Lisey's Story Part 5

"Who is this?" she asked.

"My name doesn't matter, Missus," the voice replied, and Lisey had a sudden vivid image of Gerd Allen Cole, lips moving in what might have been a prayer. Except for the gun in his longfingered poet's hand. Dear G.o.d, don't let this be another one of those, she thought. Don't let it be another Blondie. Yet she saw she once more had the silver spade in her hand-she'd grasped its wooden shaft without thinking when she picked up the phone-and that seemed to promise her that it was, it was.

"It matters to me," she said, and was astounded at her businesslike tone of voice. How could such a brisk, nononsense sentence emerge from such a suddenly dry mouth? And then, whoomp, just like that, where she'd heard the voice before came to her: that very afternoon, on the answering machine attached to this very phone. And it was really no wonder she hadn't been able to make the connection right away, because then the voice had only spoken three words: I'll try again. "You identify yourself this minute or I'm going to hang up."

There was a sigh from the other end. It sounded both tired and good-natured. "Don't make this hard on me, Missus; I'm tryin-a help you. I really am."

Lisey thought of the dusty voices from Scott's favorite movie, The Last Picture Show; she thought again of Hank Williams singing "Jambalaya." Dress in style, go hog-wile, me-oh-my-oh. She said, "I'm hanging up now, goodbye, have a nice life." Although she did not so much as stir the phone from her ear. Not yet.

"You can call me Zack, Missus. That's as good a name as any. All right?"

"Zack what?"

"Zack McCool."

"Uh-huh, and I'm Liz Taylor."

"You wanted a name, I gave you one."

He had her there. "And how did you get this number, Zack?"

"Directory a.s.sistance." So it was listed-that explained that. Maybe. "Now will you listen a minute?"

"I'm listening." Listening...and gripping the silver spade...and waiting for the wind to change. Maybe that most of all. Because a change was coming. Every nerve in her body said so.

"Missus, there was a man came see you a little while ago to have a look through your late husband's papers, and may I say I'm sorry for your loss."

Lisey ignored this last. "Lots of people have asked me to let them look through Scott's papers since he died." She hoped the man on the other end of the line wouldn't be able to guess or intuit how hard her heart was now beating. "I've told them all the same thing: eventually I'll get around to sharing them with-"

"This fella's from your late husband's old college, Missus. He says he is the logical choice, since these papers're apt to wind up there, anyway."

For a moment Lisey said nothing. She reflected on how her caller had p.r.o.nounced husband-almost husbun, as though Scott had been some exotic breakfast treat, now consumed. How he called her Missus. Not a Maine man, not a Yankee, and probably not an educated man, at least in the sense Scott would have used the word; she guessed that "Zack McCool" had never been to college. She also reflected that the wind had indeed changed. She was no longer scared. What she was, at least for the time being, was angry. More than angry. p.i.s.sed like a bear.

In a low, choked voice she hardly recognized, she said: "Woodbody. That's who you're talking about, isn't it? Joseph Woodbody. That Incunk son of a b.i.t.c.h."

There was a pause on the other end. Then her new friend said: "I'm not following you, Missus."

Lisey felt her rage come all the way up and welcomed it. "I think you're following me fine. Professor Joseph Woodbody, King of the Incunks, hired you to call and try to scare me into...what? Just turning over the keys to my husband's study, so he can go through Scott's ma.n.u.scripts and take what he wants? Is that what...does he really think..." She pulled herself down. It wasn't easy. The anger was bitter but it was sweet, too, and she wanted to trip on it. "Just tell me, Zack. Yes or no. Are you working for Professor Joseph Woodbody?"

"That's none of your bi'ness, Missus."

Lisey couldn't reply to this. She was struck dumb, at least temporarily, by the sheer effrontery of it. What Scott might have called the puffickly huh-yooge (none of your bi'ness) ludicrosity of it.

"And n.o.body hired me to try and do nothing." A pause. "Anything, I mean. Now Missus. You want to close your mouth and listen. Are you listen to me?"

She stood with the telephone's receiver curled against her ear, considering that-Are you listen to me?-and said nothing.

"I can hear you breathing, so I know you are. That's good. When I'm hired, Missus, this mother's son don't try, he does. I know you don't know me, but that's your disadvantage, not mine. This ain't...iddn't just brag. I don't try, I do. You are going to give this man what he wants, all right? He is going to call me on the telephone or e-mail me in this special way we have and say, 'Everything's okay, I got what I want.' If that don't...if it dutn't happen in a certain run of time, I'm going to come to where you are and I'm going to hurt you. I am going to hurt you places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances."

