I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweating like a pig. “Or at least suspect it.” Jo’s nook across the hall made my office seem crowded and homey by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a square room-shaped space. The rug was gone, her photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been abandoned after ninety percent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed/ out of it—scraped out of it—and I felt a moment’s unreasonable anger a Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when I’d done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved: “You took a little too much on y’self, didn’t you?” That was my feeling about Jo’s little bit of office: that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.

Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the UFO voice said. Maybe Jo did it herselfi Ever think of that, sport? “That’s stupid,” I said.

“Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death.

Considering she’d just bought—”

But I didn’t want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.

I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face.

It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears… except that’s not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.

I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room’s window in motion… but they hung perfectly straight.

“Jo?” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you?”

Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains… which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room… but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn’t alone in Sara Laughs.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.

That’s what I thought then.

When I visited Jo’s studio (her air-conditioned studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve—she hadn’t taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jo’s little office—the framed square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster depicting the wildflowers of Maine—had been put out here, along with almost everything else I remembered. It was as if Mrs. M. had sent a message—/can’t ease your pain or shorten your sadness, and I can’t prevent the wounds that oming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you won’t be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.

Out here were no bare walls; out here the walls jostled with my wife’s spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), batik squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called “my baby collages,” an abstract desert painting made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.

In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading jo’s KNITTING STUFF! NO TRESPASSING! hung over the pull-knob.

In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.

The thing which caught and held my eye was sitting on the old roll-top desk in the center of the room. During the many good summers, falls, and winter weekends we had spent here, that desktop would have been littered with spools of thread, skeins of yarn, pincushions, sketches, maybe a book about the Spanish Civil War or famous American dogs. Johanna could be aggravating, at least to me, because she imposed no real system or order on what she did. She could also be daunting, even overwhelming at times. She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.

But not now. It was possible to think that Mrs. M. had cleared the litter from the top of it and plunked down what was now there, but impossible to believe. Why would she? It made no sense.

The object was covered with a gray plastic hood. I reached out to touch it, and my hand faltered an inch or two short as a memory of an old dream (give me that it’s my dust-catcher) slipped across my mind much as that queer draft ad slipped across my face. Then it was gone, and I pulled the plastic, over off. Underneath it was my old green IBM Selectric, which I hadn’o ees.sgpr thought of in years. I leaned closer, knowing that the typewriter ball would be Courier—my old favorite—even before I saw it.

What in God’s name was my old typewriter doing out here? Johanna painted (although not very well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed)

and sometimes sold them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She could write, of course; most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No. After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job. You writejr both of us, Mike, she had said once. That’s allyours,’ I’ll just take a little taste of everything else. Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.

But here was my old IBM. Why?

“Letters,” I said. “She found it down cellar or something, and rescued it to write letters on.”

Except that wasn’t Jo. She showed me most of her letters, often urging me to write little postscripts of my own, guilt-tripping me with that old saying about how the shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot (“and the writer’s friends would never hear from him if it weren’t for Alexander Graham Bell,” she was apt to add). I hadn’t seen a typed personal letter from my wife in all the time we’d been married—if nothing else, she would have considered it shitty etiquette. She could type, producing mistake-free business letters slowly yet methodically, but she always used my desktop computer or her own Powerbook for those chores.

“What were you up to, hon?” I asked, then began to investigate her desk drawers.

Brenda Meserve had made an effort with these, but Jo’s fundamental nature had defeated her. Surface order (spools of thread segregated by color, for instance) quickly gave way to Jo’s old dear jumble. I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories, but I found no paperwork which had been typed on my old IBM, with or without the Courier ball. Not so much as a single page.

When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned back in my chair (her chair)

and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one I couldn’t remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some local’s attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product looked like a wanted poster col-orized by Ted Turner.

I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her folks—some of them friends, most of them relatives—had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while… then had simply disappeared, like a cloud over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.

She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The string of her guitar—not a strap but a string—was visible over one shoulder. In the background I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians: they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.

Jo had tinted Sara’s skin to a card-all-lair shade, maybe based on other pictures she’d seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head thrown back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she bellows out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tid-well hadn’t just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fair’s shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life… although I doubt if he said it in his wife’s hearing.

In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs.

Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, “Walk Me Baby,” bears a remarkable resemblance to “Walk This Way,” by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and consequently got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brooks’s father—a white man—in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one. That was the entrancing thing about the past.

“It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar,” I sang, putting the picture back on the desk. “It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round.”

I picked up the typewriter cover, then decided to leave it off. As I stood, my eyes went back to Sara, standing there with her eyes closed and the string which served her as a guitar strap visible over one shoulder. Something in her face and smile had always struck me as familiar, and suddenly it came to me. She looked oddly like Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had gone down to the crossroads and sold his soul to Satan for seven years of fast living, high-tension liquor, and streetlife babies. And for a jukejoint brand of immortality, of course. Which he had gotten.

Robert Johnson, supposedly poisoned over a woman.

In the late afternoon I went down to the store and saw a good-looking piece of flounder in the cold-case. It looked like supper to me. I bought a bottle of white wine to go with it, and while I was waiting my turn at the cash register, a trembling old man’s voice spoke up behind me. “See you made a new friend yes’ty.” The Yankee accent was so thick that it sounded almost like a joke… except the accent itself is only part of it; mostly, I’ve come to believe, it’s that singsong tone—real Mainers all sound like auctioneers.

I turned and saw the geezer who had been standing out on the garage tarmac the day before, watching along with Dickie Brooks as I got to know Kyra, Mattie, and Scoutie. He still had the gold-headed cane, and I now recognized it. Sometime in the 1950s, the Boston Post had donated one of those canes to every county in the New England states. They were given to the oldest residents and passed along from old fart to old fart. And the joke of it was that the Post had gone toes-up years ago.

“Actually two new friends,” I replied, trying to dredge up his name. I couldn’t, but I remembered him from when Jo had been alive, holding down one of the overstuffed chairs in Dickie’s waiting room, discussing weather and politics, politics and weather, as the hammers whanged and the air-compressor chugged. A regular. And if something happened out there on Highway 68, eye-God, he was there to see it.

“I hear Mattie Devore can be quite a dear,” he said heah, Devoah, deah—and one of his crusty eyelids drooped. I have seen a fair number of salacious winks in my time, but none that was a patch on the one tipped me by that old man with the gold-headed cane. I felt a strong urge to knock his waxy beak of a nose off. The sound of it parting company from his face would be like the crack of a dead branch broken over a bent knee.

“Do you hear a lot, old-timer?” I asked.

“Oh, ayuh!” he said. His lips—dark as strips of liver—parted in a grin. His gums swarmed with white patches. He had a couple of yellow teeth still planted in the top one, and a couple more on the bottom.

“And she gut that little one—cunnin, she is! Ayuh!”

“Cunnin as a cat a-runnin,” I agreed.

He blinked at me, a little surprised to hear such an old one out of my presumably newfangled mouth, and then that reprehensible grin widened.

“Her don’t mind her, though,” he said. “Baby gut the run of the place, don’tcha know.”

I became aware—better belated than never—that half a dozen people were watching and listening to us. “That wasn’t my impression,” I said, raising my voice a bit. “No, that wasn’t my impression at all.”

He only grinned. . that old man’s grin that says Oh, ayuh, deah; I know one worth two of that.

I left the store feeling worried for Mattie Devore. Too many people were minding her business, it seemed to me.

When I got home, I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen—it could chill while I got the barbecue going out on the deck. I reached for the fridge door, then paused. Perhaps as many as four dozen little magnets had been scattered randomly across the front—vegetables, fruits, plastic letters and numbers, even a good selection of the California Raisins—but they weren’t random anymore. Now they formed a circle on the front of the refrigerator. Someone had been in here. Someone had come in and…

Rearranged the magnets on the fridge? If so, that was a burglar who needed to do some heavy remedial work. I touched one of them—gingerly, with just the tip of my finger. Then, suddenly angry with myself, I reached out and spread them again, doing it with enough force to knock a couple to the floor. I didn’t pick them up.

That night, before going to bed, I placed the Memo-Scriber on the table beneath Bunter the Great Stuffed Moose, turning it on and putting it in the DCTATE mode. Then I slipped in one of my old home-dubbed cassettes, zeroed the counter, and went to bed, where I slept without dreams or other interruption for eight hours.

The next morning, Monday, was the sort of day the tourists come to Maine for—the air so sunny-clean that the hills across the lake seemed to be under subtle magnification. Mount Washington, New England’s highest, floated in the farthest distance.

I put on the coffee, then went into the living room, whistling. All my imaginings of the last few days seemed silly this morning. Then the whistle died away. The Memo-Scriber’s counter, set to 000 when I went to bed, was now at 012.

I rewound it, hesitated with my finger over the PLAY button, told myself(in Jo’s voice) not to be a fool, and pushed it.

“Oh Mike,” a voice whispered—mourned, almost-on the tape, and I found myself having to press the heel of one hand to my mouth to hold back a scream. It was what I had heard in Jo’s office when the draft rushed past the sides of my face. . only now the words were slowed down just enough for me to understand them. “Oh Mike,” it said again. There was a faint click. The machine had shut down for some length of time. And then, once more, spoken in the living room as I had slept in the north wing: “Oh Mike.”

Then it was gone.

Around nine o’clock, a pickup came down the driveway and parked behind my Chevrolet. The truck was new—a Dodge Ram so clean and chrome-shiny it looked as if the ten-day plates had just come off that morning—but it was the same shade of off-white as the last one and the sign on the driver’s door was the one I remembered: WILLIAM “BILI’ DEAN CAMP CHECKING CARETAKING LIGHT CARPENTRYPLUS his telephone number. I went out on the back stoop to meet him, coffee cup in my hand.

“Mike!” Bill cried, climbing down from behind the wheel. Yankee men don’t hug—that’s a truism you can put right up there with tough guys don’t dance and real men don’t eat quiche—but Bill pumped my hand almost hard enough to slop coffee from a cup that was three-quarters empty, and gave me a hearty clap on the back. His grin revealed a splendidly blatant set of false teeth—the kind which used to be called Roebuckers, because you got them from the catalogue. It occurred to me in passing that my ancient interlocutor from the Lakeview General Store could have used a pair. It certainly would have improved mealtimes for the nosy old fuck. “Mike, you’re a sight for sore eyes!”

“Good to see you, too,” I said, grinning. Nor was it a false grin; I felt all right. Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning. “You’re looking well, my friend.” It was true. Bill was four years older and a little grayer around the edges, but otherwise the same. Sixty-five? Seventy? It didn’t matter.

There was no waxy look of ill health about him, and none of the falling-away in the face, principally around the eyes and in the cheeks, that I associate with encroaching infirmity. “So’re you,” he said, letting go of my hand. “We was all so sorry about Jo, Mike. Folks in town thought the world of her. It was a shock, with her so young. My wife asked if I’d give you her condolences special. Jo made her an afghan the year she had the pneumonia, and Yvette ain’t never forgot it.”

“Thanks,” I said, and my voice wasn’t quite my own for a moment or two. It seemed that on the TR my wife was hardly dead at all. “And thank Yvette, too.”

“Yuh. Everythin okay with the house? Other’n the air conditioner, I mean. Buggardly thing! Them at the Western Auto promised me that part last week, and now they’re saying maybe not until August first.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got my Powerbook. If I want to use it, the kitchen table will do fine for a desk.” And I would want to use it—so many crosswords, so little time. “Got your hot water okay?”

“All that’s fine, but there is one problem.” I stopped. How did you tell your caretaker you thought your house was haunted? Probably there was no good way; probably the best thing to do was to go at it head-on. I had questions, but I didn’t want just to nibble around the edges of the subject and be coy. For one thing, Bill would sense it. He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn’t stupid. “What’s on your mind, Mike? Shoot.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but—” He smiled in the way of a man who suddenly understands and held up his hand. “Guess maybe I know already.”

“You do?” I felt an enormous sense of relief and I could hardly wait to find out what he had experienced in Sara, perhaps while checking for dead lightbulbs or making sure the roof was holding the snow all right.

“What did you hear?”

“Mostly what Royce Merrill and Dickie Brooks have been telling,” he said. “Beyond that, I don’t know much. Me and mother’s been in Virginia, remember. Only got back last night around eight o’clock. Still, it’s the big topic down to the store.” For a moment I remained so fixed on Sara Laughs that I had no idea what he was talking about. All I could think was that folks were gossiping about the strange noises in my house. Then the name Royce Merrill clicked and everything else clicked with it. Merrill was the elderly possum with the gold-headed cane and the salacious wink. Old Four-Teeth. My caretaker wasn’t talking about ghostly noises; he was talking about Mattie Devore.

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee,” I said. “I need you to tell me what I’m stepping in here.”

When we were seated on the deck, me with fresh coffee and Bill with a cup of tea (“Coffee burns me at both ends these days,” he said), I asked him first to tell me the Royce Merrill-Dickie Brooks version of my encounter with Mattie and Kyra. It turned out to be better than I had expected. Both old men had seen me standing at the side of the road with the little girl in my arms, and they had observed my Chevy parked halfway into the ditch with the driver’s-side door open, but apparently neither of them had seen Kyra using the white line of Route 68 as a tightrope. As if to compensate for this, however, Royce claimed that Mattie had given me a big my hero hug and a kiss on the mouth. “Did he get the part about how I grabbed her by the ass and slipped her some tongue?” I asked. Bill grinned. “Royce’s imagination ain’t stretched that far since he was fifty or so, and that was forty or more year ago.”

“I never touched her.” Well. . there had been that moment when the back of my hand went sliding along the curve of her breast, but that had been inadvertent, whatever the young lady herself might think about it. “Shite, you don’t need to tell me that,” he said. “But…” He said that but the way my mother always had, letting it trail off on its own, like the tail of some ill-omened kite. “But what?”

“You’d do well to keep your distance from her,” he said. “She’s nice enough—almost a town girl, don’t you know—but she’s trouble.” He paused. “No, that ain’t quite fair to her. She’s in trouble.”

“The old man wants custody of the baby, doesn’t he?” Bill set his teacup down on the deck rail and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. Reflections from the lake ran up his cheek in ripples, giving him an exotic look. “How’d you know?”

“Guesswork, but of the educated variety. Her father-in-law called me Saturday night during the fireworks. And while he never came right out and stated his purpose, I doubt if Max Devore came all the way back to TR-90 in western Maine to repo his daughter-in-law’s Jeep and trailer.

So what’s the story, Bill?” For several moments he only looked at me. It was almost the look of a man who knows you have contracted a serious disease and isn’t sure how much he ought to tell you. Being looked at that way made me profoundly uneasy. It also made me feel that I might be putting Bill Dean on the spot. Devore had roots here, after all. And, as much as Bill might like me, I didn’t. Jo and I were from away. It could have been worse—it could have been Massachusetts or New York—but Derry, although in Maine, was still away. “Bill? I could use a little navigational help if you—”

“You want to stay out of his way,” he said.

His easy smile was gone. “The man’s mad.” For a moment I thought Bill only meant Devore was pissed off at me, and then I took another look at his face. No, I decided, he didn’t mean pissed off; he had used the word “mad” in the most literal way. “Mad how?” I asked. “Mad like Charles Manson? Like Hannibal Lecter? How?”

“Say like Howard Hughes,” he said.

“Ever read any of the stories about him? The lengths he’d go to to get the things he wanted? It didn’t matter if it was a special kind of hot dog they only sold in L.A. or an airplane designer he wanted to steal from Lockheed or Mcdonnell-Douglas, he had to have what he wanted, and he wouldn’t rest until it was under his hand. Devore is the same way. He always was—even as a boy he was willful, according to the stories you hear in town. “My own dad had one he used to tell. He said little Max Devore broke into Scant Larribee’s tack-shed one winter because he wanted the Flexible Flyer Scant give his boy Scooter for Christmas. Back around 1923, this would have been.

Devore cut both his hands on broken glass, Dad said, but he got the sled. They found him near midnight, sliding down Sugar Maple Hill, holding his hands up to his chest when he went down. He’d bled all over his mittens and his snowsuit. There’s other stories you’ll hear about Maxie Devore as a kid—if you ask you’ll hear fifty different ones—and some may even be true. That one about the sled is true, though. I’d bet the farm on it. Because my father didn’t lie. It was against his religion.”

“Baptist?”

“Nosir, Yankee.”

“1923 was many moons ago, Bill.

Sometimes people change.”

“Ayuh, but mostly they don’t. I haven’t seen Devore since he come back and moved into Warrington’s, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve heard things that make me think that if he has changed, it’s for the worse. He didn’t come all the way across the country ’cause he wanted a vacation. He wants the kid. To him she’s just another version of Scooter Larribee’s Flexible Flyer. And my strong advice to you is that you don’t want to be the window-glass between him and her.” I sipped my coffee and looked out at the lake. Bill gave me time to think, scraping one of his workboots across a splatter of birdshit on the boards while I did it. Crowshit, I reckoned; only crows crap in such long and exuberant splatters. One thing seemed absolutely sure: Mattie Devore was roughly nine miles up Shit Creek with no paddle.

I’m not the cynic I was at twenty—is anyone? — but I wasn’t naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer… not if Mr. Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he’d taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so? “What’s the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me.”

It didn’t take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn’t to say they’re not often interesting. Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanchfield, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanch-field missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulptruck into Kewadin Pond, his widow “kinda lost heart,” as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder. Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh?

Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rustbucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there: Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children. Mattie is the princess of the piece—poor but beautiful (that she was beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he’s a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore. The child of Max Devore’s sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington’s, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.

Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington’s, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play.

Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you’re standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn’t matter if you’re gangly. And it sure doesn’t matter if you stutter. “He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington’s,” Bill said. “They didn’t know which team he belonged on—the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn’t care; either side was fine with him. Some weeks he’d play for one, some weeks t’other. Either one was more than happy to have him, too, as he could hit a ton and field like an angel. They’d put him at first base a lot because he was tall, but he was really wasted there. At second or shortstop. . my! He’d jump and twirl around like that guy Noriega.”

“You might mean Nureyev,” I said. He shrugged. “Point is, he was somethin to see. And folks liked him. He fit in. It’s mostly young folks that play, you know, and to them it’s how you do, not who you are. Besides, a lot of em don’t know Max Devore from a hole in the ground.”

“Unless they read the Wall Street Journal and the computer magazines,’’ I said. “In those, you run across the name Devore about as often as you run across the name of God in the Bible.”

“No foolin?”

“Well, I guess that in the computer magazines God is more often spelled Gates, but you know what I mean.”

