Lisey’s Story (68 page)

Lisey managed to roll to her right. Amanda pulled her arm free, and a moment later the weight of her body came off Lisey's midsection.
Lisey gasped in a deep—and deeply satisfying—breath. As she let it out, Hank Williams quit singing in mid-phrase.

“Lisey, why is it so dark in here?”

“Because Dooley cut the power, remember?”

“He cut the
lights
,” Amanda said reasonably. “If he'd cut the
power
, the TV wouldn't have been playing.”

Lisey could have asked Amanda why the TV had suddenly
stopped
playing, but didn't bother. Other matters needed discussing. They had
other fish to fry
, as the saying was. “Let's go in the house.”

“I'm a hundred percent down with that,” Amanda said. Her fingers touched Lisey's elbow, groped down her forearm, and seized her hand. The sisters stood up together. Amanda added, in a confiding tone: “No offense, Lisey, but if I ever come here again it'll be too soon.”

Lisey understood how Amanda felt, but her own feelings had changed. Scott's study
had
daunted her, no argument there. It had kept her at arm's length for two long years. But she thought the major chore which had needed doing in here was now done. She and Amanda had cleansed Scott's ghost away, kindly and—time would tell, but she was almost positive—completely.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's go in the house. I'll make hot chocolate.”

“And maybe a little brandy to start with?” Amanda asked hopefully. “Or don't crazy ladies get brandy?”

“Crazy ladies don't. You do.”

Holding hands, they groped toward the stairs. Lisey stopped only once, when she stepped on something. She bent over and picked up a round of glass easily an inch thick. She realized it was one of the lenses from Dooley's night-vision goggles and dropped it with a grimace of disgust.

“What?” Amanda asked.

“Nothing. I'm able to see a little. How about you?”

“A little. But don't let go of my hand.”

“I won't, honey.”

They descended the stairs to the barn together. It took longer to do it that way, but it felt a lot safer.

Lisey set out her smallest juice glasses and poured them each a shot of brandy from a bottle she found at the very back of the dining room drinks cabinet. She held her glass up and clinked it against Amanda's. They were standing at the kitchen counter. Every light in the room was on, even the gooseneck lamp in the corner where Lisey scribbled checks at a child's schooldesk.

“Over the teeth,” Lisey said.

“Over the gums,” Amanda said.

“Look out guts, here it comes,” they said together, and drank.

Amanda bent and blew out a gust of breath. When she straightened up, there were roses in her formerly pale cheeks, a line of red forming on her brow, and a tiny saddle of scarlet on the bridge of her nose. Tears stood in her eyes.

“Shit-a-goddam! What was
that?
”

Lisey, whose throat felt as hot as Manda's face looked, took hold of the bottle and read the label.
STAR BRANDY
, it said.
A PRODUCT OF ROMANIA
.

“Romanian brandy?” Amanda looked aghast. “Ain't no such animal! Where'd you get it?”

“It was a gift to Scott. He got it for doing something—I forget what—but I think they threw in a pen set, too.”

“It's probably poison. You pour it out and I'll pray we don't die.”

“You pour it out. I'll make the hot chocolate. Swiss.
Not
from Romania.”

She began to turn away, but Amanda touched her shoulder. “Maybe we should skip the hot chocolate and just get out of here before any of those Sheriff's deputies come back to check on you.”

“Do you think so?” Even as she asked the question, Lisey knew Amanda was right.

“Yes. Do you dare to go up in the study again?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then get my little gun. Don't forget the lights are out up there.”

Lisey opened the top of the little desk where she wrote her checks and pulled out the long-barreled flashlight she kept in there. She turned it on. The light was nice and bright.

Amanda was rinsing their glasses. “If someone found out we were here, that wouldn't be the end of the world. But if your deputies found out we came with a gun . . . and that man just happened to disappear off the face of the earth around the same time . . .”

Lisey, who had thought only as far as getting Dooley to the Bell-and-Spade Tree (and the long boy had
never
been a part of her imaginings), realized she still had work to do and had better get busy doing it. Professor Woodbody wasn't ever going to report his old drinking buddy missing, but the man might have relatives
somewhere
, and if anybody in the world had a motive for getting rid of the Black Prince of the Incunks, it was Lisey Landon. Of course there was no body (what Scott had sometimes been pleased to refer to as the
corpus delicious
), but still, she and her sister had spent what some might construe as an extremely suspicious afternoon and evening. Plus the County Sheriff's Department knew Dooley had been harassing her; she'd told them so herself.

“I'll get his shite,” she said.

Amanda did not smile. “Good.”

The flashlight cut a wide swath, and the study wasn't as spooky on her own as Lisey had feared it might be. Having stuff to do no doubt helped. She began by putting the Pathfinder back in its shoebox, then went prospecting along the floor with the light. She found both of the lenses that went with the night-vision goggles, plus half a dozen double-A batteries. She assumed these were from the gadget's power-pack. The pack must have traveled, although she couldn't remember actually seeing it; the batteries obviously hadn't. Then she picked up Dooley's terrible paper bag. Amanda had either forgotten the bag or hadn't even realized
Dooley had it, but the stuff in here would look bad for her if it were found. Especially when combined with the gun. Lisey knew they could do tests on the Pathfinder that would show it had been fired recently; she wasn't dumb (and she watched
CSI
). She also knew the tests wouldn't show it had been fired only once, into the ceiling. She tried to handle the paper bag so it wouldn't clank, and it clanked anyway. She looked around for other signs of Dooley and saw none. There were bloodstains on the rug, but if
that
were ever tested, both the type and the DNA would match hers. Blood on her rug would look very bad in combination with the stuff in the bag she now held in her hand, but with the bag gone, they'd be all right.
Probably
all right.

