Bag of Bones 9 страница

There was no revelation, no sudden weird flashes in my head. It was just Dark Score, first in my mouth and then in my stomach. I swam out to the float, climbed the three-rung ladder on the side, and flopped on the hot boards, feeling suddenly very glad I had come. In spite of everything.

Tomorrow I would start putting together some sort of life down here. . . trying to, anyway. For now it was enough to be lying with my head in the crook of one arm, on the verge of a doze, confident that the day’s adventures were over. As it happened, that was not quite true.

During our first summer on the TR, Jo and I discovered it was possible to see the Castle Rock fireworks show from the deck overlooking the lake. I remembered this just as it was drawing down toward dark, and thought that this year I would spend that time in the living room, watching a movie on the video player. Reliving all the Fourth of July twilights we had spent out there, drinking beer and laughing as the big ones went off, would be a bad idea. I was lonely enough without that, lonely in a way of which I had not been conscious in Derry. Then I wondered what I had come down here for, if not to finally face Johanna’s memory—all of it—and put it to loving rest. Certainly the possibility of writing again had never seemed more distant than it did that night.

There was no beer—I’d forgotten to get a sixpack either at the General Store or at the Village Cafe—but there was soda, courtesy of Brenda Meserve. I got a can of Pepsi and settled in to watch the lightshow, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much. Hoping, I supposed, that I wouldn’t cry.

Not that I was kidding myself; there were more tears here, all right.

I’d just have to get through them. The first explosion of the night had just gone off a spangly burst of blue with the bang travelling far behind—when the phone rang. It made me jump as the faint explosion from Castle Rock had not. I decided it was probably Bill Dean, calling long-distance to see if I was settling in all right. In the summer before Jo died, we’d gotten a wireless phone so we could prowl the downstairs while we talked, a thing we both liked to do. I went through the sliding glass door into the living room, punched the pickup button, and said, “Hello, this is Mike, ” as I went back to my deck-chair and sat down. Far across the lake, exploding below the low clouds hanging over Castle View, were green and yellow starbursts, followed by soundless flashes that would eventually reach me as noise. For a moment there was nothing from the phone, and then a man’s raspy voice—an elderly voice but not Bill Dean’s—said, “Noonan? Mr. Noonan? ”

“Yes? ” A huge spangle of gold lit up the west, shivering the low clouds with brief filigree.

It made me think of the award shows you see on television, all those beautiful women in shining dresses. “Devore. ”

“Yes? ” I said again, cautiously. “Max Devore. ” don’t see him in here too often, Audrey had said. I had taken that for Yankee wit, but apparently she’d been serious. Wonders never ceased. Okay, what next? I was at a total loss for conversational gambits. I thought of asking him how he’d gotten my number, which was unlisted, but what would be the point? When you were worth over half a billion dollars—if this really was the Max Devore I was talking to—you could get any old unlisted number you wanted. I settled for saying yes again, this time without the little uptilt at the end. Another silence followed. When I broke it and began asking questions, he would be in charge of the conversation. . . if we could be said to be having a conversation at that point. A good gambit, but I had the advantage of my long association with Harold Oblowski to fall back on, Harold, master of the pregnant pause. I sat tight, cunning little cordless phone to my ear, and watched the show in the west. Red bursting into blue, green into gold; unseen women walked the clouds in glowing award-show evening dresses. “I understand you met my daughter-in-law today, ” he said at last. He sounded annoyed. “I may have done, ” I said, trying not to sound surprised. “May I ask why you’re calling, Mr. Devore? ”

“I understand there was an incident. ” White lights danced in the sky—they could have been exploding spacecraft. Then, trailing after, the bangs. I’ve discovered the secret of time travel, I thought.

It’s an auditory phenomenon. My hand was holding the phone far too tightly, and I made it relax. Maxwell Devore. Half a billion dollars.

