Lisey's Story Part 36

1.

Once Lisey actually got going on emptying out Scott's study, the job went faster than she ever would have believed. And she never would have believed she'd end up doing it with Darla and Canty as well as Amanda. Canty remained standoffish and suspicious for a time-it felt like a long time to Lisey-but Amanda was completely unfazed. "It's an act. She'll drop it and come around. Just give her time, Lisey. Sisterhood is powerful."

Eventually Cantata did come around, although Lisey had a feeling Canty never entirely rid herself of the idea that Amanda had been faking in order to Get Attention, and that she and Lisey had been Up To Something. Probably Something No Good. Darla was puzzled about Amanda's recovery, and the sisters' odd trip to the old farm in Lisbon, but she, at least, never believed Amanda had been faking.

Darla had seen her, after all.

In any case, the four sisters cleaned and emptied the long, rambling suite over the barn during the week after the Fourth of July, hiring a couple of husky high school boys to help with the heavy lifting. The worst of said heavy lifting turned out to be Dumbo's Big Jumbo, which had to be disa.s.sembled (the component parts reminded Lisey of the Exploded Man in high school biology cla.s.s, only you'd have to call this version the Exploded Desk), and then lowered with a rented winch. The high school boys bawled encouragement to each other as the pieces went down. Lisey stood by with her sisters, praying like mad that neither of the boys would lose a finger or thumb in one of the slings or pulleys. Neither did, and by the end of the week, everything in Scott's study had been taken away, marked either for donation or long-term storage while Lisey figured out what the h.e.l.l to do with it.

Everything, that was, except for the booksnake. That remained, dozing in the long, empty main room-the hot main room, now that the air conditioners had been removed. Even with the skylights open in the daytime and a couple of fans to keep the air circulating, it was hot. And why wouldn't it be? The place was nothing but a glorified barn loft with a literary pedigree.

Then there were those ugly maroon smudges on the carpet-the oyster-white carpet that couldn't be taken up until the booksnake was gone. She'd dismissed the stains as careless slops of Wood Coat varnish when Canty asked about them, but Amanda knew better, and Lisey had an idea that Darla might have a few suspicions, as well. The carpet had to go, but the books had to go first, and Lisey wasn't quite ready to dispose of them. Just why she wasn't sure. Maybe only because they were the last of Scott's things still up here, the very last of him.

So she waited.

2.

On the third day of the sisters' cleaning binge, Deputy Boeckman called to tell Lisey that an abandoned PT Cruiser with Delaware plates had been found in a gravel pit on the Stackpole Church Road, about three miles from her house. Would Lisey come down to the Sheriff's Office and take a look? They had it back in the parking lot, the deputy said, where they kept the impounds and a few "drug-rides" (whatever they were). Lisey went with Amanda. Neither Darla nor Canty was much interested; all they knew was that a kook had been sniffing around, making a pest of himself about Scott's papers. Kooks were nothing new in their sister's life; over the years of Scott's celebrity, any number of them had been drawn to him like moths to a bug-light. The most famous, of course, had been Cole. Neither Lisey nor Amanda had said anything to give Darla and Canty the idea that this one was in Cole's cla.s.s. Certainly there was no mention of the dead cat in the mailbox, and Lisey had been at some pains to impress discretion on the Sheriff's deputies, as well.

The car in Stall 7 was a PT Cruiser, no more and no less, beige in color, nondescript once you got past the slightly flamboyant body-type. It could have been the one Lisey saw as she drove home from Greenlawn on that long, long Thursday; it could have been one of several thousand others. This was what she told Deputy Boeckman, reminding him that she'd seen it coming almost directly out of the setting sun. He nodded sadly. What she knew in her heart was that it was the one. She could smell Dooley on it. She thought: I am going to hurt you places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances and had to repress a s.h.i.+ver.

"It's a stolen car, isn't it?" Amanda asked.

"You bet your bippy," Boeckman said.

