Bag of Bones

CHAPTER 4

The ringing of the phone—or, more accurately, the way I received the ringing of the phone—was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the hum of the old IBM Selectric. It seemed to come from far away at first, then to approach like a whistling train coming down on a crossing.

There was no extension in my office or Jo’s; the upstairs phone, an old-fashioned rotary-dial, was on a table in the hall between them—in what Jo used to call “no-man’s-land.” The temperature out there must have been at least ninety degrees, but the air still felt cool on my skin after the office. I was so oiled with sweat that I looked like a slightly pot-bellied version of the muscle-boys I sometimes saw when I was working out.

“Hello?”

“Mike? Did I wake you? Were you sleeping?” It was Mattie, but a different one from last night. This one wasn’t afraid or even tentative; this one sounded so happy she was almost bubbling over. It was almost cer tainly the Mattie who had attracted Lance Devore. “Not sleeping,” I said. “Writing a little.”

“Get out! I thought you were retired.”

“I thought so, too,” I said, “but maybe I was a little hasty. What’s going on? You sound over the moon.”

“I just got off the phone with John Storrow—”

Really? How long had I been on the second floor, anyway? I looked at my wrist and saw nothing but a pale circle. It was half-past freckles and skin o’clock, as we used to say when we were kids; my watch was downstairs in the north bedroom, probably lying in a puddle of water from my overturned night-glass.

“—his age, and that he can subpoena the other son!”

“Whoa,” I said. “You lost me. Go back and slow down.”

She did. Telling the hard news didn’t take long (it rarely does):

Stor-row was coming up tomorrow. He would land at County Airport and stay at the Lookout Rock Hotel in Castle View. The two of them would spend most of Friday discussing the case. “Oh, and he found a lawyer for you,” she said. “To go with you to your deposition. I think he’s from Lewiston.”

It all sounded good, but what mattered a lot more than the bare facts was that Mattie had recovered her will to fight. Until this morning (if it was still morning; the light coming in the window above the broken air conditioner suggested that if it was, it wouldn’t be much longer) I hadn’t realized how gloomy the young woman in the red sundress and tidy white sneakers had been. How far down the road to believing she would lose her child.

“This is great. I’m so glad, Mattie.”

“And you did it. If you were here, I’d give you the biggest kiss you ever had.”

“He told you you could win, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe him.”

“Yes!” Then her voice dropped a little. “He wasn’t exactly thrilled when I told him I’d had you over to dinner last night, though.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think he would be.”

“I told him we ate in the yard and he said we only had to be inside together for sixty seconds to start the gossip.”

“I’d say he’s got an insultingly low opinion of Yankee lovin,” I said, “but of course he’s from New York.” She laughed harder than my little joke warranted, I thought. Out of semi-hysterical relief that she now had a couple of protectors? Because the whole subject of sex was a tender one for her just now? Best not to speculate. “He didn’t paddle me too hard about it, but he made it clear that he would if we did it again. When this is over, though, I’m having you for a real meal. We’ll have everything you like, just the way you like it.” Everything you like, just the way you like it. And she was, by God and Sonny Jesus, completely unaware that what she was saying might have another meaning—I would have bet on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, smiling.

Why not smile? Everything she was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you cleared the confines of Michael Noonan’s dirty mind.

It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could keep our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a pass at a girl young enough to be my daughter… outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldn’t, I probably deserved whatever I got. But Kyra wouldn’t. She was the hood ornament in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any of the wrong ideas, I’d do well to remember that. “If the judge sends Devore home empty-handed, I’ll take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow,” I said. “Storrow, too. I’ll even spring for the legal beagle I’m dating on Friday. So who’s better than me, huh?”

“No one I know,” she said, sounding serious. “I’ll pay you back for this, Mike. I’m down now, but I won’t always be down. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll pay you back.”

“Mattie, you don’t have to—”

“I do,” she said with quiet vehemence. “I do. And I have to do something else today, too.”

“What’s that?” I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morn-ing—so happy and free, like a prisoner who has just been pardoned and let out of jail—but already I was looking longingly at the door to my office. I couldn’t do much more today, I’d end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I wanted another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want. “I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart,” she said. “I’ll tell her it’s for being a good girl because I can’t tell her it’s for walking in the middle of the road when you were coming the other way.”

“Just not a black one,” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were even in my head. “Huh?” Sounding startled and doubtful. “I said bring me back one,” I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were there. “Maybe I will,” she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. “And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, I’m sorry. I never for the world—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not unhappy. A little confused, that’s all. In fact I’d pretty much forgotten about Jo’s mystery date.” A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause. “That’s probably for the best. I won’t keep you—go on back to work. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, I just. .” She stopped. And I suddenly knew two things: What she had been about to say, and that she wouldn’t say it. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. were going to make love and one of us said “Do what you want.”

Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe we both said it. Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

“Mattie? Still there?”

“Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in touch?

Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow?"

“If you don’t stay in touch, I’ll be pissed at you. Royally.” She laughed. “I will, then. But not when you’re working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much.” I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. She’d call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As I’d known last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white shorts and a halter top when she called me, no dress or skirt required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday. You don’t know any of that. IOU ’re just making it up. But I wasn’t. If I’d been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more suggestive—a Merry Widow from Victoria’s Secret, perhaps. That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. Both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew.

While on Key Largo I’d read an Atlantic Monthly essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn’t sure which one, only that it hadn’t been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken to them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner’s point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You wanted me to!” The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn’t matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really onlyyou are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and onlyyou are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

I’d thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it’s usually territory. I’ve heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn’t they just… well… let me do what I wanted? I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.

“Hello?”

“I said to stay visible while you were with her.”

“Good morning to you, too, Lawyer Storrow.”

“You must be in another time-zone up there, chum. I’ve got one-fifteen down here in New York.”

“I had dinner with her,” I said. “Outside. It’s true that I read the little kid a story and helped put her to bed, but—”

“I imagine half the town thinks you’re bopping each other’s brains out by now, and the other half will think it if I have to show up for her in court.” But he didn’t sound really angry; I thought he sounded as though he was having a happy-face day. “Can they make you tell who’s paying for your services?” I asked.

“At the custody hearing, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“At my deposition on Friday?”

“Christ, no. Durgin would lose all credibility as guardian adlitem if he went in that direction. Also, they have reasons to steer clear of the sex angle. Their focus is on Mattie as neglectful and perhaps abusive.

Proving that Mom isn’t a nun quit working around the time Kramer vs.

Kramer came out in the movie theaters. Nor is that the only problem they have with the issue.” He now sounded positively gleeful.

“Tell me.”

“Max Devore is eighty-five and divorced. Twice divorced, in point of fact. Before awarding custody to a single man of his age, secondary custody has to be taken into consideration. It is, in fact, the single most important issue, other than the allegations of abuse and neglect levelled at the mother.”

“What are those allegations? Do you know?”

“No. Mattie doesn’t either, because they’re fabrications. She’s a sweetie, by the way—”

“Yeah, she is.”

“—and I think she’s going to make a great witness. I can’t wait to meet her in person. Meantime, don’t sidetrack me. We’re talking about secondary custody, right?”

“Right.”

“Devore has a daughter who has been declared mentally incompetent and lives in an institution somewhere in California—Modesto, I think.

Not a good bet for custody.”

“It wouldn’t seem so.”

“The son, Roger, is…” I heard a faint fluttering of notebook pages.

”… fifty-four. So he’s not exactly a spring chicken, either. Still, there are lots of guys who become daddies at that age nowadays; it’s a brave new world. But Roger is a homosexual.”

I thought of Bill Dean saying, Rump-wrangler. Understand there’s a lot of that going around out them in Calij3rnia.

“I thought you said sex doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe I should have said hetero sex doesn’t matter. In certain states—California is one of themhomo sex doesn’t matter, either… or not as much. But this case isn’t going to be adjudicated in California.

It’s going to be adjudicated in Maine, where folks are less enlightened about how well two married men—married to each other, I meanan raise a little girl.”

“Roger Devore is married?” Okay. I admit it. I now felt a certain horrified glee myself. I was ashamed of it—Roger Devore was just a guy living his life, and he might not have had much or anything to do with his elderly dad’s current enterprise—but I felt it just the same.

“He and a software designer named Morris Ridding tied the knot in 1996,” John said. “I found that on the first computer sweep. And if this does wind up in court, I intend to make as much of it as I possibly can. I don’t know how much that will be—at this point it’s impossible to predict—but if I get a chance to paint a picture of that bright-eyed, cheerful little girl growing up with two elderly gays who probably spend most of their lives in computer chat-rooms speculating about what Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock might have done after the lights were out in officers’ country… well, if I get that chance, I’ll take it.”

“It seems a little mean,” I said. I heard myself speaking in the tone of a man who wants to be dissuaded, perhaps even laughed at, but that didn’t happen.

“Of course it’s mean. It feels like swerving up onto the sidewalk to knock over a couple of innocent bystanders. Roger Devote and Morris Ridding don’t deal drugs, traffic in little boys, or rob old ladies. But this is custody, and custody does an even better job than divorce of turning human beings into insects. This one isn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s bad enough because it’s so naked. Max Devore came up there to his old hometown for one reason and one reason only: to buy a kid. That makes me mad.”

I grinned, imagining a lawyer who looked like Elmer Fudd standing outside of a rabbit-hole marked DEVO with a shotgun.

“My message to Devore is going to be very simple: the price of the kid just went up. Probably to a figure higher than even he can afford.”

“/fit goes to court—you’ve said that a couple of times now. Do you think there’s a chance Devore might just drop it and go away?”

’gk pretty good one, yeah. I’d say an excellent one if he wasn’t old and used to getting his own way. There’s also the question of whether or not he’s still sharp enough to know where his best interest lies. I’ll try for a meeting with him and his lawyer while I’m up there, but so far I haven’t managed to get past his secretary…”

“Rogette Whitmore?”

“No, I think she’s a step further up the ladder. I haven’t talked to her yet, either. But I will.”

“Try either Richard Osgood or George Footman,” I said. “Either of them may be able to put you in touch with Devore or Devore’s chief counsel.”

“I’ll want to talk to the Whitmore woman in any case. Men like Devore tend to grow more and more dependent on their close advisors as they grow older, and she could be a key to getting him to let this go. She could also be a headache for us. She might urge him to fight, possibly because she really thinks he can win and possibly because she wants to watch the fur fly. Also, she might marry him."

“Marry him?”

“Why not? He could have her sign a pre-nup—I could no more’ introduce that in court than his lawyers could go fishing for who hired Mattie’s lawyer—and it would strengthen his chances.”

“John, I’ve seen the woman. She’s got to be seventy herself.”

“But she’s a potential female player in a custody case involving a little girl, and she’s a layer between old man Devore and the married gay couple. We just need to keep it in mind.”

“Okay.” I looked at the office door again, but not so longingly. There comes a point when you’re done for the day whether you want to be or not, and I thought I had reached that point. Perhaps in the evening… “The lawyer I got for you is named Romeo Bissonette.” He paused. “Can that be a real name?”

“Is he from Lewiston?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Because in Maine, especially around Lewiston, that can be a real name. Am I supposed to go see him?” I didn’t want to go see him. It was fifty miles to Lewiston over two-lane roads which would now be crawling with campers and Winnebagos. What I wanted was to go swimming and then take a long nap. A long dream/ess nap. “You don’t need to. Call him and talk to him a little. He’s only a safety net, really—he’ll object if the questioning leaves the incident on the morning of July Fourth. About that incident you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Got it?”

“Talk to him before, then meet him on Friday at… wait… it’s right here…” The notebook pages fluttered again. “Meet him at the Route 120

Diner at nine-fifteen. Coffee. Talk a little, get to know each other, maybe flip for the check. I’ll be with Mattie, getting as much as I can.

We may want to hire a private dick.”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Uh-huh. I’m going to see that bills go to your guy Goldacre. He’ll send them to your agent, and your agent can—”

“No,” I said. “Instruct Goldacre to send them directly here. Harold’s a Jewish mother. How much is this going to cost me?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars, minimum,” he said with no hesitation at all. With no apology in his voice, either.

“Don’t tell Mattie.”

“LALL right. Are you having any fun yet, Mike?”

“You know, I sort of am,” I said thoughtfully. “For seventy-five grand, you should.” We said our goodbyes and John hung up. As I put my own phone back into its cradle, it occurred to me that I had lived more in the last five days than I had in the last four years.

This time the phone didn’t ring and I made it all the way back into the office, but I knew I was definitely done for the day. I sat down at the IBM, hit the TU,N key a couple of times, and was beginning to write myself a next-note at the bottom of the page I’d been working on when the phone interrupted me. What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it! Today had been an exception, though, and I thought I could sign off with a grin. I was working, after all-working. Part of me still marvelled that I was sitting here at all, breathing easily, my heart beating steadily in my chest, and not even a glimmer of an anxiety attack on my personal event horizon. I wrote:

[NEXT: Drake to 1Zaiford. Stops on the way at vegetable stand to talk to the guy who runs it, old source, needs a good & colorful name. Straw hat. Disneyworld tee-shirt. They talk about Shackleford.]

I turned the roller until the IBM spat this page out, stuck it on top of the manuscript, and jotted a final note to myself: “Call Ted Rosencrief about Raiford.” Rosencriefwas a retired Navy man who lived in Derry. I had employed him as a research assistant on several books, using him on one project to find out how paper was made, what the migratory habits of certain common birds were for another, a little bit about the architecture of pyramid burial rooms for a third. And it’s always “a little bit” I want, never “the whole damn thing.” As a writer, my motto has always been don’t confuse me with the facts. The Arthur Hailey type of fiction is beyond me—I can’t read it, let alone write it. I want to know just enough so I can lie colorfully. Rosie knew that, and we had always worked well together.

This time I needed to know a little bit about Florida’s Raiford Prison, and what the deathhouse down there is really like. I also needed a little bit on the psychology of serial killers. I thought Rosie would probably be glad to hear from me… almost as glad as I was to finally have something to call him about.

I picked up the eight double-spaced pages I had written and fanned through them, still amazed at their existence. Had an old IBM typewriter and a Courier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.

What had come out was also amazing. I’d had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer’s block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I’d still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I’d classify “pretty good,” meaning they’d do in a pinch… or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.

The Red-Shirt &lan was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JCPENNEY store in Derry—this was not long before Penney’s moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder… very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didn’t know where they were walking, though—they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each other’s eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came within an ace of clipping the window-washer’s feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have gone over.

The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing The Red-Shirt &lan took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss.

Everything else followed from there. The writing was just secretarial.

The idea I was currently working on wasn’t one of Mike’s Really Great Ideas (Jo’s voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasn’t a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns; V. C. Andrews with a prick was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.

Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was forty years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an extremely rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew: that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.

That much I had written before the phone started ringing. Here is what I knew beyond that point, the secretarial work I’d do over the next several weeks, assuming that my marvellously recovered ability to work held up:

One day when Karen Whiting was three, the phone had rung while she and her mother were sitting in the patio hot tub. Regina thought of asking the yard-guy to answer it, then decided to get it herself-their regular man was out with the flu, and she didn’t feel comfortable about asking a stranger for a favor. Cautioning her daughter to sit still, Regina hopped out to answer the phone. When Karen put up a hand to keep from being splashed as her mother left the tub, she dropped the doll she had been bathing. When she bent to pick it up, her hair became caught in one of the hot tub’s powerful intakes. (It was reading of a fatal acci dent like this that had originally kicked the story off in my mind two or three years before.)

The yard-man, some no-name in a khaki shirt sent over by a day-labor outfit, saw what was happening. He raced across the lawn, dove headfirst into the tub, and yanked the child from the bottom, leaving hair and a good chunk of scalp clogging the jet when he did. He’d give her artificial respiration until she began to breathe again. (This would be a wonderful, suspenseful scene, and I couldn’t wait to write it.) He would refuse all of the hysterical, relieved mother’s offers of recompense, although he’d finally give her an address so that her husband could talk to him. Only both the address and his name, John Sanborn, would turn out to be a fake.

Two years later the ex-hooker with the respectable second life sees the man who saved her child on the front page of the Miami paper. His name is given as John Shackleford and he has been arrested for the rape-murder of a nine-year-old girl. And, the article goes on, he is suspected in over forty other murders, many of the victims children.

“Have you caught Baseball Cap?” one of the reporters would yell at the press conference. “Is John Shackleford Baseball Cap?”

“Well,” I said,going downstairs, “they sure think he is.”

I could hear too many boats out on the lake this afternoon to make nude bathing an option. I pulled on my suit, slung a towel over my shoulders, and started down the path—the one which had been lined with glowing paper lanterns in my dream—to wash off the sweat of my nightmares and my unexpected morning’s labors.

There are twenty-three railroad-tie steps between Sara and the lake. I had gone down only four or five before the enormity of what had just happened hit me. My mouth began to tremble. The colors of the trees and the sky mixed together as my eyes teared up. A sound began to come out of me—a kind of muffled groaning. The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down hard on a railroad tie. For a moment I thought it was over, mostly just a false alarm, and then I began to cry. I stuffed one end of the towel in my mouth during the worst of it, afraid that if the boaters on the lake heard the sounds coming out of me, they’d think someone up here was being murdered.

I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent without Jo, without friends, and without my work. I cried in gratitude because those work-less years seemed to be over. It was too early to tell for sure—one swallow doesn’t make a summer and eight pages of hard copy don’t make a career resuscitation—but I thought it really might be so.

And I cried out of fear, as well, as we do when some awful experience is finally over or when some terrible accident has been narrowly averted. I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harm’s way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right—it was a question that could wait for another day.

I cried it all out of me. Then I went on down to the lake and waded in.

The cool water felt more than good on my overheated body; it felt like a resurrection.

State your name for the record.”

“Michael Noonan.”

“Your address?”

“Derry is my permanent address, 14 Benton Street, but I also maintain a home in TR-90, on Dark Score Lake. The mailing address is Box 832. The actual house is on Lane Forty-two, off Route 68.” Elmer Durgin, Kyra Devore’s guardian aa’/item, waved a pudgy hand in front of his face, either to shoo away some troublesome insect or to tell me that was enough. I agreed that it was. I felt rather like the little girl in Our 7aw, who gave her address as Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, America, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Mind of God. Mostly I was nervous. I’d reached the age of forty still a virgin in the area of court proceedings, and although we were in the conference room of Durgin, Peters, and Jarrette on Bridge Street in Castle Rock, this was still a court proceeding. There was one mentionably odd detail to these festivities. The stenographer wasn’t using one of those keyboards-on-a-post that look like adding machines, but a Stenomask, a gadget which fit over the lower half of his face. I had seen them before, but only in old black-and-white crime movies, the ones where Dan Duryea or John Payne is always driving around in a Buick with portholes on the sides, looking grim and smoking a Camel. Glancing over into the corner and seeing a guy who looked like the world’s oldest fighter-pilot was weird enough, but hearing everything you said immediately repeated in a muffled monotone was even weirder. “Thank you, Mr. Noonan. My wife has read all your books and says you are her favorite author. I just wanted to get that on the record.” Durgin chuckled fatly. Why not? He was a fat guy. Most fat people I like—they have expansive natures to go with their expansive waistlines. But there is a subgroup which I think of as the Evil Little Fat Folks. You don’t want to fuck with the ELFFS if you can help it; they will burn your house and rape your dog if you give them half an excuse and a quarter of an opportunity. Few of them stand over five-foot-two (Durgin’s height, I estimated), and many are under five feet. They smile a lot, but their eyes don’t smile. The Evil Little Fat Folks hate the whole world. Mostly they hate folks who can look down the length of their bodies and still see their own feet. This included me, although just barely. “Please thank your wife for me, Mr. Durgin. I’m sure she could recommend one for you to start on.” Durgin chuckled. On his right, Durgin’s assistant—a pretty young woman who looked approximately seventeen minutes out of law school—chuckled. On my left, Romeo Bissonette chuckled. In the corner, the world’s oldest IF- 111 pilot only went on muttering into his Stenomask. “I’ll wait for the big-screen version,” he said. His eyes gave an ugly little gleam, as if he knew a feature film had never been made from one of my books—only a made-for-TV movie of Being Two that pulled ratings roughly equal to the National Sofa Refinishing Championships. I hoped that we’d completed this chubby little fuck’s idea of the pleasantries. “I am Kyra Devore’s guardian aa’/item,” he said. “Do you know what that means, Mr. Noonan?”

“I believe I do.”

“It means,” Durgin rolled on, “that I’ve been appointed by Judge Rancourt to decide—if I can—where Kyra Devore’s best interests lie, should a custody judgment become necessary. Judge Rancourt would not, in such an event, be required to base his decision on my conclusions, but in many cases that is what happens.” He looked at me with his hands folded on a blank legal pad. The pretty assistant, on the other hand, was scribbling madly. Perhaps she didn’t trust the fighter-pilot. Durgin looked as if he expected a round of applause. “Was that a question, Mr. Durgin?” I asked and Romeo Bissonette delivered a light, practiced chip to my ankle. I didn’t need to look at him to know it wasn’t an accident.

Durgin pursed lips so smooth and damp that he looked as if he were wearing a clear gloss on them. On his shining pate, roughly two dozen strands of hair were combed in smooth little arcs. He gave me a patient, measuring look. Behind it was all the intransigent ugliness of an Evil Little Fat Folk. The pleasantries were over, all right. I was sure of it. “No, Mr. Noonan, that was not a question. I simply thought you might like to know why we’ve had to ask you to come away from your lovely lake on such a pleasant morning. Perhaps I was wrong. Now, if” There was a peremptory knock on the door, followed by your friend and his, George Footman. Today Cleveland Casual had been replaced by a khaki Deputy Sheriff’s uniform, complete with Sam Browne belt and sidearm. He helped himself to a good look at the assistant’s bustline, displayed in a blue silk blouse, then handed her a folder and a cassette tape recorder. He gave me one brief gander before leaving. I remember you, buddy, that glance said. The smartass writer, the cheap date. Romeo Bissonette tipped his head toward me. He used the side of his hand to bridge the gap between his mouth and my ear. “Devore’s tape,” he said. I nodded to show I understood, then turned to Durgin again. “Mr. Noonan, you’ve met Kyra Devore and her mother, Mary Devore, haven’t you?” How did you get Mattie out of Mary, I wondered… and then knew, just as I had known about the white shorts and halter top. Mattie was how Ki had first tried to say Mary. “Mr. Noonan, are we keeping you up?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic, is there?” Bissonette asked. His tone was mild, but Elmer Durgin gave him a look which suggested that, should the ELFFS succeed in their goal of world domination, Bissonette would be aboard the first gulag-bound boxcar. “I’m sorry,” I said before Durgin could reply. “I just got derailed there for a second or two.”

“New story idea?” Durgin asked, smiling his glossy smile. He looked like a swamp-toad in a sportcoat. He turned to the old jet pilot, told him to strike that last, then repeated his question about Kyra and Mattie. Yes, I said, I had met them. “Once or more than once?”

“More than once.”

“How many times have you met them?”

“Twice.”

“Have you also spoken to Mary Devore on the phone?” Already these questions were moving in a direction that made me uncomfortable. “Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Three times.” The third had come the day before, when she had asked if I would join her and John Storrow for a picnic lunch on the town common after my deposition. Lunch right there in the middle of town before God and everybody. . although, with a New York lawyer to play chaperone, what harm in that? “Have you spoken to Kyra Devore on the telephone?” What an odd question! Not one anybody had prepared me for, either. I supposed that was at least partly why he had asked it. “Mr. Noonan?”

“Yes, I’ve spoken to her once.”

“Can you tell us the nature of that conversation?”

“Well…” I looked doubtfully at Bissonette, but there was no help there. He obviously didn’t know, either. “Mattie—”

“Pardon me?” Durgin leaned forward as much as he could. His eyes were intent in their pink pockets of flesh. “Mattie?”

“Mattie Devore.

Mary Devore.”

“You call her Mattie?”

24o “Yes,” I said, and had a wild impulse to add: In bed/In bed I call her that/"Oh Mattie, don’t stop, don’t stop,” I cry/"It’s the name she gave me when she introduced herself. I met her—”

“We may get to that, but right now I’m interested in your telephone conversation with Kyra Devote. When was that?”

“It was yesterday.”

“July ninth, 1998.”

“Yes.”

“Who placed that call?”

“Ma… Mary Devote.” Now he’ll ask why she called, I thought, and I’ll say she wanted to have yet another sex marathon, JSREPLAY to consist of sgeding each other chocolate-dipped strawberries while we look at pictures of naked mai-firmed dwarves. “How did Kyra Devote happen to speak to you?”

“She asked if she could. I heard her saying to her mother that she had to tell me something.”

“What was it she had to tell you?”

“That she had her first bubble bath.”

“Did she also say she coughed?” I was quiet, looking at him. In that moment I understood why people hate lawyers, especially when they’ve been dusted over by one who’s good at the job. “Mr. Noonan, would you like me to repeat the question?”

“No,” I said, wondering where he’d gotten his information. Had these bastards tapped Mattie’s phone? My phone? Both?

Perhaps for the first time I understood on a gut level what it must be like to have half a billion dollars. With that much dough you could tap a lot of telephones. “She said her mother pushed bubbles in her face and she coughed. But she was—”

“Thank you, Mr. Noonan, now let’s turn to—”

“Let him finish,” Bissonette said. I had an idea he had already taken a bigger part in the proceedings than he had expected to, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was a sleepy-looking man with a bloodhound’s mournful, trustworthy face. “This isn’t a courtroom, and you’re not cross-examining him.”

“I have the little girl’s welfare to think of,” Durgin said. He sounded both pompous and humble at the same time, a combination that went together like chocolate sauce on creamed corn. “It’s a responsibility I take very seriously. If I seemed to be badgering you, Mr. Noonan, I apologize.” I didn’t bother accepting his apology—that would have made us both phonies. “All I was going to say is that Ki was laughing when she said it. She said she and her mother had a bubble-fight. When her mother came back on, she was laughing, too.” Durgin had opened the folder Footman had brought him and was paging rapidly through it while I spoke, as if he weren’t hearing a word. “Her mother… Mattie, as you call her.”

“Yes. Mattie as I call her. How do you know about our private telephone conversation in the first place?”

“That’s none of your business, Mr. Noonan.” He selected a single sheet of paper, then closed the folder. He held the paper up briefly, like a doctor studying an X-ray, and I could see it was covered with single-spaced typing. “Let’s turn to your initial meeting with Mary and Kyra Devore. That was on the Fourth of July, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Durgin was nodding. “The morning of the Fourth. And you met Kyra Devote first.”

“Yes.”

“You met her first because her mother wasn’t with her at that time, was she?”

“That’s a badly phrased question, Mr. Durgin, but I guess the answer is yes.”

“I’m flattered to have my grammar corrected by a man who’s been on the bestseller lists,” Durgin said, smiling. The smile suggested that he’d like to see me sitting next to Romeo Bissonette in that first gulag-bound boxcar. “Tell us about your meeting, first with Kyra Devore and then with Mary Devore. Or Mattie, if you like that better.” I told the story. When I was finished, Durgin centered the tape player in front of him. The nails of his pudgy fingers looked as glossy as his lips.

“Mr. Noonan, you could have run Kyra over, isn’t that true?”

“Absolutely not. I was going thirty-five—that’s the speed limit there by the store.

I saw her in plenty of time to stop.”

“Suppose you had been coming the other way, though—heading north instead of south. Would you still have seen her in plenty of time?”

That was a fairer question than some of his others, actually. Someone coming the other way would have had a far shorter time to react.

Still… “Yes,” I said. Durgin went up with the eyebrows. “You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, Mr. Durgin. I might have had to come down a little harder on the brakes, but—” ’5t thirty-five.”

“Yes, at thirty-five. I told you, that’s the speed limit—”

“—on that particular stretch of Route 68. Yes, you told me that. You did. Is it your experience that most people obey the speed limit on that part of the road?”

“I haven’t spent much time on the TR since 1993, so I can’t—”

“Come on, Mr. Noonan—this isn’t a scene from one of your books. Just answer my questions, or we’ll be here all morning.”

“I’m doing my best, Mr. Durgin.” He sighed, put-upon. “You’ve owned your place on Dark Score Lake since the eighties, haven’t you? And the speed limit around the Lakeview General Store, the post office, and Dick Brooks’s All-Purpose Garage-what’s called The North Village—hasn’t changed since then, has it?”

“No,” I admitted. “Returning to my original question, then—in your observation, do most people on that stretch of road obey the thirty-five-mile-an-hour limit?”

“I can’t say if it’s most, because I’ve never done a traffic survey, but I guess a lot don’t.”

“Would you like to hear Castle County Sheriffs Deputy Footman testify on where the greatest number of speeding tickets are given out in TR-90, Mr. Noonan?”

“No,” I said, quite honestly. “Did other vehicles pass you while you were speaking first with Kyra Devore and then with Mary Devore?”

“How many?”

“I don’t know exactly. A couple.”

“Could it have been three?”

“I guess.”

“Five?”

“No, probably not so many.”

“But you don’t know, exactly, do you?”

“Because Kyra Devore was upset.”

“Actually she had it together pretty well for a—”

“Did she cry in your presence?”

“Well… yes.”

“Did her mother make her cry?”

“That’s unfair.”

“As unfair as allowing a three-year-old to go strolling down the middle of a busy highway on a holiday morning, in your opinion, or perhaps not quite as unfair as that?”

“Jeepers, lay off,” Mr. Bissonette said mildly. There was distress on his bloodhound’s face. “I withdraw the question,” Durgin said. “Which one?” I asked. He looked at me tiredly, as if to say he had to put up with assholes like me all the time and he was used to how we behaved. “How many cars went by from the time you picked the child up and carried her to safety to the time when you and the Devores parted company?” I hated that “carried her to safety” bit, but even as I formulated my answer, the old guy was muttering the question into his Stenomask. And it was in fact what I had done. There was no getting around it. “I told you, I don’t know for sure.”

“Well, give me a guesstimate.” Guesstimate. One of my all-time least favorite words. A Paul Harvey word. “There might have been three.”

“Including Mary Devore herself?. Driving a—” He consulted the paper he’d taken from the folder. “—a 1982 Jeep Scout?” I thought of Ki saying Mattie go fast and understood where Durgin was heading now. And there was nothing I could do about it. “Yes, it was her and it was a Scout. I don’t know what year.”

“Was she driving below the posted speed limit, at the posted speed limit, or above the posted speed limit when she passed the place where you were standing with Kyra in your arms?”

She’d been doing at least fifty, but I told Durgin I couldn’t say for sure. He urged me to try-/know you are unfamiliar with the hangman’s knot, Mr. Noonan, but I’m sure you can make one if you really work at it—and I declined as politely as I could.

He picked up the paper again. “Mr. Noonan, would it surprise you to know that two witnesses—Richard Brooks, Junior, the owner of Dick’s All-Purpose Garage, and Royce Merrill, a retired carpenter—claim that Mrs. Devore was doing well over thirty-five when she passed your location?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was concerned with the little girl.”

“Would it surprise you to know that Royce Merrill estimated her speed at sixty miles an hour?”

“That’s ridiculous. When she hit the brakes she would have skidded sideways and landed upside down in the ditch.”

“The skid-marks measured by Deputy Footman indicate a speed of at least fifty miles an hour,” Durgin said. It wasn’t a question, but he looked at me almost roguishly, as if inviting me to struggle a little more and sink a little deeper into this nasty pit. I said nothing. Durgin folded his pudgy little hands and leaned over them toward me. The roguish look was gone.

“Mr. Noonan, if you hadn’t carried Kyra Devore to the side of the road—if you hadn’t rescued her—mightn’t her own mother have run her over?”

Here was the really loaded question, and how should I answer it?

Bis-sonette was certainly not flashing any helpful signals; he seemed to be trying to make meaningful eye-contact with the pretty assistant. I thought of the book Mattie was reading in tandem with “Bartleby”-Silent Witness, by Richard North Patterson. Unlike the Grisham brand, Patterson’s lawyers almost always seemed to know what they were doing.

Objection, Your Honor, calls j$r speculation on the part of the witness.

I shrugged. “Sorry, counsellor, can’t say—left my crystal ball home.”

Again I saw the ugly flash in Durgin’s eyes. “Mr. Noonan, I can assure you that if you don’t answer that question here, you are apt to be called back from Malibu or Fire Island or wherever it is you’re going to write your next opus to answer it later on.”

I shrugged. “I’ve already told you I was concerned with the child. I can’t tell you how fast the mother was going, or how good Royce Merrill’s vision is, or if Deputy Footman even measured the right set of skid-marks. There’s a whole bunch of rubber on that part of the road, I can tell you. Suppose she was going fifty? Even fifty-five, let’s say that. She’s twenty-one years old, Durgin. At the age of twenty-one, a person’s driving skills are at their peak. She probably would have swerved around the child, and easily.”

“I think that’s quite enough.”

“Why? Because you’re not getting what you wanted?” Bissonette’s shoe clipped my ankle again, but I ignored it. “If you’re on Kyra’s side, why do you sound as though you’re on her grandfather’s?”

A baleful little smile touched Durgin’s lips. The kind that says Okay, smart guy, you want top/ay? He pulled the tape-recorder a little closer to him. “Since you have mentioned Kyra’s grandfather, Mr. Maxwell Devore of Palm Springs, let’s talk about him a little, shall we?”

“It’s your show.”

“Have you ever spoken with Maxwell Devore?”

“Yes.”

“In person or on the phone?”

“Phone.” I thought about adding that he had somehow gotten hold of my unlisted number, then remembered that Mattie had, too, and decided to keep my mouth shut on that subject.

“When was this?”

“Last Saturday night. The night of the Fourth. He called while I was watching the fireworks.”

“And was the subject of your conversation that morning’s little adventure?’’ As he asked, Durgin reached into his pocket and brought out a cassette tape. There was an ostentatious quality to this gesture; in that moment he looked like a parlor magician showing you both sides of a silk handkerchief. And he was bluffing. I couldn’t be sure of that… and yet I was. Devore had taped our conversation, all right—that underhum really had been too loud, and on some level I’d been aware of that fact even while I was talking to him—and I thought it really was on the cassette Durgin was now slotting into the cassette player… but it was a bluff.

“I don’t recall,” I said. Durgin’s hand froze in the act of snapping the cassette’s transparent loading panel shut. He looked at me with frank disbelief… and something else. I thought the something else was surprised anger. “You don’t recall? Come now, Mr. Noonan. Surely writers train themselves to recall conversations, and this one was only a week ago. Tell me what you talked about.”

“I really can’t say,” I told him in a stolid, colorless voice. For a moment Durgin looked almost panicky.

Then his features smoothed. One polished fingernail slipped back and forth over keys marked EW, it, PLAY and P, EC. “How did Mr. Devore begin the conversation?’’ he asked. “He said hello,” I said mildly, and there was a short muffled sound from behind the Stenomask. It could have been the old guy clearing his throat; it could have been a suppressed laugh.

Spots of color were blooming in Durgin’s cheeks. “After hello? What then?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Did he ask you about that morning?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Didn’t you tell him that Mary Devore and her daughter were together, Mr. Noonan? That they were together picking flowers? Isn’t that what you told this worried grandfather when he inquired about the incident which was the talk of the township that Fourth of July?”

“Oh boy,” Bissonette said. He raised one hand over the table, then touched the palm with the fingers of the other, making a re s T. “Time OUT.”

Durgin looked at him. The flush in his cheeks was more pronounced now, and his lips had pulled back enough to show the tips of small, neatly capped teeth. “What do you want?” he almost snarled, as if Bis-sonette had just dropped by to tell him about the Mormon Way or perhaps the Rosicrucians.

“I want you to stop leading this guy, and I want that whole thing about picking flowers stricken from the record,” Bissonette said. “Why?”

Durgin snapped. “Because you’re trying to get stuff on the record that this witness won’t say. If you want to break here for awhile so we can make a conference call to Judge Rancourt, get his opinion—”

“I withdraw the question,” Durgin said. He looked at me with a kind of helpless, surly rage. “Mr. Noonan, do you want to help me do my job?”

“I want to help Kyra Devore if I can,” I said. “Very well.” He nodded as if no distinction had been made. “Then please tell me what you and Maxwell Devote talked about.”

“I can’t recall.” I caught his eyes and held them.

“Perhaps,” I said, “you can refresh my recollection.” There was a moment of silence, like that which sometimes strikes a high-stakes poker game just after the last of the bets have been made and just before the players show their hands. Even the old fighter-pilot was quiet, his eyes unblinking above the mask. Then Durgin pushed the cassette player aside with the heel of his hand (the set of his mouth said he felt about it just then as I often felt about the telephone) and went back to the morning of July Fourth. He never asked about my dinner with Mattie and Ki on Tuesday night, and never returned to my telephone conversation with Devore—the one where I had said all those awkward and easily disprovable things. I went on answering questions until eleven-thirty, but the interview really ended when Durgin pushed the tape-player away with the heel of his hand. I knew it, and I’m pretty sure he did, too.

“Mike! Mike, over here!” Mattie was waving from one of the tables in the picnic area behind the town common’s bandstand. She looked vibrant and happy. I waved back and made my way in that direction, weaving between little kids playing tag, skirting a couple of teenagers making out on the grass, and ducking a Frisbee which a leaping German shepherd caught smartly. There was a tall, skinny redhead with her, but I barely got a chance to notice him. Mattie met me while I was still on the gravel path, put her arms around me, hugged me—it was no prudey little ass-poking-out hug, either—and then kissed me on the mouth hard enough to push my lips against my teeth. There was a hearty smack when she disengaged. She pulled back and looked at me with undisguised delight. “Was it the biggest kiss you’ve ever had?”

“The biggest in at least four years,” I said. “Will you settle for that?” And if she didn’t step away from me in the next few seconds, she was going to have physical proof of how much I had enjoyed it.

“I guess I’ll have to.” She turned to the redheaded guy with a funny kind of defiance. “Was that all right?”

“Probably not,” he said, “but at least you’re not currently in view of those old boys at the All-Purpose Garage. Mike, I’m John Storrow. Nice to meet you in person.”

I liked him at once, maybe because I’d come upon him dressed in his three-piece New York suit and primly setting out paper plates on a picnic table while his curly red hair blew around his head like kelp.

His skin was fair and freckled, the kind which would never tan, only burn and then peel in great eczemalike patches. When we shook, his hand seemed to be all knuckles. He had to be at least thirty, but he looked Mattie’s age, and I guessed it would be another five years before he was able to get a drink without showing his driver’s license.

“Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got a five-course lunch, courtesy of Castle Rock Variety—grinders, which are for some strange reason called “Italian sandwiches’ up here. . mozzarella sticks. . garlic fries.

… Twinkies.”

“That’s only four,” I said.

“I forgot the soft-drink course,” he said, and pulled three long-neck bottles of S’OK birch beer out of a brown bag. “Let’s eat. Mattie runs the library from two to eight on Fridays and Saturdays, and this would be a bad time for her to be missing work.”

“How did the readers’ circle go last night?” I asked. “Lindy Briggs didn’t eat you alive, I see.”

She laughed, clasped her hands, and shook them over her head. “I was a hit! An absolute smashola! I didn’t dare tell them I got all my best insights from you—”

“Thank God for small favors,” Storrow said. He was freeing his own sandwich from its string and butcher-paper wrapping, doing it carefully and a little dubiously, using just the tips of his fingers.

“—so I said I looked in a couple of books and found some leads there.

It was sort of wonderful. I felt like a college kid.”

“Good.”

“Bissonette?” John Storrow asked. “Where’s he? I never met a guy named Romeo before.”

“Said he had to go right back to Lewiston. Sorry.”

“Actually it’s best we stay small, at least to begin with.” He bit into his sandwich—they come tucked into long sub rolls—and looked at me, surprised. “This isn’t bad.”

“Eat more than three and you’re hooked for life,” Mattie said, and chomped heartily into her own.

“Tell us about the depo,” John said, and while they ate, I talked. When I finished, I picked up my own sandwich and played a little catch-up.

I’d forgotten how good an Italian can be—sweet, sour, and oily all at the same time. Of course nothing that tastes that good can be healthy; that’s a given. I suppose one could formulate a similar postulate about full-body hugs from young girls in legal trouble.

“Very interesting,” John said. “Very interesting indeed.” He took a mozzarella stick from its grease-stained bag, broke it open, and looked with a kind of fascinated horror at the clotted white gunk inside.

“People up here eat this?” he asked.

“People in New York eat fish-bladders,” I said. “Raw.”

“Touch&” He dipped a piece into the plastic container of spaghetti sauce (in this context it is called “cheese-dip” in western Maine), then ate it.

“Well?” I asked.

“Not bad. They ought to be a lot hotter, though.”

Yes, he was right about that. Eating cold mozzarella sticks is a little like eating cold snot, an observation I thought I would keep to myself on this beautiful midsummer Friday.

“If Durgin had the tape, why wouldn’t he play it?” Mattie asked. “I don’t understand.”

25o John stretched his arms out, cracked his knuckles, and looked at her benignly. “We’ll probably never know for sure,” he said. He thought Devore was going to drop the suit—it was in every line of his body-language and every inflection of his voice. That was hopeful, but it would be good if Mattie didn’t allow herself to become too hopeful.

John Storrow wasn’t as young as he looked, and probably not as guileless, either (or so I fervently hoped), but he was young. And neither he nor Mattie knew the story of Scooter Larribee’s sled. Or had seen Bill Dean’s face when he told it. “Want to hear some possibilities?”

“Sure,” I said. John put down his sandwich, wiped his fingers, and then began to tick off points. “First, he made the call.

Taped conversations have a highly dubious value under those circumstances. Second, he didn’t exactly come off like Captain Kangaroo, did he?”

“No.’

“Third, your fabrication impugns you, Mike, but not really very much, and it doesn’t impugn Mattie at all. And by the way, that thing about Mattie pushing bubbles in Kyra’s face, I love that. If that’s the best they can do, they better give it up right now. Last—and this is where the truth probably lies—I think Devore’s got Nixon’s Disease.”

“Nixon’s Disease?” Mattie asked. “The tape Durgin had isn’t the only tape. Can’t be. And your father-in-law is afraid that if he introduces one tape made by whatever system he’s got in Warrington’s, we might subpoena all of them. And I’d damn well try.” She looked bewildered. “What could be on them? And if it’s bad, why not just destroy them?”

“Maybe he can’t,” I said. “Maybe he needs them for other reasons.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” John said. “Durgin was bluffing, and that’s what matters.” He hit the heel of his hand lightly against the picnic table. “I think he’s going to drop it. I really do.”

“It’s too early to start thinking like that,” I said at once, but I could tell by Mattie’s face—shining more brightly than ever—that the damage was done.

“Fill him in on what else you’ve been doing,” Mattie told John. “Then I’ve got to get to the library.”

