Lisey’s Story (30 page)

Why was that familiar? At first it wouldn't come, and then it did.
What's my prize?
she'd asked the thing in Amanda's nightgown, the thing turned away from her.
A drink
, it had said.
A Coke? An RC?
she had asked, and it had said—

“It said . . . she or he said . . . ‘Shut up, we want to watch the holly-hocks,'” Lisey murmured.

Yes, that was right, or almost right; close enough for government work, anyway. It meant nothing to her, and yet it almost did. She stared at the word a moment or two longer, then thumbed through to the end of the notebook. All the pages were blank. She was about to toss it aside when she saw ghostly words
behind
the last page. She flipped it up and found this printed on the bent inner surface of the notebook's back cover:

But before bending to look under the bed, Lisey flipped first back to the numbers at the front of the book and then to
HOLLYHOCKS,
which she had found half a dozen pages from the end, confirming what she already knew: Amanda printed her fours with a right angle and a downward slash, as they had been taught in grammar school:
It was
Scott
who had made fours that looked a little like an ampersand:
It had been
Scott
who looped his
o
's together and had been in the habit of drawing a line under his jotted notes and memos. And it had always been Amanda's habit to print in tiny capitals . . . with slightly lazy round letters: C's, G's, Y's, and S's.

Lisey flipped back and forth between
HOLLYHOCKS
and
4th Station: Look Under the Bed
.
She thought that if she put the two writing samples in front of Darla and Canty, they would without hesitation identify the former as Amanda's work and the latter as Scott's.

And the thing in the bed with her yesterday morning . . .

“It sounded like
both
of them,” she whispered. Her flesh was creeping. She hadn't realized flesh could actually do that. “People would call me crazy, but it really did sound like both of them.”

Look under the bed.

At last she did as the note instructed. And the only bool she spied was an old pair of carpet slippers.

Lisey Landon sat in a bar of morning sun with her legs crossed at the shins and her hands resting on the balls of her knees. She had slept nude and sat that way now; the shadow of the sheers drawn across the east window lay on her slim body like the shadow of a stocking. She looked again at the note directing her to the fourth station of the bool—a short bool, a good bool, a few more and she'd get her prize.

Sometimes Paul would tease me with a hard bool . . . but never
too
hard
.

Never too hard.
With that in mind she closed the notebook with a snap and looked at the back cover. There, written in tiny dark letters below the Dennison trade name, was this:

mein gott

Lisey got to her feet and quickly began to dress.

The tree closes them in their own world. Beyond is the snow. And under the yum-yum tree is Scott's voice, Scott's hypnotic voice, and did she think
Empty Devils
was his horror story?
This
is his horror story, and except for his tears when he speaks of Paul and how they hung together through all the cutting and terror and blood on the floor, he tells it unfalteringly.

“We never had bool hunts when Daddy was home,” he says, “only when he was at work.” Scott has for the most part gotten the western Pennsylvania accent out of his talk, but now it creeps in, far deeper than her own Yankee accent, and somehow childish: not
home
but
hum
, not
work
but a strange distortion that comes out
rurk.
“Paul would
always put the first one close by. It might say ‘5 stations of the bool'—to tell you how many clues there were—and then something like ‘Go look in the closet.' The first one was only sometimes a riddle, but the others almost always were. I member one that said ‘Go where Daddy kicked the cat,' and accourse that was the old well. Another one said ‘Go where we “farm all” day.' And after a little bit I figured out that meant the old Farmall tractor down in eastfield by the rock wall, and sure enough, there was a station of the bool right there on the seat, held down with a rock. Because a station of the bool was only a scrap of paper, you know, written on and folded over. I almost always got the riddles, but if I was stuck, Paul would give me more clues until I solved it. And at the end I'd get my prize of a Coke or an RC Cola or a candybar.”

He looks at her. Beyond him is nothing but white—a wall of white. The yum-yum tree—it is actually a willow—bends around them in a magic circle, shutting out the world.

He says: “Sometimes when Daddy got the bad-gunky, cutting himself wasn't enough to let it out, Lisey. One day when he was like that he put me

up on the bench in the hall
, that was what he had said next, she could remember it now (whether she wanted to or not), but before she could follow the memory deeper into the purple where it had been hidden all this time, she saw a man standing on her back porch stoop. And it
was
a man, not a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner but an actual man. Luckily, she had time to register the fact that, although he wasn't Deputy Boeckman, he was also dressed in Castle County khaki. This saved her the embarrassment of screaming like Jamie Lee Curtis in a
Halloween
movie.