A deputy Lisey didn't know strolled over. He was tall, probably six and a half feet; it seemed a rule that these men should be tall. Broad-shouldered, too. He introduced himself as Deputy Andy Clutterbuck and shook Lisey's hand.

"Ah," she said, "the acting Sheriff."

His smile was brilliant. "Nope, Norris is back. He's in court this afternoon, but he's back, all right. I'm just plain old Deputy Clutterbuck again."

"Congratulations. This is my sister, Amanda Debusher."

Clutterbuck shook Amanda's hand. "Pleased, Ms. Debusher." Then, to both of them: "That car was stolen out of a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland." He stared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt. "Did you know that in France, they call PT Cruisers le car Jimmy Cagney?"

Amanda seemed unimpressed by this information. "Were there fingerprints?"

"Nary a one," he said. "Wiped clean. Plus whoever was driving it took the cover off the dome-light and broke the bulb. What do you think of that?"

"I think it sounds beaucoup suspicious," Amanda said.

Clutterbuck laughed. "Yeah. But there's a retired carpenter in Delaware who's going to be very happy to get his car back, busted dome-light and all."

Lisey said, "Have you found out anything about Jim Dooley?"

"That would be John Doolin, Mrs. Landon. Born in Shooter's k.n.o.b, Tennessee. Moved to Nashville at age five with his family, then went to live with his aunt and uncle in Moundsville, West Virginia, when his parents and older sister were killed in a fire in the winter of 1974. Doolin was then age nine. The official cause of the deaths was down to defective Christmas tree lights, but I talked to a retired detective who worked that case. He said there was some suspicion the boy might have had something to do with it. No proof."

Lisey saw no reason to pay close attention to the rest, because whatever he called himself, her persecutor was never coming back from the place where she had taken him. Yet she did hear Clutterbuck say that Doolin had spent a good many years in a Tennessee mental inst.i.tution, and she continued to believe that he had met Gerd Allen Cole there, and caught Cole's obsession (ding-dong for the freesias) like a virus. Scott had had a queer saying, one Lisey had never fully understood until the business ofMcCool/Dooley/Doolin. Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.

"In any case, you want to keep your eyes peeled for the guy," Clutterbuck told the two women, "and if it looks like he's still around-"

"Or takes some time off and then decides to come back," Boeckman put in.

Clutterbuck nodded. "Yep, that's a possibility, too. If he shows up again, I think we ought to have a meeting with your family, Mrs. Landon-put them all in the picture. Do you agree?"

"If he shows up, we'll certainly do that," Lisey said. She spoke seriously, almost solemnly, but on their way out of town, she and Amanda indulged in a bout of hysterical laughter at the idea of Jim Dooley ever showing up again.

3.

An hour or two before dawn the next morning, shuffling into the bathroom with one eye open, thinking of nothing but peeing and going back to bed, Lisey thought she saw something moving in the bedroom behind her. That brought her awake in a hurry, and turning on her heels. There was nothing there. She took a hand-towel from the rod beside the sink and hung it over the medicine cabinet mirror in which she'd seen the movement, wedging the towel carefully until it would stay on its own. Then and only then did she finish her business.

She was sure Scott would have understood.

4.

The summer slipped by, and one day Lisey noticed that SCHOOL SUPPLIES signs had appeared in the windows of several stores on Castle Rock's Main Street. And why not? It was suddenly halfpast August. Scott's study was-except for the booksnake and the stained white carpet upon which it dozed-waiting for the next thing. (If there was a next thing; Lisey had begun to consider the possibility of putting the house up for sale.) Canty and Rich threw their annual Midsummer Night's Dream party on August fourteenth. Lisey set out to get righteously smashed on Rich Lawlor's Long Island Iced Tea, a thing she hadn't done since Scott had died. She asked Rich for a double to get started, then set it down untasted on one of the caterer's tables. She thought she had seen something moving either on the surface of the gla.s.s, as if reflected there, or deep within the amber depths, as if swimming there. It was utter s.h.i.+te, of course, but she found her urge to get absolutely stinko was gone. In truth, she wasn't sure she dared to get drunk (or even high). Wasn't sure she dared let her defenses down in such a way. Because if she had attracted the long boy's attention, if it was watching her from time to time...or even just thinking about her...well...