“Where do you send Kyra on your workdays?” I asked. “Mrs. Cullum’s. She lives two miles up the Wasp Hill Road. Also in July there’s V.B.S. from ten until three. That’s Vacation Bible School. Ki loves it, especially the singing and the flannel-board stories about Noah and Moses. The bus drops her off at Arlene’s, and I pick her up around quarter of nine.” She smiled a little wistfully. “By then she’s usually fast asleep on the couch.” John held forth for the next ten minutes or so. He hadn’t been on the case long, but had already started a lot of balls rolling. A fellow in California was gathering facts about Roger Devore and Morris Ridding (“gathering facts” sounded so much better than “snooping”). John was particularly interested in learning about the quality of Roger Devore’s relations with his father, and if Roger was on record concerning his little niece from Maine. John had also mapped out a campaign to learn as much as possible about Max Devore’s movements and activities since he’d come back to TR-90. To that end he had the name of a private investigator, one recommended by Romeo Bissonette, my rent-a-lawyer. As he spoke, paging rapidly through a little notebook he drew from the inside pocket of his suitcoat, I remembered what he’d said about Lady Justice during our telephone conversation: Slap some handcuf25 on that broad’s wrists and some tape over her mouth to go along with the blindjld, rape her and roll her in the mud. That was maybe a bit too strong for what we were doing, but I thought at the very least we were shoving her around a little. I imagined poor Roger Devore up on the stand, having flown three thousand miles in order to be questioned about his sexual preferences. I had to keep reminding myself that his father had put him in that position, not Mattie or me or John Storrow. “Have you gotten any closer to a meeting with Devore and his chief legal advisor?” I asked. “Don’t know for sure.

The line is in the water, the offer is on the table, the puck’s on the ice, pick your favorite metaphor, mix em and match em if you desire.”

“Got your irons in the fire,” Mattie said.

“Your checkers on the board,” I added. We looked at each other and laughed. John regarded us sadly, then sighed, picked up his sandwich, and began to eat again. “You really have to meet him with his lawyer more or less dancing attendance?” I asked. “Would you like to win this thing, then discover Devore can do it all again based on unethical behavior by Mary Devore’s legal resource?” John returned. “Don’t even joke about it!” Mattie cried. “I wasn’t joking,” John said. “It has to be with his lawyer, yes. I don’t think it’s going to happen, not on this trip. I haven’t even got a look at the old cockuh, and I have to tell you my curiosity is killing me.”

“If that’s all it takes to make you happy, show up behind the backstop at the softball field next Tuesday evening,” Mattie said. “He’ll be there in his fancy wheelchair, laughing and clapping and sucking his damned old oxygen every fifteen minutes or so.”

“Not a bad idea,” John said. “I have to go back to New York for the weekend—I’m leaving apres Osgood—but maybe I’ll show up on Tuesday. I might even bring my glove.” He began clearing up our litter, and once again I thought he looked both prissy and endearing at the same time, like Stan Laurel wearing an apron. Mattie eased him aside and took over.

“No one ate any Twinkles,” she said, a little sadly. “Take them home to your daughter,” John said. “No way. I don’t let her eat stuff like this.

What kind of mother do you think I am?” She saw our expressions, replayed what she’d just said, then burst out laughing. We joined her.

Mattie’s old Scout was parked in one of the slant spaces behind the war memorial, which in Castle Rock is a World War I soldier with a generous helping of birdshit on his pie-dish helmet. A brand-new Taurus with a Hertz decal above the inspection sticker was parked next to it. John tossed his briefcase—reassuringly thin and not very ostentatious—into the back seat.

“if I can make it back on Tuesday, I’ll call you,” he told Mattie. “If I’m able to get an appointment with your father-in-law through this man Osgood, I will also call you.”

“I’ll buy the Italian sandwiches,” Mattie said. He smiled, then grasped her arm in one hand and mine in the other.

He looked like a newly ordained minister getting ready to marry his first couple. “You two talk on the telephone if you need to,” he said, “always remembering that one or both lines may be tapped. Meet in the market if you happen to. Mike, you might feel a need to drop by the local library and check out a book.”

“Not until you renew your card, though,” Mattie said, giving me a demure glance. “But no more visits to Mattie’s trailer. Is that understood?” I said yes; she said yes; John Storrow looked unconvinced. It made me wonder if he was seeing something in our faces or bodies that shouldn’t be there. “They are committed to a line of attack which probably isn’t going to work,” he said. “We can’t risk giving them the chance to change course. That means innuendos about the two of you; it also means innuendos about Mike and Kyra.” Mattie’s shocked expression made her look twelve again. “Mike and Kyra! What are you talking about?”

“Allegations of child molestation thrown up by people so desperate they’ll try anything.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “And if my father-in-law wanted to sling that kind of mud—” John nodded. “Yes, we’d be obligated to sling it right back. Newspaper coverage from coast to coast would follow, maybe even Court TV, God bless and save us. We want none of that if we can avoid it. It’s not good for the grownups, and it’s not good for the child. Now or later.”

He bent and kissed Mattie’s cheek. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said, and he did sound genuinely sorry. “Custody’s just this way.”

“I think you warned me. It’s just that. . the idea someone might make a thing like that up just because there was no other way for them to win…”

“Let me warn you again,” he said. His face came as close to grim as its young and good-natured features would probably allow. “What we have is a very rich man with a very shaky case. The combination could be like working with old dynamite.” I turned to Mattie. “Are you still worried about Ki? Still feel she’s in danger?” I saw her think about hedging her response—out of plain old Yankee reserve, quite likely—and then deciding not to. Deciding, perhaps, that hedging was a luxury she couldn’t afford. “Yes. But it’s just a feeling, you know.” John was frowning. I supposed the idea that Devore might resort to extralegal means of obtaining what he wanted had occurred to him, as well. “Keep your eye on her as much as you can,” he said. “I respect intuition. Is yours based on anything concrete?”

“No,” Mattie answered, and her quick glance in my direction asked me to keep my mouth shut. “Not really.” She opened the Scout’s door and tossed in the little brown bag with the Twinkies in it—she had decided to keep them after all. Then she turned to John and me with an expression that was close to anger. “I’m not sure how to follow that advice, anyway. I work five days a week, and in August, when we do the microfiche update, it’ll be six. Right now Ki gets her lunch at Vacation Bible School and her dinner from Arlene Cullum. I see her in the mornings. The rest of the time…” I knew what she was going to say before she said it; the expression was an old one.

”… she’s on the TR.”

“I could help you find an all pair,” I said, thinking it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than John Storrow. “No,” they said in such perfect unison that they glanced at each other and laughed. But even while she was laughing, Mattie looked tense and unhappy. “We’re not going to leave a paper trail for Durgin or Devore’s custody team to exploit,” John said. “Who pays me is one thing. Who pays Mattie’s child-care help is another.”

“Besides, I’ve taken enough from you,” Mattie said. “More than I can sleep easy on. I’m not going to get in any deeper just because I’ve been having megrims.” She climbed into the Scout and closed the door. I rested my hands on her open window. Now we were on the same level, and the eye-contact was so strong it was disconcerting. “Mattie, I don’t have anything else to spend it on. Really.”

“When it comes to John’s fee, I accept that. Because John’s fee is about Ki.” She put her hand over mine and squeezed briefly. “This other is about me. All right?”

“Yeah. But you need to tell your babysitter and the people who run this Bible thing that you’ve got a custody case on your hands, a potentially bitter one, and Kyra’s not to go anywhere with anyone, even someone they know, without your say-so.” She smiled. “It’s already been done. On John’s advice. Stay in touch, Mike.” She lifted my hand, gave it a hearty smack, and drove away. “What do you think?” I asked John as we watched the Scout blow oil on its way to the new Prouty Bridge, which spans Castle Street and spills outbound traffic onto Highway 68. “I think it’s grand she has a well-heeled benefactor and a smart lawyer,” John said. He paused, then added: “But I’ll tell you some-thing—she somehow doesn’t feel lucky to me at all. There’s a feeling I get… I don’t know…”

“That there’s a cloud around her you can’t quite see.”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s it.” He raked his hands through the restless mass of his red hair. “I just know it’s something sad.” I knew exactly what he meant… except for me there was more. I wanted to be in bed with her, sad or not, right or not. I wanted to feel her hands on me, tugging and pressing, patting and stroking. I wanted to be able to smell her skin and taste her hair. I wanted to have her lips against my ear, her breath tickling the fine hairs within its cup as she told me to do what I wanted, whatever I wanted.

I got back to Sara Laughs shortly before two o’clock and let myself in, thinking about nothing but my study and the IBM with the Courier ball. I was writing again—writing. I could still hardly believe it. I’d work (not that it felt much like work after a four-year layoff) until maybe six o’clock, swim, then go down to the Village Cafe for one of Buddy’s cholesterol-rich specialties. The moment I stepped through the door, Bunter’s bell began to ring stridently. I stopped in the foyer, my hand frozen on the knob. The house was hot and bright, not a shadow anywhere, but the gooseflesh forming on my arms felt like midnight.

“Who’s here?” I called. The bell stopped ringing. There was a moment of silence, and then a woman shrieked. It came from everywhere, pouring out of the sunny, mote-laden air like sweat out of hot skin. It was a scream of outrage, anger, grief… but mostly, I think, of horror. And I screamed in response. I couldn’t help it. I had been frightened standing in the dark cellar stairwell, listening to the unseen fist thump on the insulation, but this was far worse. It never stopped, that scream. It faded, as the child’s sobs had faded; faded as if the person screaming was being carried rapidly down a long corridor and away from me. At last it was gone. I leaned against the bookcase, my palm pressed against my tee-shirt, my heart galloping beneath it. I was gasping for breath, and my muscles had that queer exploded feel they get after you’ve had a bad scare. A minute passed. My heartbeat gradually slowed, and my breathing slowed with it. I straightened up, took a tottery step, and when my legs held me, took two more. I stood in the kitchen doorway, looking across to the living room. Above the fireplace, Bunter the moose looked glassily back at me. The bell around his neck hung still and chimeless.

A hot sunpoint glowed on its side. The only sound was that stupid Felix the Cat clock in the kitchen. The thought nagging at me, even then, was that the screaming woman had been Jo, that Sara Laughs was being haunted by my wife, and that she was in pain. Dead or not, she was in pain.

“Jo?” I asked quietly. “Jo, are you—” The sobbing began again—the sound of a terrified child. At the same moment my mouth and nose once more filled with the iron taste of the lake. I put one hand to my throat, gagging and frightened, then leaned over the sink and spat. It was as it had been before—instead of voiding a gush of water, nothing came out but a little spit. The waterlogged feeling was gone as if it had never been there. I stayed where I was, grasping the counter and bent over the sink, probably looking like a drunk who has finished the party by upchucking most of the night’s bottled cheer. I felt like that, too—stunned and bleary, too overloaded to really understand what was going on. At last I straightened up again, took the towel folded over the dishwasher’s handle, and wiped my face with it. There was tea in the fridge, and I wanted a tall, ice-choked glass of it in the worst way. I reached for the doorhandle and froze.

The fruit and vegetable magnets were drawn into a circle again. In the center was this: help im drown That’s it, I thought. I’m getting out of here. Right now. %day. Yet an hour later I was up in my stifling study with a glass of tea on the desk beside me (the cubes in it long since melted), dressed only in my bathing trunks and lost in the world I was making—the one where a private detective named Andy Drake was trying to prove that John Shackleford was not the serial killer nicknamed Baseball Cap. This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

The book was big, okay? The book was major. I was afraid to change rooms, let alone pack up the typewriter and my slim just-begun manuscript and take it back to Derry. That would be as dangerous as taking an infant out in a windstorm. So I stayed, always reserving the right to move out if things got too weird (the way smokers reserve the right to quit if their coughs get too heavy), and a week passed. Things happened during that week, but until I met Max Devore on The Street the following Friday—the seventeenth of July, it would have been—the most important thing was that I continued to work on a novel which would, if finished, be called My Childhood Friend. Perhaps we always think what was lost was the best… or would have been the best. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that my real life that week had mostly to do with Andy Drake, John Shackleford, and a shadowy figure standing in the deep background. Raymond Garraty, John Shackle-ford’s childhood friend.

A man who sometimes wore a baseball cap. During that week, the manifestations in the house continued, but at a lower level—there was nothing like that bloodcurdling scream. Sometimes Bunter’s bell rang, and sometimes the fruit and vegetable magnets would re-form themselves into a circle… never with words in the middle, though; not that week.

One morning I got up and the sugar cannister was overturned, making me think of Mattie’s story about the flour. Nothing was written in the spill, but there was a squiggle-as though something had tried to write and failed. If so, I sympathized. I knew what that was like.

My depo before the redoubtable Elmer Durgin was on Friday the tenth. On the following Tuesday I took The Street down to Warrington’s softball field, hoping for my own peek at Max Devore. It was going on six o’clock when I got within hearing range of the shouts, cheers, and batted balls.

A path marked with rustic signs (curlicued W’s burned into oak arrows)

led past an abandoned boathouse, a couple of sheds, and a gazebo half-buried in blackberry creepers. I eventually came out in deep center field. A litter of potato-chip bags, candy-wrappers, and beer cans suggested that others sometimes watched the games from this vantage-point. I couldn’t help thinking about Jo and her mysterious friend, the guy in the old brown sportcoat, the burly guy who had slipped an arm around her waist and led her away from the game, laughing, back toward The Street. Twice over the weekend I’d come close to calling Bonnie Amudson, seeing if maybe I could chase that guy down, put a name on him, and both times I had backed off. Sleeping dogs, I told myself each time. Sleeping dogs, Michael. I had the area beyond deep center to myself that evening, and it felt like the right distance from home plate, considering the man who usually parked his wheelchair behind the backstop had called me a liar and I had invited him to store my telephone number where the sunshine grows dim. I needn’t have worried in any case. Devore wasn’t in attendance, nor was the lovely Rogette. I did spot Mattie behind the casually maintained chickenwire barrier on the first-base line. John Storrow was beside her, wearing jeans and a polo shirt, his red hair mostly corralled by a Mets cap. They stood watching the game and chatting like old friends for two innings before they saw me—more than enough time for me to feel envious of John’s position, and a little jealous as well.

Finally someone lofted a long fly to center, where the edge of the woods served as the only fence. The center fielder backed up, but it was going to be far over his head. It was hit to my depth, off to my right. I moved in that direction without thinking, high-footing through the shrubs that formed a zone between the mown outfield and the trees, hoping I wasn’t running through poison ivy. I caught the softball in my outstretched left hand, and laughed when some of the spectators cheered.

The center fielder applauded me by tapping his bare right hand into the pocket of his glove. The batter, meanwhile, circled the bases serenely, knowing he had hit a ground-rule home run.

I tossed the ball to the fielder and as I returned to my original post among the candy-wrappers and beer cans, I looked back in and saw Mattie and John looking at me.

If anything confirms the idea that we’re just another species of animal, one with a slightly bigger brain and a much bigger idea of our own importance in the scheme of things, it’s how much we can convey by gesture when we absolutely have to. Mattie clasped her hands to her chest, tilted her head to the left, raised her eyebrows—My hero. I held my hands to my shoulders and flipped the palms skyward Shucks, ma’am, ’t’warn’t nothin. John lowered his head and put his fingers to his brow, as if something there hurt—Iu lucky sonofabitch.

With those comments out of the way, I pointed at the backstop and shrugged a question. Both Mattie and John shrugged back. An inning later a little boy who looked like one giant exploding freckle ran out to where I was, his oversized Michael Jordan jersey churning around his shins like a dress.

“Guy down there gimme fifty cent to say you should call im later on at his hotel over in the Rock,” he said, pointing at John. “He say you gimme another fifty cent if there was an answer.”

“Tell him I’ll call him around nine-thirty,” I said. “I don’t have any change, though. Can you take a buck?”

“Hey, yeah, swank.” He snatched it, turned away, then turned back.

He grinned, revealing a set of teeth caught between Act I and Act II.

With the softball players in the background, he looked like a Norman Rockwell archetype. “Guy also say tell you that was a bullshit catch.”

“Tell him people used to say the same thing about Willie Mays all the time.”

“Willie who?”

Ah, youth. Ah, mores. “Just tell him, son. He’ll know.”

I stayed another inning, but by then the game was getting drunk, Devore still hadn’t shown, and I went back home the way I had come. I met one fisherman standing out on a rock and two young people strolling along The Street toward Warrington’s, their hands linked. They said hi and I hi’d them back. I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Some people check their phone answering machines when they get home; that summer I always checked the front of the fridge.

Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, as Bullwinkle Moose used to say, the spirits are about to speak. That night they hadn’t, although the fruit and vegetable magnets had re-formed into a sinuous shape like a snake or perhaps the letter S taking a nap:

A little later I called John and asked him where Devore had been, and he repeated in words what he had already told me, and much more economically, by gesture. “It’s the first game he’s missed since he came back,” he said. “Mattie tried asking a few people if he was okay, and the consensus seemed to be that he was… at least as far as anyone knew.”

“What do you mean she tried asking a few people?”

“I mean that several wouldn’t even talk to her. “Cut her dead,’ my parents’ generation would have said.” Watch it, buddy, I thought but didn’t say, that’s only ha/fa stepjom my generation. “One of her old girlfriends spoke to her finally, but there’s a general attitude about Mattie Devore. That man Osgood may be a shitty salesman, but as Devore’s Mr. Moneyguy he’s doing a wonderful job of separating Mattie from the other folks in the town. Is it a town, Mike? I don’t quite get that part.”

“It’s just the TR,” I said absently. “There’s no real way to explain it.

Do you actually believe Devore’s bribing everyone? That doesn’t say much for the old Wordsworthian idea of pastoral innocence and goodness, does it?”

“He’s spreading money and using Osgood—maybe Footman, too—to spread stories. And the folks around here seem at least as honest as honest politicians.”

“The ones who stay bought?”

“Yeah. Oh, and I saw one of Devore’s potential star witnesses in the Case of the Runaway Child. Royce Merrill. He was over by the equipment shed with some of his cronies. Did you happen to notice him?” I said I had not. “Guy must be a hundred and thirty,” John said. “He’s got a cane with a gold head the size of an elephant’s asshole.”

“That’s a Boston Post cane. The oldest person in the area gets to keep it.” ’5nd I have no doubt he came by it honestly. If Devore’s lawyers put him on the stand, I’ll debone him.”

There was something chilling in John’s gleeful confidence. “I’m sure,” I said. “How did Mattie take getting cut dead by her old friends?” I was thinking of her saying that she hated Tuesday nights, hated to think of the softball games going on as they always had at the field where she had met her late husband. “She did okay,” John said. “I think she’s given most of them up as a lost cause, anyway.” I had my doubts about that—I seem to remember that at twenty-one lost causes are sort of a specialty—but I didn’t say anything. “She’s hanging in. She’s been lonely and scared, I think that in her own mind she might already have begun the process of giving Kyra up, but she’s got her confidence back now. Mostly thanks to meeting you. Talk about your fantastically lucky breaks.” Well, maybe. I flashed on Jo’s. brother Frank once saying to me that he didn’t think there was any such thing as luck, only fate and inspired choices. And then I remembered that image of the TR criss-crossed with invisible cables, connections that were unseen but as strong as steel. “John, I forgot to ask the most important question of all the other day, after I gave my depo. This custody case we’re all so concerned about… has it even been scheduled?”

D-k3 k. Jltm Dk-/IN,O “Good question. I’ve checked three ways to Sunday, and Bissonette has, too. Unless Devore and his people have pulled something really slippery, like filing in another court district, I don’t think it has been.”

“Could they do that? File in another district?”

“Maybe. But probably not without us finding out.”

“So what does it mean?”

“That Devore’s on the verge of giving up,” John said promptly. “As of now I see no other way of explaining it. I’m going back to New York first thing tomorrow, but I’ll stay in touch. If anything comes up here, you do the same.” I said I would and went to bed. No female visitors came to share my dreams.

That was sort of a relief.

When I came downstairs to recharge my iced-tea glass late Wednesday morning, Brenda Meserve had erected the laundry whirligig on the back stoop and was hanging out my clothes. This she did as her mother had no doubt taught her, with pants and shirts on the outside and undies on the inside, where any passing nosyparkers couldn’t see what you chose to wear closest to your skin. “You can take these in around four o’clock,” Mrs. M. said as she prepared to leave. She looked at me with the bright and cynical eye of a woman who has been “doing for” well-off men her entire life. “Don’t you forget and leave em out all night—dewy clothes don’t ever feel fresh until they’re warshed again.” I told her most humbly that I would remember to take in my clothes. I then asked her—feeling like a spy working an embassy party for infor-mation-if the house felt all right to her. “L&ll right how?” she asked, cocking one wild eyebrow at me. “Well, I’ve heard funny noises a couple of times. In the night.” She sniffed. “It’s a log house, ennit? Built in relays, so to speak. It setties, one wing against t’other. That’s what you hear, most likely.”

“No ghosts, huh?” I said, as if disappointed. “Not that I’ve ever seen,” she said, matter-of-fact as an accountant, “but my ma said there’s plenty down here. She said this whole lake is haunted. By the Micmacs that lived here until they was driven out by General Wing, by all the men who went away to the Civil War and died there—over six hundred went from this part of the world, Mr. Noonan, and less than a hundred and fifty came back… at least in their bodies. Ma said this side of Dark Score’s also haunted by the ghost of that Negro boy who died here, poor tyke. He belonged to one of the Red-Tops, you know.”

“No—I know about Sara and the Red-Tops, but not this.” I paused. “Did he drown?”

“Nawp, caught in an animal trap. Struggled there for most of a whole day, screaming for help. Finally they found him. They saved the foot, but they shouldn’t have. Blood-poisoning set in, and the boy died.

Summer of ought-one, that was. It’s why they left, I guess—it was too sad to stay. But my ma used to claim the little fella, he stayed. She used to say that he’s still on the TR.”

I wondered what Mrs. M. would say if I told her that the little fella had very likely been here to greet me when I arrived from Derry, and had been back on several occasions since.

“Then there was Kenny Auster’s father, Normal,” she said. “You know that story, don’t you? Oh, that’s a terrible story.” She looked rather pleased—either at knowing such a terrible story or at having the chance to tell it.

“No,” I said. “I know Kenny, though. He’s the one with the wolfhound.

Blueberry.”

“Ayuh. He carpenters a tad and caretakes a tad, just like his father before him. His dad caretook many of these places, you know, and back just after the Second World War was over, Normal Auster drownded Kenny’s little brother in his back yard. This was when they lived on Wasp Hill, down where the road splits, one side going to the old boat-landin and the other to the marina. He didn’t drown the tyke in the lake, though. He put him on the ground under the pump and just held him there until the baby was full of water and dead.”

I stood there looking at her, the clothes behind us snapping on their whirligig. I thought of my mouth and nose and throat full of that cold mineral taste that could have been well-water as well as lakewater; down here all of it comes from the same deep aquifers. I thought of the message on the refrigerator: help im drown.

“He left the baby laying right under the pump. He had a new Chevrolet, and he drove it down here to Lane Forty-two. Took his shotgun, too.”

“You aren’t going to tell me Kenny Auster’s dad committed suicide in my house, are you, Mrs. Meserve?”

She shook her head. “Nawp. He did it on the Brickers’ lakeside deck. Sat down on their porch glider and blew his damned baby-murdering head off.”

“The Brickers? I don’t—”

“You wouldn’t. Hasn’t been any Brickers on the lake since the sixties.

They were from Delaware. Quality folks. You’d think of it as the Warsh-burn place, I guess, although they’re gone, now, too. Place is empty. Every now and then that stark naturalborn fool Osgood brings someone down and shows it off, but he’ll never sell it at the price he’s asking. Mark my words.”

The Washburns I had known—had played bridge with them a time or two.

Nice enough people, although probably not what Mrs. M… with her queer backcountry snobbishness, would have called “quality.” Their place was maybe an eighth of a mile north of mine along The Street. Past that point, there’s nothing much—the drop to the lake gets steep, and the woods are massed tangles of second growth and blackberry bushes. The Street goes on to the tip of Halo Bay at the far north end of Dark Score, but once Lane Forty-two curves back to the highway, the path is for the most part used only by berry-picking expeditions in the summer and hunters in the fall.

Normal, I thought. Hell of a name for a guy who had drowned his infant son under the backyard pump.

“Did he leave a note? Any explanation?”

“Nawp. But you’ll hear folks say he haunts the lake, too. Little towns are most likely full of haunts, but I couldn’t say aye, no, or maybe myself; I ain’t the sensitive type. All I know about your place, Mr. Noo-nan, is that it smells damp no matter how much I try to get it aired out. I ’magine that’s logs. Log buildins don’t go well with lakes. The damp gets into the wood.”

She had set her purse down between her Reeboks; now she bent and picked it up. It was a countrywoman’s purse, black, styleless (except for the gold grommets holding the handles on), and utilitarian. She could have carried a good selection of kitchen appliances in there if she had wanted to.

“I can’t stand here natterin all day long, though, much as I might like to. I got one more place to go before I can call it quits. Summer’s ha’vest time in this part of the world, you know. Now remember to take those clothes in before dark, Mr. Noonan. Don’t let em get all dewy.”

“I won’t.” And I didn’t. But when I went out to take them in, dressed in my bathing trunks and coated with sweat from the oven I’d been working in (I had to get the air conditioner fixed, just had to), I saw that something had altered Mrs. M.’s arrangements. My jeans and shirts now hung around the pole. The underwear and socks, which had been decorously hidden when Mrs. M. drove up the driveway in her old Ford, were now on the outside. It was as if my unseen guest—one of my unseen guests—was saying ha ha ha.

I went to the library the next day, and made renewing my library card my first order of business. Lindy Briggs herself took my four bucks and entered me into the computer, first telling me how sorry she had been to hear about Jo’s death. And, as with Bill, I sensed a certain reproach in her tone, as if I were to blame for such improperly delayed condolences.

I supposed I was.

“Lindy, do you have a town history?” I asked when we had finished the proprieties concerning my wife.

“We have two,” she said, then leaned toward me over the desk, a little woman in a violently patterned sleeveless dress, her hair a gray puffball around her head, her bright eyes swimming behind her bifocals.

In a confidential voice she added, “Neither is much good.”

“Which one is better?” I asked, matching her tone.

“Probably the one by Edward Osteen. He was a summer resident until the mid-fifties and lived here full-time when he retired. He wrote Dark Score Days in 1965 or ’66. He had it privately published because he couldn’t find a commercial house that would take it. Even the regional publishers passed.” She sighed. “The locals bought it, but that’s not many books, is it?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said.

“He just wasn’t much of a writer. Not much of a photographer, either—those little black-and-white snaps of his make my eyes hurt.

Still, he tells some good stories. The Micmac Drive, General Wing’s trick horse, the twister in the eighteen-eighties, the fires in the nine-teen-thirties…”

“Anything about Sara and the Red-Tops?”

She nodded, smiling. “Finally got around to looking up the history of your own place, did you? I’m glad to hear it. He found an old photo of them, and it’s in there. He thought it was taken at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. Ed used to say he’d give a lot to hear a record made by that bunch.”

“So would I, but none were ever made.” A haiku by the Greek poet George Seferis suddenly occurred to me: Are these the voices of our dead friends / or just the gramophone? “What happened to Mr. Osteen? I don’t recall the name.”

“Died not a year or two before you and Jo bought your place on the lake,” she said. “Cancer.”

“You said there were two histories?”

“The other one you probably know-A History of Castle County and Castle Rock. Done for the county centennial, and dry as dust. Eddie Osteen’s book isn’t very well written, but he wasn’t dry. You have to give him that much. You should find them both over there.” She pointed to shelves with a sign over them which read of MAINE INTEREST. “They don’t circulate.” Then she brightened. “Although we will happily take any nickels you should feel moved to feed into our photocopy machine.”

Mattie was sitting in the far corner next to a boy in a turned-around baseball cap, showing him how to use the microfilm reader. She looked up at me, smiled, and mouthed the words Nice catch. Referring to my lucky grab at Warrington’s, presumably. I gave a modest little shrug before turning to the of MAINE INTEREST shelves. But she was right—lucky or not, it had been a nice catch.

“What are you looking for?”

I was so deep into the two histories I’d found that Mattie’s voice made me jump. I turned around and smiled, first aware that she was wearing some light and pleasant perfume, second that Lindy Briggs was watching us from the main desk, her welcoming smile put away.

“Background on the area where I live,” I said. “Old stories. My housekeeper got me interested.” Then, in a lower voice: “Teacher’s watching. Don’t look around.”

Mattie looked startled—and, I thought, a little worried. As it turned out, she was right to be worried. In a voice that was low-pitched yet still designed to carry at least as far as the desk, she asked if she could reshelve either book for me. I gave her both. As she picked them up she said in what was almost a con’s whisper: “That lawyer who represented you last Friday got John a private detective. He says they may have found something interesting about the guardian ad/item.”

I walked over to the of M^NE INTEST shelves with her, hoping I wasn’t getting her in trouble, and asked if she knew what the something interesting might be. She shook her head, gave me a professional little librarian’s smile, and I went away.

On the ride back to the house, I tried to think about what I’d read, but there wasn’t much. Osteen was a bad writer who had taken bad pictures, and while his stories were colorful, they were also pretty thin on the ground. He mentioned Sara and the Red-Tops, all right, but he referred to them as a “Dixie-Land octet,” and even I knew that wasn’t right. The Red-Tops might have played some Dixieland, but they had primarily been a blues group (Friday and Saturday nights) and a gospel group (Sunday mornings). Osteen’s two-page summary of the Red-Tops’ stay on the TR made it clear that he had heard no one else’s covers of Sara’s tunes.

He confirmed that a child had died of blood-poisoning caused by a traphold wound, a story which sounded like Brenda Meserve’s… but why wouldn’t it? Osteen had likely heard it from Mrs. M.’s father or grandfather. He also said that the boy was Son Tidwell’s only child, and that the guitar-player’s real name was Reginald. The Tidwells had supposedly drifted north from the whorehouse district of New Orleans—the fabled crib-and-club streets which had been known around the turn of the century as Storyville.

There was no mention of Sara and the Red-Tops in the more formal history of Castle County, and no mention of Kenny Auster’s drownded little brother in either book. Not long before Mattie came over to speak to me, I’d had a wild idea: that Son Tidwell and Sara Tidwell were man and wife, and that the little boy (not named by Osteen) had been their son.

I found the picture Lindy had mentioned and studied it closely. It showed at least a dozen black people standing in a stiff group in front of what looked like a cattle exhibition. There was an old-fashioned Ferris wheel in the background. It could well have been taken at the Fryeburg Fair, and as old and faded as it was, it had a simple, elemental power that all Osteen’s own photos put together could not match. You have seen photographs of western and Depression-era bandidos that have that same look of eerie truth—stern faces above tight ties and collars, eyes not quite lost in the shadows of antique hatbrims.

Sara stood front and center, wearing a black dress and her guitar. She was not outright smiling in this picture, but there seemed to be a smile in her eyes, and I thought they were like the eyes in some paintings, the ones that seem to follow you wherever you move in the room. I studied the photo and thought of her almost spiteful voice in my dream:

What do you want to know, sugar? I suppose I wanted to know about her and the others—who they had been, what they were to each other when they weren’t singing and playing, why they’d left, where they’d gone.

Both of her hands were clearly visible, one posed on the strings of her guitar, the other on the frets, where she had been making a G-chord on an October Fair-day in the year 1900. Her fingers were long, artistic, bare of rings. That didn’t necessarily mean that she and Son Tidwell weren’t married, of course, and even if they hadn’t been, the little boy who’d been caught in the trap could have been born on the wrong side of the blanket. Except the same ghost of a smile lurked in Son Tidwell’s eyes. The resemblance was remarkable. I had an idea that the two of them had been brother and sister, not man and wife.

I thought about these things on my way home, and I thought about cables that were felt rather than seen. . but mostly I found myself thinking about Lindy Briggs—the way she had smiled at me, the way, a little later on, she had not smiled at her bright young librarian with the high-school certification. That worried me.

Then I got back to the house, and all I worried about was my story and the people in it—bags of bones which were putting on flesh daily.

Michael Noonan, Max Devore, and Rogette Whitmore played out their horrible little comedy scene Friday evening. Two other things which bear narrating happened before that.

The first was a call from John Storrow on Thursday night. I was sitting in front of the TV with a baseball game running soundlessly in front of me (the MUTE button with which most remote controls come equipped may be the twentieth century’s finest invention). I was thinking about Sara Tidwell and Son Tidwell and Son Tidwell’s little boy. I was thinking about Storyville, a name any writer just had to love. And in the back of my mind I was thinking about my wife, who had died pregnant.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mike, I have some wonderful news,” John said. He sounded near to bursting. “Romeo Bissonette may be a weird name, but there’s nothing weird about the detective-guy he found for me. His name is George Kennedy, like the actor. He’s good, and he’s fast. This guy could work in New York.”

“If that’s the highest compliment you can think of, you need to get out of the city more.”

He went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Kennedy’s real job is with a security firm—the other stuff is strictly in the moonlight. Which is a great loss, believe me. He got most of this on the phone. I can’t believe it.”

“What specifically can’t you believe?”

“Jackpot, baby.” Again he spoke in that tone of greedy satisfaction which I found both troubling and reassuring. “Elmer Durgin has done the following things since late May: paid off his car; paid off his camp in Rangely Lakes; caught up on about ninety years of child support—”

“Nobody pays child support for ninety years,” I said, but I was just running my mouth to hear it go… to let off some of my own building excitement, in truth. “"T’ain’t possible, Mcgee.”

“It is if you have seven kids,” John said, and began howling with laughter.

I thought of the pudgy self-satisfied face, the cupid-bow mouth, the nails that looked polished and prissy. “He don’t,” I said.

“He do,” John said, still laughing. He sounded like a complete lunatic—manic, hold the depressive. “He really do! Ranging in ages from f-fourteen to th-th-three! What a b-busy p-p-potent little prick he must have!” More helpless howls. And by now I was howling right along with him—I’d caught it like the mumps. “Kennedy is going to f-f-fax me p-pictures of the whole. . fam’. . damily!” We broke up completely, laughing together long-distance. I could picture John Stor-row sitting alone in his Park Avenue office, bellowing like a lunatic and scaring the cleaning ladies.

“That doesn’t matter, though,” he said when he could talk coherently again. “You see what matters, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “How could he be so stupid?” Meaning Durgin, but also meaning Devore. John understood, I think, that we were talking about both he’s at the same time.

“Elmer Durgin’s a little lawyer from a little township tucked away in the big woods of western Maine, that’s all. How could he know that some guardian angel would come along with the resources to smoke him out? He also bought a boat, by the way. Two weeks ago. It’s a twin outboard. A big ’un. It’s over, Mike. The home team scores nine runs in the bottom of the ninth and the fucking pennant is ours.”

“If you say so.” But my hand went off on its own expedition, made a loose fist, and knocked on the good solid wood of the coffee-table.

“And hey, the softball game wasn’t a total loss.” John was still talking between little giggling outbursts like helium balloons.

“No?”

“I’m taken with her.”

“Her?”

“Mattie,” he said patiently. “Mattie Devore.” A pause, then: “Mike? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Phone slipped. Sorry.” The phone hadn’t slipped as much as an inch, but it came out sounding natural enough, I thought. And if it hadn’t, so what? When it came to Mattie, I would be—in John’s mind, at least—below suspicion. Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie. He was twenty-eight, maybe thirty. The idea that a man twelve years older might be sexually attracted to Mattie had probably never crossed his mind… or maybe just for a second or two there on the common, before he dismissed it as ludicrous. The way Mattie herself had dismissed the idea of Jo and the man in the brown sportcoat.

“I can’t do my courtship dance while I’m representing her,” he said, “wouldn’t be ethical. Wouldn’t be safe, either. Later, though… you can never tell.”

“No,” I said, hearing my voice as you sometimes do in moments when you are caught completely fiat-footed, hearing it as though it were coming from someone else. Someone on the radio or the record-player, maybe. Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone? I thought of his hands, the fingers long and slender and without a ring on any of them. Like Sara’s hands in that old photo. “No, you can never tell.” We said goodbye, and I sat watching the muted baseball game. I thought about getting up to get a beer, but it seemed too far to the refrigerator—a safari, in fact. What I felt was a kind of dull hurt, followed by a better emotion: rueful relief, I guess you’d call it. Was he too old for her? No, I didn’t think so. Just about right. Prince Charming No. 2, this time in a three-piece suit. Mattie’s luck with men might finally be changing, and if so I should be glad. I would be glad. And relieved. Because I had a book to write, and never mind the look of white sneakers flashing below a red sundress in the deepening gloom, or the ember of her cigarette dancing in the dark.

Still, I felt really lonely for the first time since I saw Kyra marching up the white line of Route 68 in her bathing suit and flip-flops. “You funny little man, said Strickland,” I told the empty room. It came out before I knew I was going to say anything, and when it did, the channel on the TV changed. It went from baseball to a rerun of All in the Family and then to Ren 0 Stimpy. I glanced down at the remote control. It was still on the coffee-table where I’d left it. The TV channel changed again, and this time I was looking at Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. There was an airplane in the background, and I didn’t need to pick up the remote and turn on the sound to know that Humphrey was telling Ingrid that she was getting on that plane. My wife’s all-time favorite movie. She bawled at the end without fail. “Jo?” I asked. “Are you here?” Bunter’s bell rang once. Very faintly. There had been several presences in the house, I was sure of it… but tonight, for the first time, I was positive it was Jo who was with me. “Who was he, hon?” I asked. “The guy at the softball field, who was he?” Bunter’s bell hung still and quiet. She was in the room, though. I sensed her, something like a held breath. I remembered the ugly, gibing little message on the refrigerator after my dinner with Mattie and Ki: blue rose liar ha ha.

“Who was he?” My voice was unsteady, sounding on the verge of tears.

“What were you doing down here with some guy? Were you…” But I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she had been lying to me, cheating on me. I couldn’t ask even though the presence I felt might be, let’s face it, only in my own head. The TV switched away from Casablanca and here was everybody’s favorite lawyer, Perry Mason, on Nick at Nite. Perry’s nemesis, Hamilton Burger, was questioning a distraught-looking woman, and all at once the sound blared on, making me jump. “I am not a liar!”

some long-ago TV actress cried. For a moment she looked right out at me, and I was stunned breathless to see Jo’s eyes in that black-and-white fifties face. “I never lied, Mr. Burger, never!”

“I submit that you did!” Burger responded. He moved in on her, leering like a vampire. “I submit that you—” The TV suddenly went off. Bunter’s bell gave a single brisk shake, and then whatever had been here was gone. But I felt better. I am not a liar… I never lied, never. I could believe that if I chose to. If I chose. I went to bed, and there were no dreams.

I had taken to starting work early, before the heat could really get a hold on the study. I’d drink some juice, gobble some toast, then sit behind the IBM until almost noon, watching the Courier ball dance and twirl as the pages floated through the machine and came out with writing on them.

That old magic, so strange and wonderful. It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile. At noon I’d break, drive down to Buddy Jellison’s greaseatorium for something nasty, then return and work for another hour or so. After that I would swim and take a long dreamless nap in the north bedroom. I had barely poked my head into the master bedroom at the south end of the house, and if Mrs. M. thought this was odd, she kept it to herself. On Friday the seventeenth, I stopped at the Lakeview General on my way back to the house to gas up my Chevrolet.

There are pumps at the All-Purpose Garage, and the go-juice was a penny or two cheaper, but I didn’t like the vibe. Today, as I stood in front of the store with the pump on automatic feed, looking off toward the mountains, Bill Dean’s Dodge Ram pulled in on the other side of the island. He climbed down and gave me a smile. “How’s it going, Mike?”

“Pretty fair.”

“Brenda says you’re writin up a storm.”

“I am,” I said, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask for an update on the broken second-floor air conditioner. The tip of my tongue was where it stayed.

I was still too nervous about my rediscovered ability to want to change anything about the environment in which I was doing it. Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.” I thought he was sincere enough, but he somehow didn’t sound like Bill.

Not the one who had greeted me back, anyway. “I’ve been looking up some old stuff about my side of the lake,” I said. “Sara and the Red-Tops?

You always were sort ofint’rested in them, I remember.”

“Them, yes, but not just them. Lots of history. I was talking to Mrs. M… and she told me about Normal Auster. Kenny’s father.” Bill’s smile stayed on, and he only paused a moment in the act of unscrewing the cap on his gas tank, but I still had a sense, quite clear, that he had frozen inside. “You wouldn’t write about a thing like that, would you, Mike? Because there’s a lot of people around here that’d feel it bad and take it wrong. I told Jo the same thing.”

“Jo?” I felt an urge to step between the two pumps and over the island so I could grab him by the arm. “What’s Jo got to do with this?” He looked at me cautiously and long. “She didn’t tell you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“She thought she might write something about Sara and the Red-Tops for one of the local papers.” Bill was picking his words very slowly. I have a clear memory of that, and of how hot the sun was, beating down on my neck, and the sharpness of our shadows on the asphalt. He began to pump his gas, and the sound of the pump’s motor was also very sharp. “I think she even mentioned Yankee magazine. I c’d be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.” I was speechless. Why would she have kept quiet about the idea to try her hand at a little local history? Becahse she might have thought she was poaching on my territory? That was ridiculous. She had known me better than that… hadn’t she? “When did you have this conversation, Bill? Do you remember?”

“Coss I do,” he said. “Same day she come down to take delivery of those plastic owls. Only I raised the subject, because folks had told me she was asking around.”

“Prying?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said stiffly, “you did.” True, but I thought prying was what he meant.

“Go on.”

“Nothing to go on about. I told her there were sore toes here and there on the TR, same as there are anyplace, and asr her not to tread on any corns if she could help it. She said she understood. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. All I know is she kep’ on asking questions.

Listenin to stories from old fools with more time than sense.”

“When was this?”

“Fall of ’93, winter and spring of ’94. Went all around town, she did even over to Motton and Harlow—with her notebook and little tape-recorder. Anyway, that’s all I know.”

I realized a stunning thing: Bill was lying. If you’d asked me before that day, I’d have laughed and told you Bill Dean didn’t have a lie in him. And he must not have had many, because he did it badly.

I thought of calling him on it, but to what end? I needed to think, and I couldn’t do it here—my mind was roaring. Given time, that roar might subside and I’d see it was really nothing, no big deal, but I needed that time. When you start finding out unexpected things about a loved one who’s been dead awhile, it rocks you. Take it from me, it does.

Bill’s eyes had shifted away from mine, but now they shifted back. He looked both earnest and—I could have sworn it—a little scared.

“She ast about little Kerry Auster, and that’s a good example of what I mean about steppin on sore toes. That’s not the stuff for a newspaper story or a magazine article. Normal just snapped. No one knows why. It was a terrible tragedy, senseless, and there’s still people who could be hurt by it. In little towns things are kind of connected under the surface—”

Yes, like cables you couldn’t quite see.

“—and the past dies slower. Sara and those others, that’s a little different. They were just. . just wanderers. . from away. Jo could have stuck to those folks and it would’ve been all right. And say—for all I know, she did. Because I never saw a single word she ever wrote.

If she did write.”

About that he was telling the truth, I felt. But I knew something else, knew it as surely as I’d known Mattie had been wearing white shorts when she called me on her day off. Sara and those others were just wanderers from away, Bill had said, but he hesitated in the middle of his thought, substituting wanderers for the word which had come naturally to mind.

Niggers was the word he hadn’t said. Sara and those others were just niggers Jgom away.

All at once I found myself thinking of an old story by Ray Bradbury, “Mars Is Heaven.” The first space travellers to Mars discover it’s Green Town, Illinois, and all their well-loved friends and relatives are there. Only the friends and relatives are really alien monsters, and in the night, while the space travellers think they are sleeping in the beds of their long-dead kinfolk in a place that must be heaven, they are slaughtered to the last man.

“Bill, you’re sure she was up here a few times in the off-season?”

“Ayuh. “T’wasn’t just a few times, either. Might have been a dozen times or more. Day-trips, don’t you know.”

“Did you ever see a fellow with her? Burly guy, black hair?”

