Lisey's Story

VII. Lisey and The Law

(Obsession and The Exhausted Mind)

1

The woman who took Lisey's call identified herself as Communications Officer Soames and said she couldn't put Lisey through to Sheriff Ridgewick, because Sheriff Ridgewick had been married the week before. He and his new bride were on the island of Maui, and would be for the next ten days.

"Who can I talk to?" Lisey asked. She didn't like the closeto-strident sound of her voice, but she understood it. Oh God, did she. This had been one long goddam day.

"Hold on, ma'am," CO Soames said. Then Lisey was in limbo with McGruff the Crime Dog, who was talking about Neighborhood Watch groups. Lisey thought this a considerable improvement on the Two Thousand Comatose Strings. After a minute or so of McGruff, a cop with a name Scott would have loved came on the line.

"This is Deputy Andy Clutterbuck, ma'am, how can I help you?"

For the third time that day—third time's the charm, Good Ma would have said, third time pays for all—Lisey introduced herself as Mrs. Scott Landon. Then she told Deputy Clutterbuck a slightly edited version of the Zack McCool story, beginning with the call she had received the previous evening and finishing with the one she'd made tonight, the one that had netted the Jim Dooley name. Clutterbuck contented himself with uh-huhs and variations thereof until she had finished, then asked her who had given her "Zack McCool"'s other, possibly real name.

With a twinge of conscience

(tattle-tale tit all the dogs in town come to have a little bit)

that caused her a moment of bitter amusement, Lisey gave up the King of the Incunks. She did not call him Woodsmucky.

"Are you going to talk to him, Deputy Clutterbuck?"

"I think that's indicated, don't you?"

"I guess so," Lisey said, wondering what, if anything, Castle County's acting Sheriff could get out of Woodbody that she hadn't been able to pry loose. She supposed there might be something—she'd been pretty mad. She also realized that wasn't what was bothering her. "Will he be arrested?"

"On the basis of what you've told me? Not even close. You might have grounds for a civil action—you'd have to ask your lawyer—but in court I'm sure he'd say that as far as he knew, all this guy Dooley meant to do was show up on your doorstep and try a little high-pressure sales routine. He'd claim not to know anything about dead cats in mailboxes and threats of personal injury…and he'd be telling the truth, based on what you've just said. Right?"

Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it was right.

"I'm going to want the letter this stalker left," Clutterbuck said, "and I'm going to want the cat. What did you do with the remains?"

"We have a wooden box-thingy attached to the house," Lisey said. She picked up a cigarette, considered it, put it back down again. "My husband had a word for it—my husband had a word for just about everything—but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, it keeps the raccoons out of the swill. I put the cat's body in a garbage bag and put the bag in the orlop." Now that she wasn't struggling to find it, Scott's word came effortlessly to mind.

"Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?"

"Yes…" Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.

"I want you to put the cat in your freezer, Mrs. Landon. It's perfectly okay to leave it in the bag. Someone will pick it up tomorrow and take it over to Kendall and Jepperson. They're the vets we have our county account with. They'll try to determine a cause of death—"

"It shouldn't be hard," Lisey said. "The mailbox was full of blood."

"Uh-huh. Too bad you didn't take a few Polaroids before you wiped it all up."

"Well excuse me all to hell and gone!" Lisey cried, stung.

"Calm down," Clutterbuck said. Calmly. "I understand that you were upset. Anybody would have been."

Not you, Lisey thought resentfully. You would have been as cool as…as a dead cat in a freezer.

She said, "That takes care of Professor Woodbody and the dead cat; now what about me?"

Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once—Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer—to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call—an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley "checked by"

(Clutterbuck's oddly delicate way of putting it), he'd see the County cruiser and move along.

Lisey hoped Clutterbuck was right about that.

Guys like this Dooley, Clutterbuck continued, were usually more show than go. If they couldn't scare someone into giving them what they wanted, they had a tendency to forget the whole deal. "My guess is you'll never see him again."

Lisey hoped he was right about that, too. She herself had her doubts. What she kept coming back to was the way "Zack" had set things up. How he'd done it so he couldn't be called off, at least not by the man who had hired him.

