Bag of Bones 20 страница

“If you say so. ” But my hand went off on its own expedition, made a loose fist, and knocked on the good solid wood of the coffee-table.

“And hey, the softball game wasn’t a total loss. ” John was still talking between little giggling outbursts like helium balloons.

“No? ”

“I’m taken with her. ”

“Her? ”

“Mattie, ” he said patiently. “Mattie Devore. ” A pause, then: “Mike? Are you there? ”

“Yeah, ” I said. “Phone slipped. Sorry. ” The phone hadn’t slipped as much as an inch, but it came out sounding natural enough, I thought. And if it hadn’t, so what? When it came to Mattie, I would be—in John’s mind, at least—below suspicion. Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie. He was twenty-eight, maybe thirty. The idea that a man twelve years older might be sexually attracted to Mattie had probably never crossed his mind. . . or maybe just for a second or two there on the common, before he dismissed it as ludicrous. The way Mattie herself had dismissed the idea of Jo and the man in the brown sportcoat.

“I can’t do my courtship dance while I’m representing her, ” he said, “wouldn’t be ethical. Wouldn’t be safe, either. Later, though. . . you can never tell. ”

“No, ” I said, hearing my voice as you sometimes do in moments when you are caught completely fiat-footed, hearing it as though it were coming from someone else. Someone on the radio or the record-player, maybe. Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone? I thought of his hands, the fingers long and slender and without a ring on any of them. Like Sara’s hands in that old photo. “No, you can never tell. ” We said goodbye, and I sat watching the muted baseball game. I thought about getting up to get a beer, but it seemed too far to the refrigerator—a safari, in fact. What I felt was a kind of dull hurt, followed by a better emotion: rueful relief, I guess you’d call it. Was he too old for her? No, I didn’t think so. Just about right. Prince Charming No. 2, this time in a three-piece suit. Mattie’s luck with men might finally be changing, and if so I should be glad. I would be glad. And relieved. Because I had a book to write, and never mind the look of white sneakers flashing below a red sundress in the deepening gloom, or the ember of her cigarette dancing in the dark.

Still, I felt really lonely for the first time since I saw Kyra marching up the white line of Route 68 in her bathing suit and flip-flops. “You funny little man, said Strickland, ” I told the empty room. It came out before I knew I was going to say anything, and when it did, the channel on the TV changed. It went from baseball to a rerun of All in the Family and then to Ren 0 Stimpy. I glanced down at the remote control. It was still on the coffee-table where I’d left it. The TV channel changed again, and this time I was looking at Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. There was an airplane in the background, and I didn’t need to pick up the remote and turn on the sound to know that Humphrey was telling Ingrid that she was getting on that plane. My wife’s all-time favorite movie. She bawled at the end without fail. “Jo? ” I asked. “Are you here? ” Bunter’s bell rang once. Very faintly. There had been several presences in the house, I was sure of it. . . but tonight, for the first time, I was positive it was Jo who was with me. “Who was he, hon? ” I asked. “The guy at the softball field, who was he? ” Bunter’s bell hung still and quiet. She was in the room, though. I sensed her, something like a held breath. I remembered the ugly, gibing little message on the refrigerator after my dinner with Mattie and Ki: blue rose liar ha ha.

“Who was he? ” My voice was unsteady, sounding on the verge of tears.

“What were you doing down here with some guy? Were you. . . ” But I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she had been lying to me, cheating on me. I couldn’t ask even though the presence I felt might be, let’s face it, only in my own head. The TV switched away from Casablanca and here was everybody’s favorite lawyer, Perry Mason, on Nick at Nite. Perry’s nemesis, Hamilton Burger, was questioning a distraught-looking woman, and all at once the sound blared on, making me jump. “I am not a liar! ”

some long-ago TV actress cried. For a moment she looked right out at me, and I was stunned breathless to see Jo’s eyes in that black-and-white fifties face. “I never lied, Mr. Burger, never! ”

“I submit that you did! ” Burger responded. He moved in on her, leering like a vampire. “I submit that you—” The TV suddenly went off. Bunter’s bell gave a single brisk shake, and then whatever had been here was gone. But I felt better. I am not a liar. . . I never lied, never. I could believe that if I chose to. If I chose. I went to bed, and there were no dreams.

I had taken to starting work early, before the heat could really get a hold on the study. I’d drink some juice, gobble some toast, then sit behind the IBM until almost noon, watching the Courier ball dance and twirl as the pages floated through the machine and came out with writing on them.

That old magic, so strange and wonderful. It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile. At noon I’d break, drive down to Buddy Jellison’s greaseatorium for something nasty, then return and work for another hour or so. After that I would swim and take a long dreamless nap in the north bedroom. I had barely poked my head into the master bedroom at the south end of the house, and if Mrs. M. thought this was odd, she kept it to herself. On Friday the seventeenth, I stopped at the Lakeview General on my way back to the house to gas up my Chevrolet.