He thought about it. I tried not to hold my breath. At last he shook his head. “Few times I saw her, she was alone. But I didn’t see her every time she came. Sometimes I only heard she’d been on the TR after she ’us gone again. Saw her in June of ’94, headed up toward Halo Bay in that little car a hers. She waved, I waved back. Went down to the house later that evenin to see if she needed anythin, but she’d gone. I didn’t see her again. When she died later on that summer, me and “Vette were so shocked.”

Whatever she was looking sr, she must never have written any of it down.

I would have J3und the manuscript, Was that true, though? She had made many trips down here with no apparent attempts at concealment, on one of them she had even been accompanied by a strange man, and I had only found out about these visits by accident.

“This is hard to talk about,” Bill said, “but since we’ve gotten started hard, we might as well go the rest of the way. Livin on the TR is like the way we used to sleep four or even five in a bed when it was January and true cold. If everyone rests easy, you do all right. But if one person gets restless, gets tossing and turning, no one can sleep. Right now you’re the restless one. That’s how people see it.”

He waited to see what I’d say. When almost twenty seconds passed without a word from me (Harold Oblowski would have been proud), he shuffled his feet and went on.

“There are people in town uneasy about the interest you’ve taken in Mattie Devore, for instance. Now I’m not sayin there’s anythin going on between the two of you—although there’s folks who do say it—but if you want to stay on the TR you’re makin it tough on yourself.”

“Why?”

“Comes back to what I said a week and a half ago. She’s trouble.”

“As I recall, Bill, you said she was in trouble. And she is. I’m trying to help her out of it. There’s nothing going on between us but that.”

“I seem to recall telling you that Max Devore is nuts,” he said. “If you make him mad, we all pay the price.” The pump clicked off and he racked it up. Then he sighed, raised his hands, dropped them. “You think this is easy for me to say?”

“You think it’s easy for me to listen to?”

“All right, ayuh, we’re in the same skiff. But Mattie Devore isn’t the only person on the TR livin hand-to-mouth, you know. There’s others got their woes, as well. Can’t you understand that?”

Maybe he saw that I understood too much and too well, because his shoulders slumped.

“If you’re asking me to stand aside and let Devore take Mattie’s baby without a fight, you can forget it,” I said. “And I hope that’s not it.

Because I think I’d have to be quits with a man who’d ask another man to do something like that.”

“I wouldn’t ask it now anywise,” he said, his accent thickening almost to the point of contempt. “It’d be too late, wouldn’t it?” And then, unexpectedly, he softened. “Christ, man, I’m worried about you. Let the rest of it go hang, all right? Hang high where the crows can pick it.”

He was lying again, but this time I didn’t mind so much, because I thought he was lying to himself. “But you need to have a care. When I said Devore was crazy, that was no figure of speech. Do you think he’ll bother with court if court can’t get him what he wants? Folks died in those summer fires back in 1933. Good people. One related to me. They burned over half the goddam county and Max Devore set em. That was his going-away present to the TR. It could never be proved, but he did it.

Back then he was young and broke, not yet twenty and no law in his pocket. What do you think he’d do now?”

He looked at me searchingly. I said nothing.

Bill nodded as if I had spoken. “Think about it. And you remember this, Mike: no man who didn’t care for you would ever talk to you straight as I have.”

“How straight was that, Bill?” I was faintly aware of some tourist walking from his Volvo to the store and looking at us curiously, and when I replayed the scene in my mind later on, I realized we must have looked like guys on the verge of a fistfight. I remember that I felt like crying out of sadness and bewilderment and an incompletely defined sense of betrayal, but I also remember being furious with this lanky old man—him in his shining-clean cotton undershirt and his mouthful of false teeth. So maybe we were close to fighting, and I just didn’t know it at the time.

“Straight as I could be,” he said, and turned away to go inside and pay for his gas.

“My house is haunted,” I said.

He stopped, back to me, shoulders hunched as if to absorb a blow. Then, slowly, he turned back. “Sara Laughs has always been haunted, Mike.

You’ve stirred em up. P’raps you should go back to Derry and let em settle. That might be the best thing.” He paused, as if replaying this last to see if he agreed with it, then nodded. He nodded as slowly as he had turned. “Ayuh, that might be best all around.”

When I got back to Sara I called Ward Hankins. Then I finally made that call to Bonnie Amudson. Part of me was rooting for her not to be in at the travel agency in Augusta she co-owned, but she was. Halfway through my talk with her, the fax began to print out xeroxed pages from Jo’s appointment calendars. On the first one Ward had scrawled, “Hope this helps.”

I didn’t rehearse what I was going to say to Bonnie; I felt that to do so would be a recipe for disaster. I told her that Jo had been writing something—maybe an article, maybe a series of them—about the township where our summerhouse was located, and that some of the locals had apparently been cheesed off by her curiosity. Some still were. Had she talked to Bonnie? Perhaps showed her an early draft?

“No, huh-uh.” Bonnie sounded honestly surprised. “She used to show me her photos, and more herb samples than I honestly cared to see, but she never showed me anything she was writing. In fact, I remember her once saying that she’d decided to leave the writing to you and just—”

“—take a little taste of everything else, right?”

“Yes.”

I thought this was a good place to end the conversation, but the guys in the basement seemed to have other ideas. “Was she seeing anyone, Bonnie?”

Silence from the other end. With a hand that seemed at least four miles down my arm, I plucked the fax sheets out of the basket. Ten of them—November of 1993 to August of 1994. Jottings everywhere in Jo’s neat hand. Had we even had a fax before she died? I couldn’t remember.

There was so fucking much I couldn’t remember.

“Bonnie? If you know something, please tell me. Jo’s dead, but I’m not.

I can forgive her if I have to, but I can’t forgive what I don’t underst—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and gave a nervous little laugh. “It’s just that I didn’t understand at first. “Seeing anyone,’ that was just so… so foreign to Jo… the Jo I knew… that I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about. I thought maybe you meant a shrink, but you didn’t, did you? You meant seeing someone like seeing a guy. A boyfriend.”

“That’s what I meant.” Thumbing through the faxed calendar sheets now, my hand not quite back to its proper distance from my eyes but getting there, getting there. I felt relief at the honest bewilderment in Bonnie’s voice, but not as much as I’d expected. Because I’d known. I hadn’t even needed the woman in the old Perry Mason episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all.

J0.

“Mike,” Bonnie was saying, very softly, as if I might be crazy, “she loved you. She loved you. ’i “Yes. I suppose she did.” The calendar pages showed how busy my wife had been. How productive. S-Ks of Maine. . the soup kitchens. Womshel, a county-to-county network of shelters for battered women. Teenshel.

Friends of Me. Libes. She had been at two or three meetings a month-two or three a week at some points — and I’d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. “I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn’t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meet ings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries?” Silence from the other end. “Bonnie?”

I took the phone away from my ear to see if the red LOW BATTERY light was on, and it squawked my name. I put it back.

“Bonnie, what is it?”

“There were no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there were no long drives. She quit.”

I thumbed through the fax-sheets again. Meetings noted everywhere in Jo’s neat hand, Soup Kitchens of Maine among them.

“I don’t understand. She quit the Soup Kitchens board?”

Another moment of silence. Then, speaking carefully: “No, Mike. She quit all of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of ’93—her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries… she resigned in October or November of 1993.”

Meetings noted on all the sheets Ward had sent me. Dozens of them.

Meetings in 1993, meetings in 1994. Meetings of boards to which she’d no longer belonged. She had been down here. On all those supposed meeting-days, Jo had been on the TR. I would have bet my life on it.

But why?

Devore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn’t have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained. From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.

I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon—my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street—I’d go as far as I could and still be assured of getting home by dark, and as I went I’d think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I’d think about them the way I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.

I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was—just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn’t exactly young, but I could go north, all right. For awhile, at least.

Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written… for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and…

help im drown The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness passed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so blighted, in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming. No, I tried to say, but the word wouldn’t come out.

My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands.

They were holding me down.

“Won’t it stop doing that?” someone asked—almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. “Won’t it ever stop doing that?”

What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head.

They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture. . or inside a Japanese lantern.

help I’m drown help I’m drown blue-cap man say git me blue-cap man say dassn’t let me ramble help I’m drown lost my berries they on the path he holdin me he face shimmer n look bad lemme up lemme up 0 sweet Jesus lemme up oxen free allee allee oxen free? pounds, SE OXEN FREE you go on and stop now ALLEE OXEN FREE she scream my name she scream it so LOUD I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of…

Nothing at all.

The horror of it passed and yet it didn’t pass. I still felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo’s fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward halfa dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening’s flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamp-post.

The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank—an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn’t.

Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I’ll do anything only stop, I tried to say, and still nothing came out. Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods… but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.

My mouth filled with the unmerciful iron of the lake again. Help me, lemme up, help I’m drown. I leaned out, screaming inside my head, screaming down at the dead face, and I realized I was looking up at myself, looking up through the rose-shimmer of sunset water at a white man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt holding onto a trembling, birch and trying to scream, his liquid face in motion, his eyes momentarily blotted out by the passage of a small perch coursing after a tasty bug, I was both the dark boy and the white man, drowned in the water and drowning in the air, is this right, is this what’s happening, tap once for yes twice for no.

I retched nothing but a single runner of spit, and, impossibly, a fish jumped at it. They’ll jump at almost anything at sunset; something in the dying light must make them crazy. The fish hit the water again about seven feet from the bank, spanking out a circular silver ripple, and it was gone—the taste in my mouth, the horrible smell, the shimmering drowned face of the Negro child—a Negro, that was how he would have thought of himself whose name had almost surely been Tidwell.

I looked to my right and saw a gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought, There, right there, and as if in confirmation, that horrible putrescent smell puffed at me again, seemingly from the ground.

I closed my eyes, still hanging onto the birch for dear life, feeling weak and sick and ill, and that was when Max Devore, that madman, spoke from behind me. “Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore?”

I turned and there he was, with Rogette Whitmore by his side. It was the only time I ever met him, but once was enough. Believe me, once was more than enough.

His wheelchair hardly looked like a wheelchair at all. What it looked like was a motorcycle sidecar crossed with a lunar lander. Half a dozen chrome wheels ran along both sides. Bigger wheels four of them, I think—ran in a row across the back. None looked to be exactly on the same level, and I realized each was tied into its own suspension-bed.

Devore would have a smooth ride over ground a lot rougher than The Street. Above the back wheels was an enclosed engine compartment. Hiding Devore’s legs was a fiberglass nacelle, black with red pinstriping, that would not have looked out of place on a racing car. Implanted in the center of it was a gadget that looked like my DSS satellite dish… some sort of computerized avoidance system, I guessed. Maybe even an autopilot.

The armrests were wide and covered with controls. Holstered on the left side of this machine was a green oxygen tank four feet long. A hose went to a clear plastic accordion tube; the accordion tube led to a mask which rested in Devore’s lap. It made me think of the old guy’s Stenomask. Coming on the heels of what had just happened, I might have considered this Tom Clancyish vehicle a hallucination, except for the bumper-sticker on the nacelle, below the dish. I BLEED DODGER BLUE, it said.

This evening the woman I had seen outside The Sunset Bar at War-rington’s was wearing a white blouse with long sleeves and black pants so tapered they made her legs look like sheathed swords. Her narrow face and hollow cheeks made her resemble Edvard Munch’s screamer more than ever. Her white hair hung around her face in a lank cowl. Her lips were painted so brightly red she seemed to be bleeding from the mouth.

She was old and she was ugly, but she was a prize compared to Mattie’s father-in-law. Scrawny, blue-lipped, the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth a dark exploded purple, he looked like something an archeologist might find in the burial room of a pyramid, surrounded by his stuffed wives and pets, bedizened with his favorite jewels. A few wisps of white hair still clung to his scaly skull; more tufts sprang from enormous ears which seemed to have melted like wax sculptures left out in the sun. He was wearing white cotton pants and a billowy blue shirt. Add a little black beret and he would have looked like a French artist from the nineteenth century at the end of a very long life.

Across his lap was a cane of some black wood. Snugged over the end was a bright red bicycle grip. The fingers grasping it looked powerful, but they were going as black as the cane itself. His circulation was failing, and I couldn’t imagine what his feet and his lower legs must look like.

“Whore run off and left you, has she?”

I tried to say something. A croak came out of my mouth, nothing more. I was still holding the birch. I let go of it and tried to straighten up, but my legs were still weak and I had to grab it again.

He nudged a silver toggle switch and the chair came ten feet closer, halving the distance between us. The sound it made was a silky whisper; watching it was like watching an evil magic carpet. Its many wheels rose and fell independent of one another and flashed in the declining sun, which had begun to take on a reddish cast. And as he came closer, I felt the sense of the man. His body was rotting out from under him, but the force around him was undeniable and daunting, like an electrical storm.

The woman paced beside him, regarding me with silent amusement. Her eyes were pinkish. I assumed then that they were gray and had picked up a bit of the coming sunset, but I think now she was an albino.

“I always liked a whore,” he said. He drew the word out, making it horrrrrrr. “Didn’t I, Rogette?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “In their place.”

“Sometimes their place was on my face!” he cried with a kind of insane perkiness, as if she had contradicted him. “Where is she, young man?

Whose face is she sitting on right now? I wonder. That smart lawyer you found? Oh, I know all about him, right down to the Unsatisfactory Conduct he got in the third grade. I make it my business to know things.

It’s the secret of my success.”

With an enormous effort, I straightened up. “What are you doing here?”

“Having a constitutional, same as you. And no law against it, is there?

The Street belongs to anyone who wants to use it. You haven’t been here long, young whoremaster, but surely you’ve been here long enough to know that. It’s our version of the town common, where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side.”

Once more using the hand not bunched around the red bicycle grip, he picked up the oxygen mask, sucked deeply, then dropped it back in his lap. He grinned—an unspeakable grin of complicity that revealed gums the color of iodine.

“She good? That little horrrrrr of yours? She must be good to have kept my son prisoner in that nasty little trailer where she lives. And then along comes you even before the worms had finished with my boy’s eyes. Does her cunt suck?”

“Shut up.”

Rogette Whitmore threw back her head and laughed. The sound was like the scream of a rabbit caught in an owl’s talons, and my flesh crawled. I had an idea she was as crazy as he was. Thank God they were old. “You struck a nerve there, Max,” she said.

“What do you want?” I took a breath… and caught a taste of that putrescence again. I gagged. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.

Devore straightened in his chair and breathed deeply, as if to mock me.

In that moment he looked like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, striding along the beach and telling the world how much he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. His grin widened. “Lovely place, just here, isn’t it? A cozy spot to stop and think, wouldn’t you say?” He looked around.

“This is where it happened, all right. Ayuh.”

“Where the boy drowned.” I thought Whitmore’s smile looked momentarily uneasy at that. Devore didn’t. He clutched for his translucent oxygen mask with an old man’s overwide grip, fingers that grope rather than reach. I could see little bubbles of mucus clinging to the inside. He sucked deep again, put it down again. “Thirty or more folks have drowned in this lake, and that’s just the ones they know about,” he said. “What’s one boy, more or less?”

“I don’t get it. Were there two Tidwell boys who died here? The one that got blood-poisoning and the one—”

“Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? Your immortal soul? God’s butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?” I said nothing. The strangeness of what had happened before he arrived was passing. What replaced it was his incredible personal magnetism. I have never in my life felt so much raw force. There was nothing supernatural about it, either, and raw is exactly the right word. I might have run. Under other circumstances, I’m sure I would have. It certainly wasn’t bravery that kept me where I was; my legs still felt rubbery, and I was afraid I might fall down. “I’m going to give you one chance to save your soul,” Devore said. He raised a bony finger to illustrate the concept of one. “Go away, my fine whoremaster. Right now, in the clothes you stand up in. Don’t bother to pack a bag, don’t even stop to make sure you turned off the stoveburners. Go. Leave the whore and leave the whorelet.”

“Leave them to you.”

“Ayuh, to me. I’ll do the things that need to be done. Souls are for liberal arts majors, Noonan. I was an engineer.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Rogette Whitmore made that screaming-rabbit sound again. The old man sat in his chair, head lowered, grinning sallowly up at me and looking like something raised from the dead. “Are you sure you want to be the one, Noonan? It doesn’t matter to her, you know—you or me, it’s all the same to her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I drew another deep breath, and this time the air tasted all right. I took a step away from the birch, and my legs were all right, too. “And I don’t care. You’re never getting Kyra. Never in what remains of your scaly life. I’ll never see that happen.”

“Pal, you’ll see plenty,” Devore said, grinning and showitg me his iodine gums. “Before July’s done, you’ll likely have seen so much you’ll wish you’d ripped the living eyes out of your head in June.”

“I’m going home. Let me pass.”

“Go home then, how could I stop you?” he asked. “The Street belongs to everyone.” He groped the oxygen mask out of his lap again and took another healthy pull. He dropped it into his lap and settled his left hand on the arm of his Buck Rogers wheelchair. I stepped toward him, and almost before I knew what was happening, he ran the wheelchair at me. He could have hit me and hurt me quite badly—broken one or both of my legs, I don’t doubt—but he stopped just short. I leaped back, but only because he allowed me to. I was aware that Whitmore was laughing again.

“What’s the matter, Noonan?”

“Get out of my way. I’m warning you.”

“Whore made you jumpy, has she?” I started to my left, meaning to go by him on that side, but in a flash he had turned the chair, shot it forward, and cut me off. “Get out of the TR, Noonan. I’m giving you good ad—” I broke to the right, this time on the lake side, and would have slipped by him quite neatly except for the fist, very small and hard, that hammered the left side of my face. The white-haired bitch was wearing a ring, and the stone cut me behind the ear. I felt the sting and the warm flow of blood. I pivoted, stuck out both hands, and pushed her. She fell to the needle-carpeted path with a squawk of surprised outrage. At the next instant something clouted me on the back of the head. A momentary orange glow lit up my sight. I staggered backward in what felt like slow motion, waving my arms, and Devote came into view again. He was slued around in his wheelchair, scaly head thrust forward, the cane he’d hit me with still upraised. If he had been ten years younger, I believe he would have fractured my skull instead of just creating that momentary orange light. I ran into my old friend the birch tree. I raised my hand to my ear and looked unbelievingly at the blood on the tips of my fingers. My head ached from the blow he had fetched me. Whitmore was struggling to her feet, brushing pine needles from her slacks and looking at me with a furious smile. Her cheeks had filled in with a thin pink flush. Her too-red lips were pulled back to show small teeth. In the light of the setting sun her eyes looked as if they were burning.

“Get out of my way,” I said, but my voice sounded small and weak. “No,” Devote said, and laid the black barrel of his cane on the nacelle that curved over the front of his chair. Now I could see the little boy who had been determined to have the sled no matter how badly he cut his hands getting it. I could see him very clearly. “No, you whore-fucking sissy. I won’t.” He shoved the silver toggle switch again and the wheelchair rushed silently at me. If I had stayed where I was, he would have run me through with his cane as surely as any evil duke was ever run through in an Alexandre Dumas story. He probably would have crushed the fragile bones in his right hand and torn his right arm clean out of its socket in the collision, but this man had never cared about such things; he left cost-counting to the little people. If I had hesitated out of shock or incredulity, he would have killed me, I’m sure of it.

Instead, I rolled to my left. My sneakers slid on the needle-slippery embankment for a moment. Then they lost contact with the earth and I was falling.

I hit the water awkwardly and much too close to the bank. My left foot struck a submerged root and twisted. The pain was huge, something that felt like a thunderclap sounds. I opened my mouth to scream and the lake poured in—that cold metallic dark taste, this time for real. I coughed it out and sneezed it out and floundered away from where I had landed, thinking The boy, the dead boy’s down here, what if he reaches up and grabs me? I turned over on my back, still flailing and coughing, very aware of my jeans clinging clammily to my legs and crotch, thinking absurdly about my wallet—I didn’t care about the credit cards or driver’s license, but I had two good snapshots of Jo in there, and they would be ruined. Devote had almost run himself over the embankment, I saw, and for a moment I thought he still might go. The front of his chair jutted over the place where I had fallen (I could see the short tracks of my sneakers just to the left of the bitch’s partially exposed roots), and although the forward wheels were still grounded, the crumbly earth was running out from beneath them in dry little avalanches that rolled down the slope and pit-a-patted into the water, creating interlocking ripple patterns. Whitmore was clinging to the back of the chair, yanking on it, but it was much too heavy for her; if Devote was to be saved, he would have to save himself. Standing waist-deep in the lake with my clothes floating around me, I rooted for him to go over.

The purplish claw of his left hand recaptured the silver toggle switch after several attempts. One finger hooked it backward, and the chair reversed away from the embankment with a final shower of stones and dirt. Whitmore leaped prankishly to one side to keep her feet from being run over. Devote fiddled some more with his controls, turned the chair to face me where I stood in the water, some seven feet out from the overhanging birch, and then nudged the chair forward until he was on the edge of The Street but safely away from the drop off. Whitmore had turned away from us entirely; she was bent over with her butt poking in my direction. If I thought about her at all, and I can’t remember that I did, I suppose I thought she was getting her breath back. Devote appeared to be in the best shape of the three of us, not even needing a hit from the oxygen mask sitting in his lap. The late light was full in his face, making him look like a half-rotted jack-o’-lantern which has been soaked with gas and set on fire. “Enjoying your swim?” he asked, and laughed.

I looked around, hoping to see a strolling couple or perhaps a fisherman looking for a place where he could wet his line one more time before dark… and yet at the same time I hoped I’d see no one. I was angry, hurt, and scared. Most of all I was embarrassed. I had been dunked in the lake by a man of eighty-five… a man who showed every sign of hanging around and making sport of me. I began wading to my right—south, back toward my house. The water was about waist-deep, cool and almost refreshing now that I was used to it. My sneakers squelched over rocks and submerged tree-branches. The ankle I’d twisted still hurt, but it was supporting me. Whether it would continue to once I got out of the lake was another question. Devore twiddled his controls some more. The chair pivoted and came rolling slowly along The Street, keeping pace with me easily. “I didn’t introduce you properly to Rogette, did I?” he said. “She was quite an athlete in college, you know. Softball and field hockey were her specialties, and she’s held onto at least some of her skills. Rogette, demonstrate your skills for this young man.” Whitmore passed the slowly moving wheelchair on the left. For a moment she was blocked out by it. When I could see her again, I could also see what she was holding. She hadn’t been bent over to get her breath. Smiling, she strode to the edge of the embankment with her left arm curled against her midriff, cradling the rocks she had picked up from the edge of the path. She selected a chunk roughly the size of a golfball, drew her hand back to her ear, and threw it at me.

Hard. It whizzed by my left temple and splashed into the water behind me. “Hey!” I shouted, more startled than afraid. Even after everything that had preceded it, I couldn’t believe this was happening. “What’s wrong with you, Rogette?” Devore asked chidingly. “You never used to throw like a girl. Get him!” The second rock passed two inches over my head. The third was a potential tooth-smasher. I batted it away with an angry, fearful shout, not noticing until later that it had bruised my palm. At the moment I was only aware of her hateful, smiling face—the face of a woman who has plunked down two dollars in a carny shooting-pitch and means to win the big stuffed teddybear even if she has to blast away all night.

And she threw fast. The rocks hailed down around me, some splashing into the ruddy water to my left or right, creating little geysers. I began to backpedal, afraid to turn and swim for it, afraid that she would throw a really big one the minute I did. Still, I had to get out of her range.

Devore, meanwhile, was laughing a wheezy old man’s laugh, his wretched face crunched in on itself like the face of a malicious apple-doll. One of her rocks struck me a hard, painful blow on the collarbone and bounced high into the air. I cried out, and she did, too: “Hai!” like a karate fighter who’s gotten in a good kick. So much for orderly retreat.

I turned, swam for deeper water, and the bitch brained me. The first two rocks she threw after I began to swim seemed to be range-finders. There was a pause when I had time to think I’m doing it, I’m getting beyond her area of… and then something hit the back of my head. I felt it and heard it the same way—it went CLONI(! like something you’d read in a Batman comic. The surface of the lake went from bright orange to bright red to dark scarlet. Faintly I could hear Devore yelling approval and Whitmore squealing her strange laugh. I took in another mouthful of iron-tasting water and was so dazed I had to remind myself to spit it out, not swallow it. My feet now felt too heavy for swimming, and my goddam sneakers weighed a ton. I put them down to stand up and couldn’t find the bottom—I had gotten beyond my depth. I looked in toward the shore. It was spectacular, blazing in the sunset like stage-scenery lit with bright orange and red gels. I was probably twenty feet out from the shore now. Devore and Whitmore were at the edge of The Street, watching.

They looked like Dad and Mom in a Grant Wood painting. Devore was using the mask again, but I could see him grinning inside it. Whitmore was grinning, too. More water sloshed in my mouth. I spit most of it out, but some went down, making me cough and half-retch. I started to sink below the surface and fought my way back up, not swimming but only splashing wildly, expending nine times the energy I needed to stay afloat. Panic made its first appearance, nibbling through my dazed bewilderment with sharp little rat teeth. I realized I could hear a high, sweet buzzing. How many blows had my poor old head taken? One from Whitmore’s fist… one from Devore’s cane… one rock… or had it been two?

Christ, I couldn’t remember. Get hold of yourself, Jr God’s sake—you’re not going to let him beat you this way, are you? Drown you like that little boy was drowned? No, not if I could help it. I trod water and ran my left hand down the back of my head. Not too far above the nape I encountered a goose-egg that was still rising. When I pressed on it the pain made me feel like throwing up and fainting at the same time. Tears rose in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. There were only traces of blood on the tips of my fingers when I looked at them, but it was hard to tell about cuts when you were in the water. “You look like a woodchuck caught out in the rain, Noonan!” Now his voice seemed to roll to where I was, as if across a great distance. “Fuck you!” I called.

“I’ll see you in jail for this!” He looked at Whitmore. She looked back with an identical expression, and they both laughed. If someone had put an Uzi in my hands at that moment, I would have killed them both with no hesitation and then asked for a second clip so I could machine-gun the bodies. With no Uzi to hand, I began to dogpaddle south, toward my house. They paced me along The Street, he rolling in his whisper-quiet wheelchair, she walking beside him as solemn as a nun and pausing every now and then to pick up a likely-looking rock. I hadn’t swum enough to be tired, but I was. It was mostly shock, I suppose. Finally I tried to draw a breath at the wrong time, swallowed more water, and panicked completely. I began to swim in toward the shore, wanting to get to where I could stand up. Rogette Whitmore began to fire rocks at me immediately, first using the ones she’ had lined up between her left arm and her midriff, then those she’d stockpiled in Devore’s lap. She was warmed up, she wasn’t throwing like a girl anymore, and her aim was deadly. Stones splashed all around me. I batted another away—a big one that likely would have cut open my forehead if it had hit—but her follow-up struck my bicep and tore a long scratch there. Enough. I rolled over and swam back out beyond her range, gasping for breath, trying to keep my head up in spite of the growing ache in the back of my neck.

When I was clear, I trod water and looked in at them. Whitmore had come all the way to the edge of the embankment, wanting to get every foot of distance she could. Hell, every damned inch. Devore was parked behind her in his wheelchair. They were both still grinning, and now their faces were as red as the faces of imps in hell. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Another twenty minutes and it would be getting dark.

Could I keep my head above water for another twenty minutes? I thought so, if I didn’t panic again, but not much longer. I thought of drowning in the dark, looking up and seeing Venus just before I went under for the last time, and the panic-rat slashed me with its teeth again. The panic-rat was worse than Rogette and her rocks, much worse. Maybe not worse than Devore. I looked both ways along the lakefront, checking The Street wherever it wove out of the trees for a dozen feet or a dozen yards. I didn’t care about being embarrassed anymore, but I saw no one.

Dear God, where was everybody? Gone to the Mountain View in Fryeburg for pizza, or the Village Cafe for milkshakes? “What do you want?” I called in to Devore. “Do you want me to tell you I’ll butt out of your business? Okay, I’ll butt out!” He laughed.

Well, I hadn’t expected it to work. Even if I’d been sincere about it, he wouldn’t have believed me. “We just want to see how long you can swim,” Whitmore said, and threw another rock—a long, lazy toss that fell about five feet short of where I was. They mean to kill me, I thought. They really do. Yes. And what was more, they might well get away with it. A crazy idea, both plausible and implausible at the same time, rose in my mind. I could see Rogette Whitmore tacking a notice to the COMMUNITY DOIN’s board outside the Lakeview General Store.

TO THE MARTIANS OF TR-90, GREETINGS!

Mr, MAXWELL DEVORE, everyone’s favorite Martian, will give each resident of the TR ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS if no one will use The Street on FRIDAY EVENING, THE 17th OF JULY, between the hours of SEVEN and NINE RM. Keep our “SUMMER FRIENDS” away, too! And remember: GOOD MARTIANS are like GOOD MONKEYS: they SEE no evil, HEAR no evil, and SPEAK no evil!

I couldn’t really believe it, not even in my current situation… and yet I almost could. At the very least I had to grant him the luck of the devil. Tired. My sneakers heavier than ever. I tried to push one of them off and succeeded only in taking in another mouthful of lakewater. They stood watching me, Devore occasionally picking the mask up from his lap and having a revivifying suck. I couldn’t wait until dark. The sun exits in a hurry here in western Maine—as it does, I guess, in mountain country everywhere—but the twilights are long and lingering. By the time it got dark enough in the west to move without being seen, the moon would have risen in the east. I found myself imagining my obituary in the New York ’mes, the headline reading POPULAR ROMANTIC SUSPENSE NOVELIST DROWNS IN M^INE. Debra Weinstock would provide them with the author photo from the forthcoming Helen’s Promise. Harold Oblowski would say all the right things, and he’d also remember to put a modest (but not tiny) death notice in Publishers lek/y. He would go half-and-half with Putnam on it, and-I sank, swallowed more water, and spat it out. I began pummelling the lake again and forced myself to stop. From the shore, I could hear Rogette Whitmore’s tinkling laughter. IOU bitch, I thought, tau scrawny bi—Mike, Jo said. Her voice was in my head, but it wasn’t the one I make when I’m imagining her side of a mental dialogue or when I just miss her and need to whistle her up for awhile. As if to underline this, something splashed to my right, splashed hard. When I looked in that direction I saw no fish, not even a ripple. What I saw instead was our swimming float, anchored about a hundred yards away in the sunset-colored water. “I can’t swim that far, baby,” I croaked. “Did you say something, Noonan?” Devore called from the shore. He cupped a mocking hand to one of his huge waxlump ears. “Couldn’t quite make it out! You sound all out of breath!” More tinkling laughter from Whitmore.

He was Johnny Carson; she was Ed Mcmahon. I3u can make it. I’ll help you. The float, I realized, might be my only chance—there wasn’t another one on this part of the shore, and it was at least ten yards beyond Whit-more’s longest rockshot so far. I began to dogpaddle in that direction, my arms now as leaden as my feet. Each time I felt my head on the verge of going under I paused, treading water, telling myself to take it easy, I was in pretty good shape and doing okay, telling myself that if I didn’t panic I’d be all right. The old bitch and the even older bastard resumed pacing me, but they saw where I was headed and the laughter stopped. So did the taunts. For a long time the swimming float seemed to draw no closer. I told myself that was just because the light was fading, the color of the water draining from red to purple to a near-black that was the color of Devore’s gums, but I was able to muster less and less conviction for this idea as my breath shortened and my arms grew heavier. When I was still thirty yards away a cramp struck my left leg. I rolled sideways like a swamped sailboat, trying to reach the bunched muscle. More water poured down my throat. I tried to cough it out, then retched and went under with my stomach still trying to heave and my fingers still looking for the knotted place above the knee. I’m really drowning, I thought, strangely calm now that it was happening.

This is how it happens, this is it. Then I felt a hand seize me by the nape of the neck. The pain of having my hair yanked brought me back to reality in a flash—it was better than an epinephrine injection. I felt another hand clamp around my left leg; there was a brief but terrific sense of heat. The cramp let go and I broke the surface swimming—really swimming this time, not just dog-paddling, and in what seemed like seconds I was clinging to the ladder on the side of the float, breathing in great, snatching gasps, waiting to see if I was going to be all right or if my heart was going to detonate in my chest like a hand grenade. At last my lungs started to overcome my oxygen debt, and everything began to calm down. I gave it another minute, then climbed out of the water and into what was now the ashes of twilight. I stood facing west for a little while, bent over with my hands on my knees, dripping on the boards. Then I turned around, meaning this time to flip them not just a single bird but that fabled double eagle. There was no one to flip it to. The Street was empty. Devore and Rogette Whitmore were gone.

Maybe they were gone. I’d do well to remember there was a lot of Street I couldn’t see. I sat cross-legged on the float until the moon rose, waiting and watching for any movement. Half an hour, I think. Maybe forty-five minutes. I checked my watch, but got no help there; it had shipped some water and stopped at 7:30?.M. To the other satisfactions Devore owed me I could now add the price of one Timex Indiglo—that’s $29.95, asshole, cough it up. At last I climbed back down the ladder, slipped into the water, and stroked for shore as quietly as I could. I was rested, my head had stopped aching (although the knot above the nape of my neck still throbbed steadily), and I no longer felt off-balance and incredulous. In some ways, that had been the worst of it—trying to cope not just with the apparition of the drowned boy, the flying rocks, and the lake, but with the pervasive sense that none of this could be happening, that rich old software moguls did not try to drown novelists who strayed into their line of sight. Had tonight’s adventure been a case of simple straying into Devore’s view, though? A coincidental meeting, no more than that? Wasn’t it likely he’d been having me watched ever since the Fourth of July. . maybe from the other side of the lake, by people with high-powered optical equipment? Paranoid bullshit, I would have said… at least I would have said it before the two of them almost sank me in Dark Score Lake like a kid’s paper boat in a mudpuddle. I decided I didn’t care who might be watching from the other side of the lake. I didn’t care if the two of them were still lurking on one of the tree-shielded parts of The Street, either. I swam until I could feel strands of waterweed tickling my ankles and see the crescent of my beach. Then I stood up, wincing at the air, which now felt cold on my skin. I limped to shore, one hand raised to fend off a hail of rocks, but no rocks came. I stood for a moment on The Street, my jeans and polo shirt dripping, looking first one way, then the other. It seemed I had this little part of the world to myself. Last, I looked back at the water, where weak moonlight beat a track from the thumbnail of beach out to the swimming float. “Thanks, Jo,” I said, then started up the railroad ties to the house. I got about halfway, then had to stop and sit down. I had never been so utterly tired in my whole life.

I climbed the stairs to the deck instead of going around to the front door, still moving slowly and marvelling at how my legs felt twice their normal weight. When I stepped into the living room I looked around with the wide eyes of someone who has been away for a decade and returns to find everything just as he left it—Bunter the moose on the wall, the Boston Globe on the couch, a compilation of 7bgh Stffcrossword puzzles on the end-table, the plate on the counter with the remains of my stir-fry still on it. Looking at these things brought the realization home full force—I had gone for a walk, leaving all this normal light clutter behind, and had almost died instead. Had almost been murdered.

I began to shake. I went into the north-wing bathroom, took off my wet clothes, and threw them into the tub—sd/at. Then, still shaking, I turned and stared at myself in the mirror over the washbasin. I looked like someone who has been on the losing side in a barroom brawl. One bicep bore a long, clotting gash. A blackish-purple bruise was unfurling what looked like shadowy wings on my left collarbone. There was a bloody furrow on my neck and behind my ear, where the lovely Rogette had caught me with the stone in her ring.

I took my shaving mirror and used it to check the back of my head.

“Can’t you get that through your thick skull?” my mother used to shout at me and Sid when we were kids, and now I thanked God that Ma had apparently been right about the thickness factor, at least in my case.

The spot where Devore had struck me with his cane looked like the cone of a recently extinct volcano. Whitmore’s bull’s-eye had left a red wound that would need stitches if I wanted to avoid a scar. Blood, rusty and thin, stained the nape of my neck all around the hairline. God knew how much had flowed out of that unpleasant-looking red mouth and been washed away by the lake.

I poured hydrogen peroxide into my cupped palm, steeled myself, and slapped it onto the gash back there like aftershave. The bite was monstrous, and I had to tighten my lips to keep from crying out. When the pain started to fade a little, I soaked cotton balls with more peroxide and cleaned my other wounds.

I showered, threw on a tee-shirt and a pair of jeans, then went into the hall to phone the County Sheriff. There was no need for directory assistance; the Castle Rock P.D. and County Sheriff’s numbers were on the N CASE OF EMEV, GENCY card thumbtacked to the bulletin board, along with numbers for the fire department, the ambulance service, and the 900-number where you could get three answers to that day’s Times crossword puzzle for a buck-fifty.

I dialled the first three numbers fast, then began to slow down. I got as far as 955–960 before stopping altogether. I stood there in the hall with the phone pressed against my ear, visualizing another headline, this one not in the decorous 7}’roes but the rowdy New York Post. NOVEI IST TO AGING COMPU-KING: “YOU BIG BULLY!” Along with side-by-side pictures of me, looking roughly my age, and Max Devore, looking roughly a hundred and six. The Post would have great fun telling its readers how Devore (along with his companion, an elderly lady who might weigh ninety pounds soaking wet) had lumped up a novelist half his age—a guy who looked, in his photograph, at least, reasonably trim and fit.

The phone got tired of holding only six of the required seven numbers in its rudimentary brain, double-clicked, and dumped me back to an open line. I took the handset away from my ear, stared at it for a moment, and then set it gently back down in its cradle. I’m not a sissy about the sometimes whimsical, sometimes hateful attention of the press, but I’m wary, as I would be around a bad-tempered fur-bearing mammal.

America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any “celeb” who dares complain about his or her treatment. “Quitcha bitchin!” cry the newspapers and the TV gossip shows (the tone is one of mingled triumph and indignation).

“Didja really think we paid ya the big bucks just to sing a song or swing a Louisville Slugger? Wrong, asshole! We pay so we can be amazed when you do it well—whatever ’it’ happens to be in your particular case—and also because it’s gratifying when you fuck up. The truth is you’re supplies. If you cease to be amusing, we can always kill you and eat you.” They can’t really eat you, of course. They can print pictures of you with your shirt off and say you’re running to fat, they can talk about how much you drink or how many pills you take or snicker about the night you pulled some starlet onto your lap at Spago and tried to stick your tongue in her ear, but they can’t really eat you. So it wasn’t the thought of the Post calling me a crybaby or being a part of Jay Leno’s opening monologue that made me put the phone down; it was the realization that I had no proof. No one had seen us. And, I realized, finding an alibi for himself and his personal assistant would be the easiest thing in the world for Max Devore. There was one other thing, too, the capper: imagining the County Sheriff sending out George Footman, aka daddy, to take my statement on how the mean man had knocked li’l Mikey into the lake. How the three of them would laugh later about that! I called John Storrow instead, wanting him to tell me I was doing the right thing, the only thing that made any sense. Wanting him to remind me that only desperate men were driven to such desperate lengths (I would ignore, at least for the time being, how the two of them had laughed, as if they were having the time of their lives), and that nothing had changed in regard to Ki Devore—her grandfather’s custody case still sucked bogwater.

I got John’s recording machine at home and left a message—just call Mike Noonan, no emergency, but feel free to call late. Then I tried his office, mindful of the scripture according to John Grisham: young lawyers work until they drop. I listened to the firm’s recording machine, then followed instructions and punched sto on my phone keypad, the first three letters of John’s last name. There was a click and he came on the line—another recorded version, unfortunately. “Hi, this is John Storrow. I’ve gone up to Philly for the weekend to see my mom and dad. I’ll be in the office on Monday; for the rest of the week, I’ll be out on business. From Tuesday to Friday you’ll probably have the most luck trying to reach me at…” The number he gave began 207–955, which meant Castle Rock. I imagined it was the hotel where he’d stayed before, the nice one up on the View. “Mike Noonan,” I said. “Call me when you can. I left a message on your apartment machine, too.” I went in the kitchen to get a beer, then only stood there in front of the refrigerator, playing with the magnets. Whoremaster, he’d called me. Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore? A minute later he had offered to save my soul. Quite funny, really. Like an alcoholic offering to take care of your liquor cabinet. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine ajkction, Mattie had said. Your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather shit in the same pit. I left the fridge with all the beer still safe inside, went back to the phone, and called Mattie. “Hi,” said another obviously recorded voice. I was on a roll. “It’s me, but either I’m out or not able to come to the phone right this minute. Leave a message, okay?” A pause, the mike rustling, a distant whisper, and then Kyra, so loud she almost blew my ear off: “Leave a HAM’ message!”

What followed was laughter from both of them, cut off by the beep. “Hi, Mattie, it’s Mike Noonan,” I said. “I just wanted—” I don’t know how I would have finished that thought, and I didn’t have to. There was a click and then Mattie herself said, “Hello, Mike.” There was such a difference between this dreary, defeated-sounding voice and the cheerful one on the tape that for a moment I was silenced. Then I asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing,” she said, then began to cry. “Everything. I lost my job.

Lindy fired me.”

Firing wasn’t what Lindy had called it, of course. She’d called it “belt-tightening,” but it was firing, all right, and I knew that if I looked into the funding of the Four Lakes Consolidated Library, I would discover that one of the chief supporters over the years had been Mr. Max Devore. And he’d continue to be one of the chief supporters. . if, that was, Lindy Briggs played ball. “We shouldn’t have talked where she could see us doing it,” I said, knowing I could have stayed away from the library completely and Mattie would be just as gone. “And we probably should have seen this coming.”

“John Storrow did see it.” She was still crying, but making an effort to get it under control. “He said Max Devore would probably want to make sure I was as deep in the corner as he could push me, come the custody hearing. He said Devore would want to make sure I answered Tm unemployed, Your Honor’ when the judge asked where I worked. I told John Mrs. Briggs would never do anything so low, especially to a girl who’d given such a brilliant talk on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Do you know what he told me?”

“He said, “You’re very young.” I thought that was a patronizing thing to say, but he was right, wasn’t he?”

“Mattie—”

“What am I going to do, Mike? What am I going to do?” The panic-rat had moved on down to Wasp Hill Road, it sounded like. I thought, quite coldly: Why not become my mistress? I3ur title will be “research assistant, “aperfictlyjake occupation as far as the IRS is concerned, I’ll throw in clothes, a couple of charge cards, a house—say goodbye to the rustbucket doublewide on Isp Hill Road—and a two-week vacation: how does February on Maul sound? Plus Ki’s education, of course, and a hejgy cash bonus at the end of the year. I’ll be considerate, too. Considerate and discreet.

Once or twice a week, and never until your little girl is fast asleep.

All you have to do is say yes and give me a key. All you have to do is slide over when I slide in. All you have to do is let me do what I want—all through the dark, all through the night, let me touch where I want to touch, let me do what I want to do, never say no, never say stop. I closed my eyes. “Mike? Are you there?”

“Sure,” I said. I touched the throbbing gash at the back of my head and winced. “You’re going to do just fine, Mattie. You—”

“The trailer’s not paid for!” she nearly wailed. “I have two overdue phone bills and they’re threatening to cut off the service! There’s something wrong with the Jeep’s transmission, and the rear axle, as well! I can pay for Ki’s last week of Vacation Bible School, I guess—Mrs. Briggs gave me three weeks’ pay in lieu of notice—but how will I buy her shoes? She outgrows everything so fast.

… there’s holes in all her shorts and most of her g-g-goddam underwear…” She was starting to weep again. “I’m going to take care of you until you get back on your feet,” I said. “No, I can’t let—”

“You can. And for Kyra’s sake, you will. Later on, if you still want to, you can pay me back. We’ll keep tabs on every dollar and dime, if you like.