2

Not twenty minutes after finishing her conversation with Deputy Clutterbuck (whom her tired mind now kept wanting to call either Deputy Butterhug or—perhaps cross-referencing Polaroid cameras—Deputy Shutterbug), a slim man dressed in khaki and wearing a large gun on his hip showed up at her front door. He introduced himself as Deputy Dan Boeckman and told her he'd been instructed to take "a certain letter" into safekeeping and photograph "a certain deceased animal." Lisey kept a straight face at that, although she had to bite down hard on the soft inner lining of her cheeks to manage the feat. Boeckman placed the letter (along with the plain white envelope) into a Baggie which Lisey provided, then asked if she had put the "deceased animal" in the freezer. Lisey had done this as soon as she finished talking to Clutterbuck, depositing the green garbage bag in the far left corner of her big Trawlsen, where there was nothing but an elderly stack of venison steaks in hoarfrosty plastic bags, a present to her and Scott from their electrician, Smiley Flanders. Smiley had won a permit in the moose lottery of '01 or '02—Lisey couldn't remember which—and had dropped "a tol'able big 'un" up in the St. John Valley. Where Charlie Corriveau had bagged his new bride, now that Lisey thought of it. Next to the meat, which she would almost certainly never get around to eating (except perhaps in the event of a nuclear war), was the only place for a dead Galloway barncat, and she told Deputy Boeckman to make sure he put it back there and nowhere else when he had finished his photography. He promised with perfect seriousness that he would "comply with her request," and she once more found it necessary to bite the insides of her cheeks. Even so, that one was close. As soon as he was clumping stolidly down the basement stairs, Lisey turned herself to the wall like a naughty child with her forehead against the plaster and her hands over her mouth, laughing in whispery, wide-throated squeals.

It was as this throe passed that she began thinking again about Good Ma's cedar box (it had been Lisey's for over thirty-five years, but she had never thought of it as hers). Remembering the box and all the little mementos tucked away inside helped to ease the hysteria bubbling up from deep inside her. What helped even more was her growing certainty that she had put the box in the attic. Which made perfect sense, of course. The detritus of Scott's working life was out there in the barn and the study; the detritus of the life she had lived while he was working would be here, in the house she had chosen and they had both come to love.

In the attic were at least four expensive Turkish rugs she had once adored and which had at some point, for reasons she did not understand, begun to give her the creeps…

At least three sets of retired luggage that had taken everything two dozen airlines, many of them dinky little commuter puddle-jumper outfits, could throw at them; battered warriors that deserved medals and parades, but would have to be content with honorable attic retirement (hell, boys, it beats the town dump)…

The Danish-Modern living room furniture that Scott said looked pretentious, and how angry with him she'd been, mostly because she'd thought he was probably right…

The rolltop desk, a "bargain" that turned out to have one short leg which had to be shimmed, only the shim was always coming out and then one day the rolltop had unrolled on her fingers and that had been it, buddy, up to the smucking attic with you…

Ashtrays on stands from their smoking days…

Scott's old IBM Selectric, which she had used for correspondence until it started getting hard to find the ribbons and CorrecTapes…

Stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'othert'ing. Another world, really, and yet it was all rah-cheer, or at least right up dere. And somewhere—probably behind a stack of magazines or sitting on top of the rocking chair with the unreliable split back—would be the cedar box. Thinking about it was like thinking about cold water when you were thirsty on a hot day. She didn't know just why that should be so, but it was.