“I s’pose. But even so, it’s been sixty-five years since Max Devore spent any real time on the TR. You know what happened when he left, don’t you?”

“No, why would I?” He looked at me, surprised. Then a kind of veil seemed to fall over his eyes. He blinked and it cleared. “Tell you another time—it ain’t no secret—but I need to be over to the Harrimans’ by eleven to check their sump-pump. Don’t want to get sidetracked. Point I was tryin to make is just this: Lance Devore was accepted as a nice young fella who could hit a softball three hundred and fifty feet into the trees if he struck it just right. There was no one old enough to hold his old man against him—not at Warrington’s on Tuesday nights, there wasn’t—and no one held it against him that his family had dough, either. Hell, there are lots of wealthy people here in the summer. You know that. None worth as much as Max Devore, but being rich is only a matter of degree.” That wasn’t true, and I had just enough money to know it. Wealth is like the Richter scale-once you pass a certain point, the jumps from one level to the next aren’t double or triple but some amazing and ruinous multiple you don’t even want to think about. Fitzgerald had it straight, although I guess he didn’t believe his own insight: the very rich are different from you and me. I thought of telling Bill that, and decided to keep my mouth shut. He had a sump-pump to fix.

Kyra’s parents met over a keg of beer stuck in a mudhole. Mattie was running the usual Tuesday-night keg out to the softball field from the main building on a handcart. She’d gotten it most of the way from the restaurant wing with no trouble, but there had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the cart finally bogged down in a soft spot. Lance’s team was up, and Lance was sitting at the end of the bench, waiting his turn to hit. He saw the girl in the white shorts and blue Warrington’s polo shirt struggling with the bogged handcart, and got up to help her.

Three weeks later they were inseparable and Mattie was pregnant; ten weeks later they were married; thirty-seven months later, Lance Devote was in a coffin, done with softball and cold beer on a summer evening, done with what he called “woodsing,” done with fatherhood, done with love for the beautiful princess. Just another early finish, hold the happily-ever-after.

Bill Dean didn’t describe their meeting in any detail; he only said, “They met at the field—she was runnin out the beer and he helped her out of a boghole when she got her handcart stuck.”

Mattie never said much about that part of it, so I don’t know much.

Except I do. . and although some of the details might be wrong, I’d bet you a dollar to a hundred 1 got most of them right. That was my summer for knowing things I had no business knowing.

It’s hot, for one thing—’94 is the hottest summer of the decade and July is the hottest month of the summer. President Clinton is being upstaged by Newt and the Republicans. Folks are saying old Slick Willie may not even run for a second term. Boris Yeltsin is reputed to be either dying of heart disease or in a dry-out clinic. The Red Sox are looking better than they have any right to. In Derry, Johanna Arlen Noonan is maybe starting to feel a little whoopsy in the morning. If so, she does not speak of it to her husband.

I see Mattie in her blue polo shirt with her name sewn in white script above her left breast. Her white shorts make a pleasing contrast to her tanned legs. I also see her wearing a blue gimme cap with the red W for Warrington’s above the long bill. Her pretty dark-blonde hair is pulled through the hole at the back of the cap and falls to the collar of her shirt. I see her trying to yank the handcart out of the mud without upsetting the keg of beer. Her head is down; the shadow thrown by the bill of the cap obscures all of her face but her mouth and small set chin.

“Luh-let m-me h-h-help,” Lance says, and she looks up. The shadow cast by the cap’s bill falls away, he sees her big blue eyes—the ones she’ll pass on to their daughter. One look into those eyes and the war is over without a single shot fired; he belongs to her as surely as any young man ever belonged to any young woman.

The rest, as they say around here, was just courtin.

The old man had three children, but Lance was the only one he seemed to care about. (“Daughter’s crazier’n a shithouse mouse,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “In some laughin academy in California. Think I heard she caught her a cancer, too.”) The fact that Lance had no interest in computers and software actually seemed to please his father. He had another son who was capable of running the business. In another way, however, Lance Devore’s older half-brother wasn’t capable at all: there would be no grandchildren from that one.

“Rump-wrangler,” Bill said. “Understand there’s a lot of that going around out there in California.”

There was a fair amount of it going around on the TR, too, I imagined, but thought it not my place to offer sexual instruction to my caretaker.

Lance Devore had been attending Reed College in Oregon, majoring in forestry—the kind of guy who falls in love with green flannel pants, red suspenders, and the sight of condors at dawn. A Brothers Grimm woodcutter, in fact, once you got past the academic jargon. In the summer between his junior and senior years, his father had summoned him to the family compound in Palm Springs, and had presented him with a boxy lawyer’s suitcase crammed with maps, aerial photos, and legal papers. These had little order that Lance could see, but I doubt that he cared. Imagine a comic-book collector given a crate crammed with rare old copies of Donald Duck. Imagine a movie collector given the rough cut of a never-released film starring Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

Then imagine this avid young forester realizing that his father owned not just acres or square miles in the vast unincorporated forests of western Maine, but entire realms.

Although Max Devore had left the TR in 1933, he’d kept a lively interest in the area where he’d grown up, subscribing to area newspapers and getting magazines such as Down East and the Maine Times. In the early eighties, he had begun to buy long columns of land just east of the Maine-New Hampshire border. God knew there had been plenty for sale; the paper companies which owned most of it had fallen into a recessionary pit, and many had become convinced that their New England holdings and operations would be the best place to begin retrenching. So this land, stolen from the Indians and clear-cut ruthlessly in the twenties and fifties, came into Max Devore’s hands. He might have bought it just because it was there, a good bargain he could afford to take advantage of. He might have bought it as a way of demonstrating to himself that he had really survived his childhood; had, in point of fact, triumphed over it.

Or he might have bought it as a toy for his beloved younger son. In the years when Devore was making his major land purchases in western Maine, Lance would have been just a kid. . but old enough for a perceptive father to see where his interests were tending.

Devore asked Lance to spend the summer of 1994 surveying purchases which were, for the most part, already ten years old. He wanted the boy to put the paperwork in order, but he wanted more than that—he wanted Lance to make sense of it. It wasn’t a land-use recommendation he was looking for, exactly, although I guess he would have listened if Lance had wanted to make one; he simply wanted a sense of what he had purchased.

Would Lance take a summer in western Maine trying to find out what his sense of it was? At a salary of two or three thousand dollars a month?

I imagine Lance’s reply was a more polite version of Buddy Jellison’s “Does a crow shit in the pine tops?”

The kid arrived in June of 1994 and set up shop in a tent on the far side of Dark Score Lake. He was due back at Reed in late August.

Instead, though, he decided to take a year’s leave of absence. His father wasn’t pleased. His father smelled what he called “girl trouble.”

“Yeah, but it’s a damned long sniff from California to Maine,” Bill Dean said, leaning against the driver’s door of his truck with his sunburned arms folded. “He had someone a lot closer than Palm Springs doin his sniffin for him.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“"Bout talk. People do it for free, and most are willing to do even more if they’re paid.”

“People like Royce Merrill?”

“Royce might be one,” he agreed, “but he wouldn’t be the only one. Times around here don’t go between bad and good; if you’re a local, they mostly go between bad and worse. So when a guy like Max Devore sends a guy out with a supply of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills…”

“Was it someone local? A lawyer?”

Not a lawyer; a real-estate broker named Richard Osgood (“a greasy kind of fella” was Bill Dean’s judgment of him) who denned and did business in Motton. Eventually Osgood had hired a lawyer from Castle Rock. The greasy fella’s initial job, when the summer of ’94 ended and Lance Devote remained on the TR, was to find out what the hell was going on and put a stop to it.

“And then?” I asked.

Bill glanced at his watch, glanced at the sky, then centered his gaze on me. He gave a funny little shrug, as if to say, “We’re both men of the world, in a quiet and settled sort of way—you don’t need to ask a silly question like that.”

“Then Lance Devore and Mattie Stanchfield got married in the Grace Baptist Church right up there on Highway 68. There were tales made the rounds about what Osgood might’ve done to keep it from comin off I heard he even tried to bribe Reverend Gooch into refusin to hitch em, but I think that’s stupid, they just would have gone someplace else. “Sides, I don’t see much sense in repeating what I don’t know for sure.”

Bill unfolded an arm and began to tick items off on the leathery fingers of his right hand.

“They got married in the middle of September, 1994, I know that.” Out popped the thumb. “People looked around with some curiosity to see if the groom’s father would put in an appearance, but he never did.”

Out popped the forefinger. Added to the thumb, it made a pistol.

“Mat-tie had a baby in April of ’95, making the kiddie a dight premature… but not enough to matter. I seen it in the store with my own eyes when it wasn’t a week old, and it was just the right size.” Out with the second finger. “I don’t know that Lance Devore’s old man absolutely refused to help em financially, but I do know they were living in that trailer down below Dickie’s Garage, and that makes me think they were havin a pretty hard skate.”

“Devore put on the choke-chain,” I said. “It’s what a guy used to getting his own way would do… but if he loved the boy the way you seem to think, he might have come around.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He glanced at his watch again. “Let me finish up quick and get out of your sunshine… but you ought to hear one more little story, because it really shows how the land lies.

“In July of last year, less’n a month before he died, Lance Devore shows up at the post-office counter in the Lakeview General. He’s got a manila envelope he wants to send, but first he needs to show Carla Decinces what’s inside. She said he was all fluffed out, like daddies sometimes get over their kids when they’re small.”

I nodded, amused at the idea of skinny, stuttery Lance Devore all fluffed out. But I could see it in my mind’s eye, and the image was also sort of sweet.

“It was a studio pitcher they’d gotten taken over in the Rock. Showed the kid… what’s her name? Kayla?”

“Kyra.”

’55yuh, they call em anything these days, don’t they? It showed Kyra sittin in a big leather chair, with a pair of joke spectacles on her little snub of a nose, lookin at one of the aerial photos of the woods over across the lake in TR-100 or TR-110—part of what the old man had picked up, anyway. Carla said the baby had a surprised look on her face, as if she hadn’t suspected there could be so much woods in the whole world. Said it was awful cunnin, she did.”

“Cunnin as a cat a-runnin,” I murmured.

“Sknd the envelope—Registered, Express Mail was addressed to Maxwell Devore, in Palm Springs, California.”

“Leading you to deduce that the old man either thawed enough to ask for a picture of his only grandchild, or that Lance Devore thought a picture might thaw him.”

Bill nodded, looking as pleased as a parent whose child has managed a difficult sum. “Don’t know if it did,” he said. “Wasn’t enough time to tell, one way or the other. Lance had bought one of those little satellite dishes, like what you’ve got here. There was a bad storm the day he put it up—hail, high wind, blowdowns along the lakeshore, lots oflightnin. That was along toward evening. Lance put his dish up in the afternoon, all done and safe, except around the time the storm commenced he remembered he’d left his socket wrench on the trailer roof. He went up to get it so it wouldn’t get all wet n rusty—”

“He was struck by lightning? Jesus, Bill!”

“Lightnin struck, all right, but it hit across the way. You go past the place where Wasp Hill Road runs into 68 and you’ll see the stump of the tree that stroke knocked over. Lance was comin down the ladder with his socket wrench when it hit. If you’ve never had a lightnin bolt tear right over your head, you don’t know how scary it is—it’s like havin a drunk driver veer across into your lane, headed right for you, and then swing back onto his own side just in time. Close lightnin makes your hair stand up—makes your damned prick stand up. It’s apt to play the radio on your steel fillins, it makes your ears hum, and it makes the air taste roasted. Lance fell off the ladder. If he had time to think anything before he hit the ground, I bet he thought he was electrocuted.

Poor boy.

He loved the TR, but it wasn’t lucky for him.”

“Broke his neck?”

“Ayuh. With all the thunder, Mattie never heard him fall or yell or anything. She looked out a minute or two later when it started to hail and he still wasn’t in. And there he was, layin on the ground and lookin up into the friggin hail with his eyes open.”

Bill looked at his watch one final time, then swung open the door to his truck. “The old man wouldn’t come for their weddin, but he came for his son’s funeral and he’s been here ever since. He didn’t want nawthin to do with the young woman—”

“But he wants the kid,” I said. It was no more than what I already knew, but I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach just the same. Don’t talk about this, Mattie had asked me on the morning of the Fourth. It’s not a good time Jar Ki and me. “How far along in the process has he gotten?”

“On the third turn and headin into the home stretch, I sh’d say. There’ll be a hearin in Castle County Superior Court, maybe later this month, maybe next. The judge could rule then to hand the girl over, or put it off until fall. I don’t think it matters which, because the one thing that’s never going to happen on God’s green earth is a rulin in favor of the mother. One way or another, that little girl is going to grow up in California.’’ Put that way, it gave me a very nasty little chill. Bill slid behind the wheel of his truck. “Stay out of it, Mike,” he said. “Stay away from Mattie Devore and her daughter. And if you get called to court on account of seem the two of em on Saturday, smile a lot and say as little as you can.”

“Max Devore’s charging that she’s unfit to raise the child.” ’yuh.”

“Bill, I saw the child, and she’s fine.” He grinned again, but this time there was no amusement in it.

“"Magine she is. But that’s not the point. Stay clear of their business, old boy. It’s my job to tell you that; with Jo gone, I guess I’m the only caretaker you got.” He slammed the door of his Ram, started the engine, reached for the gearshift, then dropped his hand again as something else occurred to him. “If you get a chance, you ought to look for the owls.”

“What owls?”

“There’s a couple of plastic owls around here someplace. They might be in y’basement or out in Jo’s studio. They come in by mail-order the fall before she passed on.”

“The fall of 19937”

“Ayuh.”

“That can’t be right.” We hadn’t used Sara in the fall of 1993. “"Tis, though. I was down here puttin on the storm doors when Jo showed up. We had us a natter, and then the UPS truck come. I lugged the box into the entry and had a coffee—I was still drinkin it then—while she took the owls out of the carton and showed em off to me. Gorry, but they looked real! She left not ten minutes after. It was like she’d come down to do that errand special, although why anyone’d drive all the way from Derry to take delivery of a couple of plastic owls I don’t know.”

“When in the fall was it, Bill? Do you remember?”

“Second week of November,” he said promptly. “Me n the wife went up to Lewiston later that afternoon, to “Vette’s sister’s. It was her birthday. On our way back we stopped at the Castle Rock Agway so “Vette could get her Thanksgiving turkey.” He looked at me curiously. “You really didn’t know about them owls?”

“No.”

“That’s a touch peculiar, wouldn’t you say?”

“Maybe she told me and I forgot,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t matter much now in any case.” Yet it seemed to matter. It was a small thing, but it seemed to matter. “Why would Jo want a couple of plastic owls to begin with?”

“To keep the crows from shittin up the woodwork, like they’re doing out on your deck. Crows see those plastic owls, they veer off.” I burst out laughing in spite of my puzzlement… or perhaps because of it. “Yeah? That really works?”

“Ayuh, long’s you move em every now and then so the crows don’t get suspicious. Crows are just about the smartest birds going, you know. You look for those owls, save yourself a lot of mess.”

“I will,” I said. Plastic owls to scare the crows away—it was exactly the sort of knowledge Jo would come by (she was like a crow herself in that way, picking up glittery pieces of information that happened to catch her interest) and act upon without bothering to tell me. All at once I was lonely for her again—missing her like hell. “Good. Some day when I’ve got more time, we’ll walk the place all the way around. Woods too, if you want. I think you’ll be satisfied.”

“I’m sure I will. Where’s Devore staying?” The bushy eyebrows went up.

“Warrington’s. Him and you’s practically neighbors. I thought you must know.” I remembered the woman I’d seen—black bathing-suit and black shorts somehow combining to give her an exotic cocktail-party lookand nodded. “I met his wife.”

Bill laughed heartily enough at that to feel in need of his handkerchief. He fished it off the dashboard (a blue paisley thing the size of a football pennant) and wiped his eyes.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Skinny woman? White hair? Face sort of like a kid’s Halloween mask?”

It was my turn to laugh. “That’s her.”

“She ain’t his wife, she’s his whatdoyoucallit, personal assistant.

Rogette Whitmore is her name.” He pronounced it roGET, with a hard G. “Devore’s wives’re all dead. The last one twenty years.”

“What kind of name is Rogette? French?”

“California,” he said, and shrugged as if that one word explained everything. “There’s people in town scared of her.”

“Is that so?”

’kyuh.” Bill hesitated, then added with one of those smiles we put on when we want others to know that we know we’re saying something silly:

“Brenda Meserve says she’s a witch.”

“And the two of them have been staying at Warrington’s almost a year?”

“Ayuh. The Whitmore woman comes n goes, but mostly she’s been here.

Thinkin in town is that they’ll stay until the custody case is finished off, then all go back to California on Devore’s private jet. Leave Osgood to sell Warrington’s, and—”

“Sell it? What do you mean, sell it?”

“I thought you must know,” Bill said, dropping his gearshift into DVAV.

“When old Hugh Emerson told Devore they closed the lodge after Thanksgiving, Devore told him he had no intention of moving. Said he was comfortable right where he was and meant to stay put.”

“He bought the place.” I had been by turns surprised, amused, and angered over the last twenty minutes, but never exactly dumbfounded. Now I was. “He bought Warrington’s Lodge so he wouldn’t have to move to Lookout Rock Hotel over in Castle View, or rent a house.”

“Ayuh, so he did. Nine buildins, includin the main lodge and The Sunset Bar; twelve acres of woods, a six-hole golf course, and five hundred feet of shorefront on The Street. Plus a two-lane bowlin alley and a softball field. Four and a quarter million. His friend Osgood did the deal and Devore paid with a personal check. I wonder how he found room for all those zeros. See you, Mike.”

With that he backed up the driveway, leaving me to stand on the stoop, looking after him with my mouth open.

Plastic owls.

Bill had told me roughly two dozen interesting things in between peeks at his watch, but the one which stayed on top of the pile was the fact (and I did accept it as a fact; he had been too positive for me not to)

that Jo had come down here to take delivery on a couple of plastic god-dam owls.

Had she told me?

She might have. I didn’t remember her doing so, and it seemed to me that I would have, but Jo used to claim that when I got in the zone it was no good to tell me anything; stuff went in one ear and out the other.

Sometimes she’d pin little notes—errands to run, calls to make—to my shirt, as if I were a first-grader. But wouldn’t I recall if she’d said “I’m going down to Sara, hon, UPS is delivering something I want to receive personally, interested in keeping a lady company?” Hell wouldn’t I have gone? I always liked an excuse to go to the TR. Except I’d been working on that screenplay… and maybe pushing it a little… notes pinned to the sleeve of my shirt… If you go out when you’re finished, we need mi& and orange juice…

I inspected what little was left of Jo’s vegetable garden with the July sun beating down on my neck and thought about owls, the plastic god-dam owls. Suppose Jo had told me she was coming down here to Sara Laughs?