Part of her was sure that was c.r.a.p.

Part of her was positive it wasn't.

As August waned and the hottest weather of the summer rolled into New England, testing tempers and the northeast powergrid, something even more distressing began happening to Lisey...except, like the things she sometimes thought she might be glimpsing in certain reflective surfaces, she wasn't entirely sure it was happening at all.

Sometimes she'd flounder up from sleep in the mornings an hour or maybe two before her usual time, gasping and covered with sweat even with the air-conditioning on, feeling as she had when coming out of nightmares as a child: that she hadn't really escaped the grip of whatever had been after her, that it was still under the bed and would curl its cold distorted hand around her ankle or reach right up through her pillow and grab her by the neck. During these panicky wakings she would run her hands over the sheets and then up to the head of her bed before opening her eyes, wanting to be sure, absolutely sure, that she wasn't...well, somewhere else. Because once you stretch those tendons, she sometimes thought, opening her eyes and looking at her familiar bedroom with great andinexpressible relief, it's ever so much easier to do it nexttime. And she had stretched a certain set of tendons, hadn't she? Yes. First by yanking Amanda, then by yanking Dooley. She had stretched them but good.

It seemed to her that after she'd awakened half a dozen times and discovered she was right where she belonged, in the bedroom that had once been hers and Scott's and was now hers alone, matters should have improved, but they didn't. They got worse instead. She felt like a loose tooth in a sick socket. And then, on the first day of the big heatwave-a heatwave to match the cold-snap of ten years before, and the ironic balance of this, coincidental though it might have been, was not lost on her-what she feared finally happened.

5.

She lay back on the couch in the living room just to rest her eyes for a few moments. The unquestionably idiotic but occasionally entertaining Jerry Springer was babbling away on the idiot box-My Mother Stole My Boyfriend, My Boyfriend Stole My Mother, something like that. Lisey reached out to pick up the remote and shut the d.a.m.n thing off, or maybe she only dreamed she did, because when she opened her eyes to see where the remote was, she was lying not on the couch but on the hill of lupin in Boo'ya Moon. It was full daylight and there was no sense of danger-certainly no sense that Scott's long boy (for so she thought of it and always would, although she supposed it was her long boy now, Lisey's long boy) was near, but she was terrified nevertheless, almost to the point of screaming helplessly. Instead of doing that she closed her eyes, visualized her living room, and suddenly she could hear the "guests" on the Springer Show yelling at each other and feel the oblong of the remote control in her left hand. A second later she was starting up from the couch, eyes wide and skin all a-p.r.i.c.kle. She could almost believe she had dreamed the whole deal (it certainly made sense, given her current level of anxiety on the subject), but the vividness of what she had seen in those few seconds argued against that idea, comforting as it was. So did the smear of purple on the back of the hand holding the TV controller.

6.

The next day she called the Fogler Library and spoke to Mr. Bertram Partridge, the head of Special Collections. That gentleman grew steadily more excited as Lisey described the books still remaining in Scott's study. He called them "a.s.sociational volumes" and said Fogler Special Collections would be very happy to have them, "and to work with her on the tax-credit question." Lisey said that would be very nice, just as though she had been asking herself the tax-credit question for years. Mr. Partridge said he would send "a team of removers" out the very next day to box the volumes up and bring them the hundred and twenty miles to the University of Maine's Orono campus. Lisey reminded him that the weather was supposed to be very hot, and that Scott's study, which was no longer air-conditioned, had reverted to its former loftish nature. Perhaps, she said, Mr. Partridge would like to hold his removers in abeyance until cooler weather.