By the time Deputy Boeckman came up from the cellar with his Polaroids, she was impatient for him to be gone. Perversely he hung on (hung on like a toothache, Dad Debusher would've said), first telling her it looked like the cat had been stabbed with some sort of tool (possibly a screwdriver), then assuring her he'd be parked right outside. It might not say TO SERVE AND PROTECT on their units (he called them units), but the thought was there every minute, and he wanted her to feel perfectly safe. Lisey said she felt so safe she was actually thinking about going to bed—it had been a long day, she'd had a family emergency to deal with as well as this stalker business, and she was utterly whipped. Deputy Boeckman finally took the hint and left after telling her one final time that she was as safe as could be, safe as houses, and there was no need for any of that sleeping-with-one-eye-open stuff. Then he clumped down her front steps as stolidly as he'd clumped down her cellar stairs, shuffling through his dead-cat photos a final time while he still had light enough to see them. A minute or two later she heard what sounded like a puffickly huh-yooge engine rev twice. Headlights washed across the lawn and the house, then abruptly went out. She thought of Deputy Daniel Boeckman sitting across the road with his cruiser parked prominently on the shoulder. She smiled. Then she went upstairs to the attic, with no idea that she would be lying on her bed fully dressed two hours later, exhausted and weeping.

3

The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it. She'd had no clear reason for wanting the box in the first place, only a strong intuition that something inside, some souvenir from her early marriage, was the next station of the bool. After awhile, however, the box itself became her goal, Good Ma's cedar box. Bools be damned, if she didn't lay hands on that cedar box—a foot long, maybe nine inches wide and six deep—she'd never be able to sleep. She'd only lie there tortured by thoughts of dead cats and dead husbands and empty beds and Incunk warriors and sisters who cut themselves and fathers who cut—

(hush Lisey hush)

She'd only lie there, leave it at that.

An hour's search was enough to convince her the cedar box wasn't in the attic, after all. But by then she was sure it was probably in the spare bedroom. It was perfectly reasonable to think it had migrated back there…except another forty minutes (including a teetery stepladder exploration of the top shelf in the closet) convinced her the spare room was another dry hole. So the box was down cellar. Had to be. Very likely it had come to rest behind the stairs, where there was a bunch of cardboard boxes containing curtains, rug-remnants, old stereo components, and a few bits of sporting equipment: ice skates, a croquet set, a badminton net with a hole in it. As she hurried down the cellar stairs (not thinking at all of the dead cat now lying beside the pile of petrified moose-meat in her freezer), Lisey began to believe she had even seen the box down there. By then she was very tired, but only distantly aware of the fact.

It took her twenty minutes to drag all the cartons from their long-term resting place. Some were damp and split open. By the time she'd finished going through the stuff inside, her limbs were trembling with exhaustion, her clothes were sticking to her, and a nasty little headache had begun thumping at the back of her skull. She shoved back the cartons that were still holding together and left the ones that had split apart where they were. Good Ma's box was in the attic after all. Must be, had been all along. As she wasted time down here among the rusty ice skates and forgotten jigsaw puzzles, the cedar box was waiting patiently up there. Lisey could now think of half a dozen places she'd neglected to search, including the crawlspace all the way back under the eaves. That was the most likely spot. She'd probably put the box there and just forgotten all about—

The thought broke off cleanly as she realized someone was standing behind her. She could see him from the corner of her eye. Call him Jim Dooley or Zack McCool, by either name he would in the next moment drop a hand on her sweaty shoulder and call her Missus. Then she'd really have something to worry about.

This sensation was so real that Lisey actually heard the shuffle of Dooley's feet. She wheeled around, hands coming up to protect her face, and had just an instant to see the Hoover vacuum she herself had pulled out from under the stairs. Then she tripped over the moldering cardboard carton with the old badminton net stuffed inside. She waved her arms for balance, almost caught it, lost it, had time to think shit-a-brick, and went down. The top of her head missed the underside of the stairs by a whisker, and that was good, because that would have been a nasty crack indeed, maybe the kind that laid you out unconscious. Laid you out dead, if you came down hard enough on the cement floor. Lisey managed to break her fall with her splayed hands, one knee landing safely on the springy mat of the rotted badminton net, the other suffering a harder landing on the cellar floor. Luckily, she was still wearing her jeans.