Not in Palm Springs, as I had supposed, but close—right here on the TR, if the characteristic under-hum on the line could be trusted. “I’m concerned for my granddaughter. ” His voice was raspier than ever. He was angry, and it showed—this was a man who hadn’t had to conceal his emotions in a lot of years. “I understand my daughter-in-law’s attention wandered again. It wanders often. ” Now half a dozen colored starbursts lit the night, blooming like flowers in an old Disney nature film. I could imagine the crowds gathered on Castle View sitting cross-legged on their blankets, eating ice cream cones and drinking beer and all going Oooooh at the same time. That’s what makes any successful work of art, I think-everybody goes Oooooh at the same time. “You’re scared of this guy, aren’t you? Jo asked. Okay, maybe you’re right to be scared. A man who feels he can be angry whenever he wants to at whoever he wants to. . .

that’s a man who can be dangerous. Then Mattie’s voice: Mr. Noonan, I’m not a bad mother. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Of course that’s what most bad mothers say in such circumstances, I imagined. . . but I had believed her.

Also, goddammit, my number was unlisted. I had been sitting here with a soda, watching the fireworks, bothering nobody, and this guy had-“Mr. Devore, I don’t have any idea what—”

“Don’t give me that, with all due respect don’t give me that, Mr. Noonan, you were seen talking to them. ”

He sounded as I imagine Joe Mccarthy sounded to those poor schmucks who ended up being branded dirty commies when they came before his committee. Be careful, Mike, Jo said. Beware of Maxwell’s silver hammer.

“I did see and speak to a woman and a little girl this morning, ” I said.

“I presume they’re the ones you’re talking about. ”

“No, you saw a toddler walking on the road alone, ” he said. “And then you saw a woman chasing after her. My daughter-in-law, in that old thing she drives. The child could have been run down. Why are you protecting that young woman, Mr. Noonan? Did she promise you something? You’re certainly doing the child no favors, I can tell you that much. ” She promised to take me back to her trailer and then take me around the world, I thought of saying.

She promised to keep her mouth open the whole time if I’d keep mine shut—is that what you want to hear? Is, Jo said. Very likely that is what he wants to hear. Very likely what he wants to believe. Don’t let him provoke you into a burst of your sophomore sarcasm, Mike—you could regret it. Why was I bothering to protect Mattie Devore, anyway? I didn’t know. Didn’t have the slightest idea of what I might be getting into here, for that matter. I only knew that she had looked tired, and the child hadn’t been bruised or frightened or sullen. “There was a car.

An old Jeep. "

“That’s more like it. ” Satisfaction. And sharp interest.

Greed, almost. “What did—”

“I guess I assumed they came in the car together, ” I said. There was a certain giddy pleasure in discovering my capacity for invention had not deserted me—I felt like a pitcher who can no longer do it in front of a crowd, but who can still throw a pretty good slider in the old back yard. “The little girl might have had some daisies. ” All the careful qualifications, as if I were testifying in court instead of sitting on my deck. Harold would have been proud.

Well, no. Harold would have been horrified that I was having such a conversation at all. “I think I assumed they were picking wildflowers.

My memory of the incident isn’t all that clear, unfortunately. I’m a writer, Mr. Devore, and when I’m driving I often drift off into my own private—”

“You’re lying. ” The anger was right out in the open now, bright and pulsing like a boil. As I had suspected, it hadn’t taken much effort to escort this guy past the social niceties. “Mr. Devore. The computer Devore, I assume? ”

“You assume correctly. ” Jo always grew cooler in tone and expression as her not inconsiderable temper grew hotter. Now I heard myself emulating her in a way that was frankly eerie. “Mr. Devore, I’m not accustomed to being called in the evening by men I don’t know, nor do I intend to prolong the conversation when a man who does so calls me a liar. Good evening, sir. ”

“If everything was fine, then why did you stop? ”

“I’ve been away from the TR for some time, and I wanted to know if the Village Cafe was still open. Oh, by the way—I don’t know where you got my telephone number, but I know where you can put it. Good night. ” I broke the connection with my thumb and then just looked at the phone, as if I had never seen such a gadget in my life. The hand holding it was trembling. My heart was beating hard; I could feel it in my neck and wrists as well as my chest. I wondered if!

could have told Devote to stick my phone number up his ass if I hadn’t had a few million rattling around in the bank myself. The Battle of the Titans, dear, Jo said in her cool voice. And all over a teenage girl in a trailer. She didn’t even have any breasts to speak off I laughed out loud. War of the Titans? Hardly. Some old robber baron from the turn of the century had said, “These days a man with a million dollars thinks he’s rich. ” Devore would likely have the same opinion of me, and in the wider scheme of things he would be right. Now the western sky was alight with unnatural, pulsing color. It was the finale.