"Not at all, Mrs. Landon," Partridge said, chuckling expansively, and Lisey knew he was afraid she might change her mind if given too long to think the matter over. "I've got a couple of young folks in mind who'll be perfect for the job. You wait and see."

7.

Less than an hour after her conversation with Bertram Partridge, Lisey's phone rang while she was making herself a tuna on rye for her supper: thin commons, but all she wanted. Outside, the heat lay on the land like a blanket. All color had been bleached from the sky; it was a perfect simmering white from horizon to horizon. As she mixed the tuna and mayonnaise with a little chopped onion, she had been thinking of how she'd found Amanda on one of those benches, looking out at the Hollyhocks, and this was strange, because she hardly ever thought of that anymore; it was like a dream to her. She remembered Amanda's asking if she'd have to drink any of that (bug-juuuuice) s.h.i.+tty punch if she came back-her way of trying to find out, Lisey supposed, if she'd have to remain incarcerated at Greenlawn-and Lisey had promised her no more punch, no more bug-juice. Amanda had agreed to return, although it had been clear she didn't really want to, that she would have been happy to continue sitting on the bench and looking out at the Hollyhocks until, in Good Ma's words, "eternity was halfway over." Just sitting there among the scary shrouded things and silent gazers, a bench or two above the woman in the caftan. The one who had murdered her child.

Lisey put her sandwich down on the counter, suddenly cold all over. She couldn't know that. There was no way she could know that.

But she did.

Be quiet, the woman had said. Be quiet while I think of why I did it.

And then Amanda had said something totally unexpected, hadn't she? Something about Scott. Although nothing Amanda said then could be important now, not with Scott dead and Jim Dooley also dead (or wis.h.i.+ng he were), but still Lisey wished she could remember exactly what it might have been.

"Said she'd come back," Lisey murmured. "Said she'd come back if it would keep Dooley from hurting me."

Yes, and Amanda had kept her word, G.o.d bless her, but Lisey wanted to remember something she'd said after that. I don't see what it can have to do with Scott, Amanda had said in that faintly distracted voice of hers. He's been dead such a long time...although...I think he told me something about- That was when the phone rang, shattering the fragile gla.s.s of Lisey's recollection. And as she picked it up, a crazy certainty came to her: it would be Dooley. h.e.l.lo, Missus, the Black Prince of the Incunks would say. I'm callin from inside the belly of the beast. How y'all doin today?

"h.e.l.lo?" she said. She knew she was gripping the phone too tightly, but was helpless to do anything about it.

"Danny Boeckman here, Mrs. Landon," the voice at the other end said, and the Mrs. was too close for comfort, but here came out heah, a comfortable Yankee p.r.o.nunciation, and Deputy Boeckman sounded uncharacteristically excited, almost bubbly, and therefore boyish. "Guess what?"

"Can't guess," Lisey said, but another crazy idea came to her: he was going to say they drew straws down at the Sheriff's Office to see who was going to call up and ask her out on a date and he drew the short one. Except why would he sound excited about that?

"We found the dome-light cover!"

Lisey had no idea what he was talking about. "I beg pardon?"

"Doolin-the guy you knew as Zack McCool and then as Jim Dooley-stole that PT Cruiser and used it while he was stalking you, Mrs. Landon. We were positive of that. And he was keeping it stashed out in that old gravel pit between runs, we were positive of that, too. We just couldn't prove it, because-"

"He wiped off all his fingerprints."

"Ayuh, and got em all. But every now n then me n Plug went out there-"

"Plug?"

"I'm sorry, Joe. Deputy Alston?"

Plug, she thought. Aware for the first time, in a clear-seeing way, that these were real men with real lives. With nicknames. Plug, she thought. Deputy Joe Alston, also known as Plug.

"Mrs. Landon? Are you there?"

"Yes, Dan. May I call you Dan?"