Suppose I had declined almost without hearing the offer because I was in the writing zone? Even if you granted those things, there was another question: why had she felt the need to come down here personally when she could have just called someone and asked them to meet the delivery truck? Kenny Auster would have been happy to do it, ditto Mrs. M. And Bill Dean, our caretaker, had actually been here. This led to other questions—one was why she hadn’t just had UPS deliver the damned things to Derry—and finally I decided I couldn’t live without actually seeing a bona fide plastic owl for myself. Maybe, I thought, going back to the house, I’d put one on the roof of my Chew when it was parked in the driveway. Forestall future bombing runs. I paused in the entry, struck by a sudden idea, and called Ward Han-kins, the guy in Waterville who handles my taxes and my few non-writing-related business affairs. “Mike,” he said heartily. “How’s the lake?”

“The lake’s cool and the weather’s hot, just the way we like it,” I said. “Ward, you keep all the records we send you for five years, don’t you? Just in case IRS decides to give us some grief?.”

“Five is accepted practice,” he said, “but I hold your stuff for seven—in the eyes of the tax boys, you’re a mighty fat pigeon.” Better afatpigeon than ap/astic owl, I thought but didn’t say. What I said was “That includes desk calendars, right? Mine and. Jo’s, up until she died?”

“You bet. Since neither of you kept diaries, it was the best way to cross-reference receipts and claimed expenses with—”

“Could you find Jo’s desk calendar for 1993 and see what she had going in the second week of November?”

“Td be happy to.

What in particular are you looking for?” For a moment I saw myself sitting at my kitchen table in Derry on my first night as a widower, holding up a box with the words Norco Home Pregnancy Test printed on the side. Exactly what was I looking for at this late date? Considering that I had loved the lady and she was almost four years in her grave, what was I looking for? Besides trouble, that was? “I’m looking for two plastic owls,” I said. Ward probably thought I was talking to him, but I’m not sure I was. “I know that sounds weird, but it’s what I’m doing.

Can you call me back?”

“Within the hour.”

“Good man,” I said, and hung up. Now for the actual owls themselves. Where was the most likely spot to store two such interesting artifacts? My eyes went to the cellar door. Elementary, my dear Watson.

The cellar stairs were dark and mildly dank. As I stood on the landing groping for the lightswitch, the door banged shut behind me with such force that I cried out in surprise. There was no breeze, no draft, the day was perfectly still, but the door banged shut just the same. Or was sucked shut. I stood in the dark at the top of the stairs, feeling for the lightswitch, smelling that oozy smell that even good concrete foundations get after awhile if there is no proper airing-out. It was cold, much colder than it had been on the other side of the door. I wasn’t alone and I knew it. I was afraid, I’d be a liar to say I wasn’t.

… but I was also fascinated. Something was with me. Something was in here with me. I dropped my hand away from the wall where the switch was and just stood with my arms at my sides. Some time passed. I don’t know how much. My heart was beating furiously in my chest; I could feel it in my temples. It was cold. “Hello?” I asked. Nothing in response. I could hear the faint, irregular drip of water as condensation fell from one of the pipes down below, I could hear my own breathing, and faintly—far away, in another world where the sun was out—I could hear the triumphant caw of a crow. Perhaps it had just dropped a load on the hood of my car. I really need an owl, I thought. In fact, I don’t know how I ever got along without one. “Hello?” I asked again. “Can you talk?”

Nothing. I wet my lips. I should have felt silly, perhaps, standing there in the dark and calling to the ghosts. But I didn’t. Not a bit.

The damp had been replaced by a coldness I could feel, and I had company. Oh, yes. “Can you tap, then? If you can shut the door, you must be able to tap.” I stood there and listened to the soft, isolated drips from the pipes. There was nothing else. I was reaching out for the lightswitch again when there was a soft thud from not far below me. The cellar of Sara Laughs is high, and the upper three feet of the concrete—the part which lies against the ground’s frost-belt—had been insulated with big silver-backed panels of Insu-Gard. The sound that I heard was, I am quite sure, a fist striking against one of these. Just a fist hitting a square of insulation, but every gut and muscle of my body seemed to come unwound. My hair stood up. My eyesockets seemed to be expanding and my eyeballs contracting, as if my head were trying to turn into a skull. Every inch of my skin broke out in gooseflesh.

Something was in here with me. Very likely something dead. I could no longer have turned on the light if I’d wanted to. I no longer had the strength to raise my arm. I tried to talk, and at last, in a husky whisper I hardly recognized, I said: “Are you really there?” Thud. “Who are you?” I could still do no better than that husky whisper, the voice of a man giving last instructions to his family as he lies on his deathbed. This time there was nothing from below. I tried to think, and what came to my struggling mind was Tony Curtis as Harry Houdini in some old movie. According to the film, Houdini had been the Diogenes of the Ouija board circuit, a guy who spent his spare time just looking for an honest medium. He’d attended one sance where the dead communicated by-“Tap once for yes, twice for no,” I said. “Can you do that?” Thud. It was on the stairs below me. . but not too far below. Five steps down, six or seven at most. Not quite close enough to touch if I should reach out and wave my hand in the black basement air. . a thing I could imagine, but not actually imagine doing. “Are you…” My voice trailed off. There was simply no strength in my diaphragm. Chilly air lay on my chest like a flatiron. I gathered all my will and tried again. “Are you Jo?” Thud. That soft fist on the insulation. A pause, and then:

Thud-thud. Yes and no. Then, with no idea why I was asking such an inane question: “Tkre the owls down here?” Thud-thud. “Do you know where they are?” Thud. “Should I look for them?” Thud! Very hard.

Why didshe want them? I could ask, but the thing on the stairs had no way to an-Hot fingers touched my eyes and I almost screamed before realizing it was sweat. I raised my hands in the dark and wiped the heels of them up my face to the hairline. They skidded as if on oil.

Cold or not, I was all but bathing in my own sweat. “Are you Lance Devore?” Thud-thud, at once. “Is it safe for me at Sara? Am I safe?”

Thud. A pause. And I knew it was a pause, that the thing on the stairs wasn’t finished. Then: Thud-thud. Yes, I was safe. No, I wasn’t safe. I had regained marginal control of my arm. I reached out, felt along the wall, and found the lightswitch. I settled my fingers on it. Now the sweat on my face felt as if it were turning to ice. “Are you the person who cries in the night?” I asked. Thud-thud from below me, and between the two thuds, I flicked the switch. The cellar globes came on. So did a brilliant hanging bulb at least a hundred and twenty-five watts—over the landing. There was no time for anyone to hide, let alone get away, and no one there to try, either. Also, Mrs. Meserve—admirable in so many ways—had neglected to sweep the cellar stairs. When I went down to where I estimated the thudding sounds had been coming from, I left tracks in the light dust. But mine were the only ones. I blew out breath in front of me and could see it. So it had been cold, still was cold… but it was warming up fast. I blew out another breath and could see just a hint of fog. A third exhale and there was nothing. I ran my palm over one of the insulated squares. Smooth. I pushed a finger at it, and although I didn’t push with any real force, my finger left a dimple in the silvery surface. Easy as pie. If someone had been thumping a fist down here, this stuff should be pitted, the thin silver skin perhaps even broken to reveal the pink fill underneath. But all the squares were smooth. “Are you still there?” I asked. No response, and yet I had a sense that my visitor was still there. Somewhere.

“I hope I didn’t offend you by turning on the light,” I said, and now I did feel slightly odd, standing on my cellar stairs and talking out loud, sermonizing to the spiders. “I wanted to see you if I could.” I had no idea if that was true or not. Suddenly—so suddenly I almost lost my balance and tumbled down the stairs—I whirled around, convinced the shroud-creature was behind me, that it had been the thing knocking, it, no polite M. R. James ghost but a horror from around the rim of the universe. There was nothing. I turned around again, took two or three deep, steadying breaths, and then went the rest of the way down the cellar stairs. Beneath them was a perfectly serviceable canoe, complete with paddle. In the corner was the gas stove we’d replaced after buying the place; also the claw-foot tub Jo had wanted (over my objections) to turn into a planter. I found a trunk filled with vaguely recalled table-linen, a box of mildewy cassette tapes (groups like the Delfonics, Funkadelic, and. 38 Special), several cartons of old dishes. There was a life down here, but ultimately not a very interesting one. Unlike the life I’d sensed in Jo’s studio, this one hadn’t been cut short but evolved out of, shed like old skin, and that was all right. Was, in fact, the natural order of things. There was a photo album on a shelf of knickknacks and I took it down, both curious and wary. No bombshells this time, however; nearly all the pix were landscape shots of Sara Laughs as it had been when we bought it. I found a picture of Join bellbottoms, though (her hair parted in the middle and white lipstick on her mouth), and one of Michael Noonan wearing a flowered shirt and muttonchop sideburns that made me cringe (the bachelor Mike in the photo was a Barry White kind of guy I didn’t want to recognize and yet did). I found Jo’s old broken treadmill, a rake I’d want if I was still around here come fall, a snowblower I’d want even more if I was around come winter, and several cans of paint. What I didn’t find was any plastic owls. My insulation-thumping friend had been right. Upstairs the telephone started ringing. I hurried to answer it, going out through the cellar door and then reaching back in to flick off the lightswitch. This amused me and at the same time seemed like perfectly normal behavior… just as being careful not to step on sidewalk cracks had seemed like perfectly normal behavior to me when I was a kid. And even if it wasn’t normal, what did it matter? I’d only been back at Sara for three days, but already I’d postulated Noonan’s First Law of Eccentricity: when you’re on your own, strange behavior really doesn’t seem strange at all. I snagged the cordless. “Hello?”

“Hi, Mike. It’s Ward.”

“That was quick.”

“The file-room’s just a short walk down the hall,” he said. “Easy as pie.

There’s only one thing on Jo’s calendar for the second week of November in 1993. It says “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” That’s on Tuesday the sixteenth. Does it help?”

“Yes,” 1 said. “Thank you, Ward. It helps a lot.” I broke the connection and put the phone back in its cradle. Yes, it helped. S-Ks of Maine was Soup Kitchens of Maine. Jo had been on their board of directors from 1992 until her death. Freep was Freeport.

It must have been a board meeting. They had probably discussed plans for feeding the homeless on Thanksgiving. . and then Jo had driven the seventy or so miles to the TR in order to take delivery of two plastic owls. It didn’t answer all the questions, but aren’t there always questions in the wake of a loved one’s death? And no statute of limitations on when they come up. The UFO voice spoke up then. While you’re right here by the phone, it said, why not call Bonnie Amudson?

Say hi, see how she’s doing? Jo had been on four different boards during the nineties, all of them doing charitable work. Her friend Bonnie had persuaded her onto the Soup Kitchens board when a seat fell vacant. They had gone to a lot of the meetings together. Not the one in November of 1993, presumably, and Bonnie could hardly be expected to remember that one particular meeting almost five years later… but if she’d saved her old minutes-of-the-meeting sheets… Exactly what the fuck was I thinking of?. Calling Bonnie, making nice, then asking her to check her December 1993 minutes? Was I going to ask her if the attendance report had my wife absent from the November meeting? Was I going to ask if maybe Jo had seemed different that last year of her life? And when Bonnie asked me why I wanted to know, what would I say? Give me that, Jo had snarled in my dream of her.

In the dream she hadn’t looked like Jo at all, she’d looked like some other woman, maybe like the one in the Book of Proverbs, the strange woman whose lips were as honey but whose heart was full of gall and wormwood. A strange woman with fingers as cold as twigs after a frost.

Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher. I went to the cellar door and touched the knob. I turned it… then let it go. I didn’t want to look down there into the dark, didn’t want to risk the chance that something might start thumping again. It was better to leave that door shut. What I wanted was something cold to drink. I went into the kitchen, reached for the fridge door, then stopped. The magnets were back in a circle again, but this time four letters and one number had been pulled into the center and lined up there. They spelled a single lower-case word: hello There was something here. Even back in broad daylight I had no doubt of that. I’d asked if it was safe for me to be here and had received a mixed message… but that didn’t matter. if I left Sara now, there was nowhere to go. I had a key to the house in Derry, but matters had to be resolved here. I knew that, too. “Hello,” I said, and opened the fridge to get a soda. “Whoever or whatever you are, hello.”

C H P T E.:. R I woke in the early hours of the following morning convinced that there was someone in the north bedroom with me. I sat up against the pillows, rubbed my eyes, and saw a dark, shouldery shape standing between me and the window. “Who are you?” I asked, thinking that it wouldn’t reply in words; it would, instead, thump on the wall. Once for yes, twice for no—what’s on your mind, Houdini? But the figure standing by the window made no reply at all. I groped up, found the string hanging from the light over the bed, and yanked it. My mouth was turned down in a grimace, my midsection tensed so tight it felt as if bullets would have bounced off. “Oh shit,” I said. “Fuck me til I cry.” Dangling from a hanger I’d hooked over the curtain rod was my old suede jacket. I’d parked it there while unpacking and had then forgotten to store it away in the closet. I tried to laugh and couldn’t. At three in the morning it just didn’t seem that funny. I turned off the light and lay back down with my eyes open, waiting for Bunter’s bell to ring or the childish sobbing to start. I was still listening when I fell asleep.

Seven hours or so later, as I was getting ready to go out to Jo’s studio and see if the plastic owls were in the storage area, where I hadn’t checked the day before, a late-model Ford rolled down my driveway and stopped nose to nose with my Chevy. I had gotten as far as the short path between the house and the studio, but now I came back. The day was hot and breathless, and I was wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off jeans and plastic flip-flops on my feet. Jo always claimed that the Cleveland style of dressing divided itself naturally into two subgenres:

Full Cleveland and Cleveland Casual. My visitor that Tuesday morning was wearing Cleveland Casual—you had your Hawaiian shirt with pineapples and monkeys, your tan slacks from Banana Republic, your white loafers.

Socks are optional, but white footgear is a necessary part of the Cleveland look, as is at least one piece of gaudy gold jewelry. This fellow was totally okay in the latter department: he had a Rolex on one wrist and a gold-link chain around his neck. The tail of his shirt was out, and there was a suspicious lump at the back. It was either a gun or a beeper and looked too big to be a beeper. I glanced at the car again.

Blackwall tires. And on the dashboard, oh look at this, a covered blue bubble. The better to creep up on you unsuspected, Gramma. “Michael Noonan?” He was handsome in a way that would be attractive to certain women—the kind who cringe when anybody in their immediate vicinity raises his voice, the kind who rarely call the police when things go wrong at home because, on some miserable secret level, they believe they deserve things to go wrong at home. Wrong things that result in black eyes, dislocated elbows, the occasional cigarette burn on the booby.

These are women who more often than not call their husbands or lovers daddy, as in “Can I bring you a beer, daddy?” or “Did you have a hard day at work, daddy?”

“Yes, I’m Michael Noonan. How can I help you?” This version of daddy turned, bent, and grabbed something from the litter of paperwork on the passenger side of the front seat. Beneath the dash, a two-way radio squawked once, briefly, and fell silent. He turned back to me with a long, buff-colored folder in one hand. Held it out. “This is yours.”

When I didn’t take it, he stepped forward and tried to poke it into one of my palms, which would presumably cause me to close my fingers in a kind of reflex. Instead I raised both hands to shoulder-level, as if he had just told me to put em up, Muggsy. He looked at me patiently, his face as Irish as the Arlen brothers’ but without the Arlen look of kindness, openness, and curiosity. What was there in place of those things was a species of sour amusement, as if he’d seen all of the world’s pissier behavior, most of it twice. One of his eyebrows had been split open a long time ago, and his cheeks had that reddish windburned look that indicates either ruddy good health or a deep interest in grain-alcohol products. He looked like he could knock you into the gutter and then sit on you to keep you there. I been good, daddy, get off me, don’t be mean. “Don’t make this tough. You’re gonna take service of this and we both know it, so don’t make this tough.”

“Show me some ID first.” He sighed, rolled his eyes, then reached into one of his shirt pockets. He brought out a leather folder and flipped it open. There was a badge and a photo ID. My new friend was George Footman, Deputy Sheriff, Castle County. The photo was flat and shadowless, like something an assault victim would see in a mugbook. “Okay?” he asked. I took the buff-backed document when he held it out again. He stood there, broadcasting that sense of curdled amusement as I scanned it. I had been subpoenaed to appear in the Castle Rock office of Elmer Dur-gin, Attorney-at-Law, at ten o’clock on the morning of July 10, 1998-Friday, in other words. Said Elmer Durgin had been appointed guardian ad litem of Kyra Elizabeth Devore, a minor child. He would take a deposition from me concerning any knowledge I might have of Kyra Elizabeth Devore in regard to her well-being. This deposition would be taken on behalf of Castle County Superior Court and Judge Noble Ran-court. A stenographer would be present. I was assured that this was the court’s depo, and nothing to do with either laintit{ or etennnt. Footman said, “It’s my job to remind you of the penalties should you fail—”

“Thanks, but let’s just assume you told me all about those, okay? I’ll be there.” I made shooing gestures at his car. I felt deeply disgusted… and I felt inter, red with. I had never been served with a process before, and I didn’t care for it. He went back to his car, started to swing in, then stopped with one hairy arm hung over the top of the open door. His Rolex gleamed in the hazy sunlight. “Let me give you a piece of advice,” he said, and that was enough to tell me anything else I needed to know about the guy. “Don’t fuck with Mr. Devore.”

“Or he’ll squash me like a bug,” I said. “Huh?”

“Your actual lines are, “Let me give you a piece of advice—don’t fuck with Mr. Devore or he’ll squash you like a bug.’” I could see by his expression—half past perplexed, going on angry—that he had meant to say something very much like that. Obviously we’d seen the same movies, including all those in which Robert De Niro plays a psycho. Then his face cleared. “Oh sure, you’re the writer,” he said. “That’s what they tell me.”

“You can say stuff like that ’cause you’re a writer.”

“Well, it’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t you a smartass, now.”

“How long have you been working for Max Devore, Deputy? And does the County Sheriffs office know you’re moonlighting?”

“They know. It’s not a problem. Ybu’re the one that might have the problem, Mr. Smartass Writer.” I decided it was time to quit this before we descended to the kaka-poopie stage of name-calling. “Get out of my driveway, please, Deputy.” He looked at me a moment longer, obviously searching for that perfect capper line and not finding it. He needed a Mr. Smartass Writer to help him, that was all. “I’ll be looking for you on Friday,” he said. “Does that mean you’re going to buy me lunch? Don’t worry, I’m a fairly cheap date.”

