Bag of Bones Part 19

'You're not Jo,' I said. 'Who are you?'

But no one was there to answer. I was in the woods. It was dark, and on the lake the loons were crying. I was walking the path to Jo's studio. It wasn't a dream; I could feel the cool air against my skin and the occasional bite of a rock into my bare sole or heel. A mosquito buzzed around my ear and I waved it away. I was wearing Jockey shorts, and at every step they pulled against a huge and throbbing erection.

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

'Everything's all right, Mike,' Jo said. She was standing on the float, watching as I swam toward her. She put her hands behind her neck like a calendar model, lifting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s more fully into the damp halter. As in the photo, I could see her nipples poking out the cloth. I was swimming in my underpants, and with the same huge erection.

'Everything's all right, Mike,' Mattie said in the north bedroom, and I opened my eyes. She was sitting beside me on the bed, smooth and naked in the weak glow of the nightlight. Her hair was down, hanging to her shoulders. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were tiny, the size of teacups, but the nipples were large and distended. Between her legs, where my hand still lingered, was a powderpuff of blonde hair, smooth as down. Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth-wings, like rose-petals. There was something desperately attractive about her as she sat there - she was like the prize you know you'll never win at the carny shooting gallery or the county fair ringtoss. The one they keep on the top shelf. She reached under the sheet and folded her fingers over the stretched material of my undershorts.

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

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

On the float Jo said, 'Do what you want.' In the north bedroom Mattie said, 'Do what you want.' In the studio, no one had to tell me anything. In there I knew exactly exactly what I wanted. what I wanted.

On the float I bent my head and put my mouth on one of Jo's b.r.e.a.s.t.s and sucked the cloth-covered nipple into my mouth. I tasted damp fabric and dank lake. She reached for me where I stuck out and I slapped her hand away. If she touched me I would come at once. I sucked, drinking back trickles of cotton-water, groping with my own hands, first caressing her a.s.s and then yanking down the bottom half of her suit. I got it off her and she dropped to her knees. I did too, finally getting rid of my wet, clinging underpants and tossing them on top of her bikini panty. We faced each other that way, me naked, her almost.

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

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

She laughed, then leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her navel was a tiny black cup. There was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. 'Everything down there is death,' she said, and pressed her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and then bent it so I was looking into the lake. Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish-nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the dead trailed pallid balloons of jellyfish guts; some were little more than bone. Yet not even the sight of this floating charnel parade could divert me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head free of her hands, pushed her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and contentious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than the other. That was how her eyes had looked on the TV monitor when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was f.u.c.king her corpse. Nor could even that realization stop me. 'Who was he?' I cried at her, covering her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. 'Who was he, Jo, for Christ's sake tell me who he was!'

In the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relis.h.i.+ng the feel of those small b.r.e.a.s.t.s against my chest and the length of her entwining legs. Then I rolled her over on the far side of the bed. I felt her hand reaching for me, and slapped it away - if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. 'Spread your legs, hurry,' I said, and she did. I closed my eyes, shutting out all other sensory input in favor of this. I pressed forward, then stopped. I made one little adjustment, pus.h.i.+ng at my engorged p.e.n.i.s with the side of my hand, then rolled my hips and slipped into her like a finger in a silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. 'Everything out there is death,' she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the window I saw Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Sixtieth - all those trendy shops, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdorf's and Steuben Gla.s.s. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and n.o.ble bag by the handles, was the bountiful, beauteous Nola, his secretary. Except her bounty was gone. This was a grinning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps; scrawny, beringed bones instead of fingers gripped the bag-handles. Harold's teeth jutted in his usual agent's grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead - mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the pa.s.sing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harold's grin - Hey, how are ya, how's the wife, how's the kids, writing any good books lately? Hey, how are ya, how's the wife, how's the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire. I slipped my hands under her b.u.t.tocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, anywhere my teeth could reach. 'Tell me who he was!' I shouted at her. 'You know, I know you do!' My voice was so m.u.f.fled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. 'Tell me, you b.i.t.c.h!' The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire. I slipped my hands under her b.u.t.tocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, anywhere my teeth could reach. 'Tell me who he was!' I shouted at her. 'You know, I know you do!' My voice was so m.u.f.fled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. 'Tell me, you b.i.t.c.h!'

On the path between Jo's studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk - all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman. I didn't see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me - the typewriter was in the way - but I didn't need to see it to know its color was brown. It squeezed, slowly tightening, the fingers wriggling.