But I’m going to take care of you.” And you’ll never take off your clothes when I’m with you. That’s a promise, and I’m going to keep it.

“Mike, you don’t have to do this.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I am going to do it. You just try and stop me.” I’d called meaning to tell her what had happened to me—giving her the humorous version—but that now seemed like the worst idea in the world. “This custody thing is going to be over before you know it, and if you can’t find anyone brave enough to put you to work down here once it is, I’ll find someone up in Derry who’ll do it. Besides, tell me the truth—aren’t you starting to feel that it might be time for a change of scenery?” She managed a scrap of a laugh. “I guess you could say that.”

“Heard from John today?”

“Actually, yes. He’s visiting his parents in Philadelphia but he gave me the number there. I called him.” He’d said he was taken with her. Perhaps she was taken with him, as well. I told myself the thorny little tug I felt across my emotions at the idea was only my imagination. Tried to tell myself that, anyway. “What did he say about you losing your job the way you did?”

“The same things you said. But he didn’t make me feel safe. You do. I don’t know why.” I did. I was an older man, and that is our chief attraction to young women: we make them feel safe. “He’s coming up again Tuesday morning. I said I’d have lunch with him.” Smoothly, not a tremor or hesitation in my voice, I said: “Maybe I could join you.” Mattie’s own voice warmed at the suggestion; her ready acceptance made me feel paradoxically guilty.

“That would be great! Why don’t I call him and suggest that you both come over here? I could barbecue again. Maybe I’ll keep Ki home from V.B.S. and make it a foursome. She’s hoping you’ll read her another story. She really enjoyed that.”

“That sounds great,” I said, and meant it. Adding Kyra made it all seem more natural, less of an intrusion on my part. Also less like a date on theirs. John could not be accused of taking an unethical interest in his client. In the end he’d probably thank me. “I believe Ki might be ready to move on to “Hansel and Gretel.” How are you, Mattie? All right?”

“Much better than I was before you called.”

“Good. Things are going to be all right.”

“Promise me."

“I think I just did.” There was a slight pause. “Areyou all right, Mike?

You sound a little… I don’t know… a little strange.”

“I’m okay,” I said, and I was, for someone who had been pretty sure he was drowning less than an hour ago. “Can I ask you one question before I go? Because this is driving me crazy.”

“Of course.”

“The night we had dinner, you said Devore told you his great-grandfather and mine knew each other.

Pretty well, according to him.”

“He said they shit in the same pit. I thought that was elegant.”

“Did he say anything else? Think hard.” She did, but came up with nothing. I told her to call me if something about that conversation did occur to her, or if she got lonely or scared, or if she started to feel worried about anything. I didn’t like to say too much, but I had already decided I’d have to have a frank talk with John about my latest adventure. It might be prudent to have the private detective from Lewiston George Kennedy, like the actor—put a man or two on the TR to keep an eye on Mattie and Kyra. Max Devote was mad, just as my caretaker had said. I hadn’t understood then, but I did now. Any time I started to doubt, all I had to do was touch the back of my head. I returned to the fridge and once more forgot to open it. My hands went to the magnets instead and again began moving them around, watching as words formed, broke apart, evolved. It was a peculiar kind of writing… but it was writing. I could tell by the way I was starting to trance out.

That half-hypnotized stare is one you cultivate until you can switch it on and off at will… at least you can when things are going well. The intuitive part of the mind unlocks itself when you begin work and rises to a height of about six feet (maybe ten on good days). Once there, it simply hovers, sending black-magic messages and bright pictures. For the balance of the day that part is locked to the rest of the machinery and goes pretty much forgotten… except on certain occasions when it comes loose on its own and you trance out unexpectedly, your mind making associations which have nothing to do with rational thought and glaring with unexpected images. That is in some ways the strangest part of the creative process. The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited. My house is haunted. Sara Laughs has always been haunted… you’ve stirred em up. stirred, I wrote on the refrigerator. But it didn’t look right, so I made a circle of fruit and vegetable magnets around it. That was better, much. I stood there for a moment, hands crossed over my chest as I crossed them at my desk when I was stuck for a word or a phrase, then took off stirr and put on haunt, making haunted. “It’s haunted in the circle,” I said, and barely heard the faint chime of Bunter’s bell, as if in agreement. I took the letters off, and as I did found myself thinking how odd it was to have a lawyer named Romeo—(romeo went in the circle)

— and a detective named George Kennedy. (george went up on the fridge) I wondered if Kennedy could help me with Andy Drake(drake on the fridge)

— maybe give me some insights. I’d never written about a private detective before and it’s the little stuff (rake off, leave the d, add etaih) — that makes the difference. I turned a 3 on its back and put an I beneath it, making a pitchfork. The devil’s in the details. From there I went somewhere else. I don’t know where, exactly, because I was tranced out, that intuitive part of my mind up so high a search-party couldn’t have found it. I stood in front of my fridge and played with the letters, spelling out little pieces of thought without even thinking about them. You mightn’t believe such a thing is possible, but every writer knows it is. What brought me back was light splashing across the windows of the foyer. I looked up and saw the shape of a car pulling to a stop behind my Chevrolet. A cramp of terror seized my belly. That was a moment when I would have given everything I owned for a loaded gun.

Because it was Footman. Had to be. Devore had called him when he and Whitmore got back to Warrington’s, had told him Noonan refuses to be a good Martian so get over there and fix him. When the driver’s door opened and the dome-light in the visitor’s car came on, I breathed a conditional sigh of relief. I didn’t know who it was, but it sure wasn’t “daddy.” This fellow didn’t look as if he could take care of a housefly with a rolled-up newspaper… although, I supposed, there were plenty of people who had made that same mistake about Jeffrey Dahmer. Above the fridge was a cluster of aerosol cans, all of them old and probably not ozone-friendly. I didn’t know how Mrs. M. had missed them, but I was pleased she had. I took the first one my hand touched—Black Flag, excellent choice—thumbed off the cap, and stuck the can in the left front pocket of my jeans. Then I turned to the drawers on the right of the sink. The top one contained silverware. The second one held what Jo called “kitchenshit" — everything from poultry thermometers to those gadgets you stick in corncobs so you don’t burn your fingers off. The third one down held a generous selection of mismatched steak knives. I took one, put it in the right front pocket of my jeans, and went to the door.

The man on my stoop jumped a little when I turned on the outside light, then blinked through the door at me like a nearsighted rabbit. He was about five-four, skinny, pale. He wore his hair cropped in the sort of cut known as a wiffle in my boyhood days. His eyes were brown. Guarding them was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with greasy-looking lenses. His little hands hung at his sides. One held the handle of a flat leather case, the other a small white oblong. I didn’t think it was my destiny to be killed by a man with a business card in one hand, so I opened the door. The guy smiled, the anxious sort of smile people always seem to wear in Woody Allen movies. He was wearing a Woody Allen outfit too, I saw—faded plaid shirt a little too short at the wrists, chinos a little too baggy in the crotch. Someone must have told him about the resemblance, I thought. That’s got to be it. “Mr. Noonan?”

“Yes?” He handed me the card. NEXV CENTURY REAL ESTATE, it said in raised gold letters. Below this, in more modest black, was my visitor’s name. “I’m Richard Osgood,” he said as if I couldn’t read, and held out his hand.

The American male’s need to respond to that gesture in kind is deeply ingrained, but that night I resisted it. He held his little pink paw out a moment longer, then lowered it and wiped the palm nervously against his chinos. “I have a message for you. From Mr. Devote.” I waited. “May I come in?”

“No,” I said. He took a step backward, wiped his hand on his pants again, and seemed to gather himself. “I hardly think there’s any need to be rude, Mr. Noonan.” I wasn’t being rude. If I’d wanted to be rude, I would have treated him to a faceful of roach-repellent. “Max Devote and his minder tried to drown me in the lake this evening. If my manners seem a little off to you, that’s probably it.” Osgood’s look of shock was real, I think. “You must be working too hard on your latest project, Mr. Noonan. Max Devore is going to be eighty-six on his next birthday—if he makes it, which now seems to be in some doubt. Poor old fella can hardly even walk from his chair to his bed anymore. As for Rogette—”

“I see your point,” I said. “In fact I saw it twenty minutes ago, without any help from you. I hardly believe it myself, and I was there. Give me whatever it is you have for me.”

“Fine,” he said in a prissy little “all right, be that way” voice. He unzipped a pouch on the front of his leather bag and brought out a white envelope, business-sized and sealed. I took it, hoping Osgood couldn’t sense how hard my heart was thumping. Devore moved pretty damned fast for a man who travelled with an oxygen tank.

The question was, what kind of move was this? “Thanks,” I said, beginning to close the door. “I’d tip you the price of a drink, but I left my wallet on the dresser.”

“Wait! You’re supposed to read it and give me an answer.” I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t know where Devore got the notion that he could order me around, but I have no intention of allowing his ideas to influence my behavior. Buzz off.” His lips turned down, creating deep dimples at the corners of his mouth, and all at once he didn’t look like Woody Allen at all. He looked like a fifty-year-old real-estate broker who had sold his soul to the devil and now couldn’t stand to see anyone yank the boss’s forked tail. “Piece of friendly advice, Mr. Noonan—you want to watch it. Max Devore is no man to fool around with.”

“Luckily for me, I’m not fooling around.” I closed the door and stood in the foyer, holding the envelope and watching Mr. Next Century Real Estate. He looked pissed off and con-fused—no one had given him the bum’s rush just lately, I guessed. Maybe it would do him some good. Lend a little perspective to his life. Remind him that, Max Devore or no Max Devore, Richie Osgood would still never stand more than five-feet-seven. Even in cowboy boots.

“Mr. Devore wants an answer!” he called through the closed door. “I’ll phone,” I called back, then slowly raised my middle fingers in the double eagle I’d hoped to give Max and Rogette earlier. “In the meantime, perhaps you could convey this.” I almost expected him to take off his glasses and rub his eyes. He walked back to his car instead, tossed his case in, then followed it. I watched until he had backed up to the lane and I was sure he was gone. Then I went into the living room and opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper, faintly scented with the perfume my mother had worn when I was just a kid. White Shoulders, I think it’s called. Across the top—neat, ladylike, printed in slightly raised letters—was ROGETTE Do WHITMORE Below it was this message, written in a slightly shaky feminine hand:

8.’30 P.M. Dear Mr. Noonan, Max wishes me to convey how glad he was to meet you! I must echo that sentiment. You are a very amusing and entertaining jllow! We enjoyed your antics ever so much. Now to business. M. ofrs you a very simple deal.” if you promise to cease asking questions about him, and if you promise to cease all legal maneuvering—if you promise to let him rest in peace, so to speak then Mr. Devore promises to cease erts to gain custody of his granddaughter. If this suits, you need only tell Mr. Osgood “I agree.” He will carry the message! Max hopes to return to Calijrnia by private jet very soon—he has business which can be put off no longer, although he has enjoyed his time here and has J3und you particularly interesting. He wants me to remind you that custody has its responsibilities, and urges you not to J$rget he said so.

Rogette P.S. He reminds me that you didn’t answer his question—does her cunt suck? Max is quite curious on that point.

I read this note over a second time, then a third. I started to put it on the table, then read it a fourth time. It was as if I couldn’t get the sense of it. I had to restrain an urge to fly to the telephone and call Mattie at once. It’s over, Mattie, I’d say. Taking your job and dunking me in the lake were the last two shots of the war. He’s giving up. No. Not until I was absolutely sure. I called Warrington’s instead, where I got my fourth answering machine of the night. Devore and Whitmore hadn’t bothered with anything warm and fuzzy, either; a voice as cold as a motel ice-machine simply told me to leave my message at the sound of the beep. “It’s Noonan,” I said. Before I could go any further there was a click as someone picked up. “Did you enjoy your swim?”

Rogette Whitmore asked in a smoky, mocking voice. if I hadn’t seen her in the flesh, I might have imagined a Barbara Stanwyck type at her most coldly attractive, coiled on a red velvet couch in a peach-silk dressing gown, telephone in one hand, ivory cigarette holder in the other. “If I’d caught up with you, Ms. Whitmore, I would have made you understand my feelings perfectly.”

“Oooo,” she said. “My thighs are a-tingle.”

“Please spare me the image of your thighs.”

“Sticks and stones, Mr. Noonan,” she said. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your call?”

“I sent Mr. Osgood away without a reply.”

“Max thought you might. He said, “Our young whoremaster believes in the value of a personal response. You can tell that just looking at him.’”

“He gets the uglies when he loses, doesn’t he?”

“Mr. Devore doesn’t lose.” Her voice dropped at least forty degrees and all the mocking good humor bailed out on the way down. “He may change his goals, but he doesn’t lose. You were the one who looked like a loser tonight, Mr. Noonan, paddling around and yelling out there in the lake. You were scared, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Badly.”

“You were right to be. I wonder if you know how lucky you are?”

“May I tell you something?”

“Of course, Mike—may I call you Mike?”

“Why don’t you just stick with Mr. Noonan.

Now—are you listening?”

“With bated breath.”

“Your boss is old, he’s nutty, and I suspect he’s past the point where he could effectively manage a Yahtzee scorecard, let alone a custody suit. He was whipped a week ago.”

“Do you have a point?”

“As a matter of fact I do, so get it right: if either of you ever tries anything remotely like that again, I’ll come after that old fuck and jam his snot-smeared oxygen mask so far up his ass he’ll be able to aerate his lungs from the bottom. And if I see you on The Street, Ms. Whitmore, I’ll use you for a shotput. Do you understand me?” I stopped, breathing hard, amazed and also rather disgusted with myself. If you had told me I’d had such a speech in me, I would have scoffed. After a long silence I said: “Ms. Whitmore? Still there?”

“I’m here,” she said. I wanted her to be furious, but she actually sounded amused. “Who has the uglies now, Mr. Noonan?”

“I do,” I said, “and don’t you forget it, you rock-throwing bitch.”

“What is your answer to Mr. Devore?”

“We have a deal. I shut up, the lawyers shut up, he gets out of Mattie and Kyra’s life. If, on the other hand, he continues to—”

“I know, I know, you’ll bore him and stroke him. I wonder how you’ll feel about all this a week from now, you arrogant, stupid creature?”

Before I could reply—it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that even at her best she still threw like a girl—she was gone.

I stood there with the telephone in my hand for a few seconds, then hung it up. Was it a trick? It felt like a trick, but at the same time it didn’t. John needed to know about this. He hadn’t left his parents’

number on his answering machine, but Mattie had it. If I called her back, though, I’d be obligated to tell her what had just happened. It might be a good idea to put off any further calls until tomorrow. To sleep on it.

I stuck my hand in my pocket and damned near impaled it on the steak knife hiding there. I’d forgotten all about it. I took it out, carried it back into the kitchen, and returned it to the drawer. Next I fished out the aerosol can, turned to put it back on top of the fridge with its elderly brothers, then stopped. Inside the circle of fruit and vegetable magnets was this: d go w 19n Had I done that myself?. Had I been so far into the zone, so tranced out, that I had put a mini-crossword on the refrigerator without remembering it? And if so, what did it mean?

Maybe someone else put it up, I thought. One of my invisible roommates.

“Go down 19n,” I said, reaching out and touching the letters. A compass heading? Or maybe it meant Go 19 Down. That suggested crosswords again.

Sometimes in a puzzle you get a clue which reads simply See 19 Across or See 19 Down. If that was the meaning here, what puzzle was I supposed to check?

“I could use a little help here,” I said, but there was no answer—not from the astral plane, not from inside my own head. I finally got the can of beer I’d been promising myself and took it back to the sofa. I picked up my %ugh Stuff crossword book and looked at the puzzle I was currently working. “Liquor Is Quicker,” it was called, and it was filled with the stupid puns which only crossword addicts find amusing. Tipsy actor? Marion Brandy. Tipsy southern novel? Tequila Mockingbird. Drives the D.A. to drink? Bourbon of proof. And the definition of Down was Oriental nurse, which every cruciverbalist in the universe knows is amah. Nothing in “Liquor Is Quicker” connected to what was going on in my life, at least that I could see.

I thumbed through some of the other puzzles in the book, looking at 19

Downs. Marble worker’s tool (chisel). CNN’s favorite howler, 2 wds (wolfblitzer). Ethanol and dimethyl ether, e.g. (isomers). I tossed the book aside in disgust. Who said it had to be this particular crossword collection, anyway? There were probably fifty others in the house, four or five in the drawer of the very end-table on which my beer can stood.

I leaned back on the sofa and closed my eyes.

I always likeda whore… sometimes theirplace was on my face. This is where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side. There’s no town drunk here, we all take turns. This is where it happened. Ayuh.

I fell asleep and woke up three hours later with a stiff neck and a terrible throb in the back of my head. Thunder was rumbling thickly far off in the White Mountains, and the house seemed very hot. When I got up from the couch, the backs of my thighs more or less peeled away from the fabric. I shuffled down to the north wing like an old, old man, looked at my wet clothes, thought about taking them into the laundry room, and then decided if I bent over that far, my head might explode.

“You ghosts take care of it,” I muttered. “If you can change the pants and the underwear around on the whirligig, you can put my clothes in the hamper.”

I took three Tylenol and went to bed. At some point I woke a second time and heard the phantom child sobbing.

“Stop,” I told it. “Stop it, Ki, no one’s going to take you anywhere.

You’re safe.” Then I went back to sleep again.

Te telephone was ringing. I climbed toward it from a drowning dream where I couldn’t catch my breath, rising into early sunlight, wincing at the pain in the back of my head as I swung my feet out of bed. The phone would quit before I got to it, they almost always do in such situations, and then I’d lie back down and spend a fruitless ten minutes wondering who it had been before getting up for good. Ringgg…

ringgg… ringgg…

Was that ten? A dozen? I’d lost count. Someone was really dedicated. I hoped it wasn’t trouble, but in my experience people don’t try that hard when the news is good. I touched my fingers gingerly to the back of my head. It hurt plenty, but that deep, sick ache seemed to be gone.

And there was no blood on my fingers when I looked at them.

I padded down the hall and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Well, you won’t have to worry about testifyin at the kid’s custody hearin anymore, at least.”

“Bill?”

“Ayuh.”

“How did you know…” I leaned around the corner and peered at the:

waggy, annoying cat-clock. Twenty minutes past seven and already sweltering. Hotter’n a bugger, as us TR Martians like to say. “How do you know he decided—”

“I don’t know nothing about his business one way or t’other.” Bill sounded touchy. “He never called to ask my advice, and I never called to give him any.”

“What’s happened? What’s going on?”

“You haven’t had the TV on yet?”

“I don’t even have the coffee on yet.”

No apology from Bill; he was a fellow who believed that people who didn’t get up until after six a.M. deserved whatever they got. I was awake now, though. And had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

“Devore killed himself last night, Mike. Got into a tub of warm water and pulled a plastic bag over his head. Mustn’t have taken long, with his lungs the way they were.”

No, I thought, probably not long. In spite of the humid summer heat that already lay on the house, I shivered. “Who found him? The woman?”

“Ayuh, sure.”

“What time?”

“"Shortly before midnight,’ they said on the Channel 6 news.”

Right around the time I had awakened on the couch and taken myself stiffly off to bed, in other words.

“Is she implicated?”

“Did she play Kevorkian, you mean? The news report I saw didn’t say nothin about that. The gossip-mill down to the Lakeview General will be turnin brisk by now, but I ain’t been down yet for my share of the grain. If she helped him, I don’t think she’ll ever see trouble for it, do you? He was eighty-five and not well.”

“Do you know if he’ll be buried on the TR?”

“California. She said there’d be services in Palm Springs on Tuesday.” A sense of surpassing oddness swept over me as I realized the source of Mattie’s problems might be lying in a chapel filled with flowers at the same time The Friends of Kyra Devore were digesting their lunches and getting ready to start throwing the Frisbee around. It’s going to be a cele bration, I thought wonderingly. I don’t know how they’re going to handle it in The Little Chapel of the Microchips in Palm Springs, but on Irsp Hill Road they’re going to be dancing and throwing their arms in the sky and hollering I3s, Lawd. I’d never been glad to hear of anyone’s death before in my life, but I was glad to hear ofdevore’s. I was sorry to feel that way, but I did. The old bastard had dumped me in the lake.

… but before the night was over, he was the one who had drowned.

Inside a plastic bag he had drowned, sitting in a tub of tepid water.

“Any idea how the TV guys got onto it so fast?” It wasn’t superfast, not with seven hours between the discovery of the body and the seven o’clock news, but TV news people have a tendency to be lazy. “Whitmore called em. Had a press conference right there in Warrin’-ton’s parlor at two o’clock this morning. Took questions settin on that big maroon plush sofa, the one Jo always used to say should be in a saloon oil paintin with a naked woman lyin on it. Remember?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw a coupla County deputies walkin around in the background, plus a fella I reckonized from Jaquard’s Funeral Home in Motton.”

“That’s bizarre,” I said. “Ayuh, body still upstairs, most likely, while Whitmore was runnin her gums. . but she claimed she was just followin the boss’s orders. Said he left a tape sayin he’d done it on Friday night so as not to affect the cump’ny stock price and wanted Rogette to call in the press right off and assure folks that the cump’ny was solid, that between his son and the Board of Directors, everythin was going to be just acey-deucey. Then she told about the services in Palm Springs.”

“He commits suicide, then holds a two A.M. press conference by proxy to soothe the stockholders.”

“Ayuh.

And it sounds just like him.” A silence fell between us on the line. I tried to think and couldn’t. All I knew was that I wanted to go upstairs and work, aching head or no aching head. I wanted to rejoin Andy Drake, John Shackleford, and Shackleford’s childhood friend, the awful Ray Garraty. There was madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.

“Bill,” I said at last, “are we still friends?”

“Christ, yes,” he said promptly. “But if there’s people around who seem a little stand-offy to you, you’ll know why, won’t you?” Sure I’d know. Many would blame the old man’s death on me. It was crazy, given his physical condition, and it would by no means be a majority opinion, but the idea would gain a certain amount of credence, at least in the short run—I knew that as well as I knew the truth about John Shackleford’s childhood friend.

Kiddies, once upon a time there was a goose that flew back to the little unincorporated township where it had lived as a downy gosling. It began laying lovely golden eggs, and the townsfolk all gathered around to marvel and receive their share. Now, however, that goose was cooked and someone had to take the heat. I’d get some, but Mattie’s kitchen might get a few degrees toastier than mine; she’d had the temerity to fight for her child instead of silently handing Ki over. “Keep your head down the next few weeks,” Bill said. “That’d be my idea. In fact, if you had business that took you right out of the TR until all this settles down, that might be for the best.”

“I appreciate the sense of what you’re saying, but I can’t. I’m writing a book. If I pick up my shit and move, it’s apt to die on me. It’s happened before, and I don’t want it to happen this time.”

“Pretty good yarn, is it?”

“Not bad, but that’s not the important thing. It’s… well, let’s just say this one’s important to me for other reasons.”

“Wouldn’t it travel as far as Derry?”

“Are you trying to get rid of me, William?”

“I’m tryin to keep an eye out, that’s all—caretakin’s my job, y’know. And don’t say you weren’t warned: the hive’s gonna buzz. There’s two stories going around about you, Mike. One is that you’re shacking with Mattie Devore. The other is that you came back to write a hatchet-job on the TR. Pull out all the old skeletons you can find.”

“Finish what Jo started, in other words. Who’s been spreading that story, Bill?” Silence from Bill. We were back on earthquake ground again, and this time that ground felt shakier than ever.

“The book I’m working on is a novel,” I said. “Set in Florida.”

“Oh, ayuh?” You wouldn’t think three little syllables could have so much relief in them. “Think you could kind of pass that around?”

“I think I could,” he said. “If you tell Brenda Meserve, it’d get around even faster and go even farther.”

“Okay, I will. As far as Mattie goes—”

“Mike, you don’t have to”

“I’m not shacking with her. That was never the deal. The deal was like walking down the street, turning the corner, and seeing a big guy beating up a little guy.” I paused. “She and her lawyer are planning a barbecue at her place Tuesday noon. I’m planning to join them. Are people from town going to think we’re dancing on Devore’s grave?”

“Some will. Royce Merrill will. Dickie Brooks will. Old ladies in pants, Yvette calls em.”

“Well fuck them,” I said. “Every last one.”

“I understand how you feel, but tell her not to shove it in folks’

faces,” he almost pleaded. “Do that much, Mike. It wouldn’t kill her to drag her grill around back of her trailer, would it? At least with it there, folks lookin out from the store or the garage wouldn’t see nothing but the smoke.”

“I’ll pass on the message. And if I make the party, I’ll put the barbecue around back myself.”

“You’d do well to stay away from that girl and her child,” Bill said. “You can tell me it’s none of my business, but I’m talkin to you like a Dutch uncle, tellin you for your own good.” I had a flash of my dream then. The slick, exquisite tightness as I slipped inside her. The little breasts with their hard nipples. Her voice in the darkness, telling me to do what I wanted. My body responded almost instantly. “I know you are,” I said.

’2kll right.” He sounded relieved that I wasn’t going to scold him—take him to school, he would have said. “I’ll let you go n have your breakfast.”

“I appreciate you calling.”

“Almost didn’t. Yvette talked me into it. She said, “You always liked Mike and Jo Noonan best of all the ones you did for. Don’t you get in bad with him now that he’s back home.’”

“Tell her I appreciate it,” I said. I hung up the phone and looked at it thoughtfully. We seemed to be on good terms again… but I didn’t think we were exactly friends.

Certainly not the way we had been. That had changed when I realized Bill was lying to me about some things and holding back about others; it had also changed when I realized what he had almost called Sara and the Red-Tops. You can’t condemn a manor what may only be a figment of your own imagination. True, and I’d try not to do it… but I knew what I knew. I went into the living room, snapped on the TV, then snapped it off again. My satellite dish got fifty or sixty different channels, and not a one of them local. There was a portable TV in the kitchen, however, and if I dipped its rabbit-ears toward the lake I’d be able to get WMTW, the ABC affiliate in western Maine. I snatched up Rogette’s note, went into the kitchen, and turned on the little Sony tucked under the cabinets with the coffee-maker. Good Morning America was on, but they would be breaking for the local news soon. In the meantime I scanned the note, this time concentrating on the mode of expression rather than the message, which had taken all of my attention the night before. Hopes to return to Calij3rnia by private jet very soon, she had written. Has business which can beput off no longer, she had written. If you promise to let him rest in peace, she had written. It was a goddam suicide note. “You knew,” I said, rubbing my thumb over the raised letters of her name. “You knew when you wrote this, and probably when you were chucking rocks at me. But why?” Custody has its responsibilities, she had written. Don’t jrget he said so. But the custody business was over, right? Not even a judge that was bought and paid for could award custody to a dead man. GMA finally gave way to the local report, where Max Devore’s suicide was the leader. The TV picture was snowy, but I could see the maroon sofa Bill had mentioned, and Rogette Whitmore sitting on it with her hands folded composedly in her lap. I thought one of the deputies in the background was George Footman, although the snow was too heavy for me to be completely sure. Mr. Devore had spoken frequently over the last eight months of ending his life, Whitmore said. He had been very unwell.

He had asked her to come out with him the previous evening, and she realized now that he had wanted to look at one final sunset. It had been a glorious one, too, she added. I could have corroborated that; I remembered the sunset very well, having almost drowned by its light.

Rogette was reading Devore’s statement when my phone rang again. It was Mattie, and she was crying in hard gusts. “The news,” she said, “Mike, did you see… do you know…” At first that was all she could manage that was coherent. I told her I did know, Bill Dean had called me and then I’d caught some of it on the local news. She tried to reply and couldn’t speak. Guilt, relief, horror, even hilarity—I heard all those things in her crying. I asked where Ki was. I could sympathize with how Mattie felt—until turning on the news this morning she’d believed old Max Devore was her bitterest enemy—but I didn’t like the idea of a three-year-old girl watching her mom fall apart. “Out back,” she managed. “She’s had her breakfast. Now she’s having a d-doll p-p-p… doll pi-p-pic—”

“Doll picnic. Yes. Good. Let it go, then. All of it.

Let it out.” She cried for two minutes at least, maybe longer. I stood with the telephone pressed to my ear, sweating in the July heat, trying to be patient. I’m going to give you one chance to save your soul, Devore had told me, but this morning he was dead and his soul was wherever it was. He was dead, Mattie was free, I was writing. Life should have felt wonderful, but it didn’t. At last she began to get her control back. “I’m sorry. I haven’t cried like that—really, really cried—since Lance died.”

“It’s understandable and you’re allowed.”

“Come to lunch,” she said. “Come to lunch please, Mike. Ki’s going to spend the afternoon with a friend she met at Vacation Bible School, and we can talk. I need to talk to someone… God, my head is spinning.

Please say you’ll come.”

“I’d love to, but it’s a bad idea. Especially with Ki gone.” I gave her an edited version of my conversation with Bill Dean. She listened carefully. I thought there might be an angry outburst when I finished, but I’d forgotten one simple fact: Mattie Stanchfield Devore had lived around here all her life. She knew how things worked.

“I understand that things will heal quicker if I keep my eyes down, my mouth shut, and my knees together,” she said, “and I’ll do my best to go along, but diplomacy only stretches so far. That old man was trying to take my daughter away, don’t they realize that down at the goddam general store?”

“I realize it.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“What if we had an early supper on the Castle Rock common? Same place as Friday? Say five-ish?”

“I’d have to bring Ki—”

“Fine,” I said.

“Bring her. Tell her I know “Hansel and Gretel’ by heart and am willing to share. Will you call John in Philly? Give him the details?”

“Yes.

I’ll wait another hour or so. God, I’m so happy. I know that’s wrong, but I’m so happy I could burst!”

“That makes two of us.” There was a pause on the other end. I heard a long, watery intake of breath.

“Mattie? All right?”

“Yes, but how do you tell a three-year-old her grandfather died?” ll her the old fuck slipped and jll headfirst into a Glad Bag, I thought, then pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to stifle a spate of lunatic cackles. “I don’t know, but you’ll have to do it as soon as she comes in.”

“I will? Why?”

“Because she’s going to see you. She’s going to see your face.”

I lasted exactly two hours in the upstairs study, and then the heat drove me out—the thermometer on the stoop read ninety-five degrees at ten o’clock. I guessed it might be five degrees warmer on the second floor.

Hoping I wasn’t making a mistake, I unplugged the IBM and carried it downstairs. I was working without a shirt, and as I crossed the living room, the back of the typewriter slipped in the sweat coating my midriff and I almost dropped the outdated sonofabitch on my toes. That made me think of my ankle, the one I’d hurt when I fell into the lake, and I set the typewriter aside to look at it. It was colorful, black and purple and reddish at the edges, but not terribly inflated. I guessed my immersion in the cool water had helped keep the swelling down. I put the typewriter on the deck table, rummaged out an extension cord, plugged in beneath Bunter’s watchful eye, and sat down facing the hazy blue-gray surface of the lake. I waited for one of my old anxiety attacks to hit—the clenched stomach, the throbbing eyes, and, worst of all, that sensation of invisible steel bands clamped around my chest, making it impossible to breathe. Nothing like that happened. The words flowed as easily down here as they had upstairs, and my naked upper body was loving the little breeze that puffed in off the lake every now and again. I forgot about Max Devore, Mattie Devore, Kyra Devore. I forgot about Jo Noonan and Sara Tidwell. I forgot about myself. For two hours I was back in Florida. John Shackleford’s execution was nearing. Andy Drake was racing the clock. It was the telephone that brought me back, and for once I didn’t resent interruption. If undisturbed, I might have gone on writing until I simply melted into a sweaty pile of goo on the deck. It was my brother. We talked about Mom—in Siddy’s opinion she was now short an entire roof instead of just a few shingles—and her sister, Francine, who had broken her hip in June. Sid wanted to know how I was doing, and I told him I was doing all right, I’d had some problems getting going on a new book but now seemed to be back on track (in my family, the only permissible time to discuss trouble is when it’s over).

And how was the Sidster? Kickin, he said, which I assumed meant just fine—Siddy has a twelve-year-old, and consequently his slang is always up-to-date. The new accounting business was starting to take hold, although he’d been scared for awhile (first I knew of it, of course). He could never thank me enough for the bridge loan I’d made him last November. I replied that it was the least I could do, which was the absolute truth, especially when I considered how much more time—both in person and on the phone—he spent with our mother than I did. “Well, I’ll let you go,” Siddy told me after a few more pleasantries—he never says goodbye or so long when he’s on the phone, it’s always well, I’ll letyou go, as if he’s been holding you hostage. “You want to keep cool up there, Mike—Weather Channel says it’s going to be hotter than hell in New England all weekend.”

“There’s always the lake if things get too bad. Hey Sid?”

“Hey what?” Like I’ll let you go, Hey what went back to childhood. It was sort of comforting; it was also sort of spooky. “Our folks all came from Prout’s Neck, right? I mean on Daddy’s side.” Mom came from another world entirely—one where the men wear Lacoste polo shirts, the women always wear full slips under their dresses, and everyone knows the second verse of “Dixie” by heart. She had met my dad in Portland while competing in a college cheerleading event.

Materfamilias came from Memphis quality, darling, and didn’t let you forget it. “I guess so,” he said. “Yeah. But don’t go asking me a lot of family-tree questions, Mike—I’m still not sure what the difference is between a nephew and a cousin, and I told Jo the same thing.”

“Did you?”

Everything inside me had gone very still… but I can’t say I was surprised. Not by then. “Uh-huh, you bet.”

“What did she want to know?”

“Everything I knew. Which isn’t much. I could have told her all about Ma’s great-great-grandfather, the one who got killed by the Indians, but Jo didn’t seem to care about any of Ma’s folks.”

“When would this have been?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

“Okay, let’s see. I think it was around the time Patrick had his appendectomy. Yeah, I’m sure it was. February of ’94. It might have been March, but I’m pretty sure it was February.” Six months from the Rite Aid parking lot. Jo moving into the shadow of her own death like a woman stepping beneath the shade of an awning. Not pregnant, though, not yet. Jo making day-trips to the TR. Jo asking questions, some of the sort that made people feel bad, according to Bill Dean. . but she’d gone on asking just the same. Yeah. Because once she got onto something, Jo was like a terrier with a rag in its jaws. Had she been asking questions of the man in the brown sport-coat?

Who was the man in the brown sportcoat?

“Pat was in the hospital, sure. Dr. Alpert said he was doing fine, but when the phone rang I jumped for it—I half-expected it to be him, Alpert, saying Pat had had a relapse or something.”

“Where in God’s name did you get this sense of impending doom, Sid?”

“I dunno, buddy, but it’s there. Anyway, it’s not Alpert, it’s Johanna. She wants to know if we had any ancestors—three, maybe even four generations back who lived there where you are, or in one of the surrounding towns. I told her I didn’t know, but you might. Know, I mean. She said she didn’t want to ask you because it was a surprise. Was it a surprise?”

“A big one,” I said. “Daddy was a lobsterman—”

“Bite your tongue, he was an artist—’a seacoast primitive.” Ma still calls him that.” Siddy wasn’t quite laughing.

“Shit, he sold lobster-pot coffee-tables and lawn-puffins to the tourists when he got too rheumatic to go out on the bay and haul traps.”

“I know that, but Ma’s got her marriage edited like a movie for television.’’

How true. Our own version of Blanche Du Bois. “Dad was a lobster-man in Prout’s Neck. He—”

Siddy interrupted, singing the first verse of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”

in a horrible offkey tenor.

“Come on, this is serious. He had his first boat from his father, right?”

“That’s the story,” Sid agreed. “Jack Noonan’s Lazy Betty, original owner Paul Noonan. Also of Prout’s. Boat took a hell of a pasting in Hurricane Donna, back in 1960. I think it was Donna.”

Two years after I was born. “And Daddy put it up for sale in ’63.”

“Yep.

I don’t know whatever became of it, but it was Grampy Paul’s to begin with, all right. Do you remember all the lobster stew we ate when we were kids, Mikey?”

“Seacoast meatloaf,” I said, hardly thinking about it. Like most kids raised on the coast of Maine, I can’t imagine ordering lobster in a restau-rant-that’s for fiatlanders. I was thinking about Grampy Paul, who had been born in the 1890s. Paul Noonan begat Jack Noonan, Jack Noonan begat Mike and Sid Noonan, and that was really all I knew, except the Noonans had all grown up a long way from where I now stood sweating my brains out.

They shit in the same pit.

Devore had gotten it wrong, that was all—when we Noonans weren’t wearing polo shirts and being Memphis quality, we were Prout’s Neckers.

It was unlikely that Devore’s great-grandfather and my own would have had anything to do with each other in any case; the old rip had been twice my age, and that meant the generations didn’t match up.

But if he had been totally wrong, what had Jo been on about? “Mike?” Sid asked. “Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay? You don’t sound so great, I have to tell you.”

“It’s the heat,” I said. “Not to mention your sense of impending doom.

Thanks for calling, Siddy.”

“Thanks for being there, brother.”

“Kickin,” I said.

I went out to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water. As I was filling it, I heard the magnets on the fridge begin sliding around. I whirled, spilling some of the water on my bare feet and hardly noticing. I was as excited as a kid who thinks he may glimpse Santa Claus before he shoots back up the chimney.

I was barely in time to see nine plastic letters drawn into the circle from all points of the compass. CARLADEAN, they spelled. . but only for a second. Some presence, tremendous but unseen, shot past me. Not a hair on my head stirred, but there was still a strong sense of being buffeted, the way you’re buffeted by the air of a passing express train if you’re standing near the platform yellow-line when the train bolts through. I cried out in surprise and groped my glass of water back onto the counter, spilling it. I no longer felt in need of cold water, because the temperature in the kitchen of Sara Laughs had dropped off the table.

I blew out my breath and saw vapor, as you do on a cold day in January.

One puff, maybe two, and it was gone—but it had been there, all right, and for perhaps five seconds the film of sweat on my body turned to what felt like a slime of ice.

CARLADEAN exploded outward in all directions—it was like watching an atom being smashed in a cartoon. Magnetized letters, fruits, and vegetables flew off the front of the refrigerator and scattered across the kitchen. For a moment the fury which fuelled that scattering was something I could almost taste, like gunpowder.

And something gave way before it, going with a sighing, rueful whisper I had heard before: “Oh Mike. Oh Mike.” It was the voice I’d caught on the Memo-Scriber tape, and although I hadn’t been sure then, I was now—it was Jo’s voice.

But who was the other one? Why had it scattered the letters?

Carla Dean. Not Bill’s wife; that was Yvette. His mother? His grandmother?

I walked slowly through the kitchen, collecting fridge-magnets like prizes in a scavenger hunt and sticking them back on the Kenmore by the handful. Nothing snatched them out of my hands; nothing froze the sweat on the back of my neck; Bunter’s bell didn’t ring. Still, I wasn’t alone, and I knew it.

CARLADEAN: Jo had wanted me to know.

Something else hadn’t. Something else had shot past me like the Wabash Cannonball, trying to scatter the letters before I could read them.

Jo was here; a boy who wept in the night was here, too.

And what else?

What else was sharing my house with me?

I didn’t see them at first, which wasn’t surprising; it seemed that half of Castle Rock was on the town common as that sultry Saturday afternoon edged on toward evening. The air was bright with hazy midsummer light, and in it kids swarmed over the playground equipment, a number of old men in bright red vests—some sort of club, I assumed—played chess, and a group of young people lay on the grass listening to a teenager in a headband playing the guitar and singing one I remembered from an old lan and Sylvia record, a cheery tune that went “Ella Speed was havin her. lovin fun, John Martin shot Ella with a Colt jrty-one…”

I saw no joggers, and no dogs chasing Frisbees. It was just too god-dam hot.

I was turning to look at the bandshell, where an eight-man combo called The Castle Rockers was setting up (I had an idea “In the Mood”

33o was about as close as they got to rock and roll), when a small person hit me from behind, grabbing me just above the knees and almost dumping me on the grass. “Gotcha!” the small person cried gleefully. “Kyra Devore!” Mattie called, sounding both amused and irritated. “You’ll knock him down!” I turned, dropped the grease-spotted Mcdonald’s bag I had been carrying, and lifted the kid up. It felt natural, and it felt wonderful. You don’t realize the weight of a healthy child until you hold one, nor do you fully comprehend the life that runs through them like a bright wire. I didn’t get choked up (“Don’t go all corny on me, Mike,” Siddy would sometimes whisper when we were kids at the movies and I got wet-eyed at a sad part), but I thought of Jo, yes. And the child she had been carrying when she fell down in that stupid parking lot, yes to that, too. Ki was squealing and laughing, her arms outspread and her hair hanging down in two amusing clumps accented by Raggedy Ann and Andy barrettes. “Don’t tackle your own quarterback!” I yelled, grinning, and to my delight she yelled it right back at me: “Don’t taggle yer own quarter-mack! Don’t taggle yer own quartermack!” I set her on her feet, both of us laughing. Ki took a step backward, tripped herself, and sat down on the grass, laughing harder than ever. I had a mean thought, then, brief but oh so clear: if only the old lizard could see how much he was missed. How sad we were at his passing. Mattie walked over, and tonight she looked as I’d half-imagined her when I first met her—like one of those lovely children of privilege you see at the country club, either goofing with their friends or sitting seriously at dinner with their parents. She was in a white sleeveless dress and low heels, her hair falling loose around her shoulders, a touch of lipstick on her mouth. Her eyes had a brilliance in them that hadn’t been there before.

When she hugged me I could smell her perfume and feel the press of her firm little breasts. I kissed her cheek; she kissed me high up on the jaw, making a smack in my ear that I felt all the way down my back. “Say things are going to be better now,” she whispered, still holding me.

“Lots better now,” I said, and she hugged me again, tight. Then she stepped away “You better have brought plenty food, big boy, because we plenty hungry womens. Right, Kyra?”

“I taggled my own quartermack,” Ki said, then leaned back on her elbows, giggling deliciously at the bright and hazy sky. “Come on,” I said, and grabbed her by the middle I toted her that way to a nearby picnic table, Ki kicking her legs and waving her arms and laughing I set her down on the bench; she slid off it and beneath the table, boneless as an eel and still laughing ’?dl right, Kyra Elizabeth,” Mattie said. “Sit up and show the other side”

“Good girl, good girl,” she said, clambering up beside me. “That’s the other side to me, Mike”

“I’m sure,” I said. Inside the bag there were Big Macs and fries for Mattie and me. For Ki there was a colorful box upon which Ronald Mcdonald and his unindicted co-conspirators capered “Mattie, I got a Happy Meal! Mike got me a Happy Meal! They have toys!”

“Well see what yours is.” Kyra opened the box, poked around, then smiled It lit up her whole face She brought out something that I at first thought was a big dust-ball For one horrible second I was back in my dream, the one of Jo under the bed with the book over her face Give me that, she had snarled It’s my dust-catcher. And something else, too—some other association, perhaps from some other dream I couldn’t get hold of it. “Mike?” Mattie asked Curiosity in her voice, and maybe borderline concern. “It’s a doggy!” Ki said “I won a doggy in my Happy Meal!” Yes; of course A dog. A little stuffed dog. And it was gray, not black… although why I’d care about the color either way I didn’t know.

“That’s a pretty good prize,” I said, taking it. It was soft, which was good, and it was gray, which was better Being gray made it all right, somehow Crazy but true I handed it back to her and smiled. “What’s his name?” Ki asked, jumping the little dog back and forth across her Happy Meal box. “What doggy’s name, Mike?” And, without thinking, I said, “Strickland.”