There are pumps at the All-Purpose Garage, and the go-juice was a penny or two cheaper, but I didn’t like the vibe. Today, as I stood in front of the store with the pump on automatic feed, looking off toward the mountains, Bill Dean’s Dodge Ram pulled in on the other side of the island. He climbed down and gave me a smile. “How’s it going, Mike? ”

“Pretty fair. ”

“Brenda says you’re writin up a storm. ”

“I am, ” I said, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask for an update on the broken second-floor air conditioner. The tip of my tongue was where it stayed.

I was still too nervous about my rediscovered ability to want to change anything about the environment in which I was doing it. Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Very glad. ” I thought he was sincere enough, but he somehow didn’t sound like Bill.

Not the one who had greeted me back, anyway. “I’ve been looking up some old stuff about my side of the lake, ” I said. “Sara and the Red-Tops?

You always were sort ofint’rested in them, I remember. ”

“Them, yes, but not just them. Lots of history. I was talking to Mrs. M. . . and she told me about Normal Auster. Kenny’s father. ” Bill’s smile stayed on, and he only paused a moment in the act of unscrewing the cap on his gas tank, but I still had a sense, quite clear, that he had frozen inside. “You wouldn’t write about a thing like that, would you, Mike? Because there’s a lot of people around here that’d feel it bad and take it wrong. I told Jo the same thing. ”

“Jo? ” I felt an urge to step between the two pumps and over the island so I could grab him by the arm. “What’s Jo got to do with this? ” He looked at me cautiously and long. “She didn’t tell you? ”

“What are you talking about? ”

“She thought she might write something about Sara and the Red-Tops for one of the local papers. ” Bill was picking his words very slowly. I have a clear memory of that, and of how hot the sun was, beating down on my neck, and the sharpness of our shadows on the asphalt. He began to pump his gas, and the sound of the pump’s motor was also very sharp. “I think she even mentioned Yankee magazine. I c’d be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am. ” I was speechless. Why would she have kept quiet about the idea to try her hand at a little local history? Becahse she might have thought she was poaching on my territory? That was ridiculous. She had known me better than that. . . hadn’t she? “When did you have this conversation, Bill? Do you remember? ”

“Coss I do, ” he said. “Same day she come down to take delivery of those plastic owls. Only I raised the subject, because folks had told me she was asking around. ”

“Prying? ”

“I didn’t say that, ” he said stiffly, “you did. ” True, but I thought prying was what he meant.

“Go on. ”

“Nothing to go on about. I told her there were sore toes here and there on the TR, same as there are anyplace, and asr her not to tread on any corns if she could help it. She said she understood. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. All I know is she kep’ on asking questions.

Listenin to stories from old fools with more time than sense. ”

“When was this? ”

“Fall of ’93, winter and spring of ’94. Went all around town, she did even over to Motton and Harlow—with her notebook and little tape-recorder. Anyway, that’s all I know. ”

I realized a stunning thing: Bill was lying. If you’d asked me before that day, I’d have laughed and told you Bill Dean didn’t have a lie in him. And he must not have had many, because he did it badly.

I thought of calling him on it, but to what end? I needed to think, and I couldn’t do it here—my mind was roaring. Given time, that roar might subside and I’d see it was really nothing, no big deal, but I needed that time. When you start finding out unexpected things about a loved one who’s been dead awhile, it rocks you. Take it from me, it does.

Bill’s eyes had shifted away from mine, but now they shifted back. He looked both earnest and—I could have sworn it—a little scared.

“She ast about little Kerry Auster, and that’s a good example of what I mean about steppin on sore toes. That’s not the stuff for a newspaper story or a magazine article. Normal just snapped. No one knows why. It was a terrible tragedy, senseless, and there’s still people who could be hurt by it. In little towns things are kind of connected under the surface—”

Yes, like cables you couldn’t quite see.

“—and the past dies slower. Sara and those others, that’s a little different. They were just. . . just wanderers. . . from away. Jo could have stuck to those folks and it would’ve been all right. And say—for all I know, she did. Because I never saw a single word she ever wrote.

If she did write. ”

About that he was telling the truth, I felt. But I knew something else, knew it as surely as I’d known Mattie had been wearing white shorts when she called me on her day off. Sara and those others were just wanderers from away, Bill had said, but he hesitated in the middle of his thought, substituting wanderers for the word which had come naturally to mind.

Niggers was the word he hadn’t said. Sara and those others were just niggers Jgom away.

All at once I found myself thinking of an old story by Ray Bradbury, “Mars Is Heaven. ” The first space travellers to Mars discover it’s Green Town, Illinois, and all their well-loved friends and relatives are there. Only the friends and relatives are really alien monsters, and in the night, while the space travellers think they are sleeping in the beds of their long-dead kinfolk in a place that must be heaven, they are slaughtered to the last man.