His reddish cheeks darkened a degree further, and I could see what they were going to look like when he was sixty, if he didn’t lay off the firewater in the meantime. He got back into his Ford and reversed up my driveway hard enough to make his tires holler. I stood where I was, watching him go. Once he was headed back out Lane Forty-two to the highway, I went into the house. It occurred to me that Deputy Footman’s extracurricular job must pay well, if he could afford a Rolex. On the other hand, maybe it was a knockoff. Settle down, Michael, Jo’s voice advised. The red rag is gone now, no one’s waving anything in front of you, so just settle-I shut her voice out. I didn’t want to settle down;

I wanted to settle up. I had been interjred with. I walked over to the hall desk where Jo and I had always kept our pending documents (and our desk calendars, now that I thought about it), and tacked the summons to the bulletin board by one corner of its buff-colored jacket. With that much accomplished, I raised my fist in front of my eyes, looked at the wedding ring on it for a moment, then slammed it against the wall beside the bookcase. I did it hard enough to make an entire row of paperbacks jump. I thought about Mattie Devore’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock, then about her father-in-law paying four and a quarter million dollars for Warrington’s. Writing a personal goddamned check. I thought about Bill Dean saying that one way or another, that little girl was going to grow up in California. I walked back and forth through the house, still simmering, and finally ended up in front of the fridge. The circle of magnets was the same, but the letters inside had changed. Instead of hell o they now read help r “Helper?” I said, and as soon as I heard the word out loud, I understood. The letters on the fridge consisted of only a single alphabet (no, not even that, I saw; g and x had been lost someplace), and I’d have to get more. If the front of my Kenmore was going to become a Ouija board, I’d need a good supply of letters. Especially vowels. In the meantime, I moved the hand the e in front of the r. Now the message read Ip her I scattered the circle of fruit and vegetable magnets with my palm, spread the letters, and resumed pacing. I had made a decision not to get between Devore and his daughter-in-law, but I’d wound up between them anyway. A deputy in Cleveland clothing had shown up in my driveway, complicating a life that already had its problems… and scaring me a little in the bargain. But at least it was a fear of something I could see and understand. All at once I decided I wanted to do more with the summer than worry about ghosts, crying kids, and what my wife had been up to four or five years ago. . if, in fact, she had been up to anything. I couldn’t write books, but that didn’t mean I had to pick scabs.

Help her.

I decided I would at least try.

“Harold Oblowski Literary Agency.”

“Come to Belize with me, Nola,” I said. “I need you. We’ll make beautiful love at midnight, when the full moon turns the beach to a bone.”

“Hello, Mr. Noonan,” she said. No sense of humor had Nola. No sense of romance, either. In some ways that made her perfect for the Oblowski Agency. “Would you like to speak to Harold?”

“If he’s in.”

“He is. Please hold.”

One nice thing about being a best selling author—even one whose books only appear, as a general rule, on lists that go to fifteen—is that your agent almost always happens to be in. Another is if he’s vacationing on Nantucket, he’ll be in to you there. A third is that the time you spend on hold is usually quite short.

“Mike!” he cried. “How’s the lake? I thought about you all weekend!”

I3ah, I thought, and pigs will whistle.

“Things are fine in general but shitty in one particular, Harold. I need to talk to a lawyer. I thought first about calling Ward Hankins for a recommendation, but then I decided I wanted somebody a little more high-powered than Ward was likely to know. Someone with filed teeth and a taste for human flesh would be nice.”

This time Harold didn’t bother with the long-pause routine. “What’s up, Mike? Are you in trouble?”

Thump once r yes, twice jr no, I thought, and for one wild moment thought of actually doing just that. I remembered finishing Christy Brown’s memoir, Down All the Days, and wondering what it would be like to write an entire book with the pen grasped between the toes of your left foot. Now I wondered what it would be like to go through eternity with no way to communicate but rapping on the cellar wall. And even then only certain people would be able to hear and understand you… and only those certain people at certain times.

Jo, was it you? And if it was, why did you answer both ways?

“Mike? Are you there?”

“Yes. This isn’t really my trouble, Harold, so cool your jets. I do have a problem, though. Your main guy is Goldacre, right?”

“Right. I’ll call him right aw—”

“But he deals primarily with contracts law.” I was thinking out loud now, and when I paused, Harold didn’t fill it. Sometimes he’s an all-right guy. Most times, really. “Call him for me anyway, would you?

Tell him I need to talk to an attorney with a good working knowledge of child-custody law. Have him put me in touch with the best one who’s free to take a case immediately. One who can be in court with me Friday, if that’s necessary.”

“Is it paternity?” he asked, sounding both respectful and afraid. “No, custody.” I thought about telling him to get the whole story from the Lawyer to Be Named Later, but Harold deserved better… and would demand to hear my version sooner or later anyway, no matter what the lawyer told him. I gave him an account of my Fourth of July morning and its aftermath. I stuck with the Devores, mentioning nothing about voices, crying children, or thumps in the dark. Harold only interrupted once, and that was when he realized who the villain of the piece was.

“You’re asking for trouble,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m in for a certain measure of it in any case,” I said. “I’ve decided I want to dish out a little as well, that’s all.”

“You will not have the peace and quiet that a writer needs to do his best work,” Harold said in an amusingly prim voice. I wondered what the reaction would be if I said that was okay, I hadn’t written anything more riveting than a grocery list since Jo died, and maybe this would stir me up a little. But I didn’t. Never let em see you sweat, the Noonan clan’s motto. Someone should carve DON’T WORRY I’M FINE on the door of the family crypt.

Then I thought: help r.

“That young woman needs a friend,” I said, “and Jo would have wanted me to be one to her. Jo didn’t like it when the little folks got stepped on.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll see who I can find. And Mike… do you want me to come up on Friday for this depo?”

“No.” It came out sounding needlessly abrupt and was followed by a silence that seemed not calculated but hurt. “Listen, Harold, my caretaker said the actual custody hearing is scheduled soon. If it happens and you still want to come up, I’ll give you a call. I can always use your moral support—you know that.”

“In my case it’s immoral support,” he replied, but he sounded cheery again. We said goodbye. I walked back to the fridge and looked at the magnets.

They were still scattered hell to breakfast, and that was sort of a relief. Even the spirits must have to rest sometimes.

I took the cordless phone, went out onto the deck, and plonked down in the chair where I’d been on the night of the Fourth, when Devote called.

Even after my visit from “daddy,” I could still hardly believe that conversation. Devote had called me a liar; I had told him to stick my telephone number up his ass. We were off to a great start as neighbors.

I pulled the chair a little closer to the edge of the deck, which dropped a giddy forty feet or so to the slope between Sara’s backside and the lake. I looked for the green woman I’d seen while swimming, telling myself not to be a dope—things like that you can see only from one angle, stand even ten feet off to one side or the other and there’s nothing to look at. But this was apparently a case of the exception’s proving the rule. I was both amused and a little uneasy to realize that the birch down there by The Street looked like a woman from the land side as well as from the lake. Some of it was due to the pine just behind it—that bare branch jutting off to the north like a bony pointing arm—but not all of it. From back here the birch’s white limbs and narrow leaves still made a woman’s shape, and when the wind shook the lower levels of the tree, the green and silver swirled like long skirts.

I had said no to Harold’s well-meant offer to come up almost before it was fully articulated, and as I looked at the tree-woman, rather ghostly in her own right, I knew why: Harold was loud, Harold was insensitive to nuance, Harold might frighten off whatever was here. I didn’t want that.

I was scared, yes—standing on those dark cellar stairs and listening to the thumps from just below me, I had been fucking terrified—but I had also felt fully alive for the first time in years. I was touching something in Sara that was entirely beyond my experience, and it fascinated me.

The cordless phone rang in my lap, making me jump. I grabbed it, expecting Max Devore or perhaps Footman, his overgolded minion. It turned out to be a lawyer named John Storrow, who sounded as if he might have graduated from law school fairly recently—like last week. Still, he worked for the firm of Avery, Mclain, and Bernstein on Park Avenue, and Park Avenue is a pretty good address for a lawyer, even one who still has a few of his milk-teeth. If Henry Goldacre said Storrow was good, he probably was. And his specialty was custody law.

“Now tell me what’s happening up there,” he said when the introductions were over and the background had been sketched in.

I did my best, feeling my spirits rise a little as the tale wound on.

There’s something oddly comforting about talking to a legal guy once the billable-hours clock has started running; you have passed the magical point at which a lawyer becomes your lawyer. Your lawyer is warm, your lawyer is sympathetic, your lawyer makes notes on a yellow pad and nods in all the right places. Most of the questions your lawyer asks are questions you can answer. And if you can’t, your lawyer will help you find a way to do so, by God. Your lawyer is always on your side. Your enemies are his enemies. To him you are never shit but always Shinola.

When I had finished, John Storrow said: “Wow. I’m surprised the papers haven’t gotten hold of this.”

“That never occurred to me.” But I could see his point. The Devore family saga wasn’t for the New York ’mes or Boston Globe, probably not even for the Derry News, but in weekly supermarket tabs like the National Enquirer or Inside l’ew, it would fit like a glove—instead of the girl, King Kong decides to snatch the girl’s innocent child and carry it with him to the top of the Empire State Building. Oh, eek, unhand that baby, you brute. It wasn’t front-page stuff, no blood or celebrity morgue shots, but as a page nine shouter it would do nicely. In my mind I composed a headline blaring over side-by-side pix of Warrington’s Lodge and Mattie’s rusty doublewide: COMPU-KING LIVES IN SPLENDOR AS HE TRIES TO TAKE YOUNG BEAUTY’s ONLY CHILD. Probably too long, I decided. I wasn’t writing anymore and still I needed an editor. That was pretty sad when you stopped to think about it. “Perhaps at some point we’ll see that they do get the story,” Storrow said in a musing tone. I realized that this was a man I could grow attached to, at least in my present angry mood. He grew brisker. “Who’m I representing here, Mr. Noonan? You or the young lady? I vote for the young lady.”

“The young lady doesn’t even know I’ve called you. She may think I’ve taken a bit too much on myself. She may, in fact, give me the rough side of her tongue.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she’s a Yankee—a Maine Yankee, the worst kind. On a given day, they can make the Irish look logical.”

“Perhaps, but she’s the one with the target pinned to her shirt. I suggest that you call and tell her that.” I promised I would. It wasn’t a hard promise to make, either. I’d known I’d have to be in touch with her ever since I had accepted the summons from Deputy Footman. “And who stands for Michael Noonan come Friday morning?”

Storrow laughed dryly. “I’ll find someone local to do that. He’ll go into this Durgin’s office with you, sit quietly with his briefcase on his lap, and listen. I may be in town by that point—I won’t know until I talk to Ms. Devore—but I won’t be in Durgin’s office. When the custody hearing comes around, though, you’ll see my face in the place.”

“All right, good. Call me with the name of my new lawyer. My other new lawyer.”

“Uh-huh. In the meantime, talk to the young lady. Get me a job.”

“I’ll try.”

“Also try to stay visible if you’re with her,” he said. “If we give the bad guys room to get nasty, they’ll get nasty.

There’s nothing like that between you, is there? Nothing nasty? Sorry to have to ask, but I do have to ask.”

“No,” I said. “It’s been quite some time since I’ve been up to anything nasty with anyone.”

“I’m tempted to commiserate, Mr. Noonan, but under the circumstances-’’ “Mike. Make it Mike.”

“Good. I like that. And I’m John. People are going to talk about your involvement anyway. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure. People know I can afford you. They’ll speculate about how she can afford me. Pretty young widow, middle-aged widower. Sex would seem the most likely.”

“You’re a realist.”

“I don’t really think I am, but I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

“I hope you do, because the ride could get rough. This is an extremely rich man we’re going up against.” Yet he didn’t sound scared.

He sounded almost… greedy. He sounded the way part of me had felt when I saw that the magnets on the fridge were back in a circle. “I know he is.”

“In court that won’t matter a whole helluva lot, because there’s a certain amount of money on the other side. Also, the judge is going to be very aware that this one is a powderkeg. That can be useful.”

“What’s the best thing we’ve got going for us?” I asked this thinking of Kyra’s rosy, unmarked face and her complete lack of fear in the presence of her mother. I asked it thinking John would reply that the charges were clearly unfounded. I thought wrong. “The best thing? Devore’s age. He’s got to be older than God.”

“Based on what I’ve heard over the weekend, I think he must be eighty-five. That would make God older.”

“Yeah, but as a potential dad he makes Tony Randall look like a teenager,” John said, and now he sounded positively gloating. “Think of it, Michael—the kid graduates from high school the year Gramps turns one hundred. Also there’s a chance the old man’s overreached himself. Do you know what a guardian ad/item is?”

“No.”

“Essentially it’s a lawyer the court appoints to protect the interests of the child. A fee for the service comes out of court costs, but it’s a pittance. Most people who agree to serve as guardian ad//item have strictly altruistic motives… but not all of them. In any case, the ad/item puts his own spin on the case.

Judges don’t have to take the guy’s advice, but they almost always do.

It makes a judge look stupid to reject the advice of his own appointee, and the thing a judge hates above all others is looking stupid.”

“Devore will have his own lawyer?” John laughed. “How about half a dozen at the actual custody hearing?”

“Are you serious?”

“The guy is eighty-five.

That’s too old for Ferraris, too old for bungee jumping in Tibet, and too old for whores unless he’s a mighty man. What does that leave for him to spend his money on?”

“Lawyers,” I said bleakly. “Yep.”

“And Mattie Devore? What does she get?”

“Thanks to you, she gets me,” John Storrow said. “It’s like a John Grisham novel, isn’t it? Pure gold.

Meantime, I’m interested in Durgin, the ad/item. If Devore hasn’t been expecting any real trouble, he may have been unwise enough to put temptation in Durgin’s way. And Durgin may have been stupid enough to succumb. Hey, who knows what we might find?” But I was a turn back. “She gets you,” I said. “Thanks to me. And if I wasn’t here to stick in my oar? What would she get then?”

“Bubkes. That’s Yiddish. It means—”

“I know what it means,” I said. “That’s incredible.”

“Nope, just American justice. You know the lady with the scales? The one who stands outside most city courthouses?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Slap some handcuffs on that broad’s wrists and some tape over her mouth to go along with the blindfold, rape her and roll her in the mud. You like that image? I don’t, but it’s a fair representation of how the law works in custody cases where the plaintiff is rich and the defendant is poor. And sexual equality has actually made it worse, because while mothers still tend to be poor, they are no longer seen as the automatic choice for custody.”

“Mattie Devore’s got to have you, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” John said simply. “Call me tomorrow and tell me that she will.”

“I hope I can do that.”

“So do I. And listen—there’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“You lied to Devore on the telephone.”

“Bullshit!”

“Nope, nope, I hate to contradict my sister’s favorite author, but you did and you know it. You told Devote that mother and child were out together, the kid was picking flowers, everything was fine. You put everything in there except Bambi and Thumper.” I was sitting up straight in my deck-chair now. I felt sandbagged. I also felt that my own cleverness had been overlooked. “Hey, no, think again. I never came out and said anything. I told him I assumed. I used the word more than once. I remember that very clearly.”

“Uh-huh, and if he was taping your conversation, you’ll get a chance to actually count how many times you used it.” At first I didn’t answer. I was thinking back to the conversation I’d had with him, remembering the underhum on the phone line, the characteristic underhum I remembered from all my previous summers at Sara Laughs. Had that steady low mmmmm been even more noticeable on Saturday night? “I guess maybe there could be a tape,” I said reluctantly.

“Uh-huh. And if Devore’s lawyer gets it to the ad litem, how do you think you’ll sound?”

“Careful,” I said. “Maybe like a man with something to hide.”

“Or a man spinning yarns. And you’re good at that, aren’t you?

After all, it’s what you do for a living. At the custody hearing, Devore’s lawyer is apt to mention that. If he then produces one of the people who passed you shortly after Mattie arrived on the scene… a person who testifies that the young lady seemed upset and flustered… how do you think you’ll sound then?”

“Like a liar,” I said, and then:

“Ah, fuck.”

“Fear not, Mike. Be of good cheer.”

“What should I do?”

“Spike their guns before they can fire them. Tell Durgin exactly what happened. Get it in the depo. Emphasize the fact that the little girl thought she was walking safely. Make sure you get in that ’crossmock’

thing. I love that.”

“Then if they have a tape they’ll play it and I’ll look like a story-changing schmuck.”

“I don’t think so. You weren’t a sworn witness when you talked to Devore, were you? There you were, sitting out on your deck and minding your own business, watching the fireworks show. Out of the blue this grouchy old asshole calls you.

Starts ranting. Didn’t even give him your number, did you?”

“No.”

“Your unlisted number.”

“No.”

“And while he said he was Maxwell Devore, he could have been anyone, right?”

“Right.”

“He could have been the Shah of Iran.”

“No, the Shah’s dead.”

“The Shah’s out, then. But he could have been a nosy neighbor… or a prankster.”

“Yes.”

“And you said what you said with all those possibilities in mind. But now that you’re part of an official court proceeding, you’re telling the whole truth and nothing but.”

“You bet.” That good my-lawyer feeling had deserted me for a bit, but it was back full-force now. “You can’t do better than the truth, Mike,” he said solemnly. “Except maybe in a few cases, and this isn’t one. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes.”

“All right, we’re done. I want to hear from either you or Mattie Devore around elevenish tomorrow. It ought to be her.”

“I’ll try.”

“If she really balks, you know what to do, don’t you?”

“I think so. Thanks, John.”

“One way or another, we’ll talk very soon,” he said, and hung up.

I sat where I was for awhile. Once I pushed the button which opened the line on the cordless phone, then pushed it again to close it. I had to talk to Mattie, but I wasn’t quite ready yet. I decided to take a walk instead. If she really balks, you know what to do, don’t you? Of course.

Remind her that she couldn’t afford to be proud. That she couldn’t afford to go all Yankee, refusing charity from Michael Noonan, author of Being Two, The Red-Shirt Man, and the soon-to-be-published Helen’s Promise. Remind her that she could have her pride or her daughter, but likely not both. Hey, Mattie, pick one.