The fall was fortunate in another way, she thought fifteen minutes later as she lay on her bed, still fully dressed but with her hard crying over; she was by then down to the isolated sobs and rueful, watery gasps for breath that are strong emotion's hangover. The fall—and the scare that had preceded it, she supposed—had cleared her head. She might have gone on hunting the box for another two hours—longer, if her strength had held out. Back to the attic, back to the spare bedroom, back to the cellar. Back to the future, Scott would surely have added; he had a knack for cracking wise at precisely the wrong moment. Or what turned out, later on, to have been precisely the right one.

In any case she might well have gone on until dawn's early light and it would have gotten her a lot of hot air in one hand and a big pile of jack shit in the other. Lisey was now convinced the box was either in a place so obvious she'd already passed it half a dozen times or it was just gone, maybe stolen by one of the cleaning women who'd worked for the Landons over the years or by some workman who'd spied it and thought his wife would like a nice box like that and that Mr. Landon's Missus (funny how that word got into your head) would never miss it.

Fiddle-de-dee, little Lisey, said the Scott who kept his place in her head. Think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.

"Yep," Lisey said, then sat up, suddenly aware that she was a sweaty, smelly woman living inside a set of sweaty, dirty clothes. She got out of them as quickly as she could, left them in a heap by the foot of the bed, and headed for the shower. She had scraped the palms of both hands breaking her fall in the cellar, but she ignored their stinging and soaped her hair twice, letting suds run down the sides of her face. Then, after almost dozing under the hot water for five minutes or so, she resolutely turned the shower's control-lever all the way over to C, rinsed off under the near-freezing needlespray, and stepped out, gasping. She used one of the big towels, and as she dropped it into the hamper she realized she felt like herself again, sane and ready to let this day go.

She went to bed, and her last thought before sleep swatted her into the black was of Deputy Boeckman standing watch. It was a comforting thought, particularly after her scare in the cellar, and she slept deeply, without dreams, until the shrill of the telephone woke her.

4

It was Cantata, calling from Boston. Of course it was. Darla had called her. Darla always called Canty when there was trouble, usually sooner rather than later. Canty wanted to know if she should come home. Lisey assured her sister that there was absolutely no reason to return from Boston early no matter how distressed Darla might have sounded. Amanda was resting comfortably, and there was really nothing Canty could do. "You can visit, but unless there's been a big change—which Dr. Alberness told us not to expect—you won't be able to tell if she even knows you're there."

"Jesus," Canty said. "That's so awful, Lisa."

"Yes. But she's with people who understand her situation—or understand how to care for people in her situation, at least. And Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loo—"

Lisey had been pacing around the bedroom with the cordless phone. Now she stopped, staring at the notebook that had slid most of the way from the right rear pocket of her discarded blue jeans. It was Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions, only now Lisey was the one who felt compelled.

"Lisa?" Canty was the only one who called her that on a regular basis, and it always made her feel like the sort of woman who showed off the prizes on some TV game show or other— Lisa, show Hank and Martha what they've won! "Lisa, are you still there?"

"Yeah, honey." Eyes on the notebook. Little rings gleaming in the sun. Little steel loops. "I said Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loops. Loop." The notebook was still curved with the shape of the buttock against which it had spent so many hours, and as she looked at it, Canty's voice seemed to be fading. Lisey heard herself saying she was sure Canty would have done all the same things if she'd been the one on the spot. She bent over and slipped the notebook the rest of the way out of the jeans pocket. She told Cantata she would call that evening, told Cantata she loved her, told Cantata goodbye and tossed the cordless phone on the bed without so much as a glance. She had eyes only for the battered little notebook, seventy-nine cents at any Walgreen's or Rexall. And why should she be so fascinated? Why, now that it was morning and she was rested? Clean and rested? With fresh sunshine pouring in, her compulsive search for the cedar box the night before seemed silly, nothing but a behavioral externalization of all the day's anxieties, but this notebook didn't seem silly, no, not at all.

And just to add to the fun, Scott's voice spoke to her, more clearly than ever. God, but that voice was clear! And strong.

I left you a note, babyluv. I left you a bool.

She thought of Scott under the yum-yum tree, Scott in the weird October snow, telling her that sometimes Paul would tease him with a hard bool…but never too hard. She hadn't thought of that in years. Had pushed it away, of course, with all the other things she didn't want to think of; she'd put it behind her purple curtain. But what was so bad about this?