'What do you want to know, sugar?' she asked from behind me. Still laughing. Still teasing. 'Do you really want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel?'

'Oh, you're killing me!' I cried. The typewriter - thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric - was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles tw.a.n.ging like guitar strings.

'Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man?'

'Just do me, you b.i.t.c.h!' 'Just do me, you b.i.t.c.h!' I screamed. She laughed again - that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough - and squeezed me where the squeezing was best. I screamed. She laughed again - that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough - and squeezed me where the squeezing was best.

'You hold still, now,' she said. 'You hold still, pretty boy, 'less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the . . . ' I lost the rest as the whole world exploded in an o.r.g.a.s.m so deep and strong that I thought it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed looking up at the stars. I screamed - I had to - and on the lake, two loons screamed back.

At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band - -Sara and Sonny and the Red-Top Boys tearing through 'Black Mountain Rag.' I sat up, dazed and spent, f.u.c.ked hollow. I couldn't see the path leading up to the house, but I could discern its switchback course by the j.a.panese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didn't want to swim back to sh.o.r.e with them in my hand. I stopped with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. Puffing out from beneath several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair.

'Oh Jesus,' I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of blood. Lying in the middle of that soaking pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more closely and saw it was a stuffed animal, a black-furred object matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it, wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but unable to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I really been having s.e.x with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In G.o.d's name, what?

'I don't believe these lies,' I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isn't exactly what happened, bur it's the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me - one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path - and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was rus.h.i.+ng blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunter's bell. Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.

I came back to the casual chatter of birds on summer vacation and to that peculiar red darkness that means the sun is s.h.i.+ning through your closed eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were folded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot.

I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.

The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to adjust, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. Meserve's note still hung from it. Sitting outside my office door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty. Pine needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then braced a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing the Jockeys I'd gone to bed in, and I didn't look as if I'd had an accident in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My c.o.c.k looked as it usually did; small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonan's Folly had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now.

'It sure felt like an adventure,' I croaked. I armed sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here. 'Not the kind I ever read about in The Hardy Boys The Hardy Boys, though.'

Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-G.o.d-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things I'd experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain. been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.

I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor.

The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldn't bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Presents Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age I'd met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had driven all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had - What? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep? What? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep?

I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didn't I? It's sitting right upstairs in the G.o.ddam hallway.

Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to - Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to - I wasn't going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasn't crazy - and I didn't think I was - listening to those contentious a.s.sholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open.

For a moment I actually saw saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that's how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed. The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug - a piece of Jo's work - was askew, and my water-gla.s.s lay overturned on the nighttable. The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur. a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that's how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed. The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug - a piece of Jo's work - was askew, and my water-gla.s.s lay overturned on the nighttable. The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur.

I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there - not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first pa.s.sing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets; if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony.

With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening patch of s.e.m.e.n, either. The former I hadn't really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, I'd had the world's most creative wet-dream - a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous night's s.e.x has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder?

'In Jo's studio, most likely,' I told the empty, sunny room. 'Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didn't leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you don't need.'

A part of me disagreed; a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did did need. But I hadn't had s.e.x with her last night, any more than I had had s.e.x with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn't killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother? need. But I hadn't had s.e.x with her last night, any more than I had had s.e.x with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn't killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother?

Oh man. What a silly question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair; there might be ghosts in the house; there might be a rich old man half a mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off; there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter: I had gone out to my wife's studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that.

I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk . . . or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didn't, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn't. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I'd work . . . if I could could work. I'd work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might. work. I'd work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.

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

Jo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo MattieSaraJo.

Below this, in lower case:

normal sperm count sperm norm all's rosy

I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then I picked up the Selectric's plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out - I really had to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Please let this work,' I said. 'Please.'

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The ringing of the phone - or, more accurately, the way I received 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. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.

'h.e.l.lo?'

'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 certainly 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-gla.s.s.

' - 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): Storrow 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 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. 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 s.e.x 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 real meal. We'll have everything you like, just the way you like it.' meal. We'll have everything you like, just the way you like it.'

Everything you like, just the way you like it. Everything you like, just the way you like it. And she was, by G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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. And she was, by G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 do,' she said with quiet vehemence. 'I do do. And I have to do something else today, too.'

'What's that?' I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morning - 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.'