I walked almost to the end of the lane, stopping at Tidwell’s Meadow with its pretty view down to the cup of the lake and across to the White Mountains. The water dreamed under a hazy sky, looking gray when you tipped your head one way, blue when you tipped it the other. That sense of mystery was very much with me. That sense of Manderley. Over forty black people had settled here at the turn of the century—lit here for awhile, anyway—according to Marie Hingerman (also according to A History of Castle County and Castle Rock, a weighty tome published in 1977, the county’s bicentennial year). Pretty special black people, too: most of them related, most of them talented, most of them part of a musical group which had first been called The Red-Top Boys and then Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys. They had bought the meadow and a good-sized tract of lakeside land from a man named Douglas Day. The money had been saved up over a period of ten years, according to Sonny Tidwell, who did the dickering (as a Red-Top, Son Tidwell had played what was then known as “chickenscratch guitar”).

There had been a vast uproar about it in town, and even a meeting to protest “the advent of these darkies, which come in a Horde.” Things had settled down and turned out okay, as things have a way of doing, more often than not. The shanty town most locals had expected on Day’s Hill (for so Tidwell’s Meadow was called in 1900, when Son Tid-well bought the land on behalf of his extensive clan) had never appeared. Instead, a number of neat white cabins sprang up, surrounding a larger building that might have been intended as a group meeting place, a rehearsal area, or perhaps, at some point, a performance hall.

Sara and the Red-Top Boys (sometimes there was a Red-Top Girl in there, as well; membership in the band was fluid, changing with every performance) played around western Maine for over a year, maybe closer to two years. In towns all up and down the Western Line—Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Morton, Fryeburg—you’ll still come across their old show-posters at barn bazaars and junk-atoriums. Sara and the Red-Tops were great favorites on the circuit, and they got along all right at home on the TR, too, which never surprised me. At the end of the day Robert Frost—that utilitarian and often unpleasant poet—was right: in the northeastern three we really do believe that good fences make good neighbors. We squawk and then keep a miserly peace, the kind with gimlet eyes and a tucked-down mouth. “They pay their bills,” we say. “I ain’t never had to shoot one a their dogs,” we say. “They keep themselves to themselves,” we say, as if isolation were a virtue. And, of course, the defining virtue: “They don’t take charity.”

And at some point, Sara Tidwell became Sara Laughs.

In the end, though, TR-90 mustn’t have been what they wanted, because after playing a county fair or two in the late summer of 1901, the clan moved on. Their neat little cabins provided summer-rental income for the Day family until 1933, when they burned in the summer fires which charred the east and north sides of the lake. End of story.

Except for her music, that was. Her music had lived.

I got up from the rock I had been sitting on, stretched my arms and my back, and walked back down the lane, singing one of her songs as I went.

Dring my hike back down the lane to the house, I tried to think about nothing at all. My first editor used to say that eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That’s blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos.

Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.

When I tried to call Mattie Devote, an extremely peculiar thing happened—one that had nothing at all ro do with spooks, as far as I could tell. Instead of an open-hum line when I pushed the cordless’s on button, I got silence. Then, just as I was thinking I must have left the phone in the north bedroom off the hook, I realized ir wasn’t complete silence. Distant as a radio transmission from deep space, cheerful and quacky as an animated duck, some guy with a fair amount of Brooklyn in his voice was singing: “He followed her to school one day, school one day, school one day. Followed her to school one day, which was against the rule…” I opened my mouth to ask who was there, but before I could, a woman’s voice said “Hello?” She sounded perplexed and doubtful.

“Mattie?” In my confusion it never occurred to me to call her something more formal, like Ms. or Mrs. Devore. Nor did it seem odd that I should know who it was, based on a single word, even though our only previous conversation had been relatively brief. Maybe the guys in the basement recognized the background music and made the connection to Kyra. “Mr. Noonan?” She sounded more bewildered than ever. “The phone never even rang!”

“I must have picked mine up just as your call was going through,” I said. “That happens from time to time.” But how many times, I wondered, did it happen when the person calling you was the one you yourself had been planning to call? Maybe quite often, actually.

Telepathy or coincidence? Live or Memorex? Either way, it seemed almost magical. I looked across the long, low living room, into the glassy eyes of Bunter the moose, and thought: I3s, but maybe this is a magic place now. “I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “I apologize about calling in the first place—it’s a presumption. Your number’s unlisted, I know.” Oh, don’t worry about that, I thought. Everyone’s got this old number by now. In fact, I’m thinking aboutputting it in the Illow Pages. “I got it from your file at the library,” she went on, sounding embarrassed.

“That’s where I work.” In the background, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” had given way to “The Farmer in the Dell.”

“It’s quite all right,” I said.

“Especially since you’re the person I was picking up the phone to call.”

“Me? Why?”

“Ladies first.” She gave a brief, nervous laugh. “I wanted to invite you to dinner. That is, Ki and I want to invite you to dinner. I should have done it before now. You were awfully good to us the other day. Will you come?”

“Yes,” I said with no hesitation at all. “With thanks. We’ve got some things to talk about, anyway.”

There was a pause. In the background, the mouse was taking the cheese.

As a kid I used to think all these things happened in a vast gray factory called The Hi-Ho Dairy-O. “Mattie? Still there?"

“He’s dragged you into it, hasn’t he? That awful old man.” Now her voice sounded not nervous but somehow dead. “Well, yes and no. You could argue that fate dragged me into it, or coincidence, or God. I wasn’t there that morning because of Max Devore; I was chasing the elusive Villageburger.” She didn’t laugh, but her voice brightened a little, and I was glad. People who talk in that dead, affectless way are, by and large, frightened people. Sometimes people who have been outright terrorized. “I’m still sorry for dragging you into my trouble.” I had an idea she might start to wonder who was dragging whom after I pitched her on John Storrow, and was glad it was a discussion I wouldn’t have to have with her on the phone. “In any case, I’d love to come to dinner. When?”

“Would this evening be too soon?”

“Absolutely not.”

“That’s wonderful. We have to eat early, though, so my little guy doesn’t fall asleep in her dessert.

Is six okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ki will be excited. We don’t have much company.”

“She hasn’t been wandering again, has she?” I thought she might be offended. Instead, this time she aid laugh. “God, no. All the fuss on Saturday scared her. Now she comes in to tell me if she’s switching from the swing in the side yard to the sandbox in back. She’s talked about you a lot, though. She calls you ’that tall guy who carrot me.” I think she’s worried you might be mad at her.”

“Tell her I’m not,” I said. “No, check that. I’ll tell her myself. Can I bring anything?”

“Bottle of wine?” she asked, a little doubtfully. “Or maybe that’s pretentious—I was only going to cook hamburgers on the grill and make potato salad.”

“I’ll bring an unpretentious bottle.”

“Thank you,” she said. “This is sort of exciting. We never have company.”

I was horrified to find myself on the verge of saying that I thought it was sort of exciting, too, my first date in four years and all. “Thanks so much for thinking of me.” As I hung up I remembered John Storrow advising me to try and stay visible with her, not to hand over any extra grist for the town gossip mill. If she was barbecuing, we’d probably be out where people could see we had our clothes on. . for most of the evening, anyway. She-would, however, likely do the polite thing at some point and invite me inside. I would then do the polite thing and go.

Admire her velvet Elvis painting on the wall, or her commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint, or whatever she had going in the way of trailer decoration; I’d let Kyra show me her bedroom and exclaim with wonder over her excellent assortment of stuffed animals and her favorite dolly, if that was required. There are all sorts of priorities in life.

Some your lawyer can understand, but I suspect there are quite a few he can’t. “Am I handling this right, Bunter?” I asked the stuffed moose.

“Bellow once for yes, twice for no.” I was halfway down the hall leading to the north wing, thinking of nothing but a cool shower, when from behind me, very soft, came a brief ring of the bell around Bunter’s neck. I stopped, head cocked, my shirt held in one hand, waiting for the bell to ring again. It didn’t. After a minute, I went the rest of the way to the bathroom and flipped on the shower.

The Lakeview General had a pretty good selection of wines tucked away in one corner—not much local demand for it, maybe, but the tourists probably bought a fair quantity—and I selected a bottle of Mondavi red.

It was probably a bit more expensive than Mattie had had in mind, but I could peel the price-sticker off and hope she wouldn’t know the difference. There was a line at the checkout, mostly folks with damp tee-shirts pulled on over their bathing suits and sand from the public beach sticking to their legs. While I was waiting my turn, my eye happened on the impulse items which are always stocked near the counter.

Among them were several plastic bags labeled ^C, NABET, each bag showing a cartoon refrigerator with the message BACK SOON stuck to it. According to the written info, there were two sets of consonants in each Magnabet, PLUS EXTRA VOWELS. I grabbed two sets… then added a third, thinking that Mattie Devore’s kid was probably just the right age for such an item.

Kyra saw me pulling into the weedy dooryard, jumped off the slumpy little swingset beside the trailer, bolted to her mother, and hid behind her. When I approached the hibachi which had been set up beside the cinderblock front steps, the child who’d spoken to me so fearlessly on Saturday was just a peeking blue eye and a chubby hand grasping a fold of her mother’s sundress below the hip. Two hours brought considerable changes, however. As twilight deepened, Kyra sat on my lap in the trailer’s living room, listening carefully—if with growing wooziness—as I read her the ever-enthralling story of Cinderella. The couch we were on was a shade of brown which can by law only be sold in discount stores, and extremely lumpy into the bargain, but I still felt ashamed of my casual preconceptions about what I would find inside this trailer. On the wall above and behind us there was an Edward Hopper print—that one of a lonely lunch counter late at night—and across the room, over the small Formica-topped table in the kitchen nook, was one of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers series. Even more than the Hopper, it looked at home in Mattie Devore’s doublewide. I have no idea why that should have been true, but it was. “Glass slipper will cut her footie,” Ki said in a muzzy, considering way. “No way,” I said. “Slipper-glass was specially made in the Kingdom of Grimoire. Smooth and unbreakable, as long as you didn’t sing high C while wearing them.”

“I get a pair?”

“Sorry, Ki,” I said, “no one knows how to make slipper-glass anymore.

It’s a lost art, like Toledo steel.” It was hot in the trailer and she was hot against my shirt, where her upper body lay, but I wouldn’t have changed it. Having a kid on my lap was pretty great. Outside, her mother was singing and gathering up dishes from the card table we’d used for our picnic. Hearing her sing was also pretty great. “Go on, go on,” Kyra said, pointing to the picture of Cinderella scrubbing the floor. The little girl peeking nervously around her mother’s leg was gone; the angry I’m-going-to-the-damn-beach girl of Saturday morning was gone; here was only a sleepy kid who was pretty and bright and trusting.

“Before I can’t hold it anymore.”

“Do you need to go pee-pee?”

“No,” she said, looking at me with some disdain. “Besides, that’s you-rinating.

Peas are what you eat with meatloaf, that’s what Mattie says. And I already went. But if you don’t go fast on the story, I’ll fall to sleep.”

“You can’t hurry stories with magic in them, Ki.”

“Well go as fast as you can.”

“Okay.” I turned the page. Here was Cinderella, trying to be a good sport, waving goodbye to her asshole sisters as they went off to the ball dressed like starlets at a disco.”

“No sooner had Cinderella said goodbye to Tammy Faye and Vanna—’”

“Those are the sisters’ names?”

“The ones I made up for them, yes. Is that okay?”

“Sure.” She settled more comfortably on my lap and dropped her head against my chest again. “"No sooner had Cinderella said goodbye to Tammy Faye and Vanna than a bright light suddenly appeared in the corner of the kitchen. Stepping out of it was a beautiful lady in a silver gown.

The jewels in her hair glowed like stars.’”

“Fairy godmother,” Kyra said matter-of-factly. “Yes.” Mattie came in carrying the remaining half-bottle of Mondavi and the blackened barbecue implements. Her sundress was bright red. On her feet she wore low-topped sneakers so white that they seemed to flash in the gloom. Her hair was tied back and although she still wasn’t the gorgeous country-club babe I had briefly envisioned, she was very pretty. Now she looked at Kyra, looked at me, raised her eyebrows, made a lifting gesture with her arms. I shook my head, sending back a message that neither of us was ready quite yet. I resumed reading while Mattie went to work scrubbing her few cooking tools. She was still humming. By the time she had finished with the spatula, Ki’s body had taken on an additional relaxation which I recognized at once—she’d conked out, and hard. I closed the Little Golden Treasury of Fairy Tales and put it on the coffee-table beside a couple of other stacked books—whatever Mattie was reading, I presumed. I looked up, saw her looking back at me from the kitchen, and flicked her the V-for-Victory sign. “Noonan, the winner by a technical knockout in the eighth round,” I said. Mattie dried her hands on a dishtowel and came over. “Give her to me.” I stood up with Kyra in my arms instead.

“I’ll carry. Where?” She pointed. “On the left.” I carried the baby down the hallway, which was narrow enough so I had to be careful not to bump her feet on one side or the top of her head on the other. At the end of the hall was the bathroom, stringently clean. On the right was a closed door which led, I assumed, into the bedroom Mattie had once shared with Lance Devore and where she now slept alone. If there was a boyfriend who overnighted even some of the time, Mattie had done a good job of erasing his presence from the trailer. I slid carefully through the door on the left and looked at the little bed with its ruffled coverlet of cabbage roses, the table with the doll-house on it, the picture of the Emerald City on one wall, the sign (done in shiny stick-on letters) on another one that read CASA KYRA. Devore wanted to take her away from here, a place where nothing was wrong—where, to the contrary, everything was perfectly right. Casa Kyra was the room of a little girl who was growing up okay. “Put her on the bed and then go pour yourself another glass of wine,” Mattie said. “I’ll zip her into her pj’s and join you. I know we’ve got stuff to talk about.”

“Okay.” I put her down, then bent a little farther, meaning to plant a kiss on her nose. I almost thought better of it, then did it anyway. When I left, Mattie was smiling, so I guess it was okay.

I poured myself a little more wine, walked back into the scrap of living room with it, and looked at the two books beside Ki’s fairy-tale collection. I’m always curious about what people are reading; the only better insight into them is the contents of their medicine cabinets, and rummaging through your host’s drugs and nostrums is frowned upon by the better class.

The books were different enough to qualify as schizoid. One, with a playing-card bookmark about three quarters of the way through, was the paperback edition of Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness. I applauded her taste; Patterson and Demille are probably the best of the current popular novelists. The other, a hardcover tome of some weight, was The Collected Short Works of Herman Melville. About as far from Richard North Patterson as you could get. According to the faded purple ink stamped on the thickness of the pages, this volume belonged to Four Lakes Community Library. That was a lovely little stone building about five miles south of Dark Score Lake, where Route 68 passes off the TR and into Motton. Where Mattie worked, presumably. I opened to her bookmark, another playing card, and saw she was reading “Bartleby.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said from behind me, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the books. “I like it—it’s a good enough story—but I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. The other one, now, I’ve even figured out who did it.”

“It’s a strange pair to read in tandem,” I said, putting them back down. “The Patterson I’m reading for pleasure,” Mattie said. She went into the kitchen, looked briefly (and with some longing, I thought) at the bottle of wine, then opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of Kool-Aid. On the fridge door were words her daughter had already assembled from her Magnabet bag: KI and MATTIE and HOHO (Santa Claus, I presumed). “Well, I’m reading them both for pleasure, I guess, but we’re due to discuss “Bartleby’ in this little group I’m a part of. We meet Thursday nights at the library. I’ve still got about ten pages to go.”

“A readers’ circle.”

“Uh-huh. Mrs. Briggs leads. She formed it long before I was born. She’s the head librarian at Four Lakes, you know.” “I do. Lindy Briggs is my caretaker’s sister-in-law.” Mattie smiled. “Small world, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s a big world but a small town.” She started to lean back against the counter with her glass of Kool-Aid, then thought better of it. “Why don’t we go outside and sit? That way anyone passing can see that we’re still dressed and that we don’t have anything on inside-out.”

I looked at her, startled She looked back with a kind of cynical good humor. It wasn’t an expression that looked particularly at home on her face. “I may only be twenty-one, but I’m not stupid,” she said. “He’s watching me. I know it, and you probably do, too. On another night I might be tempted to say fuck him if he can’t take a joke, but it’s cooler out there and the smoke from the hibachi will keep the worst of the bugs away. Have I shocked you? If so, I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t.” She had, a little. “No need to apologize.” We carried our drinks down the not-quite-steady cinderblock steps and sat side-by-side in a couple of lawn-chairs. To the left of us the coals in the hibachi glowed soft rose in the growing gloom. Mattie leaned back, placed the cold curve of her glass briefly against her forehead, then drank most of what was left, the ice cubes sliding against her teeth with a click and a rattle.

Crickets hummed in the woods behind the trailer and across the road.

Farther up Highway 68, I could see the bright white fluorescents over the gas island at the Lakeview General. The seat of my chair was a little baggy, the interwoven straps a little frayed, and the old girl canted pretty severely to the left, but there was still no place I’d rather have been sitting just then. This evening had turned out to be a quiet little miracle… at least, so far. We still had John Storrow to get to. “I’m glad you came on a Tuesday,” she said. “Tuesday nights are hard for me. I’m always thinking of the ballgame down at Warrington’s.

The guys’ll be picking up the gear by now—the bats and bases and catcher’s mask—and putting it back in the storage cabinet behind home plate. Drinking their last beers and smoking their last cigarettes.

That’s where I met my husband, you know. I’m sure you’ve been told all that by now.” I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I could hear the faint tinge of bitterness which had crept into her voice, and guessed she was still wearing the cynical expression. It was too old for her, but I thought she’d come by it honestly enough. Although if she didn’t watch out, it would take root and grow. “I heard a version from Bill, yes—Lindy’s brother-in-law.”

“Oh ayuh—our story’s on retail. You can get it at the store, or the Village Cafe, or at that old blabbermouth’s garage… which my father-in-law rescued from Western Savings, by the way. He stepped in just before the bank could foreclose. Now Dickie Brooks and his cronies think Max Devore is walking talking Jesus. I hope you got a fairer version from Mr. Dean than you’d get at the All-Purpose. You must’ve, or you wouldn’t have risked eating hamburgers with Jezebel.” I wanted to get away from that, if I could—her anger was understandable but useless. Of course it was easier for me to see that; it wasn’t my kid who had been turned into the handkerchief tied at the center of a tug-of-war rope. “They still play softball at Warrington’s?

Even though Devore bought the place?”

“Yes indeed. He goes down to the field in his motorized wheelchair every Tuesday evening and watches.

There are other things he’s done since he came back here that are just attempts to buy the town’s good opinion, but I think he genuinely loves the softball games. The Whit-more woman goes, too. Brings an extra oxygen tank along in a little red wheelbarrow with a whitewall tire on the front. She keeps a fielder’s mitt in there, too, in case any foul pops come up over the backstop to where he sits. He caught one near the start of the season, I heard, and got a standing O from the players and the folks who come to watch.”