“What was that all about? ” I asked. No answer; only a loon calling across the lake. Protesting all the unaccustomed noise in the sky, as likely as not. I got up, went inside, and put the phone back in its charging cradle, realizing as I did that I was expecting it to ring again, expecting Devore to start spouting movie cliches: If you get in my way 17l and I’m warning you, friend, not to and Let me give you a piece of good advice here you. The phone didn’t ring. I poured the rest of my soda down my gullet, which was understandably dry, and decided to go to bed. At least there hadn’t been any weeping and wailing out there on the deck; Devore had pulled me out of myself. In a weird way, I was grateful to him. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and lay down.

I thought about the little girl, Kyra, and the mother who could have been her older sister. Devote was pissed at Mattie, that much was clear, and if I was a financial nonentity to the guy, what must she be to him?

And what kind of resources would she have if he had taken against her?

That was a pretty nasty thought, actually, and it was the one I fell asleep on. I got up three hours later to eliminate the can of soda I had unwisely downed before retiring, and as I stood before the bowl, pissing with one eye open, I heard the sobbing again. A child somewhere in the dark, lost and frightened. . . or perhaps just pretending to be lost and frightened. “Don’t, ” I said. I was standing naked before the toilet bowl, my back alive with gooseflesh. “Please don’t start up with this shit, it’s scary. ” The crying dwindled as it had before, seeming to diminish like something carried down a tunnel. I went back to bed, turned on my side, and closed my eyes. “It was a dream, ” I said. “Just another Manderley dream. ” I knew better, but I also knew I was going back to sleep, and right then that seemed like the important thing. As I drifted off, I thought in a voice that was purely my own: She is alive.

Sara is alive. And I understood something, too: she belonged to me. I had reclaimed her. For good or ill, I had come home.

CHAPTER 3

At nine o’clock the following morning I filled a squeeze-bottle with grapefruit juice and set out for a good long walk south along The Street. The day was bright and already hot. It was also silent—the kind of silence you experience only after a Saturday holiday, I think, one composed of equal parts holiness and hangover. I could see two or three fishermen parked far out on the lake, but not a single power boat burred, not a single gaggle of kids shouted and splashed. I passed half a dozen cottages on the slope above me, and although all of them were likely inhabited at this time of year, the only signs of life I saw were bathing suits hung over the deck rail at the Passendales’ and a half-deflated fluorescent-green seahorse on the Batchelders’ stub of a dock. But did the Passendales’ little gray cottage still belong to the Passendales? Did the Batchelders’ amusing circular summer-camp with its Cinerama picture-window pointing at the lake and the mountains beyond still belong to the Batchelders? No way of telling, of course. Four years can bring a lot of changes. I walked and made no effort to think—an old trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs I made my way past camps where Jo and I had once had drinks and barbecues and attended the occasional card-party, I soaked up the silence like a sponge, I drank my juice, I armed sweat offmy forehead, and I waited to see what thoughts might come. The first was an odd realization: that the crying child in the night seemed somehow more real than the call from Max Devore. Had I actually been phoned by a rich and obviously bad-tempered techno-mogul on my first full evening back on the TR? Had said mogul actually called me a liar at one point? (I was, considering the tale I had told, but that was beside the point. ) I knew it had happened, but it was actually easier to believe in The Ghost of Dark Score Lake, known around some campfires as The Mysterious Crying Kiddie. My next thought—this was just before I finished my juice—was that I should call Mattie Devore and tell her what had happened. I decided it was a natural impulse but probably a bad idea. I was too old to believe in such simplicities as The Damsel in Distress Versus The Wicked Stepfather. . . or, in this case, Father-in-Law. I had my own fish to fry this summer, and I didn’t want to complicate my job by getting into a potentially ugly dispute between Mr. Computer and Ms. Doublewide. Devore had rubbed my fur the wrong way—and vigorously—but that probably wasn’t personal, only something he did as a matter of course. Hey, some guys snap bra-straps. Did I want to get in his face on this? No. I did not. I had saved Little Miss Red Sox, I had gotten myself an inadvertent feel of Mom’s small but pleasantly firm breast, I had learned that Kyra was Greek for ladylike. Any more than that would be gluttony, by God. I stopped at that point, feet as well as brain, realizing I’d walked all the way to Warrington’s, a vast barnboard structure which locals sometimes called the country club. It was, sort of—there was a six-hole golf course, a stable and riding trails, a restaurant, a bar, and lodging for perhaps three dozen in the main building and the eight or nine satellite cabins. There was even a two-lane bowling alley, although you and your competition had to take turns setting up the pins.