I thought she’d look puzzled, but she didn’t. She looked delighted.

“Stricken!” she said, bouncing the dog back and forth in ever-higher leaps over the box. “Stricken! Stricken! My dog Stricken!”

“Who’s this guy Strickland?” Mattie asked, smiling a little. She had begun to unwrap her hamburger.

’5 character in a book I read once,” I said, watching Ki play with the little puffball dog. “No one real.”

“My grampa died,” she said five minutes later.

We were still at the picnic table but the food was mostly gone.

Strick-land the stuffed puffball had been set to guard the remaining french fries. I had been scanning the ebb and flow of people, wondering who was here from the TR observing our tryst and simply burning to carry the news back home. I saw no one I knew, but that didn’t mean a whole tot, considering how long I’d been away from this part of the world.

Mattie put down her burger and looked at Ki with some anxiety, but I thought the kid was okay—she had been giving news, not expressing grief.

“I know he did,” I said.

“Grampa was awful old.” Ki pinched a couple of french fries between her pudgy little fingers. They rose to her mouth, then gloop, all gone.

“He’s with Lord Jesus now. We had all about Lord Jesus in V.B.S.”

I3s, Ki, I thought, right now Grampy’s probably teaching Lord Jesus how to use Pixel Easel and asking if there might be a whore handy.

“Lord Jesus walked on water and also changed the wine into macaroni.”

“Yes, something like that,” I said. “It’s sad when people die, isn’t it?”

“It would be sad if Mattie died, and it would be sad if you died, but Grampy was old.” She said it as though I hadn’t quite grasped this con cept the first time. “In heaven he’ll get all fixed up.”

“That’s a good way to look at it, hon,” I said.

Mattie did maintenance on Ki’s drooping barrettes, working carefully and with a kind of absent love. I thought she glowed in the summer light, her skin in smooth, tanned contrast to the white dress she had probably bought at one of the discount stores, and I understood that I loved her.

Maybe that was all right. “I miss the white nana, though,” Ki said, and this time she did look sad. She picked up the stuffed dog, tried to feed him a french fry, then put him down again. Her small, pretty face looked pensive now, and I could see a whisper of her grandfather in it. It was far back but it was there, perceptible, another ghost. “Mom says white nana went back to California with Grampy’s early remains.”

“Earthly remains, Ki-bird,” Mattie said. “That means his body.”

“Will white nana come back and see me, Mike?”

“I don’t know.”

“We had a game. It was all rhymes.” She looked more pensive than ever.

“Your mom told me about that game,” I said.

“She won’t be back,” Ki said, answering her own question. One very large tear rolled down her right cheek. She picked up “Stricken,” stood him on his back legs for a second, then put him back on guard-duty. Mattie slipped an arm around her, but Ki didn’t seem to notice. “White nana didn’t really like me. She was just pretending to like me. That was her job.”

Mattie and I exchanged a glance.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Ki said. Over by where the kid was playing the guitar, a juggler in whiteface had started up, working with half a dozen colored balls. Kyra brightened a little. “Mommy-bommy, may I go watch that funny white man?”

“Are you done eating?”

“Yeah, I’m full.”

“Thank Mike.”

“Don’t taggle yer own quartermack,” she said, then laughed kindly to show she was just pulling my leg. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and then, because that sounded a little old-fashioned: “Kickin.”

“You can go as far as that tree, but no farther,” Mattie said. “And you know why.”

“So you can see me. I will.”

She grabbed Strickland and started to run off, then stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “I guess it was the fridgeafator people,” she said, then corrected herself very carefully and seriously.

“The ree fridge-a-rator people.” My heart took a hard double beat in my chest. “It was the refrigerator people what, Ki?” I asked.

“That said white nana didn’t really like me.” Then she ran off toward the juggler, oblivious to the heat.

Mattie watched her go, then turned back to me. “I haven’t talked to anybody about Ki’s fridgeafator people. Neither has she, until now. Not that there are any real people, but the letters seem to move around by themselves. It’s like a Ouija board.”

“Do they spell things?”

For a long time she said nothing. Then she nodded. “Not always, but sometimes.” Another pause. “Most times, actually. Ki calls it mail from the people in the refrigerator.” She smiled, but her eyes were a little scared. “Are they special magnetic letters, do you think? Or have we got a poltergeist working the lakefront?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry I brought them, if they’re a problem.”

“Don’t be silly. You gave them to her, and you’re a tremendously big deal to her right now. She talks about you all the time. She was much more interested in picking out something pretty to wear for you tonight than she was in her grandfather’s death. I was supposed to wear something pretty, too, Kyra insisted. She’s not that way about people, usually—she takes them when they’re there and leaves them when they’re gone. That’s not such a bad way for a little girl to grow up, I sometimes think.”

“You both dressed pretty,” I said. “That much I’m sure of.”

“Thanks.” She looked fondly at Ki, who stood by the tree watching the juggler. He had put his rubber balls aside and moved on to Indian clubs. Then she looked back at me. “Are we done eating?”

I nodded, and Mattie began to pick up the trash and stuff it back into the take-out bag. I helped, and when our fingers touched, she gripped my hand and squeezed. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything you’ve done. Thank you so damn much.”

I squeezed back, then let go.

“You know,” she said, “it’s crossed my mind that Kyra’s moving the letters around herself. Mentally.”

“Telekinesis?”

“I guess that’s the technical term. Only Ki can’t spell much more than ’dog’ and ’cat.’”

“What’s showing up on the fridge?”

“Names, mostly. Once it was yours. Once it was your wife’s.”

“jo?”

“The whole thing—JOHANNA. And NANA. Rogette, I presume. JARED shows up sometimes, and BRIDGET. Once there was KITO.” She spelled it.

“Kito,” I said, and thought: Kyra, Kia, Kito. What is this? “A boy’s name, do you think?”

“I know it is. It’s Swahili, and means precious child. I looked it up in my baby-name book.” She glanced toward her own precious child as we walked across the grass to the nearest trash barrel.

“Any others that you can remember?”

She thought. “G has showed up a couple of times. And once there was CARLA. You understand that Ki can’t even read these names as a rule, don’t you? She has to ask me what they say.”

“Has it occurred to you that Kyra might be copying them out of a book or a magazine? That she’s learning to write using the magnetic letters on the fridge instead of paper and pencil?”

“I suppose that’s possible. .” She didn’t look as if she believed it, though. Not surprising. I didn’t believe it myself.

“I mean, you’ve never actually seen the letters moving around by themselves on the front of the fridge, have you?” I hoped I sounded as unconcerned asking this question as I wanted to. She laughed a bit nervously. “God, no!”

“Anything else?”

“Sometimes the fridgeafator people leave messages like HI and BYE and GOOD GIRL. There was one yesterday that I wrote down to show you. Kyra asked me to. It’s really weird.”

“What is it?”

“I’d rather show you, but I left it in the glove compartment of the Scout. Remind me when we go.”

Yes. I would.

“This is some spooky shit, segor,” she said. “Like the writing in the flour that time.” I thought about telling her I had my own fridgeafator people, then didn’t. She had enough to worry about without that. . or so I told myself. We stood side-by-side on the grass, watching Ki watch the juggler. “Did you call John?” I asked. “You bet.”

“His reaction?”

She turned to me, laughing with her eyes. “He actually sang a verse of “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.’”

“Wrong sex, right sentiment.” She nodded, her eyes going back to Kyra. I thought again how beautiful she looked, her body slim in the white dress, her features clean and perfectly made. “Was he pissed at me inviting myself to lunch?” I asked.

“Nope, he loved the idea of having a party.” A party. He loved the idea.

I began to feel rather small. “He even suggested we invite your lawyer from last Friday. Mr. Bis-sonette? Plus the private detective John hired on Mr. Bissonette’s recommendation. Is that okay with you?”

“Fine. How about you, Mattie? Doing okay?”

“Doing okay,” she agreed, turning to me.

“I did have several more calls than usual today. I’m suddenly quite popular.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Most were hangups, but one gentleman took time enough to call me a cunt, and there was a lady with a very strong Yankee accent who said, “Theah, you bitch, you’ve killed him. Aaa you satisfied?’ She hung up before I could tell her yes, very satisfied, thanks.” But Mattie didn’t look satisfied; she looked unhappy and guilty, as if she had literally wished him dead. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Really. Kyra and I have been alone for a long time, and I’ve been scared for most of it. Now I’ve made a couple of friends. If a few anonymous phone calls are the price I have to pay, I’ll pay it.”

She was very close, looking up at me, and I couldn’t stop myself. I put the blame on summer, her perfume, and four years without a woman. In that order, i slipped my arms around her waist, and remember perfectly the texture of her dress beneath my hands; the slight pucker at the back where the zipper hid in its sleeve. I remember the sensation of the cloth moving against the bare skin beneath. Then I was kissing her, very gently but very thoroughly—anything worth doing is worth doing right—and she was kissing me back in exactly the same spirit, her mouth curious but not afraid. Her lips were warm and smooth and held some faint sweet taste. Peaches, I think. We stopped at the same time and pulled back a little from each other. Her hands were still on my shoulders. Mine were on the sides of her waist, just above her hips. Her face was composed enough, but her eyes were more brilliant than ever, and there were slants of color in her cheeks, rising along the cheekbones. “Oh boy,” she said. “I really wanted that. Ever since Ki tackled you and you picked her up I’ve wanted ir.”

“John wouldn’t think much of us kissing in public,” I said. My voice wasn’t quite even, and my heart was racing. Seven seconds, one kiss, and every system in my body was red-lining. “In fact, John wouldn’t think much of us kissing at all. He fancies you, you know.”

“I know, but I fancy you.” She turned to check on Ki, who was still standing obediently by the tree, watching the juggler. Who might be watching us? Someone who had come over from the TR on a hot summer evening to get ice cream at Frank’s Tas-T-Freeze and enjoy a little music and society on the common? Someone who traded for fresh vegetables and fresh gossip at the Lakeview General? A regular at the All-Purpose Garage? This was insanity, and it stayed insanity no matter how you cut it. I dropped my hands from her waist. “Mattie, they could put our picture next to ’indiscreet’ in the dictionary.” She took her hands offmy shoulders and stepped back a pace, but her brilliant eyes never left mine. “I know that. I’m young but not entirely stupid.”

“I didn’t mean—” She held up a hand to stop me. “Ki goes to bed around nine—she can’t seem to sleep until it’s mostly dark. I stay up later. Come and visit me, if you want to. You can park around back.” She smiled a little. It was a sweet smile; it was also incredibly sexy. “Once the moon’s down, that’s an area of discretion.”

“Mattie, you’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“Maybe, but I’m not. And sometimes people can be too discreet for their own good.”

My body knew so emphatically what it wanted. If we had been in her trailer at that moment it would have been no contest. It was almost no contest anyway. Then something recurred to me, something I’d thought about Devore’s ancestors and my own: the generations didn’t match up.

Wasn’t the same thing true here? And I don’t believe that people automatically have a right to what they want, no matter how badly they want it. Not every thirst should be slaked. Some things are just wrong—I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. But I wasn’t sure this was one of them, and I wanted her, all right. So much. I kept thinking about how her dress had slid when I put my arms around her waist, the warm feel of her skin just beneath. And no, she wasn’t my daughter.

“You said your thanks,” I told her in a dry voice. “And that’s enough.

Really.”

“You think this is gratitude?” She voiced a low, tense laugh. “You’re forty, Mike, not eighty. You’re not Harrison Ford, but you’re a good-looking man. Talented and interesting, too. And I like you such an awful lot. I want you to be with me. Do you want me to say please? Fine.

Please be with me.”

Yes, this was about more than gratitude—I suppose I’d known that even when I was using the word. I’d known she was wearing white shorts and a halter top when she called on the phone the day I went back to work. Had she also known what I was wearing? Had she dreamed she was in bed with me, the two of us screwing our brains out while the party lights shone and Sara Tidwell played her version of the white nana rhyming game, all that crazy Manderley-sanderley-canderley stuff?. Had Mattie dreamed of telling me to do what she wanted?

And there were the fridgeafator people. They were another kind of sharing, an even spookier kind. I hadn’t quite had nerve enough to tell Mattie about mine, but she might know anyway. Down low in her mind. Down below in her mind, where the blue-collar guys moved around in the zone.

Her guys and my guys, all part of the same strange labor union. And maybe it wasn’t an issue of morality per se at all. Some thing about it—about us—just felt dangerous.

And oh so attractive.

“I need time to think,” I said.

“This isn’t about what you think. What do youj%/for me?”

“So much it scares me.”

Before I could say anything else, my ears caught a familiar series of chord-changes. I turned toward the kid with the guitar. He had been working through a repertoire of early Dylan, but now he swung into something chuggy and up-tempo, something that made you want to grin and pat your hands together.

“Do you want to go fishin here in my fishin hole?

Said do you want to fish some, honey, here in my fishin hole?

You want to fish in my pond, baby, you better have a big long pole.”

“Fishin Blues.” Written by Sara Tidwell, originally performed by Sara and the Red-Top Boys, covered by everyone from Ma Rainey to the Lovin’

Spoonful. The raunchy ones had been her specialty, double-entendre so thin you could read a newspaper through it. . although reading hadn’t been Sara’s main interest, judging by her lyrics.

Before the kid could go on to the next verse, something about how you got to wiggle when you wobble and get that big one way down deep, The Castle Rockers ran off a brass flourish that said “Shut up, everybody, we’re comin atcha.” The kid quit playing his guitar; the juggler began catching his Indian clubs and dropping them swiftly onto the grass in a line. The Rockers launched themselves into an extremely evil Sousa march, music to commit serial murders by, and Kyra came running back to us.

“The jugster’s done. Will you tell me the story, Mike? Hansel and Panzel?”

“It’s Hansel and Gretel,” I said, “and I’ll be happy to. But let’s go where it’s a little quieter, okay? The band is giving me a headache.”

“Music hurt your headie?” ’5 little bit.”

“We’ll go by Mattie’s car, then.”

“Good thought.” Kyra ran ahead to stake out a bench on the edge of the common. Mattie gave me a long warm look, then her hand. I took it. Our fingers folded together as if they had been doing it for years. I thought, I’d like it to be slow, both of us hardly moving at all. At first, anyway. And would I bring my nicest, longest pole? I think you could count on that. And then, afterward, we’d talk.

Maybe until we could see the furniture in the first early light. When you’re in bed with someone you love, particularly for the first time, five o’clock seems almost holy. “You need a vacation from your own thoughts,” Mattie said. “I bet most writers do from time to time.”

“That’s probably true.”

“I wish we were home,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if her fierceness was real or pretend. “I’d kiss you until this whole conversation became irrelevant. And if there were second thoughts, at least you’d be having them in my bed.” I turned my face into the red light of the westering sun. “Here or there, at this hour Ki would still be up.”

“True,” she said, sounding uncharacteristically glum. “True.”

Kyra reached a bench near the sign reading TOWN COMMON PARKING and climbed up on it, holding the little stuffed dog from Mickey D’s in one hand. I tried to pull my hand away as we approached her and Mat-tie held it firm. “It’s all right, Mike. At V.B.S. they hold hands with their friends everywhere they go. It’s big people who make it into a big deal.” She stopped, looked at me. “I want you to know something. Maybe it won’t matter to you, but it does to me. There wasn’t anyone before Lance and no one after. If you come to me, you’ll be my second. I’m not going to talk with you about this again, either. Saying please is all right, but I won’t beg.”

“I don’t—”

“There’s a pot with tomato plants in it by the trailer steps.

I’ll leave a key under it. Don’t think. Just come.”

“Not tonight, Mattie. I can’t.”

“You can,” she replied. “Hurry up, slowpokes!” Kyra cried, bouncing on the bench. “He’s the slow one!” Mattie called back, and poked me in the ribs. Then, in a much lower voice: “You are, too.”

She unwound her hand from mine and ran toward her daughter, her brown legs scissoring below the hem of the white dress.

In my version of “Hansel and Gretel” the witch was named Depravia. Kyra stared at me with huge eyes when I got to the part where Depravia asks Hansel to poke out his finger so she can see how plump he’s getting. “Is it too scary?” I asked. Ki shook her head emphatically. I glanced at Mattie to make sure. She nodded and waved a hand for me to go on, so I finished the story. Depravia went into the oven and Gretel found her secret stash of winning lottery tickets. The kids bought a Jet Ski and lived happily ever after on the eastern side of Dark Score Lake. By then The Castle Rockers were slaughtering Gershwin and sunset was nigh. I carried Kyra to Scoutie and strapped her in. I remembered the first time I’d helped put the kid into her car-seat, and the inadvertent press of Mattie’s breast. “I hope there isn’t a bad dream for you in that story,” I said. Until I heard it coming out of my own mouth, I hadn’t realized how fundamentally awful that one is. “I won’t have bad dreams,” Kyra said matter-of-factly. “The fridgeafator people will keep them away.”

Then, carefully, reminding herself: “Ree-fridge-a-rator.” She turned to Mattie. “Show him the crosspatch, Mommy-bommy.”

“Crossword. But thanks, I would’ve forgotten.” She thumbed open the glove compartment and took out a folded sheet of paper. “It was on the fridge this morning. I copied it down because Ki said you’d know what it meant. She said you do crossword puzzles. Well, she said crosspatches, but I got the idea.”

Had I told Kyra that I did crosswords? Almost certainly not. Did it surprise me that she knew? Not at all. I took the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and looked at what was printed there: d go W “Is it a crosspatch puzzle, Mike?” Kyra asked.

“I guess so—a very simple one. But if it means something, I don’t know what it is. May I keep this?”

“Yes,” Mattie said.

I walked her around to the driver’s side of the Scout, reaching for her hand again as we went. “Just give me a little time. I know that’s supposed to be the girl’s line, but—”

“Take the time,” she said. “Just don’t take too much.”

I didn’t want to take any, which was just the problem. The sex would be great, I knew that. But after?

There might be an after, though. I knew it and she did, too. With Mattie, “after” was a real possibility. The idea was a little scary, a little wonderful.

I kissed the corner of her mouth. She laughed and grabbed me by the earlobe. “You can do better,” she said, then looked at Ki, who was sitting in her car-seat and gazing at us interestedly. “But I’ll let you offthis time.”

“Kiss Ki!” Kyra called, holding out her arms, so I went around and kissed Ki. Driving home, wearing my dark glasses to cut the glare of the setting sun, it occurred to me that maybe I could be Kyra Devore’s father. That seemed almost as attractive to me as going to bed with her mother, which was a measure of how deep I was in. And going deeper, maybe.

Deeper still.

Sara Laughs seemed very empty after having Mattie in my arms—a sleeping head without dreams. I checked the letters on the fridge, saw nothing there but the normal scatter, and got a beer. I went out on the deck to drink it while I watched the last of the sunset. I tried to think about the refrigerator people and crosspatches that had appeared on both refrigerators: “go down nineteen” on Lane Forty-two and “go down ninety-two” on Wasp Hill Road. Different vectors from the land to the lake? Different spots on The Street? Shit, who knew?

I tried to think about John Storrow and how unhappy he was apt to be if he found out there was—to quote Sara Laughs, who got to the line long before John Mellencamp—another mule kicking in Mattie Devore’s stall.

But mostly what I thought about was holding her for the first time, kissing her for the first time. No human instinct is more powerful than the sex-drive when it is fully aroused, and its awakening images are emotional tattoos that never leave us. For me, it was feeling the soft bare skin of her waist just beneath her dress. The slippery feel of the fabric…

I turned abruptly and hurried through the house to the north wing, almost running and shedding clothes as I went. I turned the shower on to full cold and stood under it for five minutes, shivering. When I got out I felt a little more like an actual human being and a little less like a twitching bundle of nerve endings. And as I toweled dry, something else recurred to me. At some point I had thought of Jo’s brother Frank, had thought that if anyone besides myself would be able to feel Jo’s presence in Sara Laughs, it would be him. I hadn’t gotten around to inviting him down yet, and now wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had come to feel oddly possessive, almost jealous, about what was happening here.

And yet if Jo had been writing something on the quiet, Frank might know.

Of course she hadn’t confided in him about the pregnancy, but- I looked at my watch. Quarter past nine. In the trailer near the intersection of Wasp Hill Road and Route 68, Kyra was probably already asleep. . and her mother might already have put her extra key under the pot near the steps. I thought of her in the white dress, the swell of her hips just below my hands and the smell of her perfume, then pushed the images away. I couldn’t spend the whole night taking cold showers.

Quarter past nine was still early enough to call Frank Arlen. He picked up on the second ring, sounding both happy to hear from me and as if he’d gotten three or four cans further into the six-pack than I had so far done. We passed the usual pleasantries back and forth—most of my own almost entirely fictional, I was dismayed to find—and he mentioned that a famous neighbor of mine had kicked the bucket, according to the news. Had I met him? Yes, I said, remembering how Max Devote had run his wheelchair at me. Yes, I’d met him. Frank wanted to know what he was like. That was hard to say, I told him. Poor old guy was stuck in a wheelchair and suffering from emphysema. “Pretty frail, huh?” Frank asked sympathetically. “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, Frank, I called about Jo. I was out in her studio looking around, and I found my typewriter.

Since then I’ve kind of gotten the idea she was writing something. It might have started as a little piece about our house, then widened. The place is named after Sara Tidwell, you know. The blues singer.” A long pause. Then Frank said, “I know.” His voice sounded heavy, grave. “What else do you know, Frank?”

“That she was scared. I think she found out something that scared her. I think that mostly because—” That was when the light finally broke. I probably should have known from Mattie’s description, would have known if I hadn’t been so upset. “You were down here with her, weren’t you? In July of 1994. You went to the softball game, then you went back up The Street to the house.”

“How do you know that?” he almost barked. “Someone saw you. A friend of mine.” I was trying not to sound mad and not succeeding. I was mad, but it was a relieved anger, the kind you feel when your kid comes dragging into the house with a shamefaced grin just as you’re getting ready to call the cops. “I almost told you a day or two before we buried her. We were in that pub, do you remember?” Jack’s Pub, right after Frank had beaten the funeral director down on the price of Jo’s coffin. Sure I remembered. I even remembered the look in his eyes when I’d told him Jo had been pregnant when she died. He must have felt the silence spinning out, because he came back sounding anxious. “Mike, I hope you didn’t get any—”

“What? Wrong ideas? I thought maybe she was having an affair, how’s that for a wrong idea? You can call that ignoble if you want, but I had my reasons. There was a lot she wasn’t telling me. What did she tell you?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Did you know she quit all her boards and committees? Quit and never said a word to me?”

“No.” I didn’t think he was lying. Why would he, at this late date? “Jesus, Mike, if I’d known that—”

“What happened the day you came down here? Tell me.”

“I was at the printshop in Sanford. Jo called me from. . I don’t remember, I think a rest area on the turnpike.”

“Between Derry and the TR?”

“Yeah. She was on her way to Sara Laughs and wanted me to meet her there. She told me to park in the driveway if I got there first, not to go in the house… which I could have; I know where you keep the spare key.” Sure he did, in a Sucrets tin under the deck. I had shown him myself. “Did she say why she didn’t want you to go inside?”

“It’ll sound crazy.”

“No it won’t. Believe me.”

“She said the house was dangerous.” For a moment the words just hung there. Then I asked, “Did you get here first?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And waited outside?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see or sense anything dangerous?” There was a long pause. At last he said, “There were lots of people out on the lake—speedboaters, water-skiers, you know how it is—but all the engine-noise and the laughter seemed to kind of… stop dead when it got near the house. Have you ever noticed that it seems quiet there even when it’s not?” Of course I had; Sara seemed to exist in its own zone of silence. “Did it feel dangerous, though?”

“No,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Not to me, anyway. But it didn’t feel exactly empty, either. I felt… fuck, I felt watched. I sat on one of those railroad-tie steps and waited for my sis. Finally she came. She parked behind my car and hugged me… but she never took her eyes off the house. I asked her what she was up to and she said she couldn’t tell me, and that I couldn’t tell you we’d been there. She said something like, “If he finds out on his own, then it’s meant to be. I’ll have to tell him sooner or later, anyway. But I can’t now, because I need his whole attention. I can’t get that while he’s working.’” I felt a flush crawl across my skin. “She said that, huh?”

“Yeah. Then she said she had to go in the house and do something. She wanted me to wait outside. She said if she called, I should come on the run. Otherwise I should just stay where I was.”

“She wanted someone there in case she got in trouble.”

“Yeah, but it had to be someone who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer. That was me. I guess that was always me.”

“And?”

“She went inside. I sat on the hood of my car, smoking cigarettes. I was still smoking then. And you know, I did start to feel something then that wasn’t right. As if there might be someone in the house who’d been waiting for her, someone who didn’t like her. Maybe someone who wanted to hurt her. Probably I just picked that up from Jo—the way her nerves seemed all strung up, the way she kept looking over my shoulder at the house even while she was hugging me—but it seemed like something else.

Like a… I don’t know…”

“Like a vibe.”

“Yes!” he almost shouted. “A vibration. But not a good vibration, like in the Beach Boys song. A bad vibration.”

“What happened?”

“I sat and waited. I only smoked two cigarettes so I don’t guess it could have been longer than twenty minutes or half an hour, but it seemed longer. I kept noticing how the sounds from the lake seemed to make it most of the way up the hill and then just kind of… quit. And how there didn’t seem to be any birds, except far off in the distance.

“Once she came out. I heard the deck door bang, and then her footsteps on the stairs over on that side. I called to her, asked if she was okay, and she said fine. She said for me to stay where I was. She sounded a little short of breath, as if she was carrying something or had been doing some chore.”

“Did she go to her studio or down to the lake?”

“I don’t know. She was gone another fifteen minutes or so—time enough for me to smoke another butt—and then she came back out the front door. She checked to make sure it was locked, and then she came up to me. She looked a lot better. Relieved. The way people look when they do some dirty job they’ve been putting off, finally get it behind them. She suggested we walk down that path she called The Street to the resort that’s down there—”

“Warrington’s.”

“Right, right. She said she’d buy me a beer and a sandwich. Which she did, out at the end of this long floating dock.” The Sunset Bar, where I had first glimpsed Rogette.

“Then you went to have a look at the softball game.”

“That was Jo’s idea. She had three beers to my one, and she insisted. Said someone was going to hit a longshot homer into the trees, she just knew it.” Now I had a clear picture of the part Mattie had seen and told me about.

Whatever Jo had done, it had left her almost giddy with relief. She had ventured into the house, for one thing. Had dared the spirits in order to do her business and survived. She’d had three beers to celebrate and her discretion had slipped. . not that she had behaved with any great stealth on her previous trips down to the TR. Frank remembered her saying if I found out on my own then it was meant to be-que sera, sera.

It wasn’t the attitude of someone hiding an affair, and I realized now that all her behavior suggested a woman keeping a short-term secret. She would have told me when I finished my stupid book, if she had lived. If.

“You watched the game for awhile, then went back to the house along The Street.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did either of you go in?”

“No. By the time we got there, her buzz had worn off and I trusted her to drive. She was laughing while we were at the softball game, but she wasn’t laughing by the time we got back to the house. She looked at it and said, “I’m done with her. I’ll never go through that door again, Frank.’”

My skin first chilled, then prickled.

“I asked her what was wrong, what she’d found out. I knew she was writing something, she’d told me that much—”

“She told everyone but me,” I said… but without much bitterness. I knew who the man in the brown sportcoat had been, and any bitterness or anger—anger at Jo, anger at myself—paled before the relief of that. I hadn’t realized how much that fellow had been on my mind until novq.

“She must have had her reasons,” Frank said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“But she didn’t tell you what they were.”

’gkll I know is that it started—whatever it was—with her doing research for an article. It was a lark, Jo playing Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure that at first not telling you was just to keep it a surprise. She read books but mostly she talked to people—listened to their stories of the old days and teased them into looking for old letters… diaries… she was good at that part of it, I think. Damned good. You don’t know any of this?”

“No,” I said heavily. Jo hadn’t been having an affair, but she could have had one, if she’d wanted. She could have had an. affair with Tom Selleck and been written up in Inside ’ew and I would have gone on tapping away at the keys of my Powerbook, blissfully unaware.

“Whatever she found out,” Frank said, “I think she just stumbled over it.”

“And you never told me. Four years and you never told me any of it.”

“That was the last time I was with her,” Frank said, and now he 35O didn’t sound apologetic or embarrassed at all. “And the last thing she asked of me was that I not tell you we’d been to the lake house. She said she’d tell you everything when she was ready, but then she died.

After that I didn’t think it mattered. Mike, she was my sister. She was my sister and I promised.”

’gkll right. I understand.” And I did—just not enough. What had Jo discovered? That Normal Auster had drowned his infant son under a handpump? That back around the turn of the century an animal trap had been left in a place where a young Negro boy would be apt to come along and step into it? That another boy, perhaps the incestuous child of Son and Sara Tidwell, had been drowned by his mother in the lake, she maybe laughing that smoke-broken, lunatic laugh as she held him down? You gotta wiggle when you wobble, honey, and hold that young ’un way down deep.

“If you need me to apologize, Mike, consider it done.”

“I don’t. Frank, do you remember anything else she might have said that night? Anything at all?”

“She said she knew how you found the house.”

“She said what?”

“She said that when it wanted you, it called you.”

At first I couldn’t reply, because Frank Arlen had completely demolished one of the assumptions I’d made about my married life—one of the biggies, one of those that seem so basic you don’t even think about questioning them. Gravity holds you down. Light allows you to see. The compass needle points north. Stufflike that.

This assumption was that Jo was the one who had wanted to buy Sara Laughs back when we saw the first real money from my writing career, because Jo was the “house person” in our marriage, just as I was the “car person.” Jo was the one who had picked our apartments when apartments were all we could afford, Jo who hung a picture here and asked me to put up a shelf there. Jo was the one who had fallen in love with the Derry house and had finally worn down my resistance to the idea that it was too big, too busy, and too broken to take on. Jo had been the nest-builder.

She said that when it wanted you, it called you.

And it was probably true. No, I could do better than that, if I was willing to set aside the lazy thinking and selective remembering It was certainly true. I was the one who had first broached the idea of a place in western Maine. I was the one who collected stacks of real-estate brochures and hauled them home. I’d started buying regional magazines like Down East and always began at the back, where the real-estate ads were. It was I who had first seen a picture of Sara Laughs in a glossy handout called Maine Retreats, and it was I who had made the call first to the agent named in the ad, and then to Marie Hingerman after badgering Marie’s name out of the Realtor.

Johanna had also been charmed by Sara Laughs—I think anyone would have been charmed by it, seeing it for the first time in autumn sunshine with the trees blazing all around it and drifts of colored leaves blowing up The Street—but it was I who had actively sought the place out.

Except that was more lazy thinking and selective remembering. Wasn’t it?

Sara had sought me out.

Then how could I not have known it until now? And how was I led here in the firstplace, full of unknowing happy ignorance?

The answer to both questions was the same. It was also the answer to the question of how Jo could have discovered something distressing about the house, the lake, maybe the whole TR, and then gotten away with not telling me. I’d been gone, that’s all. I’d been zoning, tranced out, writing one of my stupid little books. I’d been hypnotized by the fantasies going on in my head, and a hypnotized man is easy to lead.

“Mike? Are you still there?”

“I’m here, Frank. But I’ll be goddamned if I know what could have scared her so.”

“She mentioned one other name I remember: Royce Merrill. She said he was the one who remembered the most, because he was so old. And she said, “I don’t want Mike to talk to him. I’m afraid that old man might let the cat out of the bag and tell him more than he should know.” Any idea what she meant?” “Well… it’s been suggested that a splinter from the old family tree wound up here, but my mother’s people are from Memphis. The Noo-nans are from Maine, but not from this part.” Yet I no longer entirely believed this.

“Mike, you sound almost sick.”

“I’m okay. Better than I was, actually.”

“And you understand why I didn’t tell you any of this until now? I mean, if I’d known the ideas you were getting… if I’d had any clue…”

“I think I understand. The ideas didn’t belong in my head to begin with, but once that shit starts to creep in…”

“When I got back to Sanford that night and it was over, I guess I thought it was just more of Jo’s “Oh fuck, there’s a shadow on the moon, nobody go out until tomorrow.” She was always the superstitious one, you know—knocking on wood, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder if she spilled some, those four-leaf-clover earrings she used to have…”

“Or the way she wouldn’t wear a pullover if she put it on backward by mistake,” I said. “She claimed doing that would turn around your whole day.”

“Well? Doesn’t it?” Frank asked, and I could hear a little smile in his voice.

All at once I remembered Jo completely, right down to the small gold flecks in her left eye, and wanted nobody else. Nobody else would do.

“She thought there was something bad about the house,” Frank said. “That much I do know.”

I drew a piece of paper to me and jotted Kia on it. “Yes. And by then she may have suspected she was pregnant. She might have been afraid of… influences.” There were influences here, all right. “You think she got most of this from Royce Merrill?”

“No, that was just a name she mentioned. She probably talked to dozens of people. Do you know a guy named Kloster? Gloster? Something like that?”

“Skuster,” I said. Below Kia my pencil was making a series of fat loops that might have been cursive letter l’s or hair ribbons. “Kenny Auster.

Was that it?”

“It sounds right. In any case, you know how she was once she really got going on a thing.”

Yes. Like a terrier after rats.

“Mike? Should I come up there?”

No. Now I was sure. Not Harold Oblowski, not Frank, either. There was a process going on in Sara, something as delicate and as organic as rising bread in a warm room. Frank might interrupt that process… or be hurt by it. “No, I just wanted to get it cleared up. Besides, I’m writing. It’s hard for me to have people around when I’m writing.”

“Will you call if I can help?”

“You bet,” I said. I hung up the telephone, thumbed through the book, and found a listing for R. MERRILL on the Deep Bay Road. I called the number, listened to it ring a dozen times, then hung up. No newfangled answering machine for Royce. I wondered idly where he was. Ninety-five seemed a little too old to go dancing at the Country Barn in Harrison, especially on a close night like this one. I looked at the paper with Kia written on it. Below the fat/-shapes I wrote Kyra, and remembered how, the first time I’d heard Ki say her name, I’d thought it was “Kia” she was saying. Below Kyra I wrote Kito, hesitated, then wrote Carla. I put these names in a box. Beside them I jottedjohanna, Bridget, andjared. The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down nineteen and go down ninety-two. “Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land,” I told the empty house. I looked around. Just me and Bunter and the waggy clock… except it wasn’t.

When it wanted you, it called you. I got up to get another beer. The fruits and vegetables were in a circle again. In the middle, the letters now spelled: lye stille As on some old tombstones—Godgrant she lye stille. I looked at these letters for a long time. Then I remembered the IBM was still out on the deck. I brought it in, plonked it on the dining-room table, and began to work on my current stupid little book. Fifteen minutes and I was lost, only faintly aware of thunder someplace over the lake, only faintly aware of Bunter’s bell shivering from time to time. When I went back to the fridge an hour or so later for another beer and saw that the words in the circle now said ony lye stille I hardly noticed At that moment I didn’t care if they lay stille or danced the hucklebuck by the light of the silvery moon. John Shackleford had begun to remember his past, and the child whose only friend he, John, had been. Little neglected Ray Garraty. I wrote until midnight came. By then the thunder had faded away but the heat held on, as oppressive as a blanket. I turned off the IBM and went to bed… thinking, so far as I can remember, nothing at all—not even about Mattie, lying in her own bed not so many miles away. The writing had burned off all thoughts of the real world, at least temporarily. I think that, in the end, that’s what it’s for. Good or bad, it passes the time.

I was walking north along The Street. Japanese lanterns lined it, but they were all dark because it was daylight4right daylight. The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October. The lake was deepest indigo beneath it, sparkling with sunpoints. The trees were just past the peak of their autumn colors, burning like torches. A wind out of the south blew the fallen leaves past me and between my legs in rattly, fragrant gusts. The Japanese lanterns nodded as if in approval of the season. Up ahead, faintly, I could hear music. Sara and the Red-Tops. Sara was belting it out, laughing her way through the lyric as she always had… only, how could laughter sound so much like a snarl? “White boy, I’d never kill a child of mine. That you’d even think it!” I whirled, expecting to see her right behind me, but there was no one there.

Well… The Green Lady was there, only she had changed her dress of leaves for autumn and become the Yellow Lady. The bare pine-branch behind her still pointed the way: go north, young man, go north. Not much far ther down the path was another birch, the one I’d held onto when that terrible drowning sensation had come over me again. I waited for it to come again now—for my mouth and throat to fill up with the iron taste of the lake—but it didn’t happen. I looked back at the Yellow Lady, then beyond her to Sara Laughs. The house was there, but much reduced: no north wing, no south wing, no second story. No sign of Jo’s studio off to the side, either. None of those things had been built yet. The ladybirch had travelled back with me from 1998; so had the one hanging over the lake. Otherwise-“Where am I?” I asked the Yellow Lady and the nodding Japanese lanterns. Then a better question occurred to me. “When am I?” No answer. “It’s a dream, isn’t it? I’m in bed and dreaming.” Somewhere out in the brilliant, gold-sparkling net of the lake, a loon called. Twice. Hoot once jr yes, twice jr no, I thought.

Not a dream, Michael. I don’t know exactly what it is—spiritual time-travel, maybebut it’s not a dream. “Is this really happening?” I asked the day, and from somewhere back in the trees, where a track which would eventually come to be known as Lane Forty-two ran toward a dirt road which would eventually come to be known as Route 68, a crow cawed.

Just once. I went to the birch hanging over the lake, slipped an arm around it (doing it lit a trace memory of slipping my hands around Mattie’s waist, feeling her dress slide over her skin), and peered into the water, half-wanting to see the drowned boy, half-fearing to see him.

There was no boy there, but something lay on the bottom where he had been, among the rocks and roots and waterweed. I squinted and just then the wind died a little, stilling the glints on the water. It was a cane, one with a gold head. A Boston Post cane. Wrapped around it in a rising spiral, their ends waving lazily, were what appeared to be a pair of ribbons—white ones with bright red edges. Seeing Royce’s cane wrapped that way made me think of high-school graduations, and the baton the class marshal waves as he or she leads the gowned seniors to their seats. Now I understood why the old crock hadn’t answered the phone.

Royce Merrill’s phone-answering days were all done. I knew that; I also knew I had come to a time before Royce had even been born. Sara Tidwell was here, I could hear her singing, and when Royce had been born in 1903, Sara had already been gone for two years, she and her whole Red-Top family.

“Go down, Moses,” I told the ribbon-wrapped cane in the water. “You bound for the Promised Land.”

I walked on toward the sound of the music, invigorated by the cool air and rushing wind. Now I could hear voices as well, lots of them, talking and shouting and laughing. Rising above them and pumping like a piston was the hoarse cry of a sideshow barker: “Come on in, folks, hurray, hurr-ay, hurr-ay! It’s all on the inside but you’ve got to hurr-ay, next show starts in ten minutes! See Angelina the Snake-Woman, she shimmies, she shakes, she’ll bewitch your eye and steal your heart, but don’t get too close for her bite ispoy-son! See Hando the Dog-Faced Boy, terror of the South Seas! See the Human Skeleton! See the Human Gila Monster, relic of a time God forgot! See the Bearded Lady and all the Killer Martians! It’s on the inside, yessirree, so hurr-ay, hurr-ay, hurr-ay!”

I could hear the steam-driven calliope of a merry-go-round and the bang of the bell at the top of the post as some lumberjack won a stuffed toy for his sweetie. You could tell from the delighted feminine screams that he’d hit it almost hard enough to pop it off the post. There was the snap of. 22s from the shooting gallery, the snoring moo of someone’s prize cow… and now I began to smell the aromas I have associated with county fairs since I was a boy: sweet fried dough, grilled onions and peppers, cotton candy, manure, hay. I began to walk faster as the strum of guitars and thud of double basses grew louder. My heart kicked into a higher gear. I was going to see them perform, actually see Sara Laughs and the Red-Tops live and on stage. This was no crazy three-part fever-dream, either. This was happening right now, so hurr-ay, hurr-ay, burr-ay.

The Washburn place (the one that would always be the Bricker place to Mrs. M.) was gone. Beyond where it would eventually be, rising up the steep slope on the eastern side of The Street, was a flight of broad wooden stairs. They reminded me of the ones which lead down from the amusement park to the beach at Old Orchard. Here the Japanese lanterns were lit in spite of the brightness of the day, and the music was louder than ever. Sara was singing “Jimmy Crack Corn.”

I climbed the stairs toward the laughter and shouts, the sounds of the Red-Tops and the calliope, the smells of fried food and farm animals.

Above the stairhead was a wooden arch with WELCOME TO FRYEBURG FAIR WELCOME TO THE 20TH CENTURY printed on it. As I watched, a little boy in short pants and a woman wearing a shirtwaist and an ankle-length linen skirt walked under the arch and toward me. They shimmered, grew gauzy. For a moment I could see their skeletons and the bone grins which lurked beneath their laughing faces. A moment later and they were gone.

Two farmers—one wearing a straw hat, the other gesturing expansively with a corncob pipe—appeared on the Fair side of the arch in exactly the same fashion. In this way I understood that there was a barrier between The Street and the Fair. Yet I did not think it was a barrier which would affect me. I was an exception.

“Is that right?” I asked. “Can I go in?”

The bell at the top of the Test Your Strength pole banged loud and clear. Bong once for yes, twice for no. I continued on up the stairs.

Now I could see the Ferris wheel turning against the brilliant sky, the wheel that had been in the background of the band photo in Osteen’s Dark Score Days. The framework was metal, but the brightly painted gondolas were made of wood. Leading up to it like an aisle leading up to an altar was a broad, sawdust-strewn midway. The sawdust was there for a purpose; almost every man I saw was chewing tobacco.

I paused for a few seconds at the top of the stairs, still on the lake side of the arch. I was afraid of what might happen to me if I passed under. Afraid of dying or disappearing, yes, but mostly of never being able to return the way I had come, of being condemned to spend eternity as a visitor to the turn-of-the-century Fryeburg Fair. That was also like a Ray Bradbury story, now that I thought of it.

In the end what drew me into that other world was Sara Tidwell. I had to see her with my own eyes. I had to watch her sing. Had to.

I felt a tingling as I stepped beneath the arch, and there was a sighing in my ears, as of a million voices, very far away. Sighing in relief?.

Dismay? I couldn’t tell. All I knew for sure was that being on the other side was dif-ferent-the difference between looking at a thing through a window and actually being there; the difference between observing and participating.

Colors jumped out like ambushers at the moment of attack. The smells which had been sweet and evocative and nostalgic on the lake side of the arch were now rough and sexy, prose instead of poetry. I could smell dense sausages and frying beef and the vast shadowy aroma of boiling chocolate. Two kids walked past me sharing a paper cone of cotton candy.

Both of them were clutching knotted hankies with their little bits of change in them. “Hey kids!” a barker in a dark blue shirt called to them. He was wearing arm-garters and his smile revealed one splendid gold tooth. “Knock over the milk-bottles and win a prize! I en’t had a loser all day!”

Up ahead, the Red-Tops swung into “Fishin Blues.” I’d thought the kid on the common in Castle Rock was pretty good, but this version made the kid’s sound old and slow and clueless. It wasn’t cute, like an antique picture of ladies with their skirts held up to their knees, dancing a decorous version of the black bottom with the edges of their bloomers showing. It wasn’t something Alan Lomax had collected with his other folk songs, just one more dusty American butterfly in a glass case full of them; this was smut with just enough shine on it to keep the whole struttin bunch of them out of jail. Sara Tidwell was singing about the dirty boogie, and I guessed that every overalled, straw-hatted, plug-chewing, callus-handed, clod-hopper-wearing farmer standing in front of the stage was dreaming about doing it with her, getting right down to where the sweat forms in the crease and the heat gets hot and the pink comes glimmering through.