Lisey had closed her eyes at some point during this lengthy speech, which had the feel of a memorized set-piece. She could feel hot tears trickling down her cheeks, and didn't know if they were tears of rage or...

Shame? Could they actually be tears of shame? Yes, there was something shameful in being talked to like this by a stranger. It was like being in a new school and getting scolded by the teacher on your first day.

Smuck that, babyluv, Scott said. You know what to do.

Sure she did. In a situation like this you either strapped it on or you didn't. She'd never actually been in a situation like this, but it was still pretty obvious.

"Missus? Do you understand what I just told you?"

She knew what she wanted to say to him, but he might not understand. So Lisey decided to settle for the more common usage.

"Zack?" Speaking very low.

"Yes, Missus." He immediately fell into the same low tone. What he perhaps took for one of mutual conspiracy.

"Can you hear me?"

"You're a bit low-pitch, but...yes, Missus."

She pulled air deep into her lungs. Held it for a moment, imagining this man who said Missus and husbun and dutn't for doesn't. Imagined him with the telephone screwed tightly against his ear, straining toward the sound of her voice. When she had the picture clearly in the forefront of her mind, she screamed into that ear with all her force. "THEN GO f.u.c.k YOURSELF!"

Lisey slammed the phone back into the cradle hard enough to make dust fly up from the handset.

5.

The telephone began to ring again almost immediately, but Lisey had no interest in further conversation with "Zack McCool." She suspected that any chance of having what the TV talking heads called a dialogue was gone. Not that she wanted one. Nor did she want to listen to him on the answering machine and find out if he'd lost that tone of weary good nature and now wanted to call her a b.i.t.c.h, a c.u.n.t, or a cooze. She traced the telephone cord back to the wall-the plate was close to that stack of liquor-store boxes-and yanked the jack. The phone fell silent halfway through the third ring. So much for "Zack McCool," at least for the time being. She might have doings with him later, she supposed-or about him-but right now there was Manda to deal with. Not to mention Darla, waiting for her and counting on her. She'd just go back to the kitchen, grab her car-keys off the peg...and she'd take two minutes to lock the house up, as well, a thing she didn't always bother with in the daytime.

The house and the barn and the study.

Yes, especially the study, although she was d.a.m.ned if she'd capitalize it the way Scott had done, like it was some extraspecial big deal. But speaking of extra-special big deals... She found herself looking into the top box again. She hadn't closed the flaps, so looking in was easy to do.

IKE COMES HOME.

By Scott Landon Curious-and this would, after all, take only a second-Lisey leaned the silver spade against the wall, lifted the t.i.tlepage, and looked beneath. On the second sheet was this: Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine.

BOOL! THE END!.

Nothing else.

Lisey looked at it for nearly a minute, although G.o.d knew she had things to do and places to go. Her skin was p.r.i.c.kling again, but this time the feeling was almost pleasant...and h.e.l.l, there was really no almost about it, was there? A small, bemused smile was playing around her mouth. Ever since she'd begun the work of cleaning out his study-ever since she'd lost it and trashed what Scott had been pleased to call his "memory nook," if you wanted to be exact-she had felt his presence...but never as close as this. Never as actual. She reached into the box and thumbed through a deep thickness of the pages stacked there, pretty sure of what she would find. And did. All the pages were blank. She riffled a bunch of the ones crammed in sideways, and they were, too. In Scott's childhood lexicon, a boom had been a short trip and a bool...well, that was a little more complicated, but in this context it almost certainly meant a joke or harmless prank. This giant bogus novel was Scott Landon's idea of a knee-slapper.

Were the other two boxes in the stack also bools? And the ones in the bins and cubbies across the way? Was the joke that elaborate? And if so, whom was it supposed to be on? Her? Incunks like Woodbody? That made a certain amount of sense, Scott liked to poke fun at the folks he'd called "textcrazies," but that idea pointed toward a rather terrible possibility: that he might have intuited his own (Died Young) coming collapse (Before His Time) and said nothing to her. And it led to a question: would she have believed him if he'd told her? Her first impulse was to say no-to say, if only to herself, I was the practical one, the one who checked his luggage to see if he had enough underwear and called ahead to make sure the flights were running on time. But she remembered the way the blood on his lips had turned his smile into a clown's grin; she remembered how he had once explained to her-with what had seemed like perfect lucidity-that it was unsafe to eat any kind of fresh fruit after sunset, and that food of all kinds should be avoided between midnight and six. According to Scott, "nightfood" was often poisonous, and when he said it, it sounded logical. Because- (hush) "I would have believed him, leave it at that," she whispered, and put her head down, and closed her eyes against tears that did not come. Eyes that had wept at "Zack McCool"'s set speech were now dry as stones. Silly smucking eyes!