Her visitor introduced himself as Deputy Alston. He had come to fetch away the dead cat in Lisey's freezer, and also to assure her that he would be checking on her throughout the day. He asked if she had a cell phone and Lisey said she did. It was in the BMW, and she thought it
might even be working. Deputy Alston suggested she keep it with her at all times, and that she program the Sheriff's Office into the speed-dial directory. He saw her expression and told her he was prepared to do that for her, if she “was not conversant with that feature.”

Lisey, who rarely used the little cell phone at all, led Deputy Alston to her BMW. The gadget turned out to be only half-charged, but the cord was in the console compartment between the seats. Deputy Alston reached out to unplug the cigarette lighter, saw the light scattering of ashes around it, and paused.

“Go ahead,” Lisey told him. “I thought I was going to take the habit up again, but I guess I've changed my mind.”

“Probably wise, ma'am,” Deputy Alston said, unsmiling. He removed the Beemer's cigarette lighter and plugged in the phone. Lisey had had no idea you could do that; when she thought of it at all, she'd always recharged the little Motorola phone in the kitchen. Two years, and she still hadn't quite gotten used to the idea that there was no man around to read the instructions and puzzle out the meanings of Fig 1 and Fig 2.

She asked Deputy Alston how long the charging-up would take.

“To full? No more than an hour, maybe less. Will you be within reach of a telephone in the meantime?”

“Yes, I've got some things to do in the barn. There's one there.”

“Fine. Once this one's charged, clip it to your belt or hang it on the waistband of your pants. Any cause for alarm, hit the 1-key and bam, you're talking to a cop.”

“Thank you.”

“Don't mention it. And as I said, I'll be checking on you. Dan Boeckman will make this his twenty again tonight unless he has to roll on a call. That'll probably happen—small towns like this, Friday nights are busy nights—but you've got your phone and your speed-dial, and he'll always return here.”

“That's fine. Have you heard anything at all about the man who's been bothering me?”

“Not boo, ma'am,” Deputy Alston said, comfortably enough . . . but of course he could
afford
to be comfortable, no one had threatened to hurt
him
, and quite likely no one would. He stood approximately six-five and
probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.
Might go one-seventy-five, dressed n hung
, her father might have added; in Lisbon, Dandy Debusher had been known for such witticisms.

“If Andy hears anything—Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he's running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon—I'm sure he'll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you're inside, right? Especially after dark.”

“Right.”

“And keep that phone handy.”

“I will.”

He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. “I'll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you'll be glad to see the last of it.”

“Yes,” Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought

(
mein gott
)

in Germany. In Germany where

everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Lisey doesn't remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn't matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen:
Everything that
can
go wrong
does
go wrong.

Everything that
can, does.

The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott's calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing
expense—mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn't looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott
the American Communist boiling-potter
, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him
Goinzee on! Goinzee on, mein Führer, bitte, bitte!
That year Scott is drinking, Scott is joking, and Scott is siccing lawyers on sonofabitching landlords, but Scott isn't writing. Not writing because he's always drunk or always drunk because he's not writing? Lisey doesn't know. It's sixenze of one, half a dozenze of the other. By May, when his teaching gig finally, mercifully ends, she no longer cares. By May she only wants to be someplace where conversation in the supermarket or the shops along the high street doesn't sound to her like the manimals in that movie
The Island of Dr. Moreau.
She knows that's not fair, but she also knows she hasn't been able to make a single friend in Bremen, not even among the faculty wives who speak English, and her husband is gone too much at the University. She spends too much time in the drafty house, wrapped in a shawl but still usually cold, almost always lonely and miserable, watching television programs she doesn't understand and listening to trucks rumble around the rotary up the hill. The big ones, the Peugeots, make the floors shake. The fact that Scott is also miserable, that his classes are going badly and his lectures are near-disasters, doesn't help at all. Why in God's name would it? Whoever said
misery loves company
was full of shite.
Whatever can go wrong will go wrong
, however . . .
that
guy was onto something.