I started walking in that direction, aware of cows mooing and sheep blatting from the exhibition barns—the Fair’s version of my childhood Hi-Ho Dairy-O. I walked past the shooting gallery and the ringtoss and the penny-pitch; I walked past a stage where The Handmaidens of Angelina were weaving in a slow, snakelike dance with their hands pressed together as a guy with a turban on his head and shoepolish on his face tooted a flute. The picture painted on stretched canvas suggested that Angelina—on view inside for just one tenth of a dollar, neigh 36O bor—would make these two look like old boots. I walked past the entrance to Freak Alley, the corn-roasting pit, the Ghost House, where more stretched canvas depicted spooks coming out of broken windows and crumbling chimneys. Everything in there is death, I thought… but from inside I could hear children who were very much alive laughing and squealing as they bumped into things in the dark. The older among them were likely stealing kisses. I passed the Test Your Strength pole, where the gradations leading to the brass bell at the top were marked BABY NEEDS HIS BOTTLE, SISSY, TRY AGAIN, BIG BOY, HE-MAN, and, just below the bell itself, in red: HERCOLF. S! Standing at the center of a little crowd a young man with red hair was removing his shirt, revealing a heavily muscled upper torso. A cigar-smoking carny held a hammer out to him. I passed the quilting booth, a tent where people were sitting on benches and playing Bingo, the baseball pitch. I passed them all and hardly noticed. I was in the zone, tranced out. “You’ll have to call him back,” Jo had sometimes told Harold when he phoned, “Michael is currently in the Land of Big Make-Believe.” Only now nothing felt like pretend and the only thing that interested me was the stage at the base of the Ferris wheel. There were eight black folks up there on it, maybe ten. Standing at the front, wearing a guitar and whaling on it as she sang, was Sara Tidwell. She was alive. She was in her prime. She threw back her head and laughed at the October sky.

What brought me out of this daze was a cry from behind me: “Wait up, Mike! Wait up!”

I turned and saw Kyra running toward me, dodging around the strollers and gamesters and midway gawkers with her pudgy knees pumping. She was wearing a little white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon on it. In one hand she clutched Strickland, and when she got to me she threw herself confidently forward, knowing I would catch her and swing her up. I did, and when her hat started to fall offi caught it and jammed it back on her head.

“I taggled my own quartermack,” she said, and laughed. “Again.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You’re a regular Mean Joe Green.” I was wearing overalls (the tail of a wash-faded blue bandanna stuck out of the bib pocket) and manure-stained workboots. I looked at Kyra’s white socks and saw they were homemade. I would find no discreet little label reading Made in Mexico or Made in China if I took off her straw hat and looked inside, either. This hat had been most likely Made in Motton, by some farmer’s wife with red hands and achy joints.

“Ki, where’s Mattie?”

“Home, I guess. She couldn’t come.”

“How did you get here?”

“Up the stairs. It was a lot of stairs. You should have waited for me.

You could have carrot me, like before. I want to hear the music.”

“Me too. Do you know who that is, Kyra?”

“Yes,” she said, “Kito’s mom. Hurry up, slowpoke!”

I walked toward the stage, thinking we’d have to stand at the back of the crowd, but they parted for us as we came forward, me carrying Kyra in my arms—the lovely sweet weight of her, a little Gibson Girl in her sailor dress and ribbon-accented straw hat. Her arm was curled around my neck and they parted for us like the Red Sea had parted for Moses.

They didn’t turn to look at us, either. They were clapping and stomping and bellowing along with the music, totally involved. They stepped aside unconsciously, as if some kind of magnetism were at work here—ours positive, theirs negative. The few women in the crowd were blushing but clearly enjoying themselves, one of them laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. She looked no more than twenty-two or — three.

Kyra pointed to her and said matter-of-factly: “You know Mattie’s boss at the liberry? That’s her nana.’

Lindy Briggs’s grandmother, and fresh as a daisy, I thought. Good Christ. The Red-Tops were spread across the stage and under swags of red, white, and blue bunting like some time-travelling rock band. I recognized all of them from the picture in Edward Osteen’s book. The men wore white shirts, arm-garters, dark vests, dark pants. Son Tidwell, at the far end of the stage, was wearing the derby he’d had on in the photo. Sara, though…

“Why is the lady wearing Mattie’s dress?” Kyra asked me, and she began to tremble.

“I don’t know, honey. I can’t say.” Nor could I argue—it was the white sleeveless dress Mattie had been wearing on the common, all right.

On stage, the band was smoking through an instrumental break. Reginald “Son” Tidwell strolled over to Sara, feet ambling, hands a brown blur on the strings and frets of his guitar, and she turned to face him. They put their foreheads together, she laughing and he solemn; they looked into each other’s eyes and tried to play each other down, the crowd cheering and clapping, the rest of the Red-Tops laughing as they played.

Seeing them together like that, I realized that I had been right: they were brother and sister. The resemblance was too strong to be missed or mistaken. But mostly what I looked at was the way her hips and butt switched in that white dress. Kyra and I might be dressed in turn-of-the-century country clothes, but Sara was thoroughly modern Millie. No bloomers for her, no petticoats, no cotton stockings. No one seemed to notice that she was wearing a dress that stopped above her knees—that she was all but naked by the standards of this time. And under Mattie’s dress she’d be wearing garments the like of which these people had never seen: a Lycra bra and hip-hugger nylon panties. If I put my hands on her waist, the dress would slip not against an unwet-coming corset but against soft bare skin. Brown skin, not white.

What do you want, sugar?

Sara backed away from Son, shaking her ungirdled, unbustled fanny and laughing. He strolled back to his spot and she turned to the crowd as the band played the turnaround. She sang the next verse looking directly at me.

“Bejsre you start in fishin you better check your line.

Said bqre you start in fishin, honey, you better check on your line. I’ll pull on yours, darling, and you best tug on mine.”

The crowd roared happily. In my arms, Kyra was shaking harder than ever.

“I’m scared, Mike,” she said. “I don’t like that lady. She’s a scary lady. She stole Mattie’s dress. I want to go home.”

It was as if Sara heard her, even over the rip and ram of the music. Her head cocked back on her neck, her lips peeled open, and she laughed at the sky. Her teeth were big and yellow. They looked like the teeth of a hungry animal, and I decided I agreed with Kyra: she was a scary lady.

“Okay, hon,” I murmured in Ki’s ear. “We’re out of here.”

But before I could move, the sense of the woman—I don’t know how else to say it—fell upon me and held me. Now I understood what had shot past me in the kitchen to knock away the CARLADEAN letters; the chill was the same. It was almost like identifying a person by the sound of their walk.

She led the band to the turnaround once more, then into another verse.

Not one you’d find in any written version of the song, though:

“I ain’t gonna hurt her, honey, not jsr all the treasure in the worl’. Said I wouldn’t hurt your baby, not Jr diamonds or jor pearls. Only one black-hearted bastard dare to touch that little girl.”

The crowd roared as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but Kyra began to cry. Sara saw this and stuck out her breasts—much bigger breasts than Mattie’s—and shook them at her, laughing her trademark laugh as she did. There was a parodic coldness about this gesture… and an emptiness, too. A sadness. Yet I could feel no compassion for her. It was as if the heart had been burned out of her and the sadness which remained was just another ghost, the memory of love haunting the bones of hate.

And how her laughing teeth leered.

Sara raised her arms over her head and this time shook it all the way down, as if reading my thoughts and mocking them. Just like jelly on a plate, as some other old song of the time has it. Her shadow wavered on the canvas backdrop, which was a painting of Fryeburg, and as I looked at it I realized I had found the Shape from my Manderley dreams. It was Sara. Sara was the Shape and always had been.

No, Mike. That’s close, but it’s not right.

Right or wrong, I’d had enough. I turned, putting my hand on the back of Ki’s head and urging her face down against my chest. Both her arms were around my neck now, clutching with panicky tightness.

I thought I’d have to bull my way back through the crowd—they had let me in easily enough, but they might be a lot less amenable to letting me back out. Don’t fuck with me, boys, I thought. %u don’t want to do that.

And they didn’t. On stage Son Tidwell had taken the band from E to G, someone began to bang a tambourine, and Sara went from “Fishin Blues” to “Dog My Cats” without a single pause. Out here, in front of the stage and below it, the crowd once more drew back from me and my little girl without looking at us or missing a beat as they clapped their work-swollen hands together. One young man with a port-wine stain swimming across the side of his face opened his mouth—at twenty he was already missing half his teeth—and hollered “I3e-HAW!” around a melting glob of tobacco. It was Buddy Jellison from the Village Cafe, I realized… Buddy Jellison magically rolled back in age from sixty-eight to twenty. Then I realized the hair was the wrong shade—light brown instead of black (although he was pushing seventy and looking it in every other way, Bud hadn’t a single white hair in his head). This was Buddy’s grandfather, maybe even his great-grandfather. I didn’t give a shit either way. I only wanted to get out of here.

“Excuse me,” I said, brushing by him.

“There’s no town drunk here, you meddling son of a bitch,” he said, never looking at me and never missing a beat as he clapped. “We all just take turns.”

It’s a dream after all, I thought. It’s a dream and that proves it.

But the smell of tobacco on his breath wasn’t a dream, the smell of the crowd wasn’t a dream, and the weight of the frightened child in my arms wasn’t a dream, either. My shirt was hot and wet where her face was pressed. She was crying.

“Hey, Irish!” Sara called from the stage, and her voice was so like Jo’s that I could have screamed. She wanted me to turn back—I could feel her will working on the sides of my face like fingers—but I wouldn’t do it.

I dodged around three farmers who were passing a ceramic bottle from hand to hand and then I was free of the crowd. The midway lay ahead, wide as Fifth Avenue, and at the end of it was the arch, the steps, The Street, the lake. Home. If I could get to The Street we’d be safe. I was sure of it. “Almost done, Irish!” Sara shrieked after me.

She sounded angry, but not too angry to laugh. “You gonna get what you want, sugar, all the comfort you need, but you want to let me finish my bi’ness. Do you hear me, boy? Just stand clear! Mind me, now!” I began to hurry back the way I had come, stroking Ki’s head, still holding her face against my shirt. Her straw hat fell off and when I grabbed for it, I got nothing but the ribbon, which pulled free of the brim. No matter.

We had to get out of here. On our left was the baseball pitch and some little boy shouting “Willy hit it over the fence, Ma! Willy hit it over the fence!” with monotonous, brain-croggling regularity. We passed the Bingo, where some woman howled that she had won the turkey, by glory, every number was covered with a button and she had won the turkey.

Overhead, the sun dove behind a cloud and the day went dull. Our shadows disappeared. The arch at the end of the midway drew closer with maddening slowness. “Are we home yet?” Ki almost moaned. “I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy.”

“I will,” I said.

“Everything’s going to be all right.” We were passing the Test Your Strength pole, where the young man with the red hair was putting his shirt back on. He looked at me with stolid dislike—the instinctive mistrust of a native for an interloper, per-haps—and I realized I knew him, too. He’d have a grandson named Dickie who would, toward the end of the century to which this fair had been dedicated, own the All-Purpose Garage on Route 68. A woman coming out of the quilting booth stopped and pointed at me. At the same moment her upper lip lifted in a dog’s snarl.

I knew that face, too. From where? Somewhere around town. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to know even if it did. “We never should have come here,” Ki moaned. “I know how you feel,” I said. “But I don’t think we had any choice, hon. We—”

They came out of Freak Alley, perhaps twenty yards ahead. I saw them and stopped. There were seven in all, long-striding men dressed in cutters’

clothes, but four didn’t matter—those four looked faded and white and ghostly. They were sick fellows, maybe dead fellows, and no more dangerous than daguerreotypes. The other three, though, were real. As real as the rest of this place, anyway. The leader was an old man wearing a faded blue Union Army cap. He looked at me with eyes I knew.

Eyes I had seen measuring me over the top of an oxygen mask. “Mike? Why we stoppin?”

“It’s all right, Ki. Just keep your head down. This is all a dream. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning in your own bed.”

“"Kay.” The jacks spread across the midway hand to hand and boot to boot, blocking our way back to the arch and The Street. Old Blue-Cap was in the middle.

The ones on either side of him were much younger, some by maybe as much as half a century. Two of the pale ones, the almost-not-there ones, were standing side-by-side to the old man’s right, and I wondered if I could burst through that part of their line. I thought they were no more flesh than the thing which had thumped the insulation of the cellar wall… but what if I was wrong? “Give her over, son,” the old man said. His voice was reedy and implacable. He held out his hands. It was Max Devore, he had come back, even in death he was seeking custody. Yet it wasn’t him. I knew it wasn’t. The planes of this man’s face were subtly different, the cheeks gaunter, the eyes a brighter blue. “Where am I?” I called to him, accenting the last word heavily, and in front of Angelina’s booth, the man in the turban (a Hindu who perhaps hailed from Sandusky, Ohio) put down his flute and simply watched. The snake-girls stopped dancing and watched, too, slipping their arms around each other and drawing together for comfort. “Where am/, Devore? If our great-grandfathers shit in the same pit, then where am I?”

“Ain’t here to answer your questions. Give her over.”

“I’ll take her, Jared,” one of the younger men-one of those who were really there—said. He looked at Devore with a kind of fawning eagerness that sickened me, mostly because I knew who he was: Bill Dean’s 1 bfhen KINL father. A man who had grown up to be one of the most respected elders in Castle County was all but licking Devore’s boots. Don’t think too badly of him, Jo whispered. Don’t think too badly of any of them. They were very young. “You don’t need to do nothing,” Devore said. His reedy voice was irritated; Fred Dean looked abashed. “He’s going to hand her over on his own. And if he don’t, we’ll take her together.” I looked at the man on the far left, the third of those that seemed totally real, totally there. Was this me? It didn’t look like me. There was something in the face that seemed familiar but-“Hand her over, Irish,” Devore said. “Last chance.”

Devore nodded as if this was exactly what he had expected. “Then we’ll take her. This has got to end. Come on, boys.” They started toward me and as they did I realized who the one on the end—the one in the caulked treewalker boots and flannel loggers’ pants—reminded me of:

Kenny Auster, whose wolfhound would eat cake ’til it busted. Kenny Auster, whose baby brother had been drowned under the pump by Kenny’s father. I looked behind me. The Red-Tops were still playing, Sara was still laughing, shaking her hips with her hands in the sky, and the crowd was still plugging the east end of the midway. That way was no good, anyway. if I went that way, I’d end up raising a little girl in the early years of the twentieth century, trying to make a living by writing penny dread-fuls and dime novels. That might not be so bad. .

but there was a lonely young woman miles and years from here who would miss her. Who might even miss us both. I turned back and saw the jackboys were almost on me. Some of them more here than others, more vital, but all of them dead. All of them damned. I looked at the towhead whose descendants would include Kenny Auster and asked him, “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you men do?” He held out his hands.

“Give her over, Irish. That’s allyou have to do. You and the woman can have more. All the more you want. She’s young, she’ll pop em out like watermelon seeds.”

I was hypnotized, and they would have taken us if not for Kyra. “What’s happening?” she screamed against my shirt. “Something smells! Something smells so bad./ Oh Mike, make it stop/” And I realized I could smell it, too. Spoiled meat and swampgas. Burst tissue and simmering guts. Devore was the most alive of all of them, generating the same crude but powerful magnetism I had felt around his great-grandson, but he was as dead as the rest of them, too: as he neared I could see the tiny bugs which were feeding in his nostrils and the pink corners of his eyes.

Everything down here is death, I thought. Didn’t my own wij9 tell me so?

They reached out their tenebrous hands, first to touch Ki and then to take her. I backed up a step, looked to my right, and saw more ghosts—some coming out of busted windows, some slipping from redbrick chimneys. Holding Kyra in my arms, I ran for the Ghost House. “Get him!”

Jared Devore yelled, startled. “Get him, boys! Get that punk!

Goddamnit!” I sprinted up the wooden steps, vaguely aware of something soft rubbing against my cheek—Ki’s little stuffed dog, still clutched in one of her hands. I wanted to look back and see how close they were getting, but I didn’t dare. if I stumbled-“Hey!” the woman in the ticket booth cawed. She had clouds of gingery hair, makeup that appeared to have been applied with a garden-trowel, and mercifully resembled no one I knew. She was just a carny, just passing through this benighted place.

Lucky her. “Hey, mister, you gotta buy a ticket!” No time, lady, no time. “Stop him!” Devore shouted. “He’s a goddam punk thief! That ain’t his young ’un he’s got! Stop him!” But no one did and I rushed into the darkness of the Ghost House with Ki in my arms.

Beyond the entry was a passage so narrow I had to turn sideways to get down it. Phosphorescent eyes glared at us in the gloom. Up ahead was a growing wooden rumble, a loose sound with a clacking chain beneath it.

Behind us came the clumsy thunder of caulk-equipped loggers’ boots rushing up the stairs outside. The ginger-haired carny was hollering at them now, she was telling them that if they broke anything inside they’d have to give up the goods. “You mind me, you damned rubes!” she shouted.

“That place is for kids, not the likes of you!” The rumble was directly ahead of us. Something was turning. At first I couldn’t make out what it was. “Put me down, Mike!” Kyra sounded excited. “I want to go through by myselfl” I set her on her feet, then looked nervously back over my shoulder. The bright light at the entryway was blocked out as they tried to cram in. “You asses!” Devore yelled. “Not all at the same time! Sweet weeping Jesus!” There was a smack and someone cried out. I faced front just in time to see Kyra dart through the rolling barrel, holding her hands out for balance. Incredibly, she was laughing. I followed, got halfway across, then went down with a thump. “Ooops!” Kyra called from the far side, then giggled as I tried to get up, fell again, and was tumbled all the way over. The bandanna fell out of my bib pocket. A bag of horehound candy dropped from another pocket. I tried to look back, to see if they had got themselves sorted out and were coming. When I did, the barrel hurled me through another inadvertent somersault. Now I knew how clothes felt in a dryer. I crawled to the end of the barrel, got up, took Ki’s hand, and let her lead us deeper into the Ghost House. We got perhaps ten paces before white bloomed around her like a lily and she screamed. Some animal—something that sounded like a huge cat—hissed heavily. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and I was about to jerk her backward into my arms again when the hiss came once more. I felt hot air on my ankles, and Ki’s dress made that bell-shape around her legs again. This time she laughed instead of screaming. “Go, Ki!” I whispered. “Fast.” We went on, leaving the steam-vent behind. There was a mirrored corridor where we were reflected first as squat dwarves and then as scrawny ectomorphs with long white vampire features. I had to urge Kyra on again; she wanted to make faces at herself. Behind us, I heard cursing lumberjacks trying to negotiate the barrel. I could hear Devore cursing, too, but he no longer seemed so… well, so eminent.

There was a sliding-pole that landed us on a big canvas pillow. This made a loud farting noise when we hit it, and Ki laughed until fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, rolling around and kicking her feet in glee. I got my hands under her arms and yanked her up. “Don’t taggle yer own quartermack,” she said, then laughed again. Her fear seemed to have entirely departed. We went down another narrow corridor. It smelled of the fragrant pine from which it had been constructed. Behind one of these walls, two “ghosts” were clanking chains as mechanically as men working on a shoe-factory assembly line, talking about where they were going to take their girls tonight and who was going to bring some “red-eye engine,” whatever that was. I could no longer hear anyone behind us. Kyra led the way confidently, one of her little hands holding one of my big ones, pulling me along. When we came to a door painted with glowing flames and marked THIS WAY TO HADES, she pushed through it with no hesitation at all. Here red isinglass topped the passage like a tinted skylight, imparting a rosy glow I thought far too pleasant for Hades. We went on for what felt like a very long time, and I realized I could no longer hear the calliope, the hearty bong/of the Test Your Strength bell, or Sara and the Red-Tops. Nor was that exactly surprising. We must have walked a quarter of a mile. How could any county fair Ghost House be so big? We came to three doors then, one on the left, one on the right, and one set into the end of the corridor. On one a little red tricycle was painted. On the door facing it was my green IBM typewriter. The picture on the door at the end looked older, somehow—faded and dowdy. It showed a child’s sled. That’s Scooter Larribee’s, I thought. That’s the one Devore stole. A rash of gooseflesh broke out on my arms and back. “Well,” Kyra said brightly, “here are our toys.” She lifted Strickland, presumably so he could see the red trike.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Thank you for taking me away,” she said.

“Those were scary men but the spookyhouse was fun. Nighty-night.

Stricken says nighty-night, too.” It still came out sounding exotic—tiu—like the Vietnamese word for sublime happiness.

Before I could say another word, she had pushed open the door with the trike on it and stepped through. It snapped shut behind her, and as it did I saw the ribbon from her hat. It was hanging out of the bib pocket of the overalls I was wearing. I looked at it a moment, then tried the knob of the door she had just gone through. It wouldn’t turn, and when I slapped my hand against the wood it was like slapping some hard and fabulously dense metal. I stepped back, then cocked my head in the direction from which we’d come. There was nothing. Total silence. This is the between-time, I thought. When people talk about “slipping through the cracks,” this is what they really mean. This is the place where they really go. I3u better get going yourself, Jo told me. If you don’t want to find yourself trapped here, maybe)$rever, you better get going yourself. I tried the knob of the door with the typewriter painted on it. It turned easily. Behind it was another narrow corridor—more wooden walls and the sweet smell of pine. I didn’t want to go in there, something about it made me think of a long coffin, but there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I went, and the door slammed shut behind me. Christ, I thought. I’m in the dark, in a closed-in place. . it’s timej$r one of Michael Noonan’ s world-famous panic attacks. But no bands clamped themselves over my chest, and although my heart-rate was high and my muscles were still jacked on adrenaline, I was under control. Also, I realized, it wasn’t entirely dark. I could only see a little, but enough to make out the walls and the plank floor. I wrapped the dark blue ribbon from Ki’s hat around my wrist, tucking one end underneath so it wouldn’t come loose. Then I began to move forward. I went on for a long time, the corridor turning this way and that, seemingly at random. I felt like a microbe slipping through an intestine. At last I came to a pair of wooden arched doorways. I stood before them, wondering which was the correct choice, and realized I could hear Bunter’s bell faintly through the one to my left. I went that way and as I walked, the bell grew steadily louder. At some point the sound of the bell was joined by the mutter of thunder. The autumn cool had left the air and it was hot again—stifling. I looked down and saw that the biballs and clodhopper shoes were gone. I was wearing thermal underwear and itchy socks. Twice more I came to choices, and each time I picked the opening through which I could hear Bunter’s bell. As I stood before the second pair of doorways, I heard a voice somewhere in the dark say quite clearly: “No, the President’s wife wasn’t hit. That’s his blood on her stockings.” I walked on, then stopped when I realized my feet and ankles no longer itched, that my thighs were no longer sweating into the longjohns. I was wearing the Jockey shorts I usually slept in.

I looked up and saw I was in my own living room, threading my way carefully around the furniture as you do in the dark, trying like hell not to stub your stupid toe. I could see a little better; faint milky light was coming in through the windows. I reached the counter which separates the living room from the kitchen and looked over it at the waggy-cat clock. It was five past five. I went to the sink and turned on the water. When I reached for a glass I saw I was still wearing the ribbon from Ki’s straw hat on my wrist. I unwound it and put it on the counter between the coffee-maker and the kitchen TV. Then I drew myself some cold water, drank it down, and made my way cautiously along the north-wing corridor by the pallid yellow glow of the bathroom nightlight. I peed (y0u-rinated, I could hear Ki saying), then went into the bedroom. The sheets were rumpled, but the bed didn’t have the orgiastic look of the morning after my dream of Sara, Mattie, and Jo.

Why would it? I’d gotten out of it and had myself a little sleepwalk. An extraordinarily vivid dream of the Fryeburg Fair. Except that was bullshit, and not just because I had the blue silk ribbon from Ki’s hat.

None of it had the quality of dreams on waking, where what seemed plausible becomes immediately ridiculous and all the colors—both those bright and those ominous—fade at once. I raised my hands to my face, cupped them over my nose, and breathed deeply. Pine. When I looked, I even saw a little smear of sap on one pinky finger. I sat on the bed, thought about dictating what I’d just experienced into the Memo-Scriber, then flopped back on the pillows instead. I was too tired. Thunder rumbled. I closed my eyes, began to drift away, and then a scream ripped through the house. It was as sharp as the neck of a broken bottle. I sat up with a yell, clutching at my chest.

It was Jo. I had never heard her scream like that in our life together, but I knew who it was, just the same. “Stop hurting her!” I shouted into the darkness. “Whoever you are, stop hurting her!”

She screamed again, as if something with a knife, clamp, or hot poker took a malicious delight in disobeying me. It seemed to come from a distance this time, and her third scream, while just as agonized as the first two, was farther away still. They were diminishing as the little boy’s sobbing had diminished.

A fourth scream floated out of the dark, then Sara was silent.

Breathless, the house breathed around me. Alive in the heat, aware in the faint sound of dawn thunder.

II C PI;P T E-: R I was finally able to get into the zone, but couldn’t do anything once I got there. I keep a steno pad handy for notes—character lists, page references, date chronologies—and I doodled in there a little bit, but the sheet of paper in the IBM remained blank. There was no thundering heartbeat, no throbbing eyes or difficulty breathing—no panic attack, in other words—but there was no story, either. Andy Drake, John Shackleford, Ray Garraty, the beautiful Regina Whiting… they stood with their backs turned, refusing to speak or move. The manuscript was sitting in its accustomed place on the left side of the typewriter, the pages held down with a pretty chunk of quartz I’d found on the lane, but nothing was happening. Zilch.

I recognized an irony here, perhaps even a moral. For years I had fled the problems of the real world, escaping into various Narnias of my imagination. Now the real world had filled up with bewildering thickets, there were things with teeth in some of them, and the wardrobe was locked against me.

Kyra, I had printed, putting her name inside a scalloped shape that was supposed to be a cabbage rose. Below it I had drawn a piece of bread with a beret tipped rakishly on the top crust. Noonan’s conception of French toast. The letters L.B. surrounded with curlicues. A shirt with a rudimentary duck on it. Beside this I had printed QUACK QUACK. Below QUACK QUACK I had written Ought toffy away “Bon 14yage.”

At another spot on the sheet I had written Dean, Auster, and Devore.

They were the ones who had seemed the most there, the most dangerous.

Because they had descendants? But surely all seven of those jacks must, mustn’t they? In those days most families were whoppers. And where had I been? I had asked, but Devore hadn’t wanted to say.

It didn’t feel any more like a dream at nine-thirty on a sullenly hot Sunday morning. Which left exactly what? Visions? Time-travel? And if there was a purpose to such travel, what was it? What was the message, and who was trying to send it? I remembered clearly what I’d said just before passing from the dream in which I had sleepwalked out to Jo’s studio and brought back my typewriter: I don’t believe these lies. Nor would I now. Until I could see at least some of the truth, it might be safer to believe nothing at all.

At the top of the sheet upon which I was doodling, in heavily stroked letters, I printed the word Danoevd, then circled it. From the circle I drew an arrow to Kyra’s name. From her name I drew an arrow to Ought toffy away “Bon [4yage” and added MATTI.

Below the bread wearing the beret I drew a little telephone. Above it I put a cartoon balloon with R-R-RINGGG! in it. As I finished this, the cordless phone rang. It was sitting on the deck rail. I circled: rsrle and picked up the phone.

“Mike?” She sounded excited. Happy. Relieved.

“Yeah,” I said. “How are you?”

“Great!” she said, and I circled L.B. on my pad.

“Lindy Briggs called ten minutes ago—I just got off the phone with her.

Mike, she’s giving me my job back! Isn’t that wonderful?”

Sure. And wonderful how it would keep her in town. I crossed out Ought to fly away “Bon [4yage,” knowing that Mattie wouldn’t go. Not now. And how could I ask her to? I thought again If only I knew a little more…

“Mike? Are you—”

“It’s very wonderful,” I said. In my mind’s eye I could see her standing in the kitchen, drawing the kinked telephone cord through her fingers, her legs long and coltish below her denim shorts. I could see the shirt she was wearing, a white tee with a yellow duck paddling across the front. “I hope Lindy had the good grace to sound ashamed of herself.” I circled the tee-shirt I’d drawn.

“She did. And she was frank enough to kind of… well, disarm me. She said the Whitmore woman talked to her early last week. Was very frank and to the point, Lindy said. I was to be let go immediately. If that happened, the money, computer equipment, and software Devore funnelled into the library would keep coming. If it didn’t, the flow of goods and money would stop immediately. She said she had to balance the good of the community against what she knew was wrong… she said it was one of the toughest decisions she ever had to make…”

“Uh-huh.” On the pad my hand moved of its own volition like a planchette gliding over a Ouija board, printing the words PLEASE CAN’T I PLEASE.

“There’s probably some truth in it, but Mattie… how much do you suppose Lindy makes?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet it’s more than any three other small-town librarians in the state of Maine combined.”

In the background I heard Ki: “Can I talk, Mattie? Can I talk to Mike?

Please can’t I please?”

“In a minute, hon.” Then, to me: “Maybe. All I know is that I have my job back, and I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.”

On the page, I drew a book. Then I drew a series of interlocked circles between it and the duck tee-shirt.

“Ki wants to talk to you,” Mattie said, laughing. “She says the two of you went to the Fryeburg Fair last night.”

“Whoa, you mean I had a date with a pretty girl and slept through it?”

“Seems that way. Are you ready for her?”

“Ready.”

“Okay, here comes the chatterbox.”

There was a rustling as the phone changed hands, then Ki was there. “I taggled you at the Fair, Mike! I taggled my own quartermack!”

“Did you?” I asked “That was quite a dream, wasn’t it, Ki?” There was a long silence at the other end. I could imagine Mattie wondering what had happened to her telephone chatterbox. At last Ki said in a hesitating voice: “You there too.” Tiu. “We saw the snake-dance ladies… the pole with the bell on top… we went in the spookyhouse… you fell down in the barrel! It wasn’t a dream… was it?” I could have convinced her that it was, but all at once that seemed like a bad idea, one that was dangerous in its own way. I said: “You had on a pretty hat and a pretty dress.”

“I3ah!” Ki sounded enormously relieved. “And you had on—”

“Kyra, stop. Listen to me.” She stopped at once. “It’s better if you don’t talk about that dream too much, I think. To your mom or to anyone except me.”

“Except you.”

“Yes. And the same with the refrigerator people. Okay?”

“Okay. Mike, there was a lady in Mattie’s clothes.”

“I know,” I said. It was all right for her to talk, I was sure of it, but I asked anyway: “Where’s Mattie now?”

“Waterin the flowers. We got lots of flowers, a billion at least. I have to clean up the table. It’s a chore.

I don’t mind, though. I like chores. We had French toast. We always do on Sundays. It’s yummy, ’specially with strawberry syrup.”

“I know,” I said, drawing an arrow to the piece of bread wearing the beret. “French toast is great. Ki, did you tell your mom about the lady in her dress?”

“No. I thought it might scare her.” She dropped her voice. “Here she comes I”

“That’s all right… but we’ve got a secret, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now can I talk to Mattie again?”

“Okay.” Her voice moved off a little.

“Mommy-bommy, Mike wants to talk to you.” Then she came back. “Will you bizzit us today? We could go on another picnic.”

“I can’t today, Ki. I have to work.”

“Mattie never works on Sunday.”

“Well, when I’m writing a book, I write every day. I have to, or else I’ll forget the story. Maybe we’ll have a picnic on Tuesday, though. A barbecue picnic at your house.”

“Is it long ’til Tuesday?”

“Not too long. Day after tomorrow.” “Is it long to write a book?”

“Medium-long.” I could hear Mattie telling Ki to give her the phone. “I will, just one more second. Mike?”

“I’m here, Ki.”

“I love you.” I was both touched and terrified. For a moment I was sure my throat was going to lock up the way my chest used to when I tried to write. Then it cleared and I said, “Love you, too, Ki.”

“Here’s Mattie.”

Again there was the rustly sound of the telephone changing hands, then Mattie said: “Did that refresh your recollection of your date with my daughter, sir?”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly refreshed hers.” There was a link between Mattie and me, but it didn’t extend to this—I was sure of it. She was laughing. I loved the way she sounded this morning and I didn’t want to bring her down… but I didn’t want her mistaking the white line in the middle of the road for the crossmock, either. “Mattie, you still need to be careful, okay? Just because Lindy Briggs offered you your old job back doesn’t mean everyone in town is suddenly your friend.”

“I understand that,” she said. I thought again about asking if she’d consider taking Ki up to Derry for awhile—they could live in my house, stay for the duration of the summer if that was what it took for things to return to normal down here. Except she wouldn’t do it. When it came to accepting my offer of high-priced New York legal talent, she’d had no choice. About this she did. Or thought she did, and how could I change her mind? I had no logic, no connected facts; all I had was a vague dark shape, like something lying beneath nine inches of snowblind ice.

“I want you to be careful of two men in particular,” I said. “One is Bill Dean. The other is Kenny Auster. He’s the one—”

“—with the big dog who wears the neckerchief. He—”

“That’s Booberry!” Ki called from the middle distance. “Booberry licked my facie!”

“Go out and play, hon,” Mattie said. “I’m clearun the table.”

“You can finish later. Go on outside now.” There was a pause as she watched Ki go out the door, taking Strickland with her. Although the kid had left the trailer, Mattie still spoke in the lowered tone of someone who doesn’t want to be overheard. “Are you trying to scare me?”

“No,” I said, drawing repeated circles around the word DANGER. “But I want you to be careful. Bill and Kenny may have been on Devore’s team, like Footman and Osgood. Don’t ask me why I think that might be, because I have no satisfactory answer.

It’s only a feeling, but since I got back on the TR, my feelings are different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you wearing a tee-shirt with a duck on it?”

“How do you know that? Did Ki tell you?”

“Did she take the little stuffed dog from her Happy Meal out with her just now?” A long pause. At last she said “My God” in a voice so Low I could hardly hear it. Then again: “How—”

“I don’t know how. I don’t know if you’re still in a… a bad situation, either, or why you might be, but I feel that you are. That you both are.” I could have said more, but I was afraid she’d think I’d gone entirely off the rails. “He’s dead!” she burst out.

“That old man is dead! Why can’t he leave us alone?”

“Maybe he has.

Maybe I’m wrong about all this. But there’s no harm in being careful, is there?”

“No,” she said. “Usually that’s true.”

“Usually?”

“Why don’t you come and see me, Mike? Maybe we could go to the Fair together.”

D-k3 %.31IDK31NE “Maybe this fall we will. All three of us.”

“I’d like that.”

“In the meantime, I’m thinking about the key."

“Thinking is half your problem, Mike,” she said, and laughed again. Ruefully, I thought. And I saw what she meant. What she didn’t seem to understand was that feeling was the other half. It’s a sling, and in the end I think it rocks most of us to death.

I worked for a while,’ then carried the IBM back into the house and left the manuscript on top. I was done with it, at least for the time being.

No more looking for the way back through the wardrobe; no more Andy Drake and John Shackleford until this was over. And, as I dressed in long pants and a button-up shirt for the first time in what felt like weeks, it occurred to me that perhaps something—some force—had been trying to sedate me with the story I was telling. With the ability to work again. It made sense; work had always been my drug of choice, even better than booze or the Mellaril I still kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Or maybe work was only the delivery system, the hypo with all the dreamy dreams inside it. Maybe the real drug was the zone. Being in the zone. Feeling it, you sometimes hear the basketball players say. I was in the zone and I was really feeling it. I grabbed the keys to the Chevrolet off the counter and looked at the fridge as I did. The magnets were circled again. In the middle was a message I’d seen before, one that was now instantly understandable, thanks to the extra Magnabet letters: help her “I’m doing my best,” I said, and went out.

Three miles north on Route 68—by then you’re on the part of it which used to be known as Castle Rock Road-there’s a greenhouse with a shop in front of it. Slips ’n Greens, it’s called, and Jo used to spend a fair amount of time there, buying gardening supplies or just noodling with the two women who ran the place. One of them was Helen Auster, Kenny’s wife.

I pulled in there at around ten o’clock that Sunday morning (it was open, of course; during tourist season almost every Maine shopkeeper turns heathen) and parked next to a Beamer with New York plates. I paused long enough to hear the weather forecast on the radio—contin-ued hot and humid for another forty-eight hours at least—and then got out. A woman wearing a bathing suit, a skort, and a giant yellow sunhat emerged from the shop with a bag of peat moss cradled in her arms. She gave me a little smile. I returned it with eighteen per cent interest. She was from New York, and that meant she wasn’t a Martian. The shop was even hotter and’ damper than the white morning outside. Lila Proulx, the co-owner, was on the phone. There was a little fan beside the cash register and she was standing directly in front of it, flapping the front of her sleeveless blouse. She saw me and twiddled her fingers in a wave. I twiddled mine back, feeling like someone else. Work or no work, I was still zoning. Still feeling it. I walked around the shop, picking up a few things almost at random, watching Lila out of the corner of my eye and waiting for her to get off the phone so I could talk to her… and all the time my own private hyperdrive was humming softly away. At last she hung up and I came to the counter. “Michael Noonan, what a sight for sore eyes you are!” she said, and began ringing up my purchases. “I was awfully sorry to hear about Johanna. Got to get that right up front. Jo was a pet.”

“Thanks, Lila.”

“Welcome. Don’t need to say any more about it, but with a thing like that it’s best to put it right up front. I’ve always believed it, always will believe it. Right up front. Going to do a little gardening, are you?” Gointer do a little ga’adnin, aaa you? “If it ever cools off.”

“Ayuh! Isn’t it wicked?” She flapped the top of her blouse again to show me how wicked it was, then pointed at one of my purchases. “Want this one in a special bag? Always safe, never sorry, that’s my motto.” I nodded, then looked at the little blackboard tilted against the counter.

FRESH BLUEBERRYS, the chalked message read. THE CROP IS IN!

“I’ll have a pint of berries, too,” I said. “As long as they’re not Friday’s. I can do better than Friday.” She nodded vigorously, as if to say she knew damned well I could. “These were on the bush yest’y. That fresh enough for you?”

“Good as gold,” I said. “Blueberry’s the name of Kenny’s dog, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t he a funny one? God, I love a big dog, if he’s behaved.” She turned, got a pint of berries from her little fridge, and put them in another bag for me. “Where’s Helen?” I asked. “Day off?.”

“Not her,” Lila said. “If she’s in town, you can’t get her out of this place ’less you beat her with a stick. She and Kenny and the kids went down Taxachusetts. Them and her brother’s family club together and get a seaside cottage two weeks every summer. They all went. Old Blueberry, he’ll chase seagulls until he drops.” She laughed—it was a loud and hearty one. It made me think of Sara Tidwell. Or maybe it was the way Lila looked at me as she did it. There was no laughter in her eyes. They were small and considering, coldly curious. Would youj3r Christ’s sake quit it? I told myself. They can’t all be in on it together, Mike/ Couldn’t they, though? There is such a thing as town consciousness—anyone who doubts it has never been to a New England town meeting. Where there’s a consciousness, is there not likely to be a subconscious? And if Kyra and I were doing the old mind-meld thing, could not other people in TR-90 also be doing it, perhaps without even knowing it? We all shared the same air and land; we shared the lake and the aquifer which lay below everything, buried water tasting of rock and minerals. We shared The Street as well, that place where good pups and vile dogs could walk side-by-side. As I started out with my purchases in a cloth carry-handle bag, Lila said: “What a shame about Royce Merrill.

Did you hear?”

“No,” I said. “Fell down his cellar stairs yest’y evening. What a man his age was doing going down such a steep flight of steps is beyond me, but I suppose once you get to his age, you have your own reasons for doing things.”

Is he dead? I started to ask, then rephrased. It wasn’t the way the question was expressed on the TR. “Did he pass?”

“Not yet. Motton Rescue took him to Castle County General. He’s in a coma.” Comber, she said it.

“They don’t think he’ll ever wake up, poor fella. There’s a piece of history that’ll die with him.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Goodriance, I thought. “Does he have children?”

“No. There have been Merrills on the TR for two hundred years; one died at Cemetery Ridge. But all the old families are dying out now. You have a nice day, Mike.” She smiled. Her eyes remained flat and considering. I got into my Chevy, put the bag with my purchases in it on the passenger seat, then simply sat for a moment, letting the air conditioner pour cool air on my face and neck.

Kenny Auster was in Taxachusetts. That was good. A step in the right direction. But there was still my caretaker.

“Bill’s not here,” Yvette said. She stood in the door, blocking it as well as she could (you can only do so much in that regard when you’re five-three and weigh roughly a hundred pounds), studying me with the gimlet gaze of a nightclub bouncer denying re-entry to a drunk who’s been tossed out on his ear once already. I was on the porch of the neat-as-ever-you-saw Cape Cod which stands at the top of Peabody Hill and looks all the way across New Hampshire and into Vermont’s back yard.

Bill’s equipment sheds were lined up to the left of the house, all of them painted the same shade of gray, each with its own sign: DEAN CARETAKING, No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3. Parked in front of No. 2 was Bill’s Dodge Ram. I looked at it, then back at Yvette. Her lips tightened a little more. Another notch and I figured they’d be gone entirely. “He went to North Conway with Butch Wiggins,” she said. “They went in Butch’s truck. To get—”

“No need lying for me, dear heart,” Bill said from behind her. It was still over an hour shy of noon, and on the Lord’s Day to boot, but I had never heard a man who sounded more tired.

He clumped down the hall, and as he came out of its shadows and into the light—the sun was finally burning through the murk—I saw that Bill now looked his age. Every year of it, and maybe ten more to grow on. He was wearing his usual khaki shirt and pants—Bill Dean would be a Dickies man until the day he died—but his shoulders looked slumped, almost sprained, a-s if he’d spent a week lugging buckets that were too heavy for him. The falling-away of his face had finally begun, an indefinable something that makes the eyes look too big, the jaw too prominent, the mouth a bit loose. He looked old. There were no children to carry on the family line of work, either; all the old families were dying out, Lila Proulx had said. And maybe that was a good thing. “Bill—” she began, but he raised one of his big hands to stop her. The callused fingertips shook a little. “Go in the kitchen a dight,” he told her. “I need to talk to my corn-padre here. “T’won’t take long.” Yvette looked at him, and when she looked back at me, she had indeed reached zero lip-surface. There was just a black line where they had been, like a mark dashed off with a pencil. I saw with woeful clarity that she hated me. “Don’t you tire him out,” she said to me. “He hasn’t been sleepin. It’s the heat.” She walked back down the hall, all stiff back and high shoulders, disappearing into shadows that were probably cool. It always seems to be cool in the houses of old people, have you noticed? Bill came out onto the porch and put his big hands into the pockets of his pants without offering to shake with me. “I ain’t got nothin to say to you. You and me’s quits.”

“Why, Bill? Why are we quits?” He looked west, where the hills stepped into the burning summer haze, disappearing in it before they could become mountains, and said nothing. “I’m trying to help that young woman.” He gave me a look from the corners of his eyes that I could read well enough. ’gkyuh. Help y’self right into her pants. I see men come up from New York and New Jersey with their young girls. Summer weekends, ski weekends, it don’t matter. Men who go with girls that age always look the same, got their tongues run out even when their mouths are shut. Now you look the same.”