The ma.n.u.scripts in the crammed drawers of his desks and the main filing cabinet upstairs were most certainly not bools; this Lisey knew. Some were copies of published short stories, some were alternate versions of those stories. In the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo she had marked at least three unfinished novels and what appeared to be a finished novella-and wouldn't Woodbody just drool. There were also half a dozen finished short stories Scott had apparently never cared enough to send out for publication, most of them years old from the look of the typefaces. She wasn't qualified to say what was trash and what was treasure, although she was sure it would all be of interest to Landon scholars. This, however...this bool, to use Scott's word...

She was gripping the handle of the silver spade, and hard. It was a real thing in what suddenly felt like a very cobwebby world. She opened her eyes again and said, "Scott, was this just a goof, or are you still messing with me?"

No answer. Of course. And she had a couple of sisters that needed seeing to. Surely Scott would have understood her shoving all this on the back burner for the time being.

In any case, she decided to take the spade along.

She liked the way it felt in her hand.

6.

Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the d.a.m.ned thing could start ringing again. Outside the sun was setting and a strong westerly wind had gotten up, explaining the draft that had whooshed past her when she had opened the door to take the first of her two upsetting telephone calls: no ghosts there, babyluv. This day seemed at least a month long, but that wind, lovely and somehow finegrained, like the one in her dream the night before, soothed and refreshed her. She crossed from the barn to the kitchen without fearing "Zack McCool" was lurking somewhere nearby. She knew how calls from cell phones sounded way out here: crackly and barely there. According to Scott, it was the power-lines (which he liked to call "UFO refueling stations"). Her buddy "Zack" had been coming in clear as a bell. That particular Deep s.p.a.ce Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like h.e.l.l if her next-door neighbor had loaned him their phone so he could threaten her.

She got her car-keys and slipped them into the side pocket of her jeans (unaware that she was still carrying Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions in the back pocket-although she would become aware, in the fullness of time); she also got the bulkier ring with all the keys to the Landon kingdom domestic on it, each still labeled in Scott Landon's neat hand. She locked the house, then trudged back to lock the barn's sliding doors together and the door to Scott's study at the top of the outside stairs. Once that was done, she went to her car with the spade on her shoulder and her shadow trailing out long beside her on the dooryard dirt in the last of that day's fading red Junelight.

IV. Lisey and The Blood-Bool

(All the Bad-Gunky)

1.

Driving to Amanda's along the recently widened and repaved Route 17 was a matter of fifteen minutes, even slowing for the blinker where 17 crossed the Deep Cut Road to Harlow. Lisey spent more of it than she wanted to thinking about bools in general and one bool in particular: the first. That one had been no joke.

"But the little idiot from Lisbon Falls went ahead and married him anyway," she said, laughing, then took her foot off the gas. Here was Patel's Market on the left-Texaco self-serve pumps on clean black asphalt under blinding white lights-and she felt an amazingly strong urge to pull in and grab a pack of cigarettes. Good old Salem Lights. And while she was there, she could get some of those Nissen doughnuts Manda liked, the squash ones, and maybe some HoHos for herself.

"You numbah one crazy baby," she said, smiling, and stepped smartly down on the gas again. Patel's receded. She was running with her dims on now, although there was still plenty of twilight. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw the silly silver shovel lying on the back seat, and said it again, this time laughing: "You numbah one crazy baby, ah so!"

And what if she was? Ah so what?

2.

Lisey parked behind Darla's Prius and was only halfway to the door of Amanda's trim little Cape Cod when Darla came out, not quite running and struggling not to cry.

"Thank G.o.d you're here," she said, and when Lisey saw the blood on Darla's hands she thought of bools again, thought of her husband-to-be coming out of the dark and holding out his hand to her, only it hadn't really looked like a hand anymore.

"Darla, what-"

"She did it again! That crazy b.i.t.c.h went and cut herself again! All I did was go to use the bathroom...I left her drinking tea in the kitchen...'Are you okay, Manda,' I said...and..."