"He was never mean," Scott had said. There had been tears in his eyes but none in his voice; his voice had been clear and steady. As always when he had a story to tell, he meant to be heard. "When I was little, Paul was never mean to me and I was never mean to him. We stuck together. We had to. I loved him, Lisey. I loved him so."

By now she had flipped past the pages of numbers—poor Amanda's numbers, all crammed madly together. She found nothing but blank pages beyond. Lisey thumbed through them faster and faster, her certainty that there was something here to find waning, then reached a page near the end with a single word printed on it:

HOLLY HOCKS

Why was that familiar? At first it wouldn't come, and then it did. What's my prize? she'd asked the thing in Amanda's nightgown, the thing turned away from her. A drink, it had said. A Coke? An RC? she had asked, and it had said—

"It said…she or he said…'Shut up, we want to watch the hollyhocks,'" Lisey murmured.

Yes, that was right, or almost right; close enough for government work, anyway. It meant nothing to her, and yet it almost did. She stared at the word a moment or two longer, then thumbed through to the end of the notebook. All the pages were blank. She was about to toss it aside when she saw ghostly words behind the last page. She flipped it up and found this printed on the bent inner surface of the notebook's back cover:

4th Station: Look under the Bed

But before bending to look under the bed, Lisey flipped first back to the numbers at the front of the book and then to HOLLYHOCKS, which she had found half a dozen pages from the end, confirming what she already knew: Amanda printed her fours with a right angle and a downward slash, as they had been taught in grammar school: Y. It was Scott who had made fours that looked a little like an ampersand: 4. It had been Scott who looped his o's together and had been in the habit of drawing a line under his jotted notes and memos. And it had always been Amanda's habit to print in tiny capitals…with slightly lazy round letters: C's, G's, Y's, and S's.

Lisey flipped back and forth between HOLLYHOCKS and 4th Station: Look Under the Bed. She thought that if she put the two writing samples in front of Darla and Canty, they would without hesitation identify the former as Amanda's work and the latter as Scott's.

And the thing in the bed with her yesterday morning…

"It sounded like both of them," she whispered. Her flesh was creeping. She hadn't realized flesh could actually do that. "People would call me crazy, but it really did sound like both of them."

Look under the bed.

At last she did as the note instructed. And the only bool she spied was an old pair of carpet slippers.

5

Lisey Landon sat in a bar of morning sun with her legs crossed at the shins and her hands resting on the balls of her knees. She had slept nude and sat that way now; the shadow of the sheers drawn across the east window lay on her slim body like the shadow of a stocking. She looked again at the note directing her to the fourth station of the bool—a short bool, a good bool, a few more and she'd get her prize.

Sometimes Paul would tease me with a hard bool…but never too hard.

Never too hard. With that in mind she closed the notebook with a snap and looked at the back cover. There, written in tiny dark letters below the Dennison trade name, was this:

mein gott

Lisey got to her feet and quickly began to dress.

6

The tree closes them in their own world. Beyond is the snow. And under the yum-yum tree is Scott's voice, Scott's hypnotic voice, and did she think Empty Devils was his horror story? This is his horror story, and except for his tears when he speaks of Paul and how they hung together through all the cutting and terror and blood on the floor, he tells it unfalteringly.

"We never had bool hunts when Daddy was home," he says, "only when he was at work." Scott has for the most part gotten the western Pennsylvania accent out of his talk, but now it creeps in, far deeper than her own Yankee accent, and somehow childish: not home but hum, not work but a strange distortion that comes out rurk. "Paul would always put the first one close by. It might say '5 stations of the bool'—to tell you how many clues there were—and then something like 'Go look in the closet.' The first one was only sometimes a riddle, but the others almost always were. I member one that said 'Go where Daddy kicked the cat,' and accourse that was the old well. Another one said 'Go where we "farm all" day.' And after a little bit I figured out that meant the old Farmall tractor down in eastfield by the rock wall, and sure enough, there was a station of the bool right there on the seat, held down with a rock. Because a station of the bool was only a scrap of paper, you know, written on and folded over. I almost always got the riddles, but if I was stuck, Paul would give me more clues until I solved it. And at the end I'd get my prize of a Coke or an RC Cola or a candybar."