"Sure, you bet. Anyway, every now n then we went sniffin round out there to see if we couldn't find some prizes, because there was plenty of sign that he'd spent time in that pit- candy-wrappers, a couple of RC bottles, things like that."

"RC," she said softly, and thought: Bool, Dan. Bool, Plug. Bool, The End.

"Right, that was the brand he seemed to favor, but not a single print on a single cast-off bottle matched up to one of his. The only match we got was to a fella who stole a car back in the late seventies and now clerks at the Quick-E-Mart over in Oxford. The other prints we got off the bottles, we surmise those were clerk-prints, too. But yest'y noon, Mrs. Landon-"

"Lisey."

There was a pause while he considered this. Then he went on. "Yest'y noon, Lisey, on a little track leadin out of that pit, I found the grand prize-the cover to that dome-light. He'd pulled it off and threw it into the puckies." Boeckman's voice rose, became triumphant-became not the voice of a Deputy Sheriff but perfectly human. "And that was the one thing he forgot to handle with gloves on or wipe off later! A big thumbprint on one side, a big fat old index-finger on the other! Where he gripped it. We got the results back by fax this morning."

"John Doolin?"

"Ayuh. Nine points of comparison. Nine!" There was a pause, and when he spoke again, some of the triumph had gone out of his voice. "Now if we could only find the son-of-a-buck."

"I'm sure he'll turn up in time," she said, and cast a longing glance at her tuna sandwich. She'd lost her train of thought about Amanda, but had regained her appet.i.te. To Lisey that seemed like a fair swap, especially on such a boogery-hot day. "Even if he doesn't, he's stopped hara.s.sing me."

"He's left Castle County, I'd stake my reputation on that." A note of unmistakable pride crept into Deputy Sheriff Dan Boeckman's voice. "Got a little too hot for him here, I guess, so he ditched his ride and left. Plug feels the same. Jim Dooley and Elvis have both left the building."

"Plug, is that for chewing tobacco?"

"No, ma'am, not at all. In high school, he and I played the line on the Castle Hills Knights team that won the Cla.s.s A State Champions.h.i.+p. Bangor Rams was favored by three touchdowns, but we shocked em. Only team from our part of the state to win a gold football since the nineteen-fifties. And Joey, no one could stop him, not that whole season. Even with four guys hangin off him, he kept pluggin. So we called him Plug, and I still do."

"If I called him that, do you think he'd swat me?"

Dan Boeckman laughed, delighted. "No! He'd be tickled!"

"Okay, then. I'm Lisey, you're Dan, and he's Plug."

"That's square-john with me."

"And thanks for the call. That was terrific police work."

"Thanks for saying so, ma'am. Lisey." She could hear the glow in his voice, and that made her feel good. "You be in touch, now, if there's anything else we can do. Or if you hear from that lowlife again."

"I will."

Lisey went back to her sandwich with a smile on her face and didn't think about Amanda, or the good s.h.i.+p Hollyhocks, or Boo'ya Moon, for the rest of the day. That night, however, she awoke to the sound of distant thunder and a sense that something vast was-not hunting her, exactly (it wouldn't bother), but musing on her. The idea that she should be in such a thing's unknowable mind made her feel like crying and like screaming. At the same time. It also made her want to sit up watching movies on TCM, smoking cigarettes and drinking high-tension coffee. Or beer. Beer might be better. Beer might call back sleep. Instead of getting up, she turned off the bedside lamp and lay still. I'll never go back to sleep, she thought. I'll just lie here like this until it gets light in the east. Then I can get up and make the coffee I want now. But three minutes after having this thought she was dozing. Ten minutes later she was sleeping deeply. Later still, when the moon rose and she dreamed of floating over a certain exotic beach of fine white sand on the PILLSBURY magic carpet, her bed was for a few moments empty and the room filled with the smells of frangipani and jasmine and night-blooming cereus, scents that were somehow longing and terrible at the same time. But then she was back and in the morning Lisey barely remembered her dream, her dream of flying, her dream of flying across the beach at the edge of the pool in Boo'ya Moon.