I felt both angry and embarrassed, but I resisted the urge to chase him in that direction. That was what he wanted. “What happened here?” I asked him. “What did your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers do to Sara Tidwell and her family? You didn’t just move them on, did you?”

“Didn’t have to,” Bill said, looking past me at the hills. His eyes were moist almost to the point of tears, but his jaw was set and hard. “They moved on themselves. Never was a nigger who didn’t have an itchy foot, my dad used to say.”

“Who set the trap that killed Son Tidwell’s boy? Was it your father, Bill? Was it Fred?” His eyes moved; his jaw never did. “I dunno what you’re talking about.”

“I hear him crying in my house. Do you know what it’s like to hear a dead child crying in your house? Some bastard trapped him like a weasel and I hear him crying in my fucking house./”

“You’re going to need a new caretaker,” Bill said. “I can’t do for you no more. Don’t want to. What I want is for you to get off my porch.”

“What’s happening? Help me, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’ll help you with the toe of my shoe if you don’t get going on your own.

I looked at him a moment longer, taking in the wet eyes and the set jaw, his divided nature written on his face.

“I lost my wife, you old bastard,” I said. “A woman you claimed to Now his jaw moved at last. He looked at me with surprise and injury.

“That didn’t happen here,” he said. “That didn’t have anything to do with here. She might’ve been off the TR because… well, she might’ve had her reasons to be off the TR… but she just had a stroke. Would have happened anywhere. Anywhere.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do, either. Somethingjllowed her to Derry, maybe because she was pregnant…” Bill’s eyes widened. I gave him a chance to say something, but he didn’t take it.”… or maybe just because she knew too much.”

“She had a stroke.” Bill’s voice wasn’t quite even. “I read the obituary myself. She had a damn stroke.”

“What did she find out? Talk to me, Bill. Please.” There was a long pause. Until it was over I allowed myself the luxury of thinking I might actually be getting through to him. “I’ve only got one more thing to say to you, Mike—stand back. For the sake of your immortal soul, stand back and let things run their course. They will whether you do or don’t. This river has almost come to the sea; it won’t be dammed by the likes of you. Stand back. For the love of Christ.” Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? God’s butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?

Bill turned and walked to his door, the heels of his workboots clod-ding on the painted boards. “Stay away from Mattie and Ki,” I said. “If you so much as go near that trailer—” He turned back, and the hazy sunshine glinted on the tracks below his eyes. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his cheeks. “I ain’t stirrin from this house. I wish to God I’d never come back from my vacation in the first place, but I did mostly on your account, Mike. Those two down on Wasp Hill have nothing to fear from me. No, not from me.” He went inside and closed the door. I stood there looking at it, feeling unreal—surely I could not have had such a deadly conversation with Bill Dean, could I? Bill who had reproached me for not letting folks down here share—and perhaps ease—my grief for Jo, Bill who had welcomed me back so warmly? Then I heard a clack sound. He might not have locked his door while he was at home in his entire life, but he had locked it now. The clack was very clear in the breathless July air. It told me everything I had to know about my long friendship with Bill Dean. I turned and walked back to my car, my head down. Nor did I turn when I heard a window run up behind me. “Don’t you ever come back here, you town bastard!” Yvette Dean cried across the sweltering dooryard. “You’ve broken his heart! Don’t you ever come back! Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever!”

“Please,” Mrs. M. said. “Don’t ask me any more questions, Mike. I can’t afford to get in Bill Dean’s bad books, any more’n my ma could afford to get into Normal Auster’s or Fred Dean’s.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. ’11 1 want to know is—”

“In this part of the world caretakers pretty well run the whole show. If they say to a summer fella that he should hire this carpenter or that ’lectrician, why, that’s who the summer fella hires. Or if a caretaker says this one should be fired because he ain’t proving reliable, he is fired. Or she. Because what goes once for plumbers and landscapers and ’lectri-cians has always gone twice for housekeepers. If you want to be recom-mended-and stay recommended—you have to keep on the sunny side of people like Fred and Bill Dean, or Normal and Kenny Auster. Don’t you see?” She was almost pleading. “When Bill found out I told you about what Normal Auster did to Kerry, oooo he was so mad at me.”

“Kenny Auster’s brother—the one Normal drowned under the pump—his name was Kerry?”

“Txyuh. I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, think it’s cute. Why, I went to school with a brother and sister named Roland and Rolanda Therriault, I think Roland’s in Manchester now, and Rolanda married that boy from—”

“Brenda, just answer one question. I’ll never tell. Please?” I waited, my breath held, for the click that would come when she put her telephone back in its cradle. Instead, she spoke three words in a soft, almost regretful voice. “What is it?”

“Who was Carla Dean?” I waited through another long pause, my hand playing with the ribbon that had come off Ki’s turn-of-the-century straw hat. “You dassn’t tell anyone I told you anything,” she said at last. “I won’t.”

“Carla was Bill’s twin sister.

She died sixty-five years ago, during the time of the fires.” The fires Bill claimed had been set by Ki’s grand-father—his going-away present to the TR. “I don’t know just how it happened. Bill never talks about it. If you tell him I told you, I’ll never make another bed in the TR.

He’ll see to it.” Then, in a hopeless voice, she said: “He may know anyway.”

Based on my own experiences and surmises, I guessed she might be right about that. But even if she was, she’d have a check from me every month for the rest of her working life. I had no intention of telling her that over the telephone, though—it would scald her Yankee soul. Instead I thanked her, assured her again of my discretion, and hung up. I sat at the table for a moment, staring blankly at Bunter, then said: “Who’s here?” No answer. “Come on,” I said. “Don’t be shy. Let’s go nineteen or ninety-two down. Barring that, let’s talk.” Still no answer. Not so much as a shiver of the bell around the stuffed moose’s neck. I spied the scribble of notes I’d made while talking to Jo’s brother and drew them toward me. I had put Kia, Kyra, Kito, and Carla in a box. Now I scribbled out the bottom line of that box and added the name Kerry to the list. I’ve known a lot ofsolks name their kids alike, Mrs. M. had said. They think it’s cute. I didn’t think it was cute; I thought it was creepy. It occurred to me that at least two of these soundalikes had drowned—Kerry Auster under a pump, Kia Noonan in her mother’s dying body when she wasn’t much bigger than a sunflower seed. And I had seen the ghost of a third drowned child in the lake. Kito? Was that one Kito?

Or was Kito the one who had died of blood-poisoning? They name their kids alike, they think it’s cute. How many soundalike kids had there been to start with? How many were left? I thought the answer to the first question didn’t matter, and that I knew the answer to the second one already. This river has almost come to the sea, Bill had said.

Carla, Kerry, Kito, Kia… all gone. Only Kyra Devote was left. I got up so fast and hard that I knocked over my chair. The clatter in the silence made me cry out. I was leaving, and right now. No more telephone calls, no more playing Andy Drake, Private Detective, no more depositions or half-assed wooings of the lady fair. I should have followed my instincts and gotten the fuck out of Dodge that first night.

Well, I’d go now, just get in the Chevy and haul ass for Der-Bunter’s bell jangled furiously. I turned and saw it bouncing around his neck as if batted to and fro by a hand I couldn’t see. The sliding door giving on the deck began to fly open and clap shut like something hooked to a pulley. The book of ugh Stuff crossword puzzles on the end-table and the DSS program guide blew open, their pages riffling.

There was a series of rattling thuds across the floor, as if something enormous were crawling rapidly toward me, pounding its fists as it came.

A draft—not cold but warm, like the rush of air produced by a subway train on a summer night—buffeted past me. In it I heard a strange voice which seemed to be saying Bye-BY, bye-BY, bye-BY, as if wishing me a good trip home. Then, as it dawned on me that the voice was actually saying Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, something struck me and knocked me violently forward. It felt like a large soft fist. I buckled over the table, clawing at it to stay up, overturning the lazy susan with the salt and pepper shakers on it, the napkin holder, the little vase Mrs. M. had filled with daisies. The vase rolled off the table and shattered. The kitchen TV blared on, some politician talking about how inflation was on the march again. The CD player started up, drowning out the politician; it was the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Sara Tidwell’s “I Regret You, Baby.” Upstairs, one smoke alarm went off, then another, then a third.

They were joined a moment later by the warble-whoop of the Chevy’s car alarm. The whole world was cacophony. Something hot and pillowy seized my wrist. My hand shot forward like a piston and slammed down on the steno pad. I watched as it pawed clumsily to a blank page, then seized the pencil which lay nearby. I gripped it like a dagger and then something wrote with it, not guiding my hand but raping it. The hand moved slowly at first, almost blindly, then picked up speed until it was flying, almost tearing through the sheet:

I!

I had almost reached the bottom of the page when the cold descended again, that outer cold that was like sleet in January, chilling my skin and crackling the snot in my nose and sending two shuddery puffs of white air from my mouth. My hand clenched and the pencil snapped in two.

Behind me, Bunter’s bell rang out one final furious convulsion before falling silent. Also from behind me came a peculiar double pop, like the sound of champagne corks being drawn. Then it was over. Whatever it had been or however many they had been, it was finished. I was alone again.

I turned off the CD player just as Mick and Keith moved on to a white-boy version of Howling Wolf, then ran upstairs and pushed the reset buttons on the smoke-detectors. I leaned out the window of the big guest bedroom while I was up there, aimed the fob of my keyring down at the Chevrolet, and pushed the button on it. The alarm quit. With the worst of the noise gone I could hear the TV cackling away in the kitchen. I went down, killed it, then froze with my hand still on the OFF button, looking at Jo’s annoying waggy-cat clock. Its tail had finally stopped switching, and its big plastic eyes lay on the floor.

They had popped right out of its head.

I went down to the Village Cafe for supper, snagging the last Sunday legram from the rack (COMPUTER MOGUL DEVORE DIES IN WESTERN MAINE TOWN WHERE HE GREW UP, the headline read) before sitting down at the counter.

The accompanying photo was a studio shot of Devore that looked about thirty years old. He was smiling. Most people do that quite naturally.

On Devore’s face it looked like a learned skill. I ordered the beans that were left over from Buddy Jellison’s Satur-day-night beanhole supper. My father wasn’t much for aphorisms—in my family dispensing nuggets of wisdom was Mom’s job—but as Daddy warmed up the Saturday-night yelloweyes in the oven on Sunday afternoon, he would invariably say that beans and beef stew were better the second day. I guess it stuck. The only other piece of fatherly wisdom I can remember receiving was that you should always wash your hands after you took a shit in a bus station.

While I was reading the story on Devore, Audrey came over and told me that Royce Merrill had passed without recovering consciousness. The funeral would be Tuesday afternoon at Grace Baptist, she said. Most of the town would be there, many folks just to see Ila Meserve awarded the Boston Post cane. Did I think I’d get over? No, I said, probably not. I thought it prudent not to add that I’d likely be attending a victory party at Mattie Devore’s while Royce’s funeral was going on down the road.

The usual late-Sunday-afternoon flow of customers came and went while I ate, people ordering burgers, people ordering beans, people ordering chicken salad sandwiches, people buying sixpacks. Some were from the TR, some from away. I didn’t notice many of them, and no one spoke to me. I have no idea who left the napkin on my newspaper, but when I put down the A section and turned to find the sports, there it was. I picked it up, meaning only to put it aside, and saw what was written on the back in big dark letters: GET OFF THE TR.

I never found out who left it there. I guess it could have been any of them.

I!

Te murk came back and transformed that Sunday night’s dusk into a thing of decadent beauty. The sun turned red as it slid down toward the hills and the haze picked up the glow, turning the western sky into a nosebleed. I sat out on the deck and watched it, trying to do a crossword puzzle and not getting very far. When the phone rang, I dropped gh Stuff on top of my manuscript as I went to answer it. I was tired of looking at the title of my book every time I passed.

“Hello?”

“What’s going on up there?” John Storrow demanded. He didn’t even bother to say hi. He didn’t sound angry, though; he sounded totally pumped.

“I’m missing the whole goddam soap opera!”

“I invited myself to lunch on Tuesday,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s good, the more the merrier.” He sounded as if he absolutely meant it. “What a summer, huh? What a summer! Anything happen just lately? Earthquakes? Volcanoes? Mass suicides?”

“No mass suicides, but the old guy died,” I said.

“Shit, the whole world knows Max Devore kicked it,” he said. “Surprise me, Mike! Stun me! Make me holler boy-howdy!”

“No, the other old guy. Royce Merrill.”

“I don’t know who you—oh, wait. The one with the gold cane who looked like an exhibit from Jurassic Park?”

“That’s him.”

“Bummer. Otherwise. .?”

“Otherwise everything’s under control,” I said, then thought of the popped-out eyes of the cat-clock and almost laughed. What stopped me was a kind of surety that Mr. Good Humor Man was just an act—John had really called to ask what, if anything, was going on between me and Mattie. And what was I going to say? Nothing yet? One kiss, one instant blue-steel ham-on, the fundamental things apply as time goes by?

But John had other things on his mind. “Listen, Michael, I called because I’ve got something to tell you. I think you’ll be both amused and amazed.”

“A state we all crave,” I said. “Lay it on me.”

“Rogette Whitmore called, and… you didn’t happen to give her my parents’ number, did you? I’m back in New York now, but she called me in Philly.”

“I didn’t have your parents’ number. You didn’t leave it on either of your machines.”

“Oh, right.” No apology; he seemed too excited to think of such mundanities. I began to feel excited myself, and I didn’t even know what the hell was going on. “I gave it to Mattie. Do you think the Whit-more woman called Mattie to get it? Would Mattie give it to her?”

“I’m not sure that if Mattie came upon Rogette flaming in a thoroughfare, she’d piss on her to put her out.”

“Vulgar, Michael, trs vulgarino.” But he was laughing. “Maybe Whit-more got it the same way Devore got yours.”

“Probably so,” I said. “I don’t know what’ll happen in the months ahead, but right now I’m sure she’s still got access to Max Devore’s personal control panel. And if anyone knows how to push the buttons on it, it’s probably her. Did she call from Palm Springs?”

“Uh-huh. She said she’d just finished a preliminary meeting with Devore’s attorneys concerning the old man’s will. According to her, Grampa left Mattie Devote eighty million dollars.”

I was struck silent. I wasn’t amused yet, but I was certainly amazed.

“Gets ya, don’t it?” John said gleefully.

“You mean he left it to Kyra,” I said at last. “Left it in trust to Kyra.”

“No, that’s just what he did not do. I asked Whitmore three times, but by the third I was starting to understand. There was method in his madness. Not much, but a little. You see, there’s a condition. If he left the money to the minor child instead of to the mother, the condition would have no weight. It’s funny when you consider that Mattie isn’t long past minor status herself.”

“Funny,” I agreed, and thought of her dress sliding between my hands and her smooth bare waist. I also thought of Bill Dean saying that men who went with girls that age always looked the same, had their tongues run out even if their mouths were shut.

“What string did he put on the money?”

“That Mattie remain on the TR for one year following Devore’s death—until July 17, 1999. She can leave on day-trips, but she has to be tucked up in her TR-90 bed every night by nine o’clock, or else the legacy is forfeit. Did you ever hear such a bullshit thing in your life?

Outside of some old George Sanders movie, that is?”

“No,” I said, and recalled my visit to the Fryeburg Fair with Kyra. Even in death he’s seeking custody, I had thought, and of course this was the same thing. He wanted them here. Even in death he wanted them on the TR. “It won’t fly?” I asked.

“Of course it won’t fly. Fucking crackpot might as well have written he’d give her eighty million dollars if she used blue tampons for a year. But she’ll get the eighty mil, all right. My heart is set on it.

I’ve already talked to three of our estate guys, and… you don’t think I should bring one of them up with me on Tuesday, do you? Will Stevenson’ll be the point man in the estate phase, if Mattie agrees.” He was all but babbling. He hadn’t had a thing to drink, I’d’ye bet the farm on it, but he was sky-high on all the possibilities. We’d gotten to the happily-ever-after part of the fairy tale, as far as he was concerned; Cinderella comes home from the ball through a cash cloudburst.

”… course Will’s a little bit old,” John was saying, “about three hundred or so, which means he’s not exactly a fun guy at a party, but…”

“Leave him home, why don’t you?” I said. “There’ll be plenty of time to carve up Devore’s will later on. And in the immediate future, I don’t think Mattie’s going to have any problem observing the bullshit condition. She just got her job back, remember?”

“Yeah, the white buffalo drops dead and the whole herd scatters!” John exulted. “Look at em go! And the new multimillionaire goes back to filing books and mailing out overdue notices! Okay, Tuesday we’ll just party.”

“Good.”

“Party ’til we puke.”

“Well… maybe us older folks will just party until we’re mildly nauseated, would that be all right?”

“Sure. i’ve already called Romeo Bissonette, and he’s going to bring George Kennedy, the private detective who got all that hilarious shit on Durgin.

Bissonette says Kennedy’s a scream when he gets a drink or two in him. I thought I’d bring some steaks from Peter Luger’s, did I tell you that?”

“I don’t believe you did.”

“Best steaks in the world. Michael, do you realize what’s happened to that young woman? Eighty million dollars!”

“She’ll be able to replace Scoutie.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Will you come in tomorrow night or on Tuesday?”

“Tuesday morning around ten, into Castle County Airport. New England Air. Mike, are you all right? You sound odd.”

“I’m all right. I’m where I’m supposed to be. I think.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I had wandered out onto the deck. In the distance thunder rumbled. It was hotter than hell, not a breath of breeze stirring. The sunset was fading to a baleful afterglow. The sky in the west looked like the white of a bloodshot eye. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I have an idea the situation will clarify itself. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“Okay,” he said, and then, in a hushed, almost reverential voice: “Eighty million motherfucking American dollars.”

“It’s a whole lotta lettuce,” I agreed, and wished him a good night.

I drank black coffee and ate toast in the kitchen the next morning, watching the TV weatherman. Like so many of them these days, he had a slightly mad look, as if all those Doppler radar images had driven him to the brink of something. I think of it as the Millennial Video Game look. “We’ve got another thirty-six hours of this soup to work through and then there’s going to be a big change,” he was saying, and pointed to some dark gray scum lurking in the Midwest. Tiny animated lightning-bolts danced in it like defective sparkplugs. Beyond the scum and the lightning-bolts, America looked clear all the way out to the desert country, and the posted temperatures were fifteen degrees cooler.

“We’ll see temps in the mid-nineties today and can’t look for much relief tonight or tomorrow morning. But tomorrow afternoon these frontal storms will reach western Maine, and I think most of you are going to want to keep updated on weather conditions. Before we get back to cooler air and bright clear skies on Wednesday, we’re probably going to see violent thunderstorms, heavy rain, hail in some locations. Tornados are rare in Maine, but some towns in western and central Maine could see them tomorrow. Back to you, Earl.” Earl, the morning news guy, had the innocent beefy look of a recent retiree from the Chippendales and read off the Teleprompter like one. “Wow,” he said. “That’s quite a forecast, Vince. Tornados a possibility.”

“Wow,” I said. “Say wow again, Earl. Do it ’til I’m satisfied.”

“Holy cow,” Earl said just to spite me, and the telephone rang. I went to answer it, giving the waggy clock a look as I went by. The night had been quiet—no sobbing, no screaming, no nocturnal adventures—but the clock was disquieting, just the same. It hung there On the wall eyeless and dead, like a message full of bad news. “Hello?”

“Mr. Noonan?” I knew the voice, but for a moment couldn’t place it. It was because she had called me Mr. Noonan. To Brenda Meserve I’d been Mike for almost fifteen years. “Mrs. M.? Brenda? What—”

“I can’t work for you anymore,” she said, all in a rush. “I’m sorry I can’t give you proper notice—I never stopped work for anyone without giving notice, not even that old drunk Mr. Croyden—but I have to.

Please understand.”

“Did Bill find out I called you? I swear to God, Brenda, I never said a word—”

“No. I haven’t spoken to him, nor he to me. I just can’t come back to Sara Laughs. I had a bad dream last night. A terrible dream. I dreamed that… something’s mad at me. If I come back, I could have an accident.

It would look like an accident, at least, but… it wouldn’t be.”

That’s silly, Mrs. M… I wanted to say. You’re surely past the age where you believe in campfire stories about ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties.

But of course I could say no such thing. What was going on in my house was no campfire story. I knew it, and she knew I did.

“Brenda, if I’ve caused you any trouble, I’m truly sorry.”

“Go away, Mr. Noonan. . Mike. Go back to Derry and stay for awhile.

It’s the best thing you could do.”

I heard the letters sliding on the fridge and turned. This time I actually saw the circle of fruits and vegetables form. It stayed open at the top long enough for four letters to slide inside. Then a little plastic lemon plugged the hole and completed the circle.

yats the letters said, then swapped themselves around, making stay Then both the circle and the letters broke up.

“Mike, p/ease.” Mrs. M. was crying. “Royce’s funeral is tomorrow.

Everyone in the TR who matters—the old-timers—will be there.”

Yes, of course they would. The old ones, the bags of bones who knew what they knew and kept it to themselves. Except some of them had talked to my wife. Royce himself had talked to her. Now he was dead. So was she.

“It would be best if you were gone. You could take that young woman with you, maybe. Her and her little girl.”

But could I? I somehow didn’t think so. I thought the three of us were on the TR until this was over… and I was starting to have an idea of when that would be. A storm was coming. A summer storm. Maybe even a tornado.

“Brenda, thanks for calling me. And I’m not letting you go. Let’s just call it a leave of absence, shall we?”

“Fine. . whatever you want. Will you at least think about what I said?”

“Yes. In the meantime, I don’t think I’d tell anyone you called me, all right?”

“No!” she said, sounding shocked. Then: “But they’ll know. Bill and Yvette… Dickie Brooks at the garage… old Anthony Weyland and Buddy Jellison and all the others… they’ll know. Goodbye, Mr. Noo-nan. I’m so sorry. For you and your wife. Your poor wife. I’m so sorry.” Then she was gone.

I held the phone in my hand for a long time. Then, like a man in a dream, I put it down, crossed the room, and took the eyeless clock off the wall. I threw it in the trash and went down to the lake for a swim, remembering that W. E Harvey story “August Heat,” the one that ends with the line “The heat is enough to drive a man mad.”

I’m not a bad swimmer when people aren’t pelting me with rocks, but my first shore-to-float-to-shore lap was tentative and unrhythmic—ugly—because I kept expecting something to reach up from the bottom and grab me. The drowned boy, maybe. The second lap was better, and by the third I was relishing the increased kick of my heart and the silky coolness of the water rushing past me. Halfway through the fourth lap I pulled myself up the float’s ladder and collapsed on the boards, feeling better than I had since my encounter with Devore and Rogette Whit-more on Friday night. I was still in the zone, and on top of that I was experiencing a glorious endorphin rush. In that state, even the dismay I’d felt when Mrs. M. told me she was resigning her position ebbed away. She would come back when this was over; of course she would. In the meantime, it was probably best she stay away.

Something’s mad at me. I could have an accident.

Yes indeed. She might cut herself. She might fall down a flight Of cel lar stairs. She might even have a stroke running across a hot parking lot. I sat up and looked at Sara on her hill, the deck jutting out over the drop, the railroad ties descending. I’d only been out of the water for a few minutes, but already the day’s sticky heat was folding over me, stealing my rush. The water was still as a mirror. I could see the house reflected in it, and in the reflection Sara’s windows became watchful eyes.

I thought that the focus of all the phenomena—the epicenter—was very likely on The Street between the real Sara and its drowned image. This is where it happened, Devore had said. And the old-timers? Most of them probably knew what I knew: that Royce Merrill had been murdered. And wasn’t it possible—wasn’t it likely—that what had killed him might come among them as they sat in their pews or gathered afterward around his grave? That it might steal some of their force—their guilt, their memories, their T/-ness—to help it finish the job?

I was very glad that John was going to be at the trailer tomorrow, and Romeo Bissonette, and George Kennedy, who was so amusing when he got a drink or two in him. Glad it was going to be more than just me with Mattie and Ki when the old folks got together to give Royce Merrill his sen doff. I no longer cared very much about what had happened to Sara and the Red-Tops, or even about what was haunting my house. What I wanted was to get through tomorrow, and for Mattie and Ki to get through tomorrow. We’d eat before the rain started and then let the predicted thunderstorms come. I thought that, if we could ride them out, our lives and futures might clarify with the weather.

“Is that right?” I asked. I expected no answer—talking out loud was a habit I had picked up since returning here—but somewhere in the woods east of the house, an owl hooted. Just once, as if to say it was right, get through tomorrow and things will clarify. The hoot almost brought something else to mind, some association that was ultimately too gauzy to grasp. I tried once or twice, but the only thing I could come up with was the title of a wonderful old novel I Heard the Owl Call Rly Name.

I rolled forward off the float and into the water, grasping my knees against my chest like a kid doing a cannonball. I stayed under as long as I could, until the air in my lungs started to feel like some hot bottled liquid, and then I broke the surface. I trod water about thirty yards out until I had my breath back, then set my sights on the Green Lady and stroked for shore.

I waded out, started up the railroad ties, then stopped and went back to The Street. I stood there for a moment, gathering my courage, then walked to where the birch curved her graceful belly out over the water.

I grasped that white curve as I had on Friday evening and looked into the water. I was sure I’d see the child, his dead eyes looking up at me from his bloating brown face, and that my mouth and throat would once more fill with the taste of the lake: help I’m drown, lemme up, oh sweet Jesus lemme up. But there was nothing. No dead boy, no ribbon-wrapped Boston Post cane, no taste of the lake in my mouth.

I turned and peered at the gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought There, right there, but it was only a conscious and unspontaneous thought, the mind voicing a memory. The smell of decay and the certainty that something awful had happened right there was gone.

When I got back up to the house and went for a soda, I discovered the front of the refrigerator was bare and clean. Every magnetic letter, every fruit and vegetable, was gone. I never found them. I might have, probably would have, if there had been more time, but on that Monday morning time was almost up.

I dressed, then called Mattie. We talked about the upcoming party, about how excited Ki was, about how nervous Mattie was about going back to work on Friday—she was afraid that the locals would be mean to her, but in an odd, womanly way she was even more afraid that they would be cold to her, snub her. We talked about the money, and I quickly ascertained that she didn’t believe in the reality of it. “Lance used to say his father was the kind of man who’d show a piece of meat to a starving dog and then eat it himself,” she said. “But as long as I have my job back, I won’t starve and neither will Ki.”

“But if there really are big bucks…?”

“Oh, gimme-gimme-gimme,” she said, laughing. “What do you think I am, crazy?”

“Nah. By the way, what’s going on with Ki’s fridgeafator people? Are they writing any new stuff?.”

“That is the weirdest thing,” she said.

“They’re gone.”

“The fridgeafator people?”

“I don’t know about them, but the magnetic letters you gave her sure are. When I asked Ki what she did with them, she started crying and said Allamagoosalum took them. She said he ate them in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, for a snack.”

“Allama-wh0-salum?’ “Allamagoosalum,” Mattie said, sounding wearily amused. “Another little legacy from her grandfather. It’s a corruption of the Micmac word for ’boogeyman’ or ’demon’—I looked it up at the library. Kyra had a good many nightmares about demons and wendigos and the allama-goosalum late last winter and this spring.”

“What a sweet old grandpa he was,” I said sentimentally.

“Right, a real pip. She was miserable over losing the letters; I barely got her calmed down before her ride to V.B.S. came. Ki wants to know if you’ll come to Final Exercises on Friday afternoon, by the way. She and her friend Billy Turgeon are going to flannelboard the story of baby Moses.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said… but of course I did. We all did.

’gkny idea where her letters might have gone, Mike?”

“No.”

“Yours are still okay?”

“Mine are fine, but of course mine don’t spell anything,” I said, looking at the empty door of my own fridgeafator. There was sweat on my forehead. I could feel it creeping down into my eyebrows like oil.

“Did you… I don’t know… sense anything?”

“You mean did I maybe hear the evil alphabet-thief as he slid through the window?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I suppose so.” A pause “I thought I heard something in the night, okay? About three this morning, actually. I got up and went into the hall. Nothing was there. But… you know how hot it’s been lately?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not in my trailer, not last night. It was cold as ice. I swear I could almost see my breath.” I believed her. After all, I had seen mine.

“Were the letters on the front of the fridge then?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go up the hall far enough to see into the kitchen. I took one look around and then went back to bed. I almost ran back to bed.

Sometimes bed feels safer, you know?” She laughed nervously. “It’s a kid thing. Covers are boogeyman kryptonite. Only at first, when I got in…

I don’t know… I thought someone was in there already. Like someone had been hiding on the floor underneath and then… when I went to check the hall…, they got in. Not a nice someone, either.” Give me my dust-catcher, I thought, and shuddered. “What?”

Mattie asked sharply. “What did you say?”

“I asked who did you think it was? What was the first name that came into your mind?”

“Devore,” she said. “Him. But there was no one there.” A pause. “I wish you’d been there.”

“I do, too.”

“I’m glad. Mike, do you have any ideas at all about this? Because it’s very freaky.”

“I think maybe…” For a moment I was on the verge of telling her what had happened to my own letters. But if I started talking, where would it stop? And how much could she be expected to believe?”… maybe Ki took the letters herself. Went walking in her sleep and chucked them under the trailer or something. Do you think that could be?”

“I think I like the idea of Kyra strolling around in her sleep even less than the idea of ghosts with cold breath taking the letters off the fridge,” Mattie said. “Take her to bed with you tonight,” I said, and felt her thought come back like an arrow: I’d rather take you. What she said, after a brief pause, was: “Will you come by today?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. She was noshing on flavored yogurt as we talked, eating it in little nipping bites. “You’ll see me tomorrow, though. At the party.”

“I hope we get to eat before the thunderstorms. They’re supposed to be bad.”

“I’m sure we will.”

“And are you still thinking? I only ask because I dreamed of you when I finally fell asleep again. I dreamed of you kissing me.”

“I’m still thinking,” I said. “Thinking hard.”

But in fact I don’t remember thinking about anything very hard that day.

What I remember is drifting further and further into that zone I’ve explained so badly. Near dusk I went for a long walk in spite of the heat—all the way out to where Lane Forty-two joins the highway. Coming back I stopped on the edge of Tidwell’s Meadow, watching the light fade out of the sky and listening to thunder rumble somewhere over New Hampshire. Once more there was that sense of how thin reality was, not just here but everywhere; how it was stretched like skin over the blood and tissue of a body we can never know clearly in this life. I looked at trees and saw arms; I looked at bushes and saw faces. Ghosts, Mattie had said. Ghosts with cold breath.

Time was also thin, it seemed to me. Kyra and I had really been at the Fryeburg Fair—some version of it, anyway; we had really visited the year 1900. And at the foot of the meadow the Red-Tops were almost there now, as they once had been, in their neat little cabins. I could almost hear the sound of their guitars, the murmur of their voices and laughter; I could almost see the gleam of their lanterns and smell their beef and pork frying. “Say baby, do you remember me?” one of her songs went, “in I ain’t your honey like I used to be.”

Something rattled in the underbrush to my left. I turned that way, expecting to see Sara step out of the woods wearing Mattie’s dress and Mattie’s white sneakers. In this gloom, they would seem almost to float by themselves, until she got close to me…

There was no one there, of course, it had undoubtedly been nothing but Chuck the Woodchuck headed home after a hard day at the office, but I no longer wanted to be out here, watching as the light drained out of the day and the mist came up from the ground. I turned for home.

Instead of going into the house when I got back, I made my way along the path to Jo’s studio, where I hadn’t been since the night I had taken my IBM back in a dream. My way was lit by intermittent flashes of heat lightning.

The studio was hot but not stale. I could smell a peppery aroma that was actually pleasant, and wondered if it might be some of Jo’s herbs. There was an air conditioner out here, and it worked—I turned it on and then just stood in front of it a little while. So much cold air on my overheated body was probably unhealthy, but it felt wonderful.

I didn’t feel very wonderful otherwise, however. I looked around with a growing sense of something too heavy to be mere sadness; it felt like despair. I think it was caused by the contrast between how little of Jo was left in Sara Laughs and how much of her was still out here. I imagined our marriage as a kind of playhouse—and isn’t that what marriage is, in large part? playing house? — where only half the stuff was held down. Held down by little magnets or hidden cables. Something had come along and picked up our playhouse by one corner—easiest thing in the world, and I supposed I should be grateful that the something hadn’t decided to draw back its foot and kick the poor thing all the way over. It just picked up that one corner, you see. My stuff stayed put, but all of Jo’s had slid…

Out of the house and down here.

“Jo?” I asked, and sat down in her chair. There was no answer. No thumps on the wall. No crows or owls calling from the woods. I put my hand on her desk, where the typewriter had been, and slipped my hand across it, picking up a film of dust.

“I miss you, honey,” I said, and began to cry.

When the tears were over—again—I wiped my face with the tail of my tee-shirt like a little kid, then just looked around. There was the picture of Sara Tidwell on her desk and a photo I didn’t remember on the wall—this latter was old, sepia-tinted, and woodsy. Its focal point was a man-high birchwood cross in a little clearing on a slope above the lake. That clearing was gone from the geography now, most likely, long since filled in by trees.

I looked at her jars of herbs and mushroom sections, her filing cabi nets, her sections of afghan. The green rag rug on the floor. The pot of pencils on the desk, pencils she had touched and used. I held one of them poised over a blank sheet of paper for a moment or two, but nothing happened. I had a sense of life in this room, and a sense of being watched… but not a sense of being helped. “I know some of it but not enough,” I said. “Of all the things I don’t know, maybe the one that matters most is who wrote ’help her’ on the fridge. Was it you, Jo?” No answer. I sat awhile longer—hoping against hope, I suppose—then got up, turned off the air conditioning, turned off the lights, and went back to the house, walking in soft bright stutters of unfocused lightning. I sat on the deck for a little while, watching the night. At some point I realized I’d taken the length of blue silk ribbon out of my pocket and was winding it nervously back and forth between my fingers, making half-assed cat’s cradles. Had it really come from the year 19007

The idea seemed perfectly crazy and perfectly sane at the same time. The night hung hot and hushed. I imagined old folks all over the TR—perhaps in Motton and Harlow, too—laying out their funeral clothes for tomorrow. In the doublewide trailer on Wasp Hill Road, Ki was sitting on the floor, watching a videotape of The Jungle Book—Baloo and Mowgli were singing “The Bare Necessities.” Mattie was on the couch with her feet up, reading the new Mary Higgins Clark and singing along. Both were wearing shorty pajamas, Ki’s pink, Mattie’s white. After a little while I lost my sense of them; it faded the way radio signals sometimes do late at night. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and crawled onto the top sheet of my unmade bed. I fell asleep almost at once. I woke in the middle of the night with someone running a hot finger up and down the middle of my back. I rolled over and when the lightning flashed, I saw there was a woman in bed with me. It was Sara Tid-well.

She was grinning. There were no pupils in her eyes. “Oh sugar, I’m almost back,” she whispered in the dark. I had a sense of her reaching out for me again, but when the next flash of lightning came, that side of the bed was empty.

Inspiration isn’t always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was shaving and thinking about nothing more than remembering the beer for the party. And like the best inspirations, it came out of nowhere at all. I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the %ugh Stuff crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I’d gone first in an effort to decipher “go down nineteen” and “go down ninety-two.” Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did %ugh Stuff have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I’d completed, I’d done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand-I snatched it off the dining-room table. Although it covered the whole southern part of Castle County-Motton, Harlow, and Kash-wakamak as well as the TR—it was pretty thin. The first thing I did was check the white pages to see if there were at least ninety-two. There were. The Y’s and Z’s finished up on page ninety-seven. This was the answer. Had to be. “I got it, didn’t I?” I asked Bunter. “This is it.”

Nothing. Not even a tinkle from the bell. “Fuck you—what does a stuffed moosehead know about a telephone book?” Go down nineteen. I turned to page nineteen of the telephone book, where the letter IF was prominently showcased. I began to slip my finger down the first column and as it went, my excitement faded. The nineteenth name on page nineteen was Harold Failles. It meant nothing to me. There were also Feltons and Fenners, a Filkersham and several Finneys, half a dozen Flahertys and more Fosses than you could shake a stick at. The last name on page nineteen was Framingham. It also meant nothing to me, but-Framingham, Kenneth P. I stared at that for a moment. A realization began to dawn.

It had nothing to do with the refrigerator messages. You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, I thought. This is like when you buy a blue Buick-“You see blue Buicks everywhere,” I said. “Practically got to kick em out of your way. Yeah, that’s it.” But my hands were shaking as I turned to page ninety-two. Here were the T’s of southern Castle County, along with a few U’s like Alton Ubeck and Catherine Udell just to round things out. I didn’t bother checking the ninety-second entry on the page; the phone book wasn’t the key to the magnetic crosspatches after all. It did, however, suggest something enormous. I closed the book, just held it in my hands for a moment (happy folks with blueberry rakes on the front cover), then opened it at random, this time to the M’s. And once you knew what you were looking for, it jumped right out at you. All those K’s. Oh, there were Stevens and Johns and Marthas; there was Meserve, G… and Messier, V… and Jayhouse, T. And yet, again and again, I saw the initial K where people had exercised their right not to list their first name in the book. There were at least twenty K-initials on page fifty alone, and another dozen C-initials. As for the actual names themselves…

There were twelve Kenneths on this random page in the M-section, including three Kenneth Moores and two Kenneth Munters. There were four Catherines and two Katherines. There were a Casey, a Kiana, and a Kiefer. “Holy Christ, it’s like fallout,” I whispered. I thumbed through the book, not able to believe what I was seeing and seeing it anyway.

Kenneths, Katherines, and Keiths were everywhere. I also saw Kimberly, Kim, and Kym. There were Cammie, Kia (yes, and we had thought ourselves so original), Kiah, Kendra, Kaela, Keil, and Kyle. Kirby and Kirk. There was a woman named Kissy Bowden, and a man named Kito Rennie—Kito, the same name as one of Kyra’s fridgeafator people. And everywhere, outnumbering such usually common initials as S and T and E, were those K’s. My eyes danced with them. I turned to look at the clock-didn’t want to stand John Storrow up at the airport, Christ no—and there was no clock there. Of course not. Old Krazy Kat had popped his peepers during a psychic event. I gave a loud, braying laugh that scared me a little—it wasn’t particularly sane. “Get hold of yourself, Mike,” I said. “Take a deep breath, son.” I took the breath. Held it. Let it out.

Checked the digital readout on the microwave. Quarter past eight. Plenty of time for John. I turned back to the telephone book and began to riffle rapidly through it. I’d had a second inspiration—not a megawatt blast like the first one, but a lot more accurate, it turned out.

Western Maine is a relatively isolated area—it’s a little like the hill country of the border South—but there has always been at least some inflow of folks from away (“fiatlanders” is the term the locals use when they are feeling contemptuous), and in the last quarter of the century it has become a popular area for active seniors who want to fish and ski their way through retirement. The phone book goes a long way toward separating the newbies from the long-time residents. Babickis, Parettis, O’Quindlans, Donahues, Smolnacks, Dvoraks, Blindermeyers—all from away.

All fiatlanders. Jalberts, Meserves, Pillsburys, Spruces, Ther-riaults, Perraults, Stanchfields, Starbirds, Dubays—all from Castle County. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? When you see a whole column of Bowies on page twelve, you know that those folks have been around long enough to relax and really spread those Bowie genes.

There were a few K-initials and K-names among the Parettis and the Smolnacks, but only a few. The heavy concentrations were all attached to families that had been here long enough to absorb the atmosphere. To breathe the fallout. Except it wasn’t radiation, exactly, it l suddenly imagined a black headstone taller than the tallest tree on the lake, a monolith which cast its shadow over half of Castle County. This picture was so clear and so terrible that I covered my eyes, dropping the phone book on the table. I backed away from it, shuddering. Hiding my eyes actually seemed to enhance the image further: a grave-marker so enormous it blotted out the sun; TR-90 lay at its foot like a funeral bouquet.

Sara Tidwell’s son had drowned in Dark Score Lake. . or been drowned in it. But she had marked his passing. Memorialized it. I wondered if anyone else in town had ever noticed what I just had. I didn’t suppose it was all that likely; when you open a telephone book you’re looking for a specific name in most cases, not reading whole pages line by line.

I wondered if Jo had noticed—if she’d known that almost every longtime family in this part of the world had, in one way or another, named at least one child after Sara Tidwell’s dead son.

Jo wasn’t stupid. I thought she probably had. I returned to the bathroom, relathered, started again from scratch. When I finished, I went back to the phone and picked it up. I poked in three numbers, then stopped, looking out at the lake. Mattie and Ki were up and in the kitchen, both of them wearing aprons, both of them in a fine froth of excitement. There was going to be a party! They would wear pretty new summer clothes, and there would be music from Mat-tie’s boombox CD player! Ki was helping Mattie make biscuits for strewberry snortcake, and while the biscuits were baking they would make salads. If I called Mattie up and said Pack a couple of bags, you and Ki are going to spend a week at Disney World, Mattie would assume I was joking, then tell me to hurry up and finish getting dressed so I’d be at the airport when John’s plane landed. If I pressed, she’d remind me that Lindy had offered her her old job back, but the offer would close in a hurry if Mattie didn’t show up promptly at two P.M. on Friday. If I continued to press, she would just say no.

Because I wasn’t the only one in the zone, was I? I wasn’t the only one who was really feeling it.

I returned the phone to its recharging cradle, then went back into the north bedroom. By the time I’d finished dressing, my fresh shirt was already feeling wilted under the arms; it was as hot that morning as it had been for the last week, maybe even hotter. But I’d be in plenty of time to meet the plane. I had never felt less like partying, but I’d be there. Mikey on the spot, that was me. Mikey on the goddam spot.

John hadn’t given me his flight number, but at Castle County Airport, such niceties are hardly necessary. This bustling hub of transport consists of three hangars and a terminal which used to be a Flying A gas sta-tion-when the light’s strong on the little building’s rusty north side, you can still see the shape of that winged Ao There’s one runway.

Security is provided by Lassie, Breck Pellerin’s ancient collie, who spends her days crashed out on the linoleum floor, cocking an ear at the ceiling whenever a plane lands or takes off.

I popped my head into Pelterin’s office and asked him if the ten from Boston was on time. He said it ’twas, although he hoped the paa’ty I was meetin planned to either fly back out before mid-afternoon or stay the night. Bad weather was comin in, good gorry, yes. What Breck Pellerin referred to as ’lectrical weather. I knew exactly what he meant, because in my nervous system that electricity already seemed to have arrived.

I went out to the runway side of the terminal and sat on a bench advertising Cormier’s Market (FLY INTO OUR DELI FOR THE BEST MEATS IN MAINE). The sun was a silver button stuck on the eastern slope of a hot white sky. Headache weather, my mother would have called it, but the weather was due to change. I would hold onto the hope of that change as best I could.

At ten past ten I heard a wasp-whine from the south. At quarter past, some sort of twin-engine plane dropped out of the murk, flopped onto the runway, and taxied toward the terminal. There were only four pas sengers, and John Storrow was the first one off. I grinned when I saw him. I had to grin. He was wearing a black tee-shirt with wu ^ THE CI–IAM?IOSS printed across the front and a pair of khaki shorts which displayed a perfect set of city shins: white and bony. He was trying to manage both a Styrofoam cooler and a briefcase. I grabbed the cooler maybe four seconds before he dropped it, and tucked it under my arm. “Mike!”

he cried, lifting one hand palm out.