He looks at her. Beyond him is nothing but white—a wall of white. The yum-yum tree—it is actually a willow—bends around them in a magic circle, shutting out the world.

He says: "Sometimes when Daddy got the bad-gunky, cutting himself wasn't enough to let it out, Lisey. One day when he was like that he put me

7

up on the bench in the hall, that was what he had said next, she could remember it now (whether she wanted to or not), but before she could follow the memory deeper into the purple where it had been hidden all this time, she saw a man standing on her back porch stoop. And it was a man, not a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner but an actual man. Luckily, she had time to register the fact that, although he wasn't Deputy Boeckman, he was also dressed in Castle County khaki. This saved her the embarrassment of screaming like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween movie.

Her visitor introduced himself as Deputy Alston. He had come to fetch away the dead cat in Lisey's freezer, and also to assure her that he would be checking on her throughout the day. He asked if she had a cell phone and Lisey said she did. It was in the BMW, and she thought it might even be working. Deputy Alston suggested she keep it with her at all times, and that she program the Sheriff's Office into the speed-dial directory. He saw her expression and told her he was prepared to do that for her, if she "was not conversant with that feature."

Lisey, who rarely used the little cell phone at all, led Deputy Alston to her BMW. The gadget turned out to be only half-charged, but the cord was in the console compartment between the seats. Deputy Alston reached out to unplug the cigarette lighter, saw the light scattering of ashes around it, and paused.

"Go ahead," Lisey told him. "I thought I was going to take the habit up again, but I guess I've changed my mind."

"Probably wise, ma'am," Deputy Alston said, unsmiling. He removed the Beemer's cigarette lighter and plugged in the phone. Lisey had had no idea you could do that; when she thought of it at all, she'd always recharged the little Motorola phone in the kitchen. Two years, and she still hadn't quite gotten used to the idea that there was no man around to read the instructions and puzzle out the meanings of Fig 1 and Fig 2.

She asked Deputy Alston how long the charging-up would take.

"To full? No more than an hour, maybe less. Will you be within reach of a telephone in the meantime?"

"Yes, I've got some things to do in the barn. There's one there."

"Fine. Once this one's charged, clip it to your belt or hang it on the waistband of your pants. Any cause for alarm, hit the 1-key and bam, you're talking to a cop."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it. And as I said, I'll be checking on you. Dan Boeckman will make this his twenty again tonight unless he has to roll on a call. That'll probably happen—small towns like this, Friday nights are busy nights—but you've got your phone and your speed-dial, and he'll always return here."

"That's fine. Have you heard anything at all about the man who's been bothering me?"

"Not boo, ma'am," Deputy Alston said, comfortably enough…but of course he could afford to be comfortable, no one had threatened to hurt him, and quite likely no one would. He stood approximately six-five and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Might go one-seventy-five, dressed n hung, her father might have added; in Lisbon, Dandy Debusher had been known for such witticisms.

"If Andy hears anything—Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he's running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon—I'm sure he'll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you're inside, right? Especially after dark."

"Right."

"And keep that phone handy."

"I will."

He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. "I'll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you'll be glad to see the last of it."

"Yes," Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought

(mein gott)

in Germany. In Germany where

8

everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Lisey doesn't remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn't matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen: Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Everything that can, does.