8.

As it happened, Lisey's vision of dismantling the booksnake varied in only two respects from what she had foreseen, and these were minor variations indeed. First, one half of Mr. Partridge's two-person team turned out to be a girl-a strapping twentysomething with a caramel-colored ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox cap. Second, Lisey hadn't guessed how quickly the job would be done. In spite of the study's fearsome heat (not even three fans turning at top speed could do much about it), all the books were packed away in a dark blue UMO van in less than an hour. When Lisey asked the two librarians from Special Collections (who called themselves-only half-jokingly, Lisey thought-the Minions of Partridge) if they'd like iced tea, they agreedenthusiastically, and put away two large gla.s.ses each. The girl was Cory. She was the one who told Lisey how much she had liked Scott's books, especially Relics, which she claimed to have read three times. The boy was Mike, and he was the one who said they were very sorry for her loss. Lisey thanked them both for their kindness, and meant it."It must make you sad, seeing it so empty," Cory said, and tipped her gla.s.s toward the barn. The ice cubes clinked in it. Lisey was careful not to look directly at the gla.s.s, lest she see something besides ice in there.

"It is a little sad, but it's freeing, too," she said. "I put off the job of cleaning it out for too long. My sisters helped me. I'm glad we did it. More tea, Cory?"

"No thanks, but could I use your bathroom before we start back?"

"Of course. Through the living room, first door on the right."

Cory excused herself. Absently-almost absently-Lisey moved the girl's gla.s.s behind the brown plastic iced-tea pitcher. "Another gla.s.s, Mike?"

"No thanks," he said. "You'll be taking up the carpet, too, I guess."

She laughed self-consciously. "Yes. Pretty bad, isn't it? From Scott's one experiment in wood-staining. It was a disaster." Thinking: Sorry, honey.

"Looks a little like dried blood," Mike said, and finished his iced tea. The sun, hazy and hot, ran across the surface of his gla.s.s, and for a moment an eye seemed to peer out of it at Lisey. When he set it down, she had to restrain an urge to s.n.a.t.c.h it and hide it behind the plastic pitcher with the other one.

"Everybody says that," she agreed.

"World's worst shaving cut," Mike said, and laughed. They both laughed. Lisey thought hers sounded almost as natural as his. She didn't look at his gla.s.s. She didn't think about the long boy that was now her long boy. She thought about nothing but the long boy.

"Sure you won't have a little more?" she asked.

"Better not, I'm driving," Mike said, and they had another laugh.

Cory came back and Lisey thought Mike would also ask to use the bathroom, but he didn't-guys had bigger kidneys, bigger bladders, bigger somethings, or so Scott had claimed-and Lisey was glad, because that meant only the girl gave her that funny look before they drove away with the disa.s.sembled booksnake in the back of the van. Oh, she undoubtedly told Mike what she saw in the living room and found in the bathroom, told him on the long drive north to the University of Maine at Orono, but Lisey wasn't there to hear it. The girl's look wasn't so bad, come to that, because Lisey hadn't known what it meant at the time, although she had patted the side of her head, thinking maybe her hair had fallen funny across her ear or was standing up or something. Then, later (after popping the iced-tea gla.s.ses into the dishwasher without so much as a look at them), she'd gone to use the bathroom herself and saw the towel hanging across the mirror in there. She remembered putting the hand-towel over the medicine cabinet mirror upstairs, remembered blinding that one perfectly well, but when had she done this one?

Lisey didn't know.

She went back to the living room and saw there was a sheet hung in a swag over the mirror above the mantel, as well. She should have noticed that on her way through, she imagined Cory had, it was pretty smucking obvious, but the truth was little Lisey Landon didn't spend much time studying her own reflection these days.