Warrington’s had been built around the beginning of World War I. That made it younger than Sara Laughs, but not by much. A long dock led out to a smaller building calle/unset Bar. It was there that Warrington’s summer guests would gather for drinks at the end of the day (and some for Bloody Marys at the beginning). And when I glanced out that way, I realized I was no longer alone. There was a woman standing on the porch to the left of the floating bar’s door, watching me.

She gave me a pretty good jump. My nerves weren’t in their best condition right then, and that probably had something to do with it. . .

but I think she would have given me a jump in any case. Part of it was her stillness. Part was her extraordinary thinness. Most of it was her face. Have you ever seen that Edvard Munch drawing, The Cry? Well, if you imagine that screaming face at rest, mouth closed and eyes watchful, you’ll have a pretty good image of the woman standing at the end of the dock with one long-fingered hand resting on the rail. Although I must tell you that my first thought was not Edvard Munch but Mrs. Danvers.

She looked about seventy and was wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. The combination looked strangely formal, a variation on the ever-popular little black cocktail dress. Her skin was cream-white, except above her nearly flat bosom and along her bony shoulders. There it swam with large brown age-spots. Her face was a wedge featuring prominent skull-like cheekbones and an unlined lamp of brow. Beneath that bulge, her eyes were lost in sockets of shadow. White hair hung scant and lank around her ears and down to the prominent shelf of her jaw.

God, she’s thin, I thought. She’s nothing but a bag of- A shudder twisted through me at that. It was a strong one, as if someone were spinning a wire in my flesh. I didn’t want her to notice it—what a way to start a summer day, by revolting a guy so badly that he stood there shaking and grimacing in front of you—so I raised my hand and waved. I tried to smile, as well. Hello there, lady standing out by the floating bar. Hello there, you old bag of bones, you scared the living shit out of me but it doesn’t take much these days and I forgive you. How the fuck ya doin? I wondered if my smile looked as much like a gri mace to her as it felt to me.

She didn’t wave back.

Feeling quite a bit like a fooi—THERE’s NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TA: Tt3Veas—I ended my wave in a kind of half-assed salute and headed back the way I’d come. Five steps and I had to look over my shoulder; the sensation of her watching me was so strong it was like a hand pressing between my shoulderblades.

The dock where she’d been was completely deserted. I squinted my eyes, at first sure she must have just retreated deeper into the shadow thrown by the little boozehaus, but she was gone. As if she had been a ghost herself.

She stepped into the bar, hon, Jo said. You know that, don’t you? I mean. . . you do know it, right?

“Right, right, ” I murmured, setting off north along The Street toward home. “Of course I do. Where else? ” Except it didn’t seem to me that there had been time; it didn’t seem to me that she could have stepped in, even in her bare feet, without me hearing her. Not on such a quiet morning.

Jo again: Perhaps she’s stealthy.