“Going to the games puts him in touch with his son, you think?” Mattie smiled grimly. “I don’t think Lance so much as crosses his mind, not when he’s at the ballfield. They play hard at Warrington’s—slide into home with their feet up, jump into the puckerbrush for the flyballs, curse each other when they do something wrong—and that’s what old Max Devore enjoys, that’s why he never misses a Tuesdayevening game. He likes to watch them slide and get up bleeding.”

“Is that how Lance played?” She thought about it carefully.

“He played hard, but he wasn’t crazed. He was there just for the fun of it. We all were. We women—shit, really just us girls, Barney Therriault’s wife, Cindy, was only sixteen—we’d stand behind the backstop on the first-base side, smoking cigarettes or waving punks to keep the bugs away, cheering our guys when they did something good, laughing when they did something stupid. We’d swap sodas or share a can of beer. I’d admire Helen Geary’s twins and she’d kiss Ki under the chin until Ki giggled. Sometimes we’d go down to the Village Cafe afterward and Buddy’d make us pizzas, losers pay. All friends again, you know, a ter the game. We’d sit there laughing and yelling and blowing straw-wrappers around, some of the guys half-loaded but nobody mean. In those days they got all the mean out on the ballfield. And you know what? None of them come to see me. Not Helen Geary, who was my best friend. Not Richie Lattimore, who was Lance’s best riend—the two of them would talk about rocks and birds and the kinds of trees there were across the lake for hours on end. They came to the uneral, and for a little while a ter, and then… you know what it was like? When I was a kid, our well dried up. For awhile you’d get a trickle when you turned on the tap, but then there was just air. Just air.” The cynicism was gone and there was only hurt in her voice. “I saw Helen at Christmas, and we promised to get together for the twins’

birthday, but we never did. I think she’s scared to come near me.”

“Because of the old man?”

“Who else? But that’s okay, life goes on.” She sat up, drank the rest of her Kool-Aid, and set the glass aside. “What about you, Mike? Did you come back to write a book? Are you going to name the TR?” This was a local bon mot that I remembered with an almost painful twinge of nostalgia. Locals with great plans were said to be bent on naming the TR. “No,” I said, and then astonished myself by saying: “I don’t do that anymore. I think I expected her to leap to her feet, overturning her chair and uttering a sharp cry of horrified denial. All of which says a good deal about me, I suppose, and none of it flattering. “You’ve retired?” she asked, sounding calm and remarkably unhorri-fled. “Or is it writer’s block?”

“Well, it’s certainly not chosen retirement.” I realized the conversation had taken a rather amusing turn. I’d come primarily to sell her on John Storrow—to shove John Storrow down her throat, if that was what it tookand instead I was for the first time discussing my inability to work. For the first time with anyone. “So it’s a block.”

“I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. I think novelists may come equipped with a certain number of stories to tell—they’re built into the software. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “Maybe you’ll write now that you’re down here.

Maybe that’s part of the reason you came back.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Are you scared?”

“Sometimes. Mostly about what I’ll do for the rest of my life. I’m no good at boats in bottles, and my wife was the one with the green thumb.”

“I’m scared, too,” she said. “Scared a lot. All the time now, it seems like.”

“That he’ll win his custody case? Mattie, that’s what I—”

“The custody case is only part of it,” she said. “I’m scared just to be here, on the TR. It started early this summer, long after I knew Devore meant to get Ki away from me if he could. And it’s getting worse. In a way it’s like watching thunderheads gather over New Hampshire and then come piling across the lake. I can’t put it any better than that, except…” She shifted, crossing her legs and then bending forward to pull the skirt of her dress against the line of her shin, as if she were cold. “Except that I’ve woken up several times lately, sure that I wasn’t in the bedroom alone. Once when I was sure I wasn’t in the bed alone. Sometimes it’s just a feeling—like a headache, only in your nerves—and sometimes I think I can hear whispering, or crying. I made a cake one night—about two weeks ago, this was—and forgot to put the flour away. The next morning the cannister was overturned, and the flour was spilled on the counter. Someone had written ’hello’ in it. I thought at first it was Ki, but she said she didn’t do it. Besides, it wasn’t her printing, hers is all straggly. I don’t know if she could even write hello. Hi, maybe, but… Mike, you don’t think he could be sending someone around to try and freak me out, do you? I mean that’s just stupid, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of something thumping the insulation in the dark as I stood on the stairs. I thought of hello printed with magnets on my refrigerator door, and a child sobbing in the dark. My skin felt more than cold; it felt numb. A headache in the nerves, that was good, that was exactly how you felt when something reached around the wall of the real world and touched you on the nape of the neck. “Maybe it’s ghosts,” she said, and smiled in an uncertain way that was more frightened than amused. I opened my mouth to tell her about what had been happening at I IZIR’!FI IZIN IX 1 IN k… x Sara Laughs, then closed it again. There was a clear choice to be made here: either we could be sidetracked into a discussion of the paranormal, or we could come back to the visible world. The one where Max Devore was trying to steal himself a kid. “Yeah,” I said. “The spirits are about to speak.”

“I wish I could see your face better. There was something on it just then. What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But right now I think we’d better talk about Kyra. Okay?”

“Okay.” In the faint glow of the hibachi I could see her settling herself in her chair, as if to take a blow. “I’ve been subpoenaed to give a deposition in Castle Rock on Friday. Before Elmer Durgin, who is Kyra’s guardian ad litem—”

“That pompous little toad isn’t Ki’s anything!” she burst out. “He’s in my father-in-law’s hip pocket, just like Dickie Osgood, old Max’s pet real-estate guy! Dickie and Elmer Durgin drink together down at The Mellow Tiger, or at least they did until this business really got going.

Then someone probably told them it would look bad, and they stopped.”

“The papers were served by a deputy named George Footman.”

“Just one more of the usual suspects,” Mattie said in a thin voice. “Dickie Osgood’s a snake, but George Footman’s a junkyard dog. He’s been suspended off the cops twice. Once more and he can work for Max Devore full-time.”

“Well, he scared me. I tried not to show it, but he did. And people who scare me make me angry. I called my agent in New York and then hired a lawyer. One who makes a specialty of child-custody cases.”

I tried to see how she was taking this and couldn’t, although we were sitting fairly close together. But she still had that set look, like a woman who expects to take some hard blows. Or perhaps for Mattie the blows had already started to fall. Slowly, not allowing myself to rush, I went through my conversation with John Storrow. I emphasized what Storrow had said about sexual equality—that it was apt to be a negative force in her case, making it easier for Judge Rancourt to take Kyra away. I also came down hard on the fact that Devore could have all the lawyers he wanted—not to men tion sympathetic witnesses, with Richard Osgood running around the TR and spreading Devore’s dough—but that the court wasn’t obligated to treat her to so much as an ice cream cone. I finished by telling her that John wanted to talk to one of us tomorrow at eleven, and that it should be her. Then I waited. The silence spun out, broken only by crickets and the faint revving of some kid’s unmuffled truck. Up Route 68, the white fluorescents went out as the Lakeview Market finished another day of summer trade. I didn’t like Mattie’s quiet; it seemed like the prelude to an explosion. A Yankee explosion. I held my peace and waited for her to ask me what gave me the right to meddle in her business. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and defeated. It hurt to hear her sounding that way, but like the cynical look on her face earlier, it wasn’t surprising. And I hardened myself against it as best I could. Hey, Mattie, tough old world. Pick one. “Why would you do this?” she asked. “Why would you hire an expensive New York lawyer to take my case? That is what you’re offering, isn’t it? It’s got to be, because I sure can’t hire him. I got thirty thousand dollars’ insurance money when Lance died, and was lucky to get that. It was a policy he bought from one of his Warrington’s friends, almost as a joke, but without it I would have lost the trailer last winter. They may love Dickie Brooks at Western Savings, but they don’t give a rat’s ass for Mattie Stanchfield Devore. After taxes I make about a hundred a week at the library. So you’re offering to pay. Right?”

“Right.”

“Why? You don’t even know us.”

“Because…” I trailed off. I seem to remember wanting Jo to step in at that point, asking my mind to supply her voice, which I could then pass on to Mattie in my own. But Jo didn’t come. I was flying solo. “Because now I do nothing that makes a difference,” I said at last, and once again the words astonished me.

“And I do know you. I’ve eaten your food, I’ve read Ki a story and had her fall asleep in my lap… and maybe I saved her life the other day when I grabbed her out of the road. We’ll never know for sure, but maybe I did. You know what the Chinese say about something like that?” I didn’t expect an answer, the question was more rhetorical than real, but she surprised me. Not for the last time, either. “That if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them.”

“Yes. It’s also about what’s fair and what’s right, but I think mostly it’s about wanting to be part of something where I make a difference. I look back on the four years since my wife died, and there’s nothing there. Not even a book where Marjorie the shy typist meets a handsome stranger.” She sat thinking this over, watching as a fully loaded pulptruck snored past on the highway, its headlights glaring and its load of logs swaying from side to side like the hips of an overweight woman. “Don’t you root for us,” she said at last. She spoke in a low, unexpectedly fierce voice.

“Don’t you root for us like he roots for his team-of-the-week down at the softball field. I need help and I know it, but I won’t have that. I can’t have it. We’re not a game, Ki and me. You understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“You know what people in town will say, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a lucky girl, don’t you think? First I marry the son of an extremely rich man, and after he dies, I fall under the protective wing of another rich guy. Next I’ll probably move in with Donald Trump.”

“(]ut it out.”

“I’d probably believe it myself, if I were on the other side. But I wonder if anyone notices that lucky Mattie is still living in a Modair trailer and can’t afford health insurance. Or that her kid got most of her vaccinations from the County Nurse. My parents died when I was fifteen. I have a brother and a sister, but they’re both a lot older and both out of state. My parents were drunks—not physically abusive, but there was plenty of the other kinds. It was like growing up in a… a roach motel. My dad was a pulper, my mom was a bourbon beautician whose one ambition was to own a Mary Kay pink Cadillac. He drowned in Kewadin Pond. She drowned in her own vomit about six months later. How do you like it so far?”

“Not very much. I’m sorry.”

“After Mom’s funeral my brother, Hugh, offered to take me back to Rhode Island, but I could tell his wife wasn’t exactly nuts about having a fifteen-year-old join the family, and I can’t say that I blamed her.

Also, I’d just made the jv cheering squad. That seems like supreme diddlyshit now, but it was a very big deal then.” Of course it had been a big deal, especially to the child of alcoholics. The only one still living at home. Being that last child, watching as the disease really digs its claws in, can be one of the world’s loneliest jobs. Last one out of the sacred ginmill please turn off the lights. “I ended up going to live with my aunt Florence, just two miles down the road. It took us about three weeks to discover we didn’t like each other very much, but we made it work for two years. Then, between my junior and senior years, I got a summer job at Warrington’s and met Lance. When he asked me to marry him, Aunt Flo refused to give permission. When I told her I was pregnant, she emancipated me so I didn’t need it.”

“You dropped out of school?” She grimaced, nodded. “I didn’t want to spend six months having people watch me swell up like a balloon. Lance supported me. He said I could take the equivalency test. I did last year. It was easy. And now Ki and I are on our own. Even if my aunt agreed to help me, what could she do? She works in the Castle Rock Gore-Tex factory and makes about sixteen thousand dollars a year.” I nodded again, thinking that my last check for French royalties had been about that. My last quarterly check.

Then I remembered something Ki had told me on the day I met her. “When I was carrying Kyra out of the road, she said that if you were mad, she’d go to her white nana. If your folks are dead, who did she—” Except I didn’t really have to ask; I only had to make one or two simple connections. “Rogette Whitmore’s the white nana? Devore’s assistant? But that means…”

“That Ki’s been with them. Yes, you bet. Until late last month, I allowed her to visit her grandpa—and Rogette by association, of course—quite often. Once or twice a week, and sometimes for an overnight. She likes her ’whita poppa’—at least she did at first—and she absolutely adores that creepy woman.” I thought Mattie shivered in the gloom, although the night was still very warm. “Devore called to say he was coming east for Lance’s funeral and to ask if he could see his granddaughter while he was here. Nice as pie, he was, just as if he’d never tried to buy me off when Lance told him we were going to get married.”

“Did he?”

“Uh-huh. The first offer was a hundred thousand. That was in August of 1994, after Lance called him to say we were getting married in mid-September. I kept quiet about it. A week later, the offer went up to two hundred thousand.”

“For what, precisely?”

“To remove my bitch-hooks and relocate with no forwarding address. This time I did tell Lance, and he hit the roof. Called his old man and said we were going to be married whether he liked it or not.

Told him that if he ever wanted to see his grandchild, he had better cut the shit and behave.” With another parent, I thought, that was probably the most reasonable response Lance Devore could have made. I respected him for it. The only problem was that he wasn’t dealing with a reasonable man; he was dealing with the fellow who, as a child, had stolen Scooter Larribee’s new sled. “These offers were made by Devore himself, over the telephone. Both when Lance wasn’t around. Then, about ten days before the wedding, I had a visit from Dickie Osgood. I was to make a call to a number in Delaware, and when I did. .” Mattie shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like something out of one of your books.”

“May I guess?”

“If you want.”

“He tried to buy the child.

He tried to buy Kyra.” Her eyes widened. A scantling moon had come up and I could see that look of surprise well enough. “How much?” I asked.

“I’m curious. How much for you to give birth, leave Devore’s grandchild with Lance, then scat?”

“Two million dollars,” she whispered. “Deposited in the bank of my choice, as long as it was west of the Mississippi and I signed an agreement to stay away from her—and from Lance—until at least April twentieth, 2016.”

“The year Ki turns twenty-one.”

“And Osgood doesn’t know any of the details, so Devore’s skirts remain clean here in town.”

“Uh-huh. And the two million was only the start.

There was to be an additional million on Ki’s fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth birthdays.” She shook her head in a disbelieving way. “The linoleum keeps bubbling up in the kitchen, the showerhead keeps falling into the tub, and the whole damn rig cants to the east these days, but I could have been the six-million-dollar woman.” Did you ever consider taking the ofr, Mattie? I wondered. . but that was a question I’d never ask, a sign of curiosity so unseemly it deserved no satisfaction.

“Did you tell Lance?”

“I tried not to. He was already furious with his father, and I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want that much hate at the start of our marriage, no matter how good the reasons for hating might be… and I didn’t want Lance to… later on with me, you know…”

She raised her hands, then dropped them back on her thighs. The gesture was both weary and oddly endearing. “You didn’t want Lance turning on you ten years later and saying “You came between me and my father, you bitch.’”

“Something like that. But in the end, I couldn’t keep it to myself. I was just this kid from the sticks, didn’t own a pair of pantyhose until I was eleven, wore my hair in nothing but braids or a ponytail until I was thirteen, thought the whole state of New York was New York City… and this guy… thisphantomfather… had offered me six million bucks. It terrified me. I had dreams about him coming in the night like a troll and stealing my baby out of her crib. He’d come wriggling through the window like a snake…”

“Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, no doubt.” She smiled. “I didn’t know about the oxygen then.

Or Rogette Whit-more, either. All I’m trying to say is that I was only seventeen and not good at keeping secrets.” I had to restrain my own smile at the way she said this—as if decades of experience now lay between that naive, frightened child and this mature woman with the mail-order diploma.

“Lance was angry.”

“So angry he replied to his father by e-mail instead of calling. He stuttered, you see, and the more upset he was, the worse his stutter became. A phone conversation would have been impossible.”

Now, at last, I thought I had a clear picture. Lance Devore had written his father an unthinkable letter—unthinkable, that was, if you happened to be Max Devore. The letter said that Lance didn’t want to hear from his father again, and Mattie didn’t, either. He wouldn’t be welcome in their home (the Modair trailer wasn’t quite the humble woodcutter’s cottage of a Brothers Grimm tale, but it was close enough for kissing).

He wouldn’t be welcome to visit following the birth of their baby, and if he had the gall to send the child a present then or later, it would be returned. Stay out of my life, Dad. This time you’ve gone too far to forgive. There are undoubtedly diplomatic ways of handling an offended child, some wise and some crafty. . but ask yourself this: would a diplomatic father have gotten himself into such a situation to begin with? Would a man with even minimal insight into human nature have offered his son’s fiancee a bounty (one so enormous it probably had little real sense or meaning to her) to give up her firstborn child? And he’d offered this devil’s bargain to a girl-woman of seventeen, an age when the romantic view of life is at absolute high tide. If nothing else, Devore should have waited awhile before making his final offer.

You could argue that he didn’t know if he had awhile, but it wouldn’t be a persuasive argument. I thought Mattie was right—deep in that wrinkled old prune which served him as a heart, Max Devore thought he was going to live forever. In the end, he hadn’t been able to restrain himself.

There was the sled he wanted, the sled he just had to have, on the other side of the window. All he had to do was break the glass and take it.

He’d been doing it all his life, and so he had reacted to his son’s e-mail not craftily, as a man of his years and abilities should have done, but furiously, as the child would have done if the glass in the shed window had proved immune to his hammering fists. Lance didn’t want him meddling? Fine! Lance could live with his backwoods Daisy Mae in a tent or a trailer or a goddamned cowbarn. He could give up the cushy surveying job, as well, and find real employment. See how the other half lived! In other words, you can’t quit on me, son. You’re fired. “We didn’t fall into each other’s arms at the funeral,” Mattie said, “don’t get that idea. But he was decent to me—which I didn’t expect—and I tried to be decent to him. He offered me a stipend, which I refused. I was afraid there might be legal ramifications.”

“I doubt it, but I like your caution. What happened when he saw Kyra for the first time, Mattie?

Do you remember?”

“I’ll never forget it.” She reached into the pocket of her dress, found a battered pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. She looked at it with a mixture of greed and disgust. “I quit these because Lance said we couldn’t really afford them, and I knew he was right. But the habit creeps back. I only smoke a pack a week, and I know damned well even that’s too much, but sometimes I need the comfort. Do you want one?” I shook my head. She lit up, and in the momentary flare of the match, her face was way past pretty. What had the old man made of her? I wondered. “He met his granddaughter for the first time beside a hearse,” Mattie said. “We were at Dakin’s Funeral Home in Motton. It was the ’viewing.” Do you know about that?”

“Oh yes,” I said, thinking of Jo.