The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott's calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing expense—mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn't looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on! Goinzee on, mein Führer, bitte, bitte! That year Scott is drinking, Scott is joking, and Scott is siccing lawyers on sonofabitching landlords, but Scott isn't writing. Not writing because he's always drunk or always drunk because he's not writing? Lisey doesn't know. It's sixenze of one, half a dozenze of the other. By May, when his teaching gig finally, mercifully ends, she no longer cares. By May she only wants to be someplace where conversation in the supermarket or the shops along the high street doesn't sound to her like the manimals in that movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. She knows that's not fair, but she also knows she hasn't been able to make a single friend in Bremen, not even among the faculty wives who speak English, and her husband is gone too much at the University. She spends too much time in the drafty house, wrapped in a shawl but still usually cold, almost always lonely and miserable, watching television programs she doesn't understand and listening to trucks rumble around the rotary up the hill. The big ones, the Peugeots, make the floors shake. The fact that Scott is also miserable, that his classes are going badly and his lectures are near-disasters, doesn't help at all. Why in God's name would it? Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however…that guy was onto something.

When Scott is at home, he's in her eye a great deal more than she's used to, because he's not crawling off to the grim little room that's been designated his study to write stories. He tries to write them at first, but by December his efforts have become sporadic and by February he's given up entirely. The man who can write in a Motel 6 with eight lanes of traffic pounding by outside and a frat party going on upstairs has come utterly and completely unstrappinzee. But he doesn't brood about it, not that she can see. Instead of writing he spends long, hilarious, and ultimately exhausting weekends with his wife. Often she drinks with him and gets drunk with him, because other than fuck him it's all she can think of to do. There are blue hungover Mondays when Lisey is actually glad to see him going out the door, although when ten PM comes and he's still not back, she's always perched by the living room window that looks out on the Ring Road, waiting anxiously for the leased Audi he drives, wondering where he is and who he's drinking with. How much he's drinking. There are Saturdays when he persuades her to play strenuous games of hide and seek with him in the big drafty house; he says it will keep them warm, at least, and he's right about that. Or they will chase each other, racing up and down stairs or pounding along the halls in their ridiculous lederhosen, laughing like a pair of dopey (not to mention horny) kids, yelling out their German buzzwords: Achtung! and Jawohl! and Ich habe Kopfschmerzen! and—most frequently—Mein Gott! More often than not these silly games end in sex. With booze or without it (but usually with), Scott always wants sex that winter and spring, and she believes that before they vacate the drafty house on the Bergenstrasse, they have done it in all the rooms, most of the bathrooms (including the one with the hideous laughing toilet), and even some of the closets. All that sex is one of the reasons that she never (well, almost never) worries that he's having an affair, in spite of the long hours he's gone, in spite of the hard drinking, in spite of the fact that he's not doing what he was made to do, which is to write stories.

But of course she's not doing what she was made to do, either, and there are times when that knowledge catches up to her. She can't say he lied to her, or even misdirected her; no, she can never say that. He only told her once, but that one time he was perfectly straight about it: there could be no kids. If she felt she had to have children—and he knew she came from a big family—then they couldn't get married. It would break his heart, but if that was how she felt, that was the way it would have to be. He had told her that under the yum-yum tree, where they'd sat enclosed in the strange October snow. She only permits herself to remember that conversation during the lonely weekday afternoons in Bremen, when the sky always seems to be white and the hour none and the trucks rumble endlessly and the bed shakes beneath her. The bed that he bought and will later insist on having shipped back to America. Often she lies there with her arm over her eyes, thinking that this was a really terrible idea in spite of their laughing weekends and their passionate (sometimes febrile) lovemaking. They have done things in that lovemaking that she wouldn't have credited even six months ago, and Lisey knows these variations have little to do with love; they're about boredom, homesickness, booze, and the blues. His drinking, always heavy, has now begun to scare her. She sees the inevitable crash coming if he doesn't pull back. And the emptiness of her womb has begun to depress her. They made a deal, yeah, sure, but under the yumyum tree she didn't fully understand that the years pass and time has weight. He may begin to write again when they get back to America, but what will she do? He never lied to me, she thinks as she lies on the Bremen bed with her arm over her eyes, but she sees a time—and not all that distant—when this fact will no longer satisfy, and the prospect frightens her. Sometimes she wishes she had never sat under that smucking willow with Scott Landon.

Sometimes she wishes she had never met him at all.

