Lisey’s Story (13 page)

For a moment Lisey said nothing. She reflected on how her caller had pronounced
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. Pissed like a bear.

In a low, choked voice she hardly recognized, she said: “Wood-body. That's who you're talking about, isn't it? Joseph Woodbody. That Incunk son of a bitch.”

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 manuscripts 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 nobody 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 FUCK YOURSELF!”

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

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 bitch, a cunt, 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 damned if she'd capitalize it the way Scott had done, like it was some extra-special 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 title-page, 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 God knew she had things to do and places to go. Her skin was prickling again, but this time the feeling was almost pleasant . . . and hell, 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 “text-crazies,” 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, “night-food” 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 manuscripts 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.

Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the damned 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 fine-grained, 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 Space Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like hell 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 door-yard dirt in the last of that day's fading red Junelight.

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?

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 God 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 bitch 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.