“John!” I returned in much the same spirit (evoe is the word that comes immediately to the crossword aficionado’s mind), and slapped him five.

His homely-handsome face split in a grin, and I felt a little stab of guilt. Mattie had expressed no preference for John—quite the opposite, in fact—and he really hadn’t solved any of her problems; Devore had done that by topping himself before John had so much as a chance to get started on her behalf. Yet still I felt that nasty little poke.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of this heat. You have air condi tioning in your car, I presume?”

“Absolutely.”

“What about a cassette player? You got one of those? If you do, I’ll play you something that’ll make you chortle.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word actually used in conversation, John.”

The grin shone out again, and I noticed what a lot of freckles he had.

Sheriffandy’s boy Opie grows up to serve at the bar. “I’m a lawyer. I use words in conversation that haven’t even been invented yet. You have a tape-player?”

“Of course I do.” I hefted the cooler. “Steaks?”

“You bet. Peter Luger’s. They’re—”

“—the best in the world. You told me.”

As we went into the terminal, someone said, “Michael?”

It was Romeo Bissonette, the lawyer who had chaperoned me through my deposition. In one hand he had a box wrapped in blue paper and tied with a white ribbon. Beside him, just rising from one of the lumpy chairs, was a tall guy with a fringe of gray hair. He was wearing a brown suit, a blue shirt, and a string tie with a golf-club on the clasp. He looked more like a farmer on auction day than the sort of guy who’d be a scream when you got a drink or two into him, but I had no doubt this was the private detective. He stepped over the comatose collie and shook hands with me. “George Kennedy, Mr. Noonan. I’m pleased to meet you. My wife has read every single book you ever wrote.”

“Well thank her for me.”

“I will. I have one in the car—a hardcover…” He looked shy, as so many people do when they get right to the point of asking. “I wonder if you’d sign it for her at some point.”

“I’d be delighted to,” I said. “Right away’s best, then I won’t forget.”

I turned to Romeo. “Good to see you, Romeo.”

“Make it Rommie,” he said. “Good to see you, too.” He held out the box.

“George and I clubbed together on this. We thought you deserved something nice for helping a damsel in distress.”

Kennedy now did look like a man who might be fun after a few drinks. The kind who might just take a notion to hop onto the nearest table, turn a tablecloth into a kilt, and dance. I looked at John, who gave the kind of shrug that means hey, don’t ask me.

I pulled off the satin bow, slipped my finger under the Scotch tape holding the paper, then looked up. I caught Rommie Bissonette in the act of elbowing Kennedy. Now they were both grinning.

“There’s nothing in here that’s going to jump out at me and go booga-booga, is there, guys?” I asked. “Absolutely not,” Rommie said, but his grin widened.

Well, I can be as good a sport as the next guy. I guess. I unwrapped the package, opened the plain white box inside, revealed a square pad of cotton, lifted it out. I had been smiling all through this, but now I felt the smile curl up and die on my mouth. Something went twisting up my spine as well, and I think I came very close to dropping the box.

It was the oxygen mask Devore had had on his lap when he met me on The Street, the one he’d snorted from occasionally as he and Rogette paced me, trying to keep me out deep enough to drown. Rommie Bis-sonette and George Kennedy had brought it to me like the scalp of a dead enemy and I was supposed to think it wasfunny- “Mike?” Rommie asked anxiously.

“Mike, are you okay? It was just a joke—”

I blinked and saw it wasn’t an oxygen mask at all—how in God’s name could I have been so stupid? For one thing, it was bigger than Devore’s mask; for another, it was made of opaque rather than clear plastic. It was-I gave a tentative chuckle. Rommie Bissonette looked tremendously relieved. So did Kennedy. John only looked puzzled. “Funny,” I said.

“Like a rubber crutch.” I pulled out the little mike from inside the mask and let it dangle. It swung back and forth on its wire, reminding me of the waggy clock’s tail. “What the hell is it?” John asked. “Park Avenue lawyer,” Rommie said to George, broadening his accent so it came out Paa-aak Avenew lawyah. “Ain’t nevah seen one of these, have ya, chummy? Nossir, coss not.” Then he reverted to normal-speak, which was sort of a relief. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life, and for me the amusement value of burlesque Yankee accents has worn pretty thin. “It’s a Stenomask. The stenog keeping the record at Mike’s depo was wearing one. Mike kept looking at him—”

“It freaked me out,” I said. “Old guy sitting in the corner and mumbling into the Mask of Zorro.”

“Gerry Bliss freaks a lot of people out,” Kennedy said. He spoke in a low rumble.

“He’s the last one around here who wears em. He’s got ten or eleven left in his mudroom. I know, because I bought that one from him.”

“I hope he stuck it to you,” I said. “I thought it would make a nice memento,” Rommie said, “but for a second there I thought I’d given you the box with the severed hand in it—I hate it when I mix up my gift-boxes like that. What’s the deal?”

“It’s been a long hot July,” I said. “Put it down to that.” I hung the Stenomask’s strap over one finger, dangling it that way. “Mattie said to be there by eleven,” John told us. “We’re going to drink beer and throw the Frisbee around.”

“I can do both of those things quite well,” George Kennedy said. Outside in the tiny parking lot George went to a dusty Altima, rummaged in the back, and came out with a battered copy of The Red-Shirt Man. “Frieda made me bring this one. She has the newer ones, but this is her favorite. Sorry about how it looks—she’s read it about six times.”

II “It’s my favorite, too,” I said, which was true. “And I like to see a book with mileage.” That was also true. I opened the book, looked approvingly at a smear of long-dried chocolate on the flyleaf, and then wrote: For Frieda Kennedy, whose husband was there to lend a hand.

Thanks jr sharing him, and thanks For reading, Mike Noonan. That was a long inscription for me—usually I just stick to Best wishes or Good luck, but I wanted to make up for the curdled expression they had seen on my face when I opened their innocent little gag present. While I was scribbling, George asked me if I was working on a new novel. “No,” I said. “Batteries currently on recharge.” I handed the book back. “Frieda won’t like that.”

“No. But there’s always Red-Shirt.”

“We’ll follow you,” Rommie said, and a rumble came from deep in the west. It was no louder than the thunder which had rumbled on and offfor the last week, but this wasn’t dry thunder. We all knew it, and we all looked in that direction. “Think we’ll get a chance to eat before it storms?” George asked me. “Yeah. Just about barely.”

I drove to the gate of the parking lot and glanced right to check for traffic. When I did, I saw John looking at me thoughtfully. “What?”

“Mattie said you were writing, that’s all. Book go tits-up on you or something?” My Childhood Friend was just as lively as ever, in fact… but it would never be finished. I knew that this morning as well as I knew there was rain on the way. The boys in the basement had for some reason decided to take it back. Asking why might not be such a good idea—the answers might be unpleasant. “Something. I’m not sure just what.” I pulled out onto the highway, checked behind me, and saw Rommie and George following in George’s little Altima. America has become a country full of big men in little cars. “What do you want me to listen to? If it’s home karaoke, I pass. The last thing on earth I want to hear is you singing “Bubba Shot the Jukebox Last Night.’”

I I51"UIISIN IXLLNKJ D.?-k k)U Dk… Jlnis “Oh, it’s better than that,” he said. “Miles better.”

He opened his briefcase, rooted through it, and came out with a plastic cassette box. The tape inside was marked 7-20-98—yesterday. “I love this,” he said. He leaned forward, turned on the radio, then popped the cassette into the player.

I was hoping I’d already had my quota of nasty surprises for the morning, but I was wrong.

“Sorry, I just had to get rid of another call,” John said from my Chevy’s speakers in his smoothest, most lawyerly voice. I’d have bet a million dollars that his bony shins hadn’t been showing when this tape was made.

There was a laugh, both smoky and grating. My stomach seized up at the sound of it. I remembered seeing her for the first time standing outside The Sunset Bar, wearing black shorts over a black tank-style swimsuit.

Standing there and looking like a refugee from crash-diet hell.

“You mean you had to turn on your tape-recorder,” she said, and now I remembered how the water had seemed to change color when she nailed me that really good one in the back of the head. From bright orange to dark scarlet it had gone. And then I’d started drinking the lake. “That’s okay. Tape anything you want.”

John reached out suddenly and ejected the cassette. “You don’t need to hear this,” he said. “It’s not substantive. I thought you’d get a kick out of her blather, but. . man, you look terrible. Do you want me to drive? You’re white as a fucking sheet.”

“I can drive,” I said. “Go on, play it. Afterward I’ll tell you about a little adventure I had Friday night… but you’re going to keep it to yourself. They don’t have to know" — I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the Altima—"and Mattie doesn’t have to know. Especially Mattie.” He reached for the tape, then hesitated. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. It was just hearing her again out of the blue like that. The quality of her voice. Christ, the reproduction is good.”

“Nothing but the best for Avery, Mclain, and Bernstein. We have very strict protocols about what we can tape, by the way. If you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t. I imagine none of it’s admissible in litigation anyway, is it?”

“In certain rare cases a judge might let a tape in, but that’s not why we do it. A tape like this saved a man’s life four years ago, right around the time I joined the firm. That guy is now in the Witness Protection Program.”

“Play it.”

He leaned forward and pushed the button.

John: “How is the desert, Ms. Whitmore?”

Whitmore: “Hot.”

John: “Arrangements progressing nicely? I know how difficult times like this can—”

Whitmore: “You know very little, counsellor, take it from me. Can we cut the crap?”

John: “Consider it cut.”

Whitmore: “Have you conveyed the conditions of Mr. Devore’s will to his daughter-in-law?”

John: “Yes ma’am.”

Whitmore: “Her response?”

John: “I have none to give you now. I may have after Mr. Devore’s will has been probated. But surely you know that such codicils are rarely if ever accepted by the courts.”

Whitmore.” “Well, if that little lady moves out of town, we’ll see, won’t we?”

John.” “I suppose we will.”

Whitmore: “When is the victory party?”

John: “Excuse me?”

Whitmore: “Oh please. I have sixty different appointments today, plus a boss to bury tomorrow. You’re going up there to celebrate with her and her daughter, aren’t you? Did you know she’s invited the writer? Her fuck-buddy?”

John turned to me gleefully. “Do you hear how pissed she sounds? She’s trying to hide it, but she can’t. It’s eating her up inside!”

I barely heard him. I was in the zone with what she was saying (the writer her fuck-buddy)

and what was under what she was saying. Some quality beneath the words.

We just want to see how long you can swim, she had called out to me.

John: “I hardly think what I or Mattie’s friends do is any of your business, Ms. Whitmore. May I respectfully suggest that you party with your friends and let Mattie Devore party with Whitmore: “Give him a message.”

Me. She was talking about me. Then I realized it was even more personal than that—she was talking to me. Her body might be on the other side of the country, but her voice and spiteful spirit were right here in the car with us.

And Max Devore’s will. Not the meaningless shit his lawyers had put down on paper but his will. The old bastard was as dead as Damocles, but yes, he was definitely still seeking custody.

John.” “Give who a message, Ms. Whitmore?”

Whitmore.” “Tell him he never answered Mr. Devore’s question.”

John.” “What question is that?”

Does her cunt suck?

Whitmore: “Ask him. He’ll know.”

John: “If you mean Mike Noonan, you can ask him yourself. You’ll see him in Castle County Probate Court this fall.”

Whitmore: “I hardly think so. Mr. Devore’s will was made and witnessed out here.”

John: “Nevertheless, it will be probated in Maine, where he died. My heart is set on it. And when you leave Castle County the next time, Rogette, you will do so with your education in matters of the law considerably broadened.”

For the first time she sounded angry, her voice rising to a reedy cavq.

Whitmore: “If you think—”

John.” “I don’t think. I know. Goodbye, Ms. Whitmore.” Whitmore: “You might do well to stay away from—”

There was a click, the hum of an open line, then a robot voice saying “Nine-forty A.M. . Eastern Daylight. . July. . twentieth.” John punched U pounds T, collected his tape, and stored it back in his briefcase.

“I hung up on her.” He sounded like a man telling you about his first skydive. “I actually did. She was mad, wasn’t she? Wouldn’t you say she was seriously pissed?”

“Yeah.” It was what he wanted to hear but not what I really believed.

Pissed, yes. Seriously pissed? Maybe not. Because Mattie’s location and state of mind hadn’t been her concern; Rogette had called to talk to me.

To tell me she was thinking of me. To bring back memories of how it felt to tread water with the back of your head gushing blood. To freak me out. And she had succeeded.

“What was the question you didn’t answer?” John asked me.

“I don’t know what she meant by that,” I said, “but I can tell you why hearing her turned me a little white in the gills. If you can be discreet, and if you want to hear.”

“We’ve got eighteen miles to cover; lay it on me.”

I told him about Friday night. I didn’t clutter my version with visions or psychic phenomena; there was just Michael Noonan out for a sunset walk along The Street. I’d been standing by a birch tree which hung over the lake, watching the sun drop toward the mountains, when they came up behind me. From the point where Devore charged me with his wheelchair to the point where I finally got back onto solid ground, I stuck pretty much to the truth.

When I finished, John was at first utterly silent. It was a measure of how thrown for a loop he was; under normal circumstances he was every bit the chatterbox Ki was.

“Well?” I asked. “Comments? Questions?”

“Lift your hair so I can see behind your ear.”

I did as he asked, revealing a big Band-Aid and a large area of swelling. John leaned forward to study it like a little kid observing his best friend’s battle-scar during recess. “Holy shit,” he said at last.

It was my turn to say nothing.

“Those two old fucks tried to drown you.”

I said nothing.

“They tried to drown you for helping Mattie.” Now I really said nothing.

“And you never reported it?”

“I started to,” I said, “then realized I’d make myself look like a whiny little asshole. And a liar, most likely.”

“How much do you think Osgood might know?”

“About them trying to drown me? Nothing. He’s just a messenger boy.”

A little more of that unusual quiet from John. After a few seconds of it he reached out and touched the lump on the back of my head. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” A pause. “Jesus. Then he went back to Warrington’s and pulled the pin. Jesus. Michael, I never would have played that tape if I’d known—”

“It’s all right. But don’t even think of telling Mattie. I’m wearing my hair over my ear like that for a reason.”

“Will you ever tell her, do you think?”

“I might. Some day when he’s been dead long enough so we can laugh about me swimming with my clothes on.”

“That might be awhile,” he said. “Yeah. It might.”

We drove in silence for a bit. I could sense John groping for a way to bring the day back to jubilation, and loved him for it. He leaned forward, turned on the radio, and found something loud and nasty by Guns ’n Roses—welcome to the jungle, baby, we got fun and games. “Party ’til we puke,” he said. “Right?”

I grinned. It wasn’t easy with the sound of the old woman’s voice still clinging to me like light slime, but I managed. “If you insist,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “Most certainly.”

“John, you’re a good guy for a lawyer.”

“And you’re a good one for a writer.”

This time the grin on my face felt more natural and stayed on longer. We passed the marker reading TR-90, and as we did, the sun burned through the haze and flooded the day with light. It seemed like an omen of better times ahead, until I looked into the west. There, black in the bright, I could see the thunderheads building up over the White Mountains.

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand. Very few—perhaps one in twenty—have any concept of what it really is or how deep it runs. That’s probably just as well for their sleep and peace of mind. And I’m not talking about the lust of satyrs and rapists and molesters; I’m talking about the lust of shoe-clerks and high-school principals.

Not to mention writers and lawyers.

We turned into Mattie’s dooryard at ten to eleven, and as I parked my Chevy beside her rusted-out Jeep, the trailer door opened and Mat-tie came out on the top step. I sucked in my breath, and beside me I could hear John sucking in his.

She was very likely the most beautiful young woman I have ever seen in my life as she stood there in her rose-colored shorts and matching middy top. The shorts were not short enough to be cheap (my mother’s word) but plenty short enough to be provocative. Her top tied in floppy string bows across the shoulders and showed just enough tan to dream on. Her hair hung to her shoulders. She was smiling and waving. I thought, She’s made it—take her into the country-club dining room now, dressed just as she is, and she shuts everyone else down. “Oh Lordy,” John said. There was a kind of dismayed longing in his voice. “All that and a bag of chips.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Put your eyes back in your head, big boy.” He made cupping motions with his hands as if doing just that.

George, meanwhile, had pulled his Altima in next to us. “Come on,” I said, opening my door. “Time to party.”

“I can’t touch her, Mike,” John said. “I’ll melt.”

“Come on, you goof.” Mattie came down the steps and past the pot with the tomato plant in it. Ki was behind her, dressed in an outfit similar to her mother’s, only in a shade of dark green. She had the shys again, I saw; she kept one steadying hand on Mattie’s leg and one thumb in her mouth. “The guys are here! The guys are here!”

Mattie cried, laughing, and threw herself into my arms. She hugged me tight and kissed the corner of my mouth. I hugged her back and kissed her cheek. Then she moved on to John, read his shirt, patted her hands together in applause, and then hugged him. He hugged back pretty well for a guy who was afraid he might melt, I thought, picking her up off her feet and swinging her around in a circle while she hung onto his neck and laughed. “Rich lady, rich lady, rich lady!” John chanted, then set her down on the cork soles of her white shoes. “Free lady, free lady, free lady!” she chanted back. “The hell with rich!” Before he could reply, she kissed him firmly on the mouth. His arms rose to slip around her, but she stepped back before they could catch hold. She turned to Rommie and George, who were standing side-by-side and looking like fellows who might want to explain all about the Mormon Church. I took a step forward, meaning to do the introductions, but John was taking care of that, and one of his arms managed to accomplish its mission after all—it circled her waist as he led her forward toward the men.

Meanwhile a little hand slipped into mine. I looked down and saw Ki looking up at me. Her face was grave and pale and every bit as beautiful as her mother’s. Her blonde hair, freshly washed and shining, was held back with a velvet scrunchy.

D/k. k… /ldk… /INIZD “Guess the fridgeafator people don’t like me now,” she said. The laughter and insouciance were gone, at least for the moment. She looked on the verge of tears. “My letters all went bye-bye.” I picked her up and set her in the crook of my arm as I had on the day I’d met her walking down the middle of Route 68 in her bathing suit. I kissed her forehead and then the tip of her nose. Her skin was perfect silk. “I know they did,” I said. “I’ll buy you some more.”

“Promise?” Doubtful dark blue eyes fixed on mine. “Promise. And I’ll teach you special words like zygote and bibulous. I know lots of special words.”

“How many?”

“A hundred and eighty.” Thunder rumbled in the west. It didn’t seem louder, but it was more focused, somehow. Ki’s eyes went in that direction, then came back to mine. “I’m scared, Mike.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“Ofi don’t know. The lady in Mattie’s dress. The men we saw.” Then she looked over my shoulder. “Here comes Mommy.” I have heard actresses deliver the line Not in front of the children in that exact same tone of voice. Kyra wiggled in the circle of my arms. “Land me.” I landed her. Mattie, John, Rommie, and George came over to join us. Ki ran to Mattie, who picked her up and then eyed us like a general surveying her troops. “Got the beer?” she asked me. “Yessum. A case of Bud and a dozen mixed sodas, as well. Plus lemonade.’’ “Great. Mr. Kennedy—”

“George, ma’am.”

“George, then. And if you call me ma’am again, I’ll punch you in the nose. I’m Mattie. Would you drive down to the Lakeview General”-she pointed to the store on Route 68, about half a mile from us—"and get some ice?”

“You bet.”

“Mr. Bissonette—”

“Rommie.”

“There’s a little garden at the north end of the trailer, Rommie. Can you find a couple of good-looking lettuces?”

“I think I can handle that.”

“John, let’s get the meat into the fridge. As for you, Michael…” She pointed to the barbecue. “The briquets are the self-lighting kind—just drop a match and stand back. Do your duty.”

“Aye, good lady,” I said, and dropped to my knees in front of her. That finally got a giggle out of Ki.

Laughing, Mattie took my hand and pulled me back onto my feet. “Come on, Sir Galahad,” she said. “It’s going to rain. I want to be safe inside and too stuffed to jump when it does.”

In the city, parties begin with greetings at the door, gathered-in coats, and those peculiar little air-kisses (when, exactly, did that social oddity begin?). In the country, they begin with chores. You fetch, you carry, you hunt for stuff like barbecue tongs and oven mitts.

The hostess drafts a couple of men to move the picnic table, then decides it was actually better where it was and asks them to put it back. And at some point you discover that you’re having fun.

I piled briquets until they looked approximately like the pyramid on the bag, then touched a match to them. They blazed up satisfyingly and I stood back, wiping my forearm across my forehead. Cool and clear might be coming, but it surely wasn’t in hailing distance yet. The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west black-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night had burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.

“Mike?”

I looked around at Kyra. “What, honey?”

“Will you take care of me?”

“Yes,” I said with no hesitation at all.

For a moment something about my response—perhaps only the quickness of it—seemed to trouble her. Then she smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Look, here comes the ice-man!”

George was back from the store. He parked and got out. I walked over with Kyra, she holding my hand and swinging it possessively back and forth. Rommie came with us, juggling three heads of lettuce—I didn’t think he was much of a threat to the guy who had fascinated Ki on the common Saturday night.

George opened the Altima’s back door and brought out two bags of ice.

“The store was closed,” he said. “Sign said WILL RE-OPEN AT 5 P.M. That seemed a little too long to wait, so I took the ice and put the money through the mail-slot.”

They’d closed for Royce Merrill’s funeral, of course. Had given up almost a full day’s custom at the height of the tourist season to see the old fellow into the ground. It was sort of touching. I thought it was also sort of creepy.

“Can I carry some ice?” Kyra asked.

“I guess, but don’t frizzicate yourself,” George said, and carefully put a five-pound bag of ice into Ki’s outstretched arms.

“Frizzicate,” Kyra said, giggling. She began walking toward the trailer, where Mattie was just coming out. John was behind her and regarding her with the eyes of a gutshot beagle. “Mommy, look! I’m frizzicating!”

I took the other bag. “I know the icebox is outside, but don’t they keep a padlock on it?”

“I am friends with most padlocks,” George said.

“Oh. I see.”

“Mike! Catch!” John tossed a red Frisbee. It floated toward me, but high. I jumped for it, snagged it, and suddenly Devore was back in my head: What’s wrong with you, Rogette? You never used to throw like a girl Get him/

I looked down and saw Ki looking up. “Don’t think about sad stuff,” she said.

I smiled at her, then flipped her the Frisbee. “Okay, no sad stuff. Go on, sweetheart. Toss it to your mom. Let’s see if you can.”

She smiled back, turned, and made a quick, accurate flip to her mother—the toss was so hard that Mattie almost flubbed it. Whatever else Kyra Devore might have been, she was a Frisbee champion in the making.

Mattie tossed the Frisbee to George, who turned, the tail of his absurd brown suitcoat flaring, and caught it deftly behind his back. Mattie laughed and applauded, the hem of her top flirting with her navel.

“Showoffl” John called from the steps. “Jealousy is such an ugly emotion,” George said to Rommie Bis-sonette, and flipped him the Frisbee. Rommie floated it back to John, but it went wide and bonked off the side of the trailer. As John hurried down the steps to get it, Mattie turned to me. “My boombox is on the coffee-table in the living room, along with a stack of CDS. Most of them are pretty old, but at least it’s music. Will you bring them out?”

“Sure.” I went inside, where it was hot in spite of three strategically placed fans working overtime.

I looked at the grim, mass-produced furniture, and at Mattie’s rather noble effort to impart some character: the van Gogh print that should not have looked at home in a trailer kitchenette but did, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks over the sofa, the tie-dyed curtains that would have made Jo laugh. There was a bravery here that made me sad for her and furious at Max Devore all over again. Dead or not, I wanted to kick his ass. I went into the living room and saw the new Mary Higgins Clark on the sofa end-table with a bookmark sticking out of it. Lying beside it in a heap were a couple of little-girl hair ribbons—something about them looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t remember ever having seen Ki wearing them. I stood there a moment longer, frowning, then grabbed the boombox and CDS and went back outside. “Hey, guys,” I said.

“Let’s rock.”

I was okay until she danced. I don’t know if it matters to you, but it does to me. I was okay until she danced. After that I was lost. We took the Frisbee around to the rear of the house, partly so we wouldn’t piss off any funeral-bound townies with our rowdiness and good cheer, mostly because Mattie’s back yard was a good place to play—level ground and low grass. After a couple of missed catches, Mattie kicked off her party-shoes, dashed barefoot into the house, and came back in her sneakers. After that she was a lot better. We threw the Frisbee, yelled insults at each other, drank beer, laughed a lot. Ki wasn’t much on the catching part, but she had a phenomenal arm for a kid of three and played with gusto. Rommie had set the boombox up on the trailer’s back step, and it spun out a haze of late-eighties and early-nineties music: U2, Tears for Fears, the Eurythmics, Crowded House, A Flock of Seagulls, Ah-Hah, the Bangles, Melissa Etheridge, Huey Lewis and the News. It seemed to me that I knew every song, every riff.

We sweated and sprinted in the noon light. We watched Mattie’s long, tanned legs flash and listened to the bright runs of Kyra’s laughter. At one point Rommie Bissonette went head over heels, all the change spilling out of his pockets, and John laughed until he had to sit down.

Tears rolled from his eyes. Ki ran over and plopped on his defenseless lap. John stopped laughing in a hurry. “Ooofl” he cried, looking at me with shining, wounded eyes as his bruised balls no doubt tried to climb back inside his body. “Kyra Devote!” Mattie cried, looking at John apprehensively. “I taggled my own quartermack,” Ki said proudly. John smiled feebly at her and staggered to his feet. “Yes,” he said. “You did. And the ref calls fifteen yards for squashing.”

“Are you okay, man?” George asked. He looked concerned, but his voice was grinning.

“I’m fine,” John said, and spun him the Frisbee. It wobbled feebly across the yard. “Go on, throw. Let’s see whatcha got.” The thunder rumbled louder, but the black clouds were all still west of us; the sky overhead remained a harmless humid blue. Birds still sang and crickets hummed in the grass. There was a heat-shimmer over the barbecue, and it would soon be time to slap on John’s New York steaks. The Frisbee still flew, red against the green of the grass and trees, the blue of the sky.

I was still in lust, but everything was still all right—men are in lust all over the world and damned near all of the time, and the icecaps don’t melt. But she danced, and everything changed. It was an old Don Henley song, one driven by a really nasty guitar riff. “Oh God, I love this one,” Mattie cried. The Frisbee came to her. She caught it, dropped it, stepped on it as if it were a hot red spot falling on a nightclub stage, and began to shake. She put her hands first behind her neck and then on her hips and then behind her back. She danced stand ins with the toes of her sneakers on the Frisbee. She danced without moving. She danced as they say in that song—like a wave on the ocean.

“The government bugged the men’s room in the local disco lounge, And all she wants to do is dance, dance…

keep the boys from selling all the weapons they can scrounge, And all she wants to do, all she wants to do is dance.”

Women are sexy when they dance—incredibly sexy—but that wasn’t what I reacted to, or how I reacted. The lust I was coping with, but this was more than lust, and not copeable. It was something that sucked the wind out of me and left me feeling utterly at her mercy. In that moment she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, not a pretty woman in shorts and a middy top dancing in place on a Frisbee, but Venus revealed. She was everything I had missed during the last four years, when I’d been so badly off I didn’t know I was missing anything. She robbed me of any last defenses I might have had. The age difference didn’t matter. If I looked to people like my tongue was hanging out even when my mouth was shut, then so be it. If I lost my dignity, my pride, my sense of self, then so be it. Four years on my own had taught me there are worse things to lose.

How long did she stand there, dancing? I don’t know. Probably not long, not even a minute, and then she realized we were looking at her, rapt—because to some degree they all saw what I saw and felt what I felt. For that minute or however long it was, I don’t think any of us used much oxygen.

She stepped off the Frisbee, laughing and blushing at the same time, confused but not really uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…

I love that song.”

“All she wants to do is dance,” Rommie said.

“Yes, sometimes that’s all she wants,” Mattie said, and blushed harder than ever. “Excuse me, I have to use the facility.” She tossed me the Frisbee and then dashed for the trailer.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself back to reality, and saw John doing the same thing. George Kennedy was wearing a mildly stunned expression, as if someone had fed him a light sedative and it was finally taking effect.

Thunder rumbled. This time it did sound closer.

I skimmed the Frisbee to Rommie. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m in love,” he said, and then seemed to give himself a small mental shake—it was a thing you could see in his eyes. “I also think it’s time we got going on those steaks if we’re going to eat outside.

Want to help me?”

“Sure.”

“I will, too,” John said.

We walked back to the trailer, leaving George and Kyra to play toss.

Kyra was asking George if he had ever caught any crinimals. In the kitchen, Mattie was standing beside the open fridge and stacking steaks on a platter. “Thank God you guys came in. I was on the point of giving up and gobbling one of these just the way it is. They’re the most beautiful things I ever saw.”

“You’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” John said. He was being totally sincere, but the smile she gave him was distracted and a little bemused. I made a mental note to myself: never compliment a woman on her beauty when she has a couple of raw steaks in her hands. It just doesn’t turn the windmill somehow.

“How are you at barbecuing meat?” she asked me. “Tell the truth, because these are way too good to mess up.”

“I can hold my own.”

“Okay, you’re hired. John, you’re assisting. Rommie, help me do salads.”

“My pleasure.”

George and Ki had come around to the front of the trailer and were now sitting in lawn-chairs like a couple of old cronies at their London club. George was telling Ki how he had shot it out with Rolfe Nedeau and the Real Bad Gang on Lisbon Street in 1993.

“George, what’s happening to your nose?” John asked. “It’s getting so long.”

“Do you mind?” George asked. “I’m having a conversation here.”

“Mr. Kennedy has caught lots of crooked crinimals,” Kyra said. “He caught the Real Bad Gang and put them in Supermax.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Kennedy also won an Academy Award for acting in a movie called Cool Hand Luke.”

“That’s absolutely correct,” George said. He raised his right hand and crossed the two fingers. “Me and Paul Newman. Just like that.”

“We have his pusgetti sauce,” Ki said gravely, and that got John laughing again. It didn’t hit me the same way, but laughter is catching; just watching John was enough to break me up after a few seconds. We were howling like a couple of fools as we slapped the steaks on the grill. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn our hands off. “Why are they laughing?” Ki asked George. “Because they’re foolish men with little tiny brains,” George said. “Now listen, Ki—I got them all except for the Human Headcase. He jumped into his car and I jumped into mine. The details of that chase are nothing for a little girl to hear—” George regaled her with them anyway while John and I stood grinning at each other across Mattie’s barbecue. “This is great, isn’t it?” John said, and I nodded. Mattie came out with corn wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by Rommie, who had a large salad bowl clasped in his arms and negotiated the steps carefully, trying to peer over the top of the bowl as he made his way down them. We sat at the picnic table, George and Rommie on one side, John and I flanking Mattie on the other. Ki sat at the head, perched on a stack of old magazines in a lawn-chair. Mattie tied a dishtowel around her neck, an indignity Ki submitted to only because (a) she was wearing new clothes, and (b) a dishtowel wasn’t a baby-bib, at least technically speaking. We ate hugely—salad, steak (and John was right, it really was the best I’d ever had), roasted corn on the cob, “strewberry snortcake” for dessert. By the time we’d gotten around to the snortcake, the thunderheads were noticeably closer and there was a hot, jerky breeze blowing around the yard. “Mattie, if I never eat a meal as good as this one again, I won’t be surprised,’’

Rommie said. “Thanks ever so much for having me.”

“Thank you,” she said. There were tears standing in her eyes. She took my hand on one side and John’s on the other. She squeezed both. “Thank you all. If you knew what things were like for Ki and me before this last week. .” She shook her head, gave John and me a final squeeze, and let go. “But that’s over.”

“Look at the baby,” George said, amused.

Ki had slumped back in her lawn-chair and was looking at us with glazing eyes. Most of her hair had come out of the scrunchy and lay in clumps against her cheeks. There was a dab of whipped cream on her nose and a single yellow kernel of corn sitting in the middle of her chin. “I threw the Frisbee six fousan times,” Kyra said. She spoke in a distant, declamatory tone. “I tired.” Mattie started to get up. I put my hand on her arm. “Let me?” She nodded, smiling. “If you want.” I picked Kyra up and carried her around to the steps. Thunder rumbled again, a long, low roll that sounded like the snarl of a huge dog. I looked up at the encroaching clouds, and as I did, movement caught my eye. It was an old blue car heading west on Wasp Hill Road toward the lake. The only reason I noticed it was that it was wearing one of those stupid bumper-stickers from the Village Cafe: HOW, N BROKEN—WATCH FOR FINGER.

I carried Ki up the steps and through the door, turning her so I wouldn’t bump her head. “Take care of me,” she said in her sleep. There was a sadness in her voice that chilled me. It was as if she knew she was asking the impossible. “Take care of me, I’m little, Mama says I’m a little guy.”

“I’ll take care of you,” I said, and kissed that silky place between her eyes again. “Don’t worry, Ki, go to sleep.” I carried her to her room and put her on her bed. By then she was totally conked out. I wiped the cream off her nose and picked the corn-kernel off her chin. I glanced at my watch and saw it was ten ’til two. They would be gathering at Grace Baptist by now. Bill Dean was wearing a gray tie.

Buddy Jellison had a hat on. He was standing behind the church with some other men who were smoking before going inside. I turned. Mattie was in the doorway. “Mike,” she said. “Come here, please.”

I went to her. There was no cloth between her waist and my hands this time. Her skin was warm, and as silky as her daughter’s. She looked up at me, her lips parted. Her hips pressed forward, and when she felt what was hard down there, she pressed harder against it. “Mike,” she said again. I closed my eyes. I felt like someone who has just come to the doorway of a brightly lit room full of people laughing and talking. And dancing. Because sometimes that is all we want to do. I want to come in, I thought. That’s what I want to do, all I want to do. Let me do what I want. Let me-I realized I was saying it aloud, whispering it rapidly into her ear as I held her with my hands going up and down her back, my fingertips ridging her spine, touching her shoulderblades, then coming around in front to cup her small breasts. “Yes,” she said. “What we both want. Yes. That’s fine.” Slowly, she reached up with her thumbs and wiped the wet places from under my eyes. I drew back from her. “The key—” She smiled a little. “You know where it is.”

“I’ll come tonight.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been. .” I had to clear my throat. I looked at Kyra, who was deeply asleep. “I’ve been lonely. I don’t think I knew it, but I have been.”

“Me too. And I knew it for both of us. Kiss, please.” I kissed her. I think our tongues touched, but I’m not sure. What I remember most clearly is the liveness of her. She was like a dreidel lightly spinning in my arms. “Hey!” John called from outside, and we sprang apart. “You guys want to give us a little help? It’s gonna rain!”

“Thanks for finally making up your mind,” she said to me in a tow voice.

She turned and hurried back up the doublewide’s narrow corridor. The next time she spoke to me, I don’t think she knew who she was talking to, or where she was. The next time she spoke to me, she was dying.

“Don’t wake the baby,” I heard her tell John, and his response: “Oh, sorry, sorry.”

I stood where I was a moment longer, getting my breath, then slipped into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I remember seeing a blue plastic whale in the bathtub as I turned to take a towel off the rack. I remember thinking that it probably blew bubbles out of its spout-hole, and I even remember having a momentary glimmer of an idea—a children’s story about a spouting whale. Would you call him Willie? Nah, too obvious. Wilhelm, now that had a fine round ring to it, simultaneously grand and amusing. Wilhelm the Spouting Whale. I remember the bang of thunder from overhead. I remember how happy I was, with the decision finally made and the night to look forward to. I remember the murmur of men’s voices and the murmur of Mattie’s response as she told them where to put the stuff. Then I heard all of them going back out again. I looked down at myself and saw a certain lump was subsiding. I remember thinking there was nothing so absurd-looking as a sexually excited man and knew I’d had this same thought before, perhaps in a dream. I left the bathroom, checked on Kyra again—rolled over on her side, fast asleep—and then went down the hall. I had just reached the living room when gunfire erupted outside. I never confused the sound with thunder. There was a moment when my mind fumbled toward the idea of backfires—some kid’s hotrod—and then I knew. Part of me had been expecting something to happen. . but it had been expecting ghosts rather than gunfire. A fatal lapse. It was the rapidpah/pah/pah/of an auto-fire weapon—a Glock nine-millimeter, as it turned out. Mattie screamed—a high, drilling scream that froze my blood. I heard John cry out in pain and George Kennedy bellow, “Down, down! For the love of Christ, get her down/” Something hit the trailer like a hard spatter of hail—a rattle of punching sounds running from west to east. Something split the air in front of my eyes—I heard it. There was an almost-musical sproing sound, like a snapping guitar string. On the kitchen table, the salad bowl one of them had just brought in shattered.

I ran for the door and nearly dived down the cement-block steps. I saw the barbecue overturned, with the glowing coals already setting patches of the scant front-yard grass on fire. I saw Rommie Bissonette sitting with his legs outstretched, looking stupidly down at his ankle, which was soaked with blood. Mattie was on her hands and knees by the barbecue with her hair hanging in her face—it was as if she meant to sweep up the hot coals before they could cause some real trouble. John staggered toward me, holding out a hand. The arm above it was soaked with blood.

And I saw the car I’d seen before—the nondescript sedan with the joke sticker on it. It had gone up the road—the men inside making that first pass to check us out—then turned around and come back. The shooter was still leaning out the front passenger window. I could see the stubby smoking weapon in his hands. It had a wire stock. His features were a blue blank broken only by huge gaping eyesockets—a ski-mask. Overhead, thunder gave a long, awakening roar.

George Kennedy was walking toward the car, not hurrying, kicking hot spilled coals out of his way as he went, not bothering about the dark-red stain that was spreading on the right thigh of his pants, reaching behind himself, not hurrying even when the shooter pulled back in and shouted “Go go go!” at the driver, who was also wearing a blue mask, George not hurrying, no, not hurrying a bit, and even before I saw the pistol in his hand, I knew why he had never taken off his absurd Pa Kettle suit jacket, why he had even played Frisbee in it.

The blue car (it turned out to be a 1987 Ford registered to Mrs. Sonia Belliveau of Auburn and reported stolen the day before) had pulled over onto the shoulder and had never really stopped rolling. Now it accelerated, spewing dry brown dust out from under its rear tires, fishtailing, knocking Mattie’s RFD box off its post and sending it flying into the road.

George still didn’t hurry. He brought his hands together, holding his gun with his right and steadying with his left. He squeezed off five deliberate shots. The first two went into the trunk—I saw the holes appear. The third blew in the back window of the departing Ford, and I heard someone shout in pain. The fourth went I don’t know where. The fifth blew the left rear tire. The Ford veered to that side. The driver almost brought it back, then lost it completely. The car ploughed into the ditch thirty yards below Mattie’s trailer and rolled over on its side. There was a whumpfl and the rear end was engulfed in flames. One of George’s shots must have hit the gas-tank. The shooter began struggling to get out through the passenger window.

“Ki… get Ki… away…” A hoarse, whispering voice.

Mattie was crawling toward me. One side of her head—the right side—still looked all right, but the left side was a ruin. One dazed blue eye peered out from between clumps of bloody hair. Skull-fragments littered her tanned shoulder like bits of broken crockery. How I would love to tell you I don’t remember any of this, how I would love to have someone else tell you that Michael Noonan died before he saw that, but I cannot. Alas is the word for it in the crossword puzzles, a four-letter word meaning to express great sorrow.

“Ki… Mike, get Ki…”

I knelt and put my arms around her. She struggled against me. She was young and strong, and even with the gray matter of her brain bulging through the broken wall of her skull she struggled against me, crying for her daughter, wanting to reach her and protect her and get her to safety.

“Mattie, it’s all right,” I said. Down at the Grace Baptist Church, at the far end of the zone I was in, they were singing “Blessed Assurance’’… but most of their eyes were as blank as the eye now peering at me through the tangle of bloody hair. “Mattie, stop, rest, it’s all right.”

“Ki… get Ki… don’t let them…”

“They won’t hurt her, Mattie, I promise.”

She slid against me, slippery as a fish, and screamed her daughter’s name, holding out her bloody hands toward the trailer. The rose-colored shorts and top had gone bright red. Blood spattered the grass as she thrashed and pulled. From down the hill there was a guttural explosion as the Ford’s gas-tank exploded. Black smoke rose toward a black sky.

Thunder roared long and loud, as if the sky were saying You want noise?

I3ah? I’ll give you noise.

“Say Mattie’s all right, Mike!” John cried in a wavering voice. “Oh for God’s sake say she’s—”

He dropped to his knees beside me, his eyes rolling up until nothing showed but the whites. He reached for me, grabbed my shoulder, then tore damned near half my shirt off as he lost his battle to stay conscious and fell on his side next to Mattie. A curd of white goo bubbled from one corner of his mouth. Twelve feet away, near the overturned barbecue, Rommie was trying to get on his feet, his teeth clenched in pain. George was standing in the middle of Wasp Hill Road, reloading his gun from a pouch he’d apparently had in his coat pocket and watching as the shooter worked to get clear of the overturned car before it was engulfed. The entire right leg of George’s pants was red now. He may live but he’ll never wear that suit again, I thought. I held Mattie. I put my face down to hers, put my mouth to the ear that was still there and said: “Kyra’s okay. She’s sleeping. She’s fine, I promise.” Mattie seemed to understand. She stopped straining against me and collapsed to the grass, trembling all over. “Ki… Ki…” This was the last of her talking on earth. One of her hands reached out blindly, groped at a tuft of grass, and yanked it out. “Over here,” I heard George saying. “Get over here, motherfuck, don’t you even think about turning your back on me.”

“How bad is she?” Rommie asked, hobbling over. His face was as white as paper. And before I could reply: “Oh Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Blessed be the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Oh Mary born without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee. Oh no, oh Mike, no.” He began again, this time lapsing into Lewiston street-French, what the old folks call La Parle. “Quit it,” I said, and he did. It was as if he had only been waiting to be told. “Go inside and check on Kyra. Can you?”

“Yes.” He started toward the trailer, holding his leg and lurching along. With each lurch he gave a high yip of pain, but somehow he kept going. I could smell burning tufts of grass. I could smell electric rain on a rising wind. And under my hands I could feel the light spin of the drei-del slowing down as she went. I turned her over, held her in my arms, and rocked her back and forth. At Grace Baptist the minister was now reading Psalm 139 for Royce: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light. The minister was reading and the Martians were listening. I rocked her back and forth in my arms under the black thunderheads. I was supposed to come to her that night, use the key under the pot and come to her. She had danced with the toes of her white sneakers on the red Frisbee, had danced like a wave on the ocean, and now she was dying in my arms while the grass burned in little clumps and the man who had fancied her as much as I had lay unconscious beside her, his right arm painted red from the short sleeve of his WE are THE CHAMPIONS tee-shirt all the way down to his bony, freckled wrist.

“Mattie,” I said. “Mattie, Mattie, Mattie.” I rocked her and smoothed my hand across her forehead, which on the right side was miraculously unsplattered by the blood that had drenched her. Her hair fell over the ruined left side of her face. “Mattie,” I said. “Mattie, Mattie, oh Mattie.” Lightning flashed—the first stroke I had seen. It lit the western sky in a bright blue arc. Mattie trembled strongly in my arms—all the way from neck to toes she trembled. Her lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration. Her hand came up and seemed to grab for the back of my neck, as a person falling from a cliff may grasp blindly at anything to hold on just a little longer.

Then it fell away and lay limply on the grass, palm up. She trembled once more—the whole delicate weight of her trembled in my arms—and then she was still.