Lisey’s Story (28 page)

“Mrs. Landon?” It was the Professor, sounding more anxious than ever. She'd forgotten all about him. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” she said. “This is what it gets you, you know.”

“I beg pardon?”

“You know what I'm talking about. All the stuff you wanted so bad, the stuff you thought you had to have? This is what it gets you. How you feel right now. Plus the questions you'll have to answer when I hang up, of course.”

“Mrs. Landon, I don't—”

“If the police call you, I want you to tell them everything you've told me. Which means you better answer your wife's questions first, don't you think?”

“Mrs. Landon,
please!
” Woodbody sounded panicky now.

“You bought into this. You and your friend Dooley.”

“Stop calling him my
friend!
”

Lisey's Tornado Look grew stronger, the lips thinning until they showed the tops of her teeth. At the same time, her eyes narrowed until they were no more than blue sparks. It was a feral look, and it was all Debusher.

“But he
is!
” she cried. “You're the one who drank with him, and told him your tale of woe, and laughed when he called me Yoko Landon. You were the one who set him on me, whether you said it in so many words or not, and now it turns out he's just as crazy as a shithouse rat and you can't pull him off. So
yes
, Professor, I'm going to call the County Sheriff, and
yessirree
, I'll be giving them your name, I'll be giving them anything that'll help them find your friend, because he's not
done
, you know it and so do I, because he doesn't
want
to be done, he's having a
good smucking time
, and this is what it
gets
you. You bought it, you own it! Okay?
Okay?
”

No answer. But she could hear the wet sound of breathing and knew the former King of the Incunks was trying not to cry. She hung up, snagged another ciggy off the floor, lit it. She went back to the telephone, then shook her head. She'd call the Sheriff's Office in a minute. First she wanted to get the silver spade out of the Beemer, and she wanted to do it right away, before all the light was gone and her part of the world swapped day for night.

The side yard—which she supposed she'd go to her grave thinking of as the dooryard—was already too dark for comfort, although Venus, the wishing-star, had yet to make her appearance in the sky. The shadows where the barn joined the toolshed were especially dark, and the BMW
was parked less than twenty feet from there. Of course Dooley wasn't hiding in that well of shadows, and if he
was
on the place, he might be anywhere: leaning against the changing-hut by the pool, peering around the corner of the house where the kitchen was, crouched behind the cellar bulkhead . . .

Lisey whirled on her heels at that idea, but there was still enough light to see there was nothing on either side of the bulkhead. And the bulkhead doors themselves were locked, so she didn't have to worry about Dooley in the cellar. Unless, of course, he'd broken into the house somehow and hidden down there before she got home.

Stop it Lisey you're creeping yourself ou
—

She paused with her fingers curled around the handle of the BMW's rear door. She stood that way for maybe five seconds, then let her cigarette drop from her free hand and stamped out the butt. There was someone standing in the deep angle where the barn and the toolshed met. Standing there very tall and still.

Lisey opened the Beemer's rear passenger door and snatched out the silver spade. The light inside the car stayed on when she closed the door again. She'd forgotten that, how the inside lights of cars now stayed on for a little while, the courtesy light they called it, but she found nothing courteous about the idea that Dooley could see her and she could no longer see him thanks to the way that smucking light was screwing up her vision. She stepped away from the car, holding the shaft of the spade diagonally across her breasts. The light inside the BMW finally went out. For a moment that made things worse. She could see only a world of indistinct purple shapes under the fading lavender sky, and she fully expected him to leap out at her, calling her Missus and asking why she hadn't listen as his hands closed around her throat and her breath rattled to an end.

It didn't happen and in another three seconds or so, her eyes re-adapted to the low light. Now she could see him again, tall and straight, grave and still, standing there in the angle of the big building and the small one. With something at his feet. Some kind of square package. It could have been a suitcase.

Good God, he doesn't think he can get all of Scott's papers in there, does he?
she thought, and took another cautious step to her left, holding the silver spade so tightly that her fists throbbed. “Zack, is that you?” Another step. Two. Three.

She heard a car coming and understood that its headlights were going to sweep the yard, revealing him fully. When that happened, he would leap at her. She swung the silver spade back over her shoulder just as she had in August of 1988, finishing her windup as the approaching car breasted Sugar Top Hill, flooding her yard with momentary light and revealing the power-mower she herself had left in the angle of the barn and the shed. The shadow of its handle leaped upward on the side of the barn, then faded as the car's headlights faded. Once more the lawn-mower could have been a man with a suitcase at his feet, she supposed, although once you'd seen the truth . . .

In a horror movie
, she thought,
this is where the monster would leap out of the darkness and grab me. Just as I'm starting to relax.

Nothing leaped out to grab her, but Lisey didn't think it would hurt to take the silver spade inside with her, if only for good luck. Carrying it in one hand now, down by the collar where the shaft met the silver scoop, Lisey went to call Norris Ridgewick, the Castle County Sheriff.

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

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

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

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

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

With a twinge of conscience

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

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

“Are you going to talk to him, Deputy Clutterbuck?”

“I think that's indicated, don't you?”

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

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

Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it
was
right.

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

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

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?”

“Yes . . .” Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisey hoped Clutterbuck was right about that.

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

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

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

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