"Hold on," Lisey told her, forcing herself to at least sound calm. She'd always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it's not that bad. Wasn't that supposed to be the oldest child's job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.

"Oh, she's not gonna die, but what a mess," Darla said, beginning to cry after all. Sure, now that I'm here you let go, Lisey thought. Never occurs to any of you that little Lisey might have a few problems of her own, does it?

Darla blew first one side of her nose and then the other onto Amanda's darkening lawn in a pair of unladylike honks. "What a freakin mess, maybe you're right, maybe a place like Greenlawn's the answer...if it's private, that is...and discreet...I just don't know...maybe you can do something with her, probably you can, she listens to you, she always has, I'm at my wits' end..."

"Come on, Darl," Lisa said soothingly, and here was a revelation: she didn't really want cigarettes at all. Cigarettes were yesterday's bad habit. Cigarettes were as dead as her late husband, collapsed at a reading two years ago and died shortly thereafter in a Kentucky hospital, bool, the end. What she wanted to be holding wasn't a Salem Light but the handle of that silver spade.

There was comfort you didn't even have to light.

3.

It's a bool, Lisey!

She heard it again as she turned on the light in Amanda's kitchen. And saw him again, walking toward her up the shadowy lawn behind her apartment in Cleaves Mills. Scott who could be crazy, Scott who could be brave, Scott who could be both at the same time, under the right circ.u.mstances.

And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!

Behind the apartment where she taught him to f.u.c.k and he taught her to say smuck and they taught each other to wait, wait, wait for the wind to change. Scott wading through the heavy, heady smell of mixed flowers because it was almost summer and Parks Greenhouse was down there and the louvers were open to let in the night air. Scott walking out of all that perfumed exhalation, that late-spring night, and into the light of the back door where she stood waiting. p.i.s.sed off at him, but not as p.i.s.sed; in fact almost ready to make up. She had, after all, been stood up before (although never by him), and she'd had boyfriends turn up drunk before (including him). And oh when she had seen him- Her first blood-bool.

And now here was another. Amanda's kitchen was daubed and smeared and splattered with what Scott had sometimes been pleased to call-usually in a bad Howard Cosell imitation-"the claret." Red droplets of it ran across Manda's cheery yellow Formica counter; a smear of it bleared the gla.s.s front of the microwave; there were blips and blots and even a single foottrack on the linoleum. A dishtowel dropped in the sink was soaked with it.

Lisey looked at all this and felt her heart speed up. It was natural, she told herself; the sight of blood did that to people. Plus, she was at the end of a long and stressful day. The thing you want to remember is that it almost certainly looks worse than it really is. You can bet she spread it around on purpose-there was never anything wrong with Amanda's sense of the dramatic. And you've seen worse, Lisey. The thing she did to her belly-b.u.t.ton, for instance. Or Scott back in Cleaves. Okay?

"What?" Darla asked.

"I didn't say anything," Lisey replied. They were standing in the doorway, looking at their unfortunate older sister, who sat at the kitchen table-also surfaced in cheery yellow Formica-with her head bent and her hair hanging in her face.

"You did, you said okay."

"Okay, I said okay," Lisey replied crossly. "Good Ma used to say people who talk to themselves have money in the bank." And she did. Thanks to Scott, she had just over or just under twenty million, depending on how the market in T-bills and certain stocks had done that day.

The idea of money didn't seem to draw much water when you were in a blood-smeared kitchen, however. Lisey wondered if Mandy had never used s.h.i.+t simply because she'd never thought of it. If so, that was genuine by-G.o.d good fortune, wasn't it?

"You took away the knives?" she asked Darla, sotto voce.

"Of course I did," Darla said indignantly...but in the same low voice. "She did it with pieces of her teacup, Lisey. While I was having a pee."

Lisey had figured that out for herself and had already made a mental note to go to Wal-Mart for new ones just as soon as she could. Fun Yellow to match the rest of the kitchen if possible, but the real requirement was that they be the plastic ones with the little stickers reading UNBREAKABLE on the sides.

She knelt beside Amanda and moved to take her hand. Darla said, "That's what she cut, Lise. She did both palms." Doing so very gently, Lisey plucked Amanda's hands out of her lap. She turned them over and winced. The cuts were starting to clot, but they still made her stomach hurt. And of course they made her think again of Scott coming out of the summer darkness and holding out his dripping hand like a G.o.ddam loveoffering, an act of atonement for the terrible sins of getting drunk and forgetting they had a date. Sheesh, and they called Cole crazy?