“Yes, ” I murmured. I did a lot of talking out loud before that summer was over. “Yes, perhaps she is. Perhaps she’s stealthy. ” Sure. Like Mrs. Danvers.

I stopped again and looked back, but the right-of-way path had followed the lake around a little bit of cu(ve, and I could no longer see either Warrington’s or The Sunset Bar. And really, I thought, that was just as well. On my way back, I tried to list the oddities which had preceded and then surrounded my return to Sara Laughs: the repeating dreams; the sunflowers; the radio-station sticker; the weeping in the night. I supposed that my encounter with Mattie and Kyra, plus the follow-up phone-call from Mr. Pixel Easel, also qualified as passing strange. . . but not in the same way as a child you heard sobbing in the night.

And what about the fact that we had been in Derry instead of on Dark Score when Johanna died? Did that qualify for the list? I didn’t know. I couldn’t even remember why that was. In the fall and winter of 1993 I’d been fiddling with a screenplay for The Red-Shirt Man. In February of ’94 I got going on All the Vy from the 7bp, and that absorbed most of my attention. Besides, deciding to go west to the TR, west to Sara. . .

“That was Jo’s job, ” I told the day, and as soon as I heard the words I understood how true they were. We’d both loved the old girl, but saying “Hey Irish, let’s get our asses over to the TR for a few days” had been Jo’s job. She might say it any time. . . except in the year before her death she hadn’t said it once. And I had never thought to say it for her. Had somehow forgotten all about Sara Laughs, it seemed, even when summer came around. Was it possible to be that absorbed in a writing project? It didn’t seem likely. . . but what other explanation was there?

Something was very wrong with this picture, but I didn’t know what it was. Not from nothin. That made me think of Sara Tidwell, and the lyrics to one of her songs. She had never been recorded, but I owned the Blind Lemon Jefferson version of this particular tune. One verse went:

It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round Let me kiss you on your sweet lips sugar You the good thing that I Jund.

I loved that song, and had always wondered how it would have sounded coming out of a woman’s mouth instead of from that whiskey-voiced old troubadour. Out of Sara Tidwell’s mouth. I bet she sang sweet. And boy, I bet she could swing it. I had gotten back to my own place again. I looked around, saw no one in the immediate vicinity (although I could now hear the day’s first ski-boat burring away downwater), stripped to my underpants, and swam out to the float. I didn’t climb it, only lay beside it holding onto the ladder with one hand and lazily kicking my feet. It was nice enough, but what was I going to do with the rest of the day? I decided to spend it cleaning my work area on the second floor. When that was done, maybe I’d go out and look around in Jo’s studio. if I didn’t lose my courage, that was. I swam back, kicking easily along, raising my head in and out of water which flowed along my body like cool silk. I felt like an otter. I was most of the way to the shore when I raised my dripping face and saw a woman standing on The Street, watching me. She was as thin as the one I’d seen down at Warrington’s. . . but this one was green. Green and pointing north along the path like a dryad in Some old legend. I gasped, swallowed water, coughed it back out. I stood up in chest-deep water and wiped my streaming eyes. Then I laughed (albeit a little doubtfully).

The woman was green because she was a birch growing a little to the north of where my set of railroad-tie steps ended at The Street. And even with my eyes clear of water, there was something creepy about how the leaves around the ivory-streaked-with-black trunk almost made a peering face. The air was perfectly still and so the face was perfectly still (as still as the face of the woman in the black shorts and bathing suit had been), but on a breezy day it would seem to smile or frown. . . or perhaps to laugh. Behind it there grew a sickly pine. One bare branch jutted off to the north. It was this I had mistaken for a skinny arm and a bony, pointing hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d spooked myself like that. I see things, that’s all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint, every line in the dirt like a secret message. Which did not, of course, ease the task of deciding what was really peculiar at Sara Laughs and what was peculiar only because my mind was peculi r. I glanced around, saw I still had this part of the [ake to myself (although not for much longer; the bee-buzz of the first pber boat had been joined by a second and third), and stripped off my soggy underpants. I wrung them out, put them on top of my shorts and tee-shirt, and walked naked up the railroad-tie steps with my clothes held against my chest. I pretended I was Bunter, bringing breakfast and the morning paper to Lord Peter Wimsey. By the time I got back inside the house I was grinning like a fool.