Where's his car? His PT Cruiser? Because I know that car I saw was his
.

She couldn't worry about that now. It was dark. This was what she had to worry about, this stuff rah-cheer. And her sisters. Darla and Canty, currently on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride way the hell and gone up to Acadia Mental Health in Derry. So they wouldn't get caught in the Jim Dooley version of Mr. Silver's potato-grader.

But did she really have to worry about those two? No. They'd be royally pissed, of course . . . and royally
curious
 . . . but in the end they'd keep quiet if she and Amanda told them they absolutely had to, and why? Because of the sister thing, that was why. She and Amanda would have to be careful with them, and there would have to be
some
sort of story (what kind could possibly cover this Lisey had no idea, although she was sure Scott could have come up with something). There had to be a story because, unlike Amanda and Lisey, Darla and Cantata had husbands. And husbands were all too often the back door by which secrets escaped into the outside world.

As Lisey turned to go, her eye was caught by the booksnake sleeping against the wall. All those quarterly reviews and scholarly journals, all those year-end annuals, bound reports, and copies of theses done on Scott's work. Many containing pictures of a gone life—call it
SCOTT AND LISEY! THE MARRIED YEARS!

She could easily see a couple of college kids dismantling the snake and loading its component parts into cardboard boxes with liquor brands
printed on the sides, then stacking the boxes in the back of a truck and driving them away. To Pitt?
Bite your tongue
, Lisey thought. She didn't consider herself a grudge-holding woman, but after Jim Dooley, it would be a snowy day in hell before she put any more of Scott's stuff where Woodsmucky could look at it without buying a plane ticket. No, the Fogler Library at the University of Maine would do just fine—right down the road from Cleaves Mills. She could see herself standing by and watching the final packing-up, maybe bringing out a pitcher of iced tea to the kids when the work was done. And when the tea was finished, they would set their glasses down and thank her. One of them might tell her how much he'd liked her husband's books, and the other might say they were very sorry for her loss. As if he had died two weeks ago. She'd thank them. Then she would watch them drive away with all those frozen images of her life with him locked inside their truck.

You can really let go?

She thought she could. Still, that snake drowsing along the wall drew the eye. So many shut books, sleeping deep—they drew the eye. She looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman's high firm breasts. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn't ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

“I always loved you, Scott,” she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. “You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn't I?”

Then, shining the flashlight's beam ahead of her, she went back down the stairs with the shoebox in one hand and Dooley's awful paper bag in the other.

Amanda was standing at the kitchen door when Lisey came back in.

“Good,” Amanda said. “I was getting worried. What's in the bag?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Oh . . . kay,” Amanda said. “Is he . . . you know, gone from up there?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I hope so.” Amanda shivered. “He was a scary guy.”

You don't know the half of it
, Lisey thought.

“Well,” Amanda said, “I guess we better get going.”

“Going where?”

“Lisbon Falls,” Amanda said. “The old farm.”

“What—”
Then she stopped. It made a weird kind of sense.

“I came around at Greenlawn, just like you told that Dr. Alberness, and you took me to my house so I could change my clothes. Then I got freaky and started talking about the farm. Come on, Lisey, let's go, let's blow this pop-shop before someone comes.” Amanda led her out into the dark.

Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late nineteen-eighties paid the property taxes.

“Why did you want to go to the old farm?” Lisey asked as she slipped behind the BMW's wheel. “I'm not clear on that.”

“Because
I
wasn't,” Amanda said as Lisey turned in a circle and started down the long drive. “I just said I had to go there and see the old place if I wasn't going to, you know, slip back into the Twilight Zone, so of course you took me.”

“Of course I did,” Lisey said. She looked both ways, saw no one coming—especially
no County Sheriff's Department cars, praise God—and turned left, the direction that would take her through Mechanic Falls, Poland Springs, and eventually to Gray and Lisbon beyond. “And why did we send Darla and Canty in the wrong direction?”

“I absolutely insisted,” Amanda said. “I was afraid if they showed up, they'd take me back to my house or your house or even to Greenlawn before I got a chance to visit with Mom and Dad and then spend some time at the home place.” For a moment Lisey had no idea what Manda was talking about—
spend time with Mom and Dad?
Then she got it. The Debusher family plot was at nearby Sabbatus Vale Cemetery. Both Good Ma and Dandy were buried there, along with Grampy and Granny D and God knew how many others.

She asked, “But weren't you afraid
I'd
take you back?”

Amanda eyed her indulgently. “Why would
you
take me back? You were the one who took me
out
.”

“Maybe because you started acting crazy, asking to visit a farm that's been deserted for thirty years or more?”

“Foof!” Amanda waved a dismissive hand. “I could always wrap you around my finger, Lisey—Canty and Darla both know this.”

“Bull
shit
you could!”

Amanda only gave her a maddening smile, her complexion a rather weird green in the glow of the dashboard lights, and said nothing. Lisey opened her mouth to renew the argument, then closed it again. She thought the story would work, because it came down to a pair of easily grasped ideas: Amanda had been acting crazy (nothing new there) and Lisey had been humoring her (understandable, given the circumstances). They could work with it. As for the shoebox with the gun in it . . . and Dooley's bag . . .

“We're going to stop in Mechanic Falls,” she told Amanda. “Where the bridge goes over the Androscoggin River. I've got a couple of things to get rid of.”