“The casket was closed but they still call it a viewing. Weird. I came out to have a cigarette. I told Ki to sit on the funeral parlor steps so she wouldn’t get the smoke, and I went a little way down the walk. This big gray limo pulled up. I’d never seen anything like it before, except on TV. I knew who it was right away. I put my cigarettes back in my purse and told Ki to come. She toddled down the walk and took hold of my hand. The limo door opened, and Rogette Whitmore got out. She had an oxygen mask in one hand, but he didn’t need it, at least not then. He got out after her. A tall man—not as tall as you, Mike, but tall—wearing a gray suit and black shoes as shiny as mirrors.” She paused, thinking. Her cigarette rose briefly to her mouth, then went back down to the arm of her chair, a red firefly in the weak moonlight.

“At first he didn’t say anything. The woman tried to take his arm and help him climb the three or four steps from the road to the walk, but he shook her off. He got to where we were standing under his own power, although I could hear him wheezing way down deep in his chest. It was the sound a machine makes when it needs oil. I don’t know how much he can walk now, but it’s probably not much. Those few steps pretty well did him in, and that was almost a year ago. He looked at me for a second or two, then bent forward with his big, bony old hands on his knees. He looked at Kyra and she looked up at him.” Yes. I could see it… except not in color, not in an image like a photograph. I saw it as a woodcut, just one more harsh illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The little girl looks up wide-eyed at the rich old man—once a boy who went triumphantly sliding on a stolen sled, now at the other end of his life and just one more bag of bones. “In my imagining, Ki was wearing a hooded jacket and Devore’s grandpa mask was slightly askew, allowing me to see the tufted wolf-pelt beneath. What big eyes you have, Grandpa, what a big nose you have, Grandpa, what big teeth you have, too. “He picked her up. I don’t know how much effort it cost him, but he did.

And—the oddest thing—Ki let herself be picked up. He was a complete stranger to her, and old people always seem to scare little children, but she let him pick her up. “Do you know who I am?’ he asked her. She shook her head, but the way she was looking at him… it was as if she almost knew. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Yes.”

“He said, Tm your grandpa.” And I almost grabbed her back, Mike, because I had this crazy idea… I don’t know…”

“That he was going to eat her up?” Her cigarette paused in front of her mouth. Her eyes were round. “How do you know that? How can you know that?”

“Because in my mind’s eye it looks like a fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood and the Old Gray Wolf. What did he do then?” ’te her up with his eyes. Since then he’s taught her to play checkers and Candyland and box-dots. She’s only three, but he’s taught her to add and subtract. She has her own room at Warrington’s and her own little computer in it, and God knows what he’s taught her to do with that… but that first time he only looked at her. It was the hungriest look I’ve ever seen in my life. ’5nd she looked back. It couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty seconds, but it seemed like forever. Then he tried to hand her back to me. He’d used up all his strength, though, and if I hadn’t been right there to take her, I think he would have dropped her on the cement walk. “He staggered a little, and Rogette Whitmore put an arm around him. That was when he took the oxygen mask from her—there was a little air-bottle attached to it on an elastic—and put it over his mouth and nose. A couple of deep breaths and he seemed more or less all right again. He gave it back to Rogette and really seemed to see me for the first time. He said, “I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?’ I said, “Yes, sir, I think you have.” He gave me a look, very black, when I said that. I think if he’d been even five years younger, he might have hit me for it.”

“But he wasn’t and he didp.’t.”

“No. He said, “I want to go inside. Will you help me do that?’ I said I would. We went up the mortuary steps with Rogette on one side of him, me t sort of like a harem girl. It wasn’t a very nice feeling. When we got into the vestibule, he sat down to catch his breath and take a little more oxygen. Rogette turned to Kyra. I think that woman’s got a scary face, it reminds me of some painting or other—”

“The Cry? The one by Munch?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the one.” She dropped her cigarette—she’d smoked it all the way down to the filter—and stepped on it, grinding it into the bony, rock-riddled ground with one white sneaker. “But Ki wasn’t scared of her a bit. Not then, not later. She bent down to Kyra and said, “What rhymes with lady?’ and Kyra said “Shady!’ right off. Even at two she loved rhymes. Rogette reached into her purse and brought out a Hershey’s Kiss.

Ki looked at me to see if she had permission and I said, “All right, but just one, and I don’t want to see any of it on your dress.” Ki popped it into her mouth and smiled at Rogette as if they’d been friends since forever. “By then Devore had his breath back, but he looked tired—the most tired man I’ve ever seen. He reminded me of something in the Bible, about how in the days of our old age we say we have no pleasure in them.

My heart kind of broke for him. Maybe he saw it, because he reached for my hand. He said, “Don’t shut me out.” And at that moment I could see Lance in his face. I started to cry. I said, “I won’t unless you make me.’” I could see them there in the funeral home’s foyer, him sitting, her standing, the little girl looking on in wide-eyed puzzlement as she sucked the sweet Hershey’s Kiss. Canned organ music in the background.

Poor old Max Devore had been crafty enough on the day of his son’s viewing, I thought. Don’t shut me out, indeed. I tried to buy you off and when that didn’t work I upped the stakes and tried to buy the baby. When that also failed, I told my son that you and he and my grandchild could choke on the dirt of your own decision. In a way, I’m the reason he was where he was when hejll and broke his neck, but don’t shut me out, Mattie, I’m just a poor old geezer, so don’t shut me out. “I was stupid, wasn’t I?”

“You expected him to be better than he was. If that makes you stupid, Mattie, the world could use more of it.”

“I did have my doubts,” she said. “It’s why I wouldn’t take any of his money, and by last October he’d quit asking. But I let him see her. I suppose, yeah, part of it was the idea there might be something in it for Ki later on, but I honestly didn’t think about that so much. Mostly it was him being her only blood link to her father. I wanted her to enjoy that the way any kid enjoys having a grandparent. What I didn’t want was for her to be infected by all the crap that went on before Lance died. “At first it seemed to be working. Then, little by little, things changed. I realized that Ki didn’t like her ’white poppa’ so much; for one thing. Her feelings about Rogette are the same, but Max Devore’s started to make her nervous in some way I don’t understand and she can’t explain. I asked her once if he’d ever touched her anywhere that made her feel funny. I showed her the places I meant, and she said no. I believe her, but… he said something or did something. I’m almost sure of it.”

“Could be no more than the sound of his breathing getting worse,” I said. “That alone might be enough to scare a child. Or maybe he had some kind of spell while she was there. What about you, Mattie?”

“Well. . one day in February Lindy Briggs told me that George Footman had been in to check the fire extinguishers and the smoke detectors in the library. He also asked if Lindy had found any beer cans or liquor bottles in the trash lately. Or cigarette butts that were obviously homemade.”

“Roaches, in other words.”

“Uh-huh. And Dickie Osgood has been visiting my old friends, I hear. Chatting. Panning for gold.

Digging the dirt.”

“Is there any to dig?”

“Not much, thank God.” I hoped she was right, and I hoped that if there was stuff she wasn’t telling me, John Storrow would get it out of her. “But through all this you let Ki go on seeing him.”

“What would pulling the plug on the visits have accomplished? And I thought that allowing them to go on would at least keep him from speeding up any plans he might have.” That, I thought, made a lonely kind of sense. “Then, in the spring, I started to get some extremely creepy, scary feelings.”

“Creepy how? Scary how?”

“I don’t know.” She took out her cigarettes, looked at them, then stuffed the pack back in her pocket. “It wasn’t just that my father-in-law was looking for dirty laundry in my closets, either. It was Ki. I started to worry about ICI all the time she was with him… with them. Rogette would come in the BMW they’d bought or leased, and Ki would be sitting out on the steps waiting for her. With her bag of toys if it was a day-visit, with her little pink Minnie Mouse suitcase if it was an overnight. And she’d always come back with one more thing than she left with. My father-in-law’s a great believer in presents. Before popping her into the car, Rogette would give me that cold little smile of hers and say, “Seven o’clock then, we’ll give her supper’ or “Eight o’clock then, and a nice hot breakfast before she leaves.” I’d say okay, and then Rogette would reach into her bag and hold out a Hershey’s Kiss to Ki just the way you’d hold a biscuit out to a dog to make it shake hands. She’d say a word and Kyra would rhyme it. Rogette would toss her her treat—woof-woof, good dog, I always used to think—and off they’d go. Come seven in the evening or eight in the morning, the BMW would pull in right where your car’s parked now. You could set your clock by the woman. But I got worried.”

“That they might get tired of the legal process and just snatch her?”

This seemed to me a reasonable concern—so reasonable I could hardly believe Mattie had ever let her little girl go to the old man in the first place. In custody cases, as in the rest of life, possession tends to be nine tenths of the law, and ifmattie was telling the truth about her past and present, a custody hearing was apt to turn into a tiresome production even for the rich Mr. Devore. Snatching might, in the end, look like a more efficient solution. “Not exactly,” she said. “I guess it’s the logical thing, but that wasn’t really it. I just got afraid.

There was nothing I could put my finger on. It would get to be quarter past six in the evening and I’d think, “This time that white-haired bitch isn’t going to bring her back. This time she’s going to…’” I waited. When nothing came I said, “Going to what?”

“I told you, I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve been afraid for Ki since spring. By the time June came around, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I put a stop to the visits. Kyra’s been off-and-on pissed at me ever since. I’m pretty sure that’s most of what that Fourth of July escapade was about. She doesn’t talk about her grandfather very much, but she’s always popping out with “What do you think the white nana’s doing now, Mat-tie?’ or “Do you think the white nana would like my new dress?’ Or she’ll run up to me and say “Sing, ring, king, thing,’ and ask for a treat.”

“What was the reaction from Devore?”

“Complete fury. He called again and again, first asking what was wrong, then making threats.”

“Physical threats?”

“Custody threats. He was going to take her away, when he was finished with me I’d stand before the whole world as an unfit mother, I didn’t have a chance, my only hope was to relent and let me see my granddaughter, goddammit.” I nodded.”

“Please don’t shut me out’

doesn’t sound like the guy who called while I was watching the fireworks, but that does.” “I’ve also gotten calls from Dickie Osgood, and a number of other locals,” she said. “Including Lance’s old friend Richie Lattimore.

Richie said I wasn’t being true to Lance’s memory.”

“What about George Footman?”

“He cruises by once in awhile. Lets me know he’s watching. He hasn’t called or stopped in. You asked about physical threats—just seeing Footman’s cruiser on my road feels like a physical threat to me.

He scares me. But these days it seems as if everything does.”

“Even though Kyra’s visits have stopped.”

“Even though. It feels… thundery.

Like something’s going to happen. And every day that feeling seems to get stronger.”

“John Storrow’s number,” I said. “Do you want it?” She sat quietly, looking into her lap. Then she raised her head and nodded.

“Give it to me. And thank you. From the bottom of my heart.” I had the number on a pink memo-slip in my front pocket. She grasped it but did not immediately take it. Our fingers were touching, and she was looking at me with disconcerting steadiness. It was as if she knew more about my motives than I did myself. “What can I do to repay you?” she asked, and there it was. “Tell Storrow everything you’ve told me.” I let go of the pink slip and stood up. “That’ll do just fine. And now I have to get along. Will you call and tell me how you made out with him?”

“Of course.” We walked to my car. I turned to her when we got there. For a moment I thought she was going to put her arms around me and hug me, a thank-you gesture that might have led anywhere in our current mood—one so heightened it was almost melodramatic. But it was a melodramatic situation, a fairy tale where there’s good and bad and a lot of repressed sex running under both. Then headlights appeared over the brow of the hill where the market stood and swept past the All-Purpose Garage. They moved toward us, brightening. Mattie stood back and actually put her hands behind her, like a child who has been scolded.

The car passed, leaving us in the dark again… but the moment had passed, too. If there had been a moment. “Thanks for dinner,” I said.

“It was wonderful.”

“Thanks for the lawyer, I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, too,” she said, and we both laughed. The electricity went out of the air. “He spoke of you once, you know. Devore.”

I looked at her in surprise. “I’m amazed he even knew who I was. Before this, I mean.”

“He knows, all right. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection.”

“You’re kidding. You must be.”

“I’m not. He said that your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather worked the same camps and were neighbors when they weren’t in the woods—I think he said not far from where Boyd’s Marina is now. “They shit in the same pit,’ is the way he put it. Charming, huh? He said he guessed that if a couple of loggers from the TR could produce millionaires, the system was working the way it was supposed to. “Even if it took three generations to do it,’ he said. At the time I took it as a veiled criticism of Lance.”

“It’s ridiculous, however he meant it,” I said. “My family is from the coast. Prout’s Neck. Other side of the state. My dad was a fisherman and so was his father before him. My great-grandfather, too. They trapped lobsters and threw nets, they didn’t cut trees.” All that was true, and yet my mind tried to fix on something. Some memory connected to what she was saying. Perhaps if I slept on it, it would come back to me.

“Could he have been talking about someone in your wife’s family?”

“Nope.

There are Arlens in Maine—they’re a big family—but most are still in Massachusetts. They do all sorts of things now, but if you go back to the eighteen-eighties, the majority would have been quarrymen and stonecutters in the Malden-Lynn area. Devore was pulling your leg, Mattie.” But even then I suppose I knew he wasn’t. He might have gotten some part of the story wrong—even the sharpest guys begin to lose the edge of their recollection by the time they turn eighty-five—but Max Devore wasn’t much of a leg-puller. I had an image of unseen cables stretching beneath the surface of the earth here on the TR—stretching in all directions, unseen but very powerful.

My hand was resting on top of my car door, and now she touched it briefly. “Can I ask you one other question before you go? It’s stupid, I warn you.”

“Go ahead. Stupid questions are a specialty of mine.”

“Do you have any idea at all what that “Bartleby’ story is about?”

I wanted to laugh, but there was enough moonlight for me to see she was serious, and that I’d hurt her feelings if I did. She was a member of Lindy Briggs’s readers’ circle (where I had once spoken in the late eighties), probably the youngest by at least twenty years, and she was afraid of appearing stupid.

“I have to speak first next time,” she said, “and I’d like to give more than just a summary of the story so they know I’ve read it. I’ve thought about it until my head aches, and I just don’t see. I doubt if it’s one of those stories where everything comes magically clear in the last few pages, either. And I feel like I should see—that it’s right there in front of me.”

That made me think of the cables again—cables running in every direction, a subcutaneous webwork connecting people and places. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them. Especially if you tried to get away.

Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.

“Okay, listen up, school’s in session,” I said. “I am. Believe me.”

“Most critics think Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel, and that’s fair enough, but if’bartleby’ were a hundred pages longer, I think I’d put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?”

“A secretary?”

“That’s too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He’s the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties… no ties to, you know…”

A couple of loggers who couldproduce millionaires. They shit in the samepit. “Mike?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I focused my mind as best I could. “Bartleby is tied to life only by work. In that way he’s a twentieth-century American type, not much different from Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or—in the dark version—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. But then Bartleby begins to question even work, the god of middle-class American males.”

She looked excited now, and I thought it was a shame she’d missed her last year of high school. For her and also for her teachers. “That’s why he starts saying “I prefer not to’?”

“Yes. Think of Bartleby as a… a hot-air balloon. Only one rope still tethers him to the earth, and that rope is his scrivening. We can measure the rot in that last rope by the steadily increasing number of things Bartleby prefers not to do. Finally the rope breaks and Bartleby floats away. It’s a goddam disturbing story, isn’t it?”

“One night I dreamed about him,” she said. “I opened the trailer door and there he was, sitting on the steps in his old black suit. Thin. Not much hair. I said, “Will you move, please? I have to go out and hang the clothes now.” And he said, “I prefer not to.” Yes, I guess you could call it disturbing.”

“Then it still works,” I said, and got into my car. “Call me. Tell me how it goes with Je, hn Storrow.”

“I will. And anything I can do to repay, just ask.” Just ask. How young did you have to be, how beautifully ignorant, to issue that kind of blank check? My window was open. I reached through it and squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back, and hard. “You miss your wife a lot, don’t you?” she said. “It shows?”

“Sometimes.” She was no longer squeezing, but she was still holding my hand. “When you were reading to Ki, you looked both happy and sad at the same time. I only saw her once, your wife, but I thought she was very beautiful.” I had been thinking about the touch of our hands, concentrating on that. Now I forgot about it entirely. “When did you see her? And where? Do you remember?” She smiled as if those were very silly questions. “I remember. It was at the ballfield, on the night I met my husband.” Very slowly I withdrew my hand from hers. So far as I knew, neither Jo nor I had been near TR-90 all that summer of ’94. . but what I knew was apparently wrong. Jo had been down on a Tuesday in early July. She had even gone to the softball game. “Are you sure it was Jo?” I asked. Mattie was looking off toward the road. It wasn’t my wife she was thinking about; I would have bet the house and lot on it—either house, either lot. It was Lance. Maybe that was good.

If she was thinking about him, she probably wouldn’t look too closely at me, and I didn’t think I had much control of my expression just then.

She might have seen more on my face than I wanted to show. “Yes,” she said. “I was standing with Jenna McCoy and Helen Geary—this was after Lance helped me with a keg of beer I got stuck in the mud and then asked if I was going for pizza with the rest of them after the game—and Jenna said, “Look, it’s Mrs. Noonan,’ and Helen said, “She’s the writer’s wife, Mattie, isn’t that a cool blouse?’ The blouse was all covered with blue roses.” I remembered it very well. Jo liked it because it was a joke—there are no blue roses, not in nature and not in cultivation.

Once when she was wearing it she had thrown her arms extravagantly around my neck, swooned her hips forward against mine, and cried that she was my blue rose and I must stroke her until she turned pink.

Remembering that hurt, and badly. “She was over on the third-base side, behind the chickenwire screen,” Mattie said, “with some guy who was wearing an old brown jacket with patches on the elbows. They were laughing together over something, and then she turned her head a little and looked right at me.” She was quiet for a moment, standing there beside my car in her red dress. She raised her hair off the back of her neck, held it, then let it drop again. “Right at me. Really seeing me.

And she had a look about her… she’d just been laughing but this look was sad, somehow. It was as if she knew me. Then the guy put his arm around her waist and they walked away.” Silence except for the crickets and the far-off drone of a truck. Mattie only stood there for a moment, as if dreaming with her eyes open, and then she felt something and looked back at me. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Except who was this guy with his arrfi around my wife?”

She laughed a little uncertainly. “Well I doubt if he was her boyfriend, you know. He was quite a bit older. Fifty, at least.” So what? I thought. I myself was forty, but that didn’t mean I had missed the way Mattie moved inside her dress, or lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. “I mean… you’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t really know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know these days, it seems. But the lady’s dead in any case, so how can it matter?” Mattie was looking distressed. “If I put my foot in something, Mike, I’m sorry.”