The second floor was stifling in spite of the open windows, and I saw why as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. Jo and I had shared space up here, she on the left (only a little room, really just a cubby, which was all she needed with the studio north of the house), me on the right.

At the far end of the hall was the grilled snout of the monster air-conditioning unit we’d bought the year after we bought the lodge.

Looking at it, I realized I had missed its characteristic hum without even being aware of it. There was a sign taped to it which said, Mr. Noonan: Broken. Blows hot air when you turn it on & sounds full of broken glass. Dean says the part it needs is promised Fom lstern Auto in Castle Rock. I’ll believe it when I see it. B. Meserve. I grinned at that last—it was Mrs. M. right down to the ground—and then i tried the switch. Machinery often responds favorably when it senses a penis-equipped human in the vicinity, Jo used to claim, but not this time. I listened to the air conditioner grind for five seconds or so, then snapped it off. “Damn thing shit the bed, ” as TR folks like to say. And until it was fixed, I wouldn’t even be doing crossword puzzles up here. I looked in my office just the same, as curious about what I might feel as about what I might find. The answer was next to nothing. There was the desk where I had finished The Red-Shirt Man, thus proving to myself that the first time wasn’t a fluke; there was the photo of Richard Nixon, arms raised, flashing the double V-for-Victory sign, with the caption WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN? running beneath; there was the rag rug Jo had hooked for me a winter or two before she had discovered the wonderful world of afghans and pretty much gave up hooking. It wasn’t quite the office of a stranger, but every item (most of all, the weirdly empty surface of the desk) said that it was the work-space of an earlier-generation Mike Noonan. Men’s lives, I had read once, are usually defined by two primary forces: work and marriage. In my life the marriage was over and the career on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. Given that, it didn’t seem strange to me that now the space where I’d spent so many days, usually in a state of real happiness as I made up various imaginary lives, seemed to mean nothing. It was like looking at the office of an employee who had been fired. . . or who had died suddenly. I started to leave, then had an idea. The filing cabinet in the corner was crammed with papers—bank statements (most eight or ten years out of date), correspondence (mostly never answered), a few story fragments-but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I moved on to the closet, where the temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten degrees, and in a cardboard box which Mrs. M. had marked G^DOE’rs, I unearthed it—a Sanyo Memo-Scriber Debra Weinstock gave me at the conclusion of our work on the first of the Putnam books. It could be set to turn itself on when you started to talk; it dropped into its? ^use mode when you stopped to think. I never asked Debra if the thing just caught her eye and she thought, “Why, I’ll bet any self-respecting popular novelist would enjoy owning one of these babies, ” or if it was something a little more specific. . . some sort of hint, perhaps?

Verbalize those little faxes from your subconscious while they’re still fresh, Noonan? I hadn’t known then and didn’t now. But I had it, a genuine pro-quality dictating-machine, and there were at least a dozen cassette tapes in my car, home dubs I’d made to listen to while driving.

I would insert one in the Memo-Scriber tonight, slide the volume control as high as it would go, and put the machine in its DICTATE mode. Then, if the noise I’d heard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what he thought it was. What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on? “Well then, I’ll know something else, ” I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweating like a pig. “Or at least suspect it. ” Jo’s nook across the hall made my office seem crowded and homey by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a square room-shaped space. The rug was gone, her photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been abandoned after ninety percent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed/ out of it—scraped out of it—and I felt a moment’s unreasonable anger a Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when I’d done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved: “You took a little too much on y’self, didn’t you? ” That was my feeling about Jo’s little bit of office: that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.

Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the UFO voice said. Maybe Jo did it herselfi Ever think of that, sport? “That’s stupid, ” I said.

“Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death.

Considering she’d just bought—”

But I didn’t want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.

I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face.

It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears. . . except that’s not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.

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