9

"That's not true," she whispered to the shadowy barn, but she felt the deadweight of his study above her as a denial—all those books, all those stories, all that gone life. She didn't repent her marriage, but yes, sometimes she did wish she had never met her troubling and troublesome man. Had met someone else instead. A nice safe computer programmer, for instance, a fellow who made seventy thousand a year and would have given her three children. Two boys and a girl, one by now grown up and married, two still in school. But that was not the life she had found. Or the one that had found her.

Instead of turning immediately to the Bremen bed (that seemed too much, too soon), Lisey turned to her pathetic little excuse for an office, opened the door, and surveyed it. What had she meant to do in here while Scott wrote his stories upstairs? She couldn't remember, but knew what had drawn her here now: the answering machine. She looked at the red 1 glowing in the window with UNPLAYED MESSAGES printed beneath it, and wondered if she should call in Deputy Alston to listen. She decided not to. If it was Dooley, she could play it for him later.

Of course it's Dooley—who else?

She steeled herself for more threats delivered in that calm, superficially reasonable voice and pushed PLAY. A moment later a young woman named Emma was explaining the really

extraordinary savings Lisey could enjoy by switching to MCI. Lisey killed this rapturous message in mid-flow, pushed ERASE, and thought: So much for women's intuition.

She left the office laughing.

10

Lisey looked at the swaddled shape of the Bremen bed with neither sorrow nor nostalgia, although she supposed she and Scott had made love in it—or fucked, anyway; she couldn't remember how much actual love there had been during SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY—hundreds of times. Hundreds? Was that possible during a mere nine-month stretch, especially when there had been days, sometimes whole working weeks, when she didn't see him from the time he sleepwalked out the door at seven AM with his briefcase banging his knee to the time he shuffled back in, usually half-lit, at ten PM or quarter to eleven? Yes, she supposed it was, if you spent whole weekends having what Scott sometimes called "smuckaramas." Why would she hold any affection for this silent sheeted monstrosity, no matter how many times they had bounced on it? She had better cause to hate it, because she understood in some way that wasn't intuitive but was rather the working of subconscious logic (Lisey's smart as the devil, as long as she doesn't think about it, she had once overheard Scott telling someone at a party, and hadn't known whether to feel flattered or ashamed) that their marriage had almost broken in that bed. Never mind how nasty-fine the sex had been, or that he'd fucked her to effortless multiple orgasms and tossed her salad until she thought she might go out of her mind from the nervepopping pleasure of it; never mind the place she'd found, the one she could touch before he came and sometimes he'd just shudder but sometimes he'd scream and that made her go goosebumps all over, even when he was deep inside her and as hot as…well, as hot as a suck-oven. She thought it was right the goddam thing should be shrouded like an enormous corpse, because—in her memory, at least—everything that had occurred between them there had been wrong and violent, one choke-hold shake after another on the throat of their marriage. Love? Make love? Maybe. Maybe a few times. Mostly what she remembered was one uglyfuck after another. Choke…and let go. Choke…and let go. And every time it took longer for the thing that was Scott-and-Lisey to breathe again. Finally they left Germany. They took the QE2 back to New York from Southampton, and on the second day out she had come back from a walk on the deck and had paused outside their stateroom with her key in her hand, head tilted, listening. From inside had come the slow but steady click of his typewriter, and Lisey had smiled.

She wouldn't allow herself to believe it was all right, but standing outside that door and hearing his resumption, she had known it could be. And it was. When he told her he'd made arrangements to have what he called the Mein Gott Bed shipped stateside, she had said nothing, knowing they would never sleep in it or make love in it again. If Scott had suggested they do so—Just vunce, liddle Leezie, for old dimes' zake!—she would have refused. In fact, she would have told him to go smuck himself. If ever there was a haunted piece of furniture, it was this one.

She approached it, dropped onto her knees, swept back the hem of the dropcloth that covered it, and peered beneath. And there, in that musty, enclosed space where the smell of old chickenshit had come creeping back (like a dog to its vomit, she thought), was what she had been looking for.

There in the shadows was Good Ma Debusher's cedar box.