“Who was the man? Do you know?” She shook her head. “I thought he was a summer person—there was that feeling about him, maybe just because he was wearing a jacket on a hot summer evening—but if he was, he wasn’t staying at Warrington’s. I knew most of them.”

“And they walked off together?”

“Yes.” Sounding reluctant. “Toward the parking lot?”

“Yes.” More reluctant still. And this time she was lying. I knew it with a queer certainty that went far beyond intuition; it was almost like mind-reading. I reached through the window and took her hand again. “You said if I could think of anything you could do to repay me, to just ask. I’m asking. Tell me the truth, Mattie.” She bit her lip, looking down at my hand lying over hers. Then she looked up at my face. “He was a burly guy. The old sportcoat made him look a little like a college professor, but he could have been a carpenter for all I know. His hair was black. He had a tan. They had a laugh together, a good one, and then she looked at me and the laugh went out of her face. After that he put an arm around her and they walked away.” She paused. “Not toward the parking lot, though. Toward The Street.”

The Street. From there they could have walked north along the edge of the lake until they came to Sara Laughs. And then? Who knew? “She never told me she came down here that summer,” I said. Mattie seemed to try several responses and find none of them to her liking. I gave her her hand back. It was time for me to go. In fact I had started to wish I’d left five minutes sooner. “Mike, I’m sure—”

“No,” I said. “You’re not.

Neither am I. But I loved her a lot and I’m going to try and let this go. It probably signifies nothing, and besides—what else can I do?

Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome.” Mattie looked so much like crying that I picked her hand up again and kissed the back of it. “I feel like a dope.”

“You’re not a dope,” I said. I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.

Driving home I thdught of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It’s easy to give that idea lip service, but it’s a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it’s a literal fact in one’s own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we’d been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo’s failure to conceive. “If you want a kid, you’ll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said.

“Both the odds and time are still on your side. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen four years from now. Will you ever fill the house with babies? Probably not. But you might have two, and you’ll almost certainly have one if you keep doing the thing that makes them.” She had grinned. “Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.” There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter’s bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had intended to buy. No more than she’d told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck. What else hadn’t she told me? “Stop,” I muttered. “For Christ’s sake stop thinking about it.” But I couldn’t.

When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again. Three letters had been clustered in the middle: g d I moved the 0 up to where I thought it belonged, making “god” or maybe an abridged version of “good.” Which meant exactly what? “I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,” I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring. When it didn’t, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth. As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994. What meetings had Jo put on her calendar for that month? What excuses to be out of Derry? And once I had finished with Ward, I could tackle Jo’s friend Bonnie Amudson, ask her if anything had been going on with Jo in the last summer of her life. Let her rest in peace, why don’t you? It was the UFO voice. What good will it do you to do otherwise? Assume she popped over to the TR after one of her board meetings, maybe just on a whim, met an old friend, took him back to the housejr a bite of dinner.

Just dinner. And never told me? I asked the UFO voice, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and then rinsing. Never said a single word? How do you know she didn’t? the voice returned, and that froze me in the act of putting my toothbrush back in the medicine cabinet. The UFO voice had a point. I had been deep into All the Wayjqom the 3p by July of ’94. Jo could have come in and told me she’d seen Lon Chaney Junior dancing with the queen, doing the Werewolves of London, and I probably would have said “Uh-huh, honey, that’s nice” as I went on proofing copy.

“Bullshit,” I said to my reflection. “That’s just bullshit.”

Except it wasn’t. When I was really driving on a book I more or less fell out of the world; other than a quick scan of the sports pages, I didn’t even read the newspaper. So yes—it was possible that Jo had told me she’d run over to the TR after a board meeting in Lewiston or Freeport, it was possible that she’d told me she’d run into an old friend—perhaps another student from the photography seminar she’d attended at Bates in 1991—and it was possible she’d told me they’d had dinner together on our deck, eating black trumpet mushrooms she’d picked herself as the sun went down. It was possible she’d told me these things and I hadn’t registered a word of what she was saying. And did I really think I’d get anything I could trust out of Bonnie Amudson? She’d been Jo’s friend, not mine, and Bonnie might feel the statute of limitations hadn’t run out on any secrets my wife had told her. The bottom line was as simple as it was brutal: Jo was four years dead. Best to love her and let all troubling questions lapse. I took a final mouthful of water directly from the tap, swished it around in my mouth, and spat it out.

When I returned to the kitchen to set the coffee-maker for seven A.M… I saw a new message in a new circle of magnets. It read blue rose liar ha ha I looked at it for a second or two, wondering what had put it there, and why. Wondering if it was true. I stretched out a hand and scattered all the letters far and wide. Then I went to bed.

I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was very ill. “I thought you were going to die,” my father told me once, and he was not a man given to exaggeration. He told me about how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of cold water one night, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my heart, but both of them completely convinced that I’d burn up before their eyes if they didn’t do something. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive voice about the bright figures I saw in the room—angels come to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure—and the last time my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson 8: Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. After that, he said, he didn’t dare take it anymore.

I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once. The world grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People—most of them seeming impossibly talldarted in and out of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words all came out booming, with instant echoes. Someone shook a pair of baby-shoes in my face. I seem to remember my brother, Siddy, sticking his hand into his shirt and making repeated arm-fart noises. Continuity broke down.

Everything came in segments, weird wieners on a poison string.

In the years between then and the summer I returned to Sara Laughs, I had the usual sicknesses, infections, and insults to the body, but never anything like that feverish interlude when I was eight. I never expected to—believing, I suppose, that such experiences are unique to children, people with malaria, or maybe those suffering catastrophic mental breakdowns. But on the night of July seventh and the morning of July eighth, I lived through a period of time remarkably like that childhood delirium. Dreaming, waking, moving—they were all one. I’ll tell you as best I can, but nothing I say can convey the strangeness of that experience. It was as if I had found a secret passage hidden just beyond the wall of the world and went crawling along it.

First there was music. Not Dixieland, because there were no horns, but like Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or four acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a hard, happy drumming that didn’t sound as if it was coming from a real drum; it sounded as if someone with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a bunch of boxes. Then a woman’s voice joined in—a contralto voice, not quite mannish, roughing over the high notes. It was laughing and urgent and ominous all at the same time, and I knew at once that I was hearing Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking.

“You know we’re going back to MANDERLEY, We’re gonna dance on the SANDERLEY, I’m gonna sing with the BANDERLEY, We gonna ball all we CANDERLEY- Ball me, baby, yeah,t”

The basses—yes, there were two—broke out in a barnyard shuffle like the break in Elvis’s version of “Baby Let’s Play House,” and then there was a guitar solo: Son Tidwell playing that chickenscratch thing.

Lights gleamed in the dark, and I thought of a song from the fifties—Claudine Clark singing “Party Lights.” And here they were, Japanese lanterns hung from the trees above the path of railroad-tie steps leading from the house to the water. Party lights casting mystic circles of radiance in the dark: red blue and green. Behind me, Sara was singing the bridge to her Manderley song—mama likes it nasty, mama likes it strong, mama likes to party all night long—but it was fading.

Sara and the Red-Top Boys had set up their bandstand in the driveway by the sound, about where George Footman had parked when he came to serve me with Max Devore’s subpoena. I was descending toward the lake through circles of radiance, past party lights surrounded by soft-winged moths.

One had found its way inside a lamp and it cast a monstrous, batlike shadow against the ribbed paper. The flower-boxes Jo had put beside the steps were full of night-blooming roses. In the light of the Japanese lanterns they looked blue. Now the band was only a faint murmur; I could hear Sara shouting out the lyric, laughing her way through it as though it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, all that Manderley-sanderley-canderley stuff, but I could no longer make out the individual words. Much clearer was the lap of the lake against the rocks at the foot of the steps, the hollow clunk of the cannisters under the swimming float, and the cry of a loon drifting out of the darkness.

Someone was standing on The Street to my right, at the edge of the lake.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could see the brown sportcoat and the tee-shirt he was wearing beneath it. The lapels cut off some of the letters of the message, so it looked like this:

ORMA ER OUN I knew what it said anyway—in dreams you almost always know, don’t you?

NOV&tar SPERM COUNT, a Village Cafe yuck-it-up special if ever there was one. I was in the north bedroom dreaming all this, and here I woke up enough to know I was dreaming. . except it was like waking into another dream, because Bunter’s bell was ringing madly and there was someone standing in the hall. Mr. Normal Sperm Count? No, not him. The shadow-shape falling on the door wasn’t quite human. It was slumped, the arms indistinct. I sat up into the silver shaking of the bell, clutching a loose puddle of sheet against my naked waist, sure it was the shroud-thing out there—the shroud-thing had come out of its grave to get me. “Please don’t,” I said in a dry and trembling voice. “Please don’t, please.” The shadow on the door raised its arms. “It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar/” Sara Tidwell’s laughing, furious voice sang…

“It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round/” I lay back down and pulled the sheet over my face in a childish act of denial… and there I stood on our little lick of beach, wearing just my undershorts. My feet were ankle-deep in the water. It was warm the way the lake gets by midsummer.

My dim shadow was cast two ways, in one direction by the scantling moon which rode low above the water, in another by the Japanese lantern with the moth caught inside it. The man who’d been standing on the path was gone but he had left a plastic owl to mark his place. It stared at me with frozen, gold-ringed eyes. “Hey Irish!” I looked out at the swimming float. Jo stood there. She must have just climbed out of the water, because she was still dripping and her hair was plastered against her cheeks. She was wearing the two-piece swimsuit from the photo I’d found, gray with red piping. “It’s been a long time, Irish—what do you say?”

“Say about what?” I called back, although I knew. “About this!” She put her hands over her breasts and squeezed. Water ran out between her fingers and trickled across her knuckles. “Come on, Irish,” she said from beside and above me, “come on, you bastard, let’s go.” I felt her strip down the sheet, pulling it easily out of my sleep-numbed fingers.

I shut my eyes, but she took my hand and placed it between her legs. As I found that velvety seam and began to stroke it open, she began to rub the back of my neck with her fingers.

“You’re not Jo,” I said. “Who are you?”

But no one was there to answer. I was in the woods. It was dark, and on the lake the loons were crying. I was walking the path to Jo’s studio.

It wasn’t a dream; I could feel the cool air against my skin and the occasional bite of a rock into my bare sole or heel. A mosquito buzzed around my ear and I waved it away. I was wearing Jockey shorts, and at every step they pulled against a huge and throbbing erection.

“What the hell is this?” I asked as Jo’s little barnboard studio loomed in the dark. I looked behind me and saw Sara on her hill, not the woman but the house, a long lodge jutting toward the nightbound lake. “What’s happening to me?”

“Everything’s all right, Mike,” Jo said. She was standing on the float, watching as I swam toward her. She put her hands behind her neck like a calendar model, lifting her breasts more fully into the damp halter. As in the photo, I could see her nipples poking out the cloth. I was swimming in my underpants, and with the same huge erection.

“Everything’s all right, Mike,” Mattie said in the north bedroom, and I opened my eyes. She was sitting beside me on the bed, smooth and naked in the weak glow of the nightlight. Her hair was down, hanging to her shoulders. Her breasts were tiny, the size of teacups, but the nipples were large and distended. Between her legs, where my hand still lingered, was a powderpuff of blonde hair, smooth as down. Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth-wings, like rose-petals. There was something desperately attractive about her as she sat there—she was like the prize you know you’ll never win at the carny shooting gallery or the county fair ringtoss. The one they keep on the top shelf. She reached under the sheet and folded her fingers over the stretched material of my undershorts.

Everything’s all right, it ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round, said the UFO voice as I climbed the steps to my wife’s studio. I stooped, fished for the key from beneath the mat, and took it out.

I climbed the ladder to the float, wet and dripping, preceded by my engorged sex—is there anything, I wonder, so unintentionally comic as a sexually aroused man? Jo stood on the boards in her wet bathing suit. I pulled Mattie into bed with me. I opened the door to Jo’s studio. All of these things happened at the same time, weaving in and out of each other like strands of some exotic rope or belt. The thing with Jo felt the most like a dream, the thing in the studio, me crossing the floor and looking down at my old green IBM, the least. Mattie in the north bedroom was somewhere in between.

On the float Jo said, “Do what you want.” In the north bedroom Mattie said, “Do what you want.” In the studio, no one had to tell me anything.

In there I knew exactly what I wanted.

On the float I bent my head and put my mouth on one of Jo’s breasts and sucked the cloth-covered nipple into my mouth. I tasted damp fabric and dank lake. She reached for me where I stuck out and I slapped her hand away. If she touched me I would come at once. I sucked, drinking back trickles of cotton-water, groping with my own hands, first caressing her ass and then yanking down the bottom half of her suit. I got it off her and she dropped to her knees. I did too, finally getting rid of my wet, clinging underpants and tossing them on top of her bikini panty. We faced each other that way, me naked, her almost.

“Who was the guy at the game?” I panted. “Who was he, Jo?”

“No one in particular, Irish. Just another bag of bones.”

She laughed, then leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her navel was a tiny black cup. There was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. “Everything down there is death,” she said, and pressed her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and then bent it so I was looking into the lake. Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish-nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the dead trailed pallid balloons of jellyfish guts; some were little more than bone. Yet not even the sight of this floating charnel parade could divert me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head free of her hands, pushed her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and contentious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than the other.

That was how her eyes had looked on the TV monitor when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was fucking her corpse. Nor could even that realization stop me. “Who was he?” I cried at her, covering her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. “Who was he, Jo, for Christ’s sake tell me who he was!” In the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relishing the feel of those small breasts against my chest and the length of her entwining legs.

Then I rolled her over on the far side of the bed. I felt her hand reaching for me, and slapped it away—if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. “Spread your legs, hurry,” I said, and she did. I closed my eyes, shutting out all other sensory input in favor of this. I pressed forward, then stopped. I made one little adjustment, pushing at my engorged penis with the side of my hand, then rolled my hips and slipped into her like a finger in a silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. “Everything out there is death,” she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the window I saw Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Sixtieth—all those trendy shops, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdortts and Steuben Glass. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and Noble bag by the handles, was the bountiful, beauteous Nola, his secretary. Except her bounty was gone. This was a grinning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps; scrawny, beringed bones instead of fingers gripped the bag-handles.

Harold’s teeth jutted in his usual agent’s grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead—mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harold’s grin—Hey, how are ya, how’s the wij, how’s the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire.

I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. “Tell me who he was!” I shouted at her. “You know, I know you do!” My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. “Tell me, you bitch!” On the path between Jo’s studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk—all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman. I didn’t see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me—the typewriter was in the way—but I didn’t need to see it to know its color was brown. It squeezed, slowly tightening, the fingers wriggling. “What do you want to know, sugar?”

she asked from behind me. Still laughing. Still teasing. “Do you really want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel?”

“Oh, you’re killing me!” I cried. The typewriter—thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric—was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings. “Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man?” ’just do me, you bitch!” I screamed. She laughed again—that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough—and squeezed me where the squeezing was best. “You hold still, now,” she said. “You hold still, pretty boy, ’less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the…” I lost the rest as the whole world exploded in an orgasm so deep and strong that I thought it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and ejaculated looking up at the stars. I screamed—I had to—and on the lake, two loons screamed back. At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band—Sara and Sonny and the Red-Top Boys tearing through “Black Mountain Rag.” I sat up, dazed and spent, fucked hollow. I couldn’t see the path leading up to the house, but I could discern its switchback course by the Japanese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didn’t want to swim back to shore with them in my hand. I stopped with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. Puffing out from beneath several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair. “Oh Jesus,” I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of blood.

Lying in the middle of that soaking pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more closely and saw it was a stuffed animal, a black-furred object matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it, wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but unable to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I really been having sex with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In God’s name, what? “I don’t believe these lies,” I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isn’t exactly what happened, bur it’s the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me—one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path—and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was rushing blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunter’s bell.

Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.

I came back to the casual chatter of birds on summer vacation and to that peculiar red darkness that means the sun is shining through your closed eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were folded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot. I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.

The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to adjust, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. Meserve’s note still hung from it.

Sitting outside my office door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty.

Pine needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then braced a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing the Jockeys I’d gone to bed in, and I didn’t look as if I’d had an accident in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My cock looked as it usually did; small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonan’s Folly had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now. “It sure felt like an adventure,” I croaked. I armed sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here. “Not the kind I ever read about in The Hardy Boys, though.” Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things I’d experienced in my measles fever-delirium… and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain. I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor. The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldn’t bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age I’d met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had driven all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had-Il/hat? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep? I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didn’t I? It’s sitting right upstairs in the god-dam hallway. Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to-I wasn’t going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasn’t crazy—and I didn’t think I was—listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open. For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that’s how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed.

The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug—a piece of Jo’s work—was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable.

The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur. I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there—not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets; if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony. With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening patch of semen, either. The former I hadn’t really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, I’d had the world’s most creative wet-dream—a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous night’s sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder? “In Jo’s studio, most likely,” I told the empty, sunny room. “Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didn’t leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you don’t need.” A part of me disagreed; a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadn’t had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn’t killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother? Oh man. What a silly question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair; there might be ghosts in the house; there might be a rich old man halfa mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off; there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter: I had gone out to my wife’s studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that. I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk… or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didn’t, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work… if I could work.

I’d work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees… which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.

The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click! the photo shop in Castle Rock where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. I’d put it in so that the blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my little harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going on:

Jo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo Mattiesarajo.

Below this, in lower case: normal sperm count sperm norm all’s rosy I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

Then I picked up the Selectric’s plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out—I really had to do it.

I thought I’d seen a fan hiding in the far corner of the closet, behind the box marked GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around again with a ragged little laugh. I’d had moments of confidence before, hadn’t I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no business in this room after all.

“Take it easy,” I said, “take it easy.” But I couldn’t, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green below him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.

I bent to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter. There was halfa ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly crispy look paper gets when it’s been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply—stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks; my hands were shaking.

At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my weight and the same old rumble of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat facing the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how springy it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing quality of the voices below me, remembering the smell of chlorine and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers: fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board wondering (and not for the first time!) if you could be paralyzed if you hit the water wrong. Probably not, but you could die of fear. There were documented cases of that in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.

Go on/Jo’s voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected; this time it was shrill. Stop dithering andgo on!

I reached for the IBM’s rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the Powerbook’s trash. Goodbye, oldpal, I had thought.

“Please let this work,” I said. “Please.”

I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn’t care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote Chapter One and waited for the storm to break.