“Bill, you’re sure she was up here a few times in the off-season? ”

“Ayuh. “T’wasn’t just a few times, either. Might have been a dozen times or more. Day-trips, don’t you know. ”

“Did you ever see a fellow with her? Burly guy, black hair? ”

He thought about it. I tried not to hold my breath. At last he shook his head. “Few times I saw her, she was alone. But I didn’t see her every time she came. Sometimes I only heard she’d been on the TR after she ’us gone again. Saw her in June of ’94, headed up toward Halo Bay in that little car a hers. She waved, I waved back. Went down to the house later that evenin to see if she needed anythin, but she’d gone. I didn’t see her again. When she died later on that summer, me and “Vette were so shocked. ”

Whatever she was looking sr, she must never have written any of it down.

I would have J3und the manuscript, Was that true, though? She had made many trips down here with no apparent attempts at concealment, on one of them she had even been accompanied by a strange man, and I had only found out about these visits by accident.

“This is hard to talk about, ” Bill said, “but since we’ve gotten started hard, we might as well go the rest of the way. Livin on the TR is like the way we used to sleep four or even five in a bed when it was January and true cold. If everyone rests easy, you do all right. But if one person gets restless, gets tossing and turning, no one can sleep. Right now you’re the restless one. That’s how people see it. ”

He waited to see what I’d say. When almost twenty seconds passed without a word from me (Harold Oblowski would have been proud), he shuffled his feet and went on.

“There are people in town uneasy about the interest you’ve taken in Mattie Devore, for instance. Now I’m not sayin there’s anythin going on between the two of you—although there’s folks who do say it—but if you want to stay on the TR you’re makin it tough on yourself. ”

“Why? ”

“Comes back to what I said a week and a half ago. She’s trouble. ”

“As I recall, Bill, you said she was in trouble. And she is. I’m trying to help her out of it. There’s nothing going on between us but that. ”

“I seem to recall telling you that Max Devore is nuts, ” he said. “If you make him mad, we all pay the price. ” The pump clicked off and he racked it up. Then he sighed, raised his hands, dropped them. “You think this is easy for me to say? ”

“You think it’s easy for me to listen to? ”

“All right, ayuh, we’re in the same skiff. But Mattie Devore isn’t the only person on the TR livin hand-to-mouth, you know. There’s others got their woes, as well. Can’t you understand that? ”

Maybe he saw that I understood too much and too well, because his shoulders slumped.

“If you’re asking me to stand aside and let Devore take Mattie’s baby without a fight, you can forget it, ” I said. “And I hope that’s not it.

Because I think I’d have to be quits with a man who’d ask another man to do something like that. ”

“I wouldn’t ask it now anywise, ” he said, his accent thickening almost to the point of contempt. “It’d be too late, wouldn’t it? ” And then, unexpectedly, he softened. “Christ, man, I’m worried about you. Let the rest of it go hang, all right? Hang high where the crows can pick it. ”

He was lying again, but this time I didn’t mind so much, because I thought he was lying to himself. “But you need to have a care. When I said Devore was crazy, that was no figure of speech. Do you think he’ll bother with court if court can’t get him what he wants? Folks died in those summer fires back in 1933. Good people. One related to me. They burned over half the goddam county and Max Devore set em. That was his going-away present to the TR. It could never be proved, but he did it.

Back then he was young and broke, not yet twenty and no law in his pocket. What do you think he’d do now? ”

He looked at me searchingly. I said nothing.

Bill nodded as if I had spoken. “Think about it. And you remember this, Mike: no man who didn’t care for you would ever talk to you straight as I have. ”

“How straight was that, Bill? ” I was faintly aware of some tourist walking from his Volvo to the store and looking at us curiously, and when I replayed the scene in my mind later on, I realized we must have looked like guys on the verge of a fistfight. I remember that I felt like crying out of sadness and bewilderment and an incompletely defined sense of betrayal, but I also remember being furious with this lanky old man—him in his shining-clean cotton undershirt and his mouthful of false teeth. So maybe we were close to fighting, and I just didn’t know it at the time.

“Straight as I could be, ” he said, and turned away to go inside and pay for his gas.

“My house is haunted, ” I said.

He stopped, back to me, shoulders hunched as if to absorb a blow. Then, slowly, he turned back. “Sara Laughs has always been haunted, Mike.

You’ve stirred em up. P’raps you should go back to Derry and let em settle. That might be the best thing. ” He paused, as if replaying this last to see if he agreed with it, then nodded. He nodded as slowly as he had turned. “Ayuh, that might be best all around. ”

When I got back to Sara I called Ward Hankins. Then I finally made that call to Bonnie Amudson. Part of me was rooting for her not to be in at the travel agency in Augusta she co-owned, but she was. Halfway through my talk with her, the fax began to print out xeroxed pages from Jo’s appointment calendars. On the first one Ward had scrawled, “Hope this helps. ”

I didn’t rehearse what I was going to say to Bonnie; I felt that to do so would be a recipe for disaster. I told her that Jo had been writing something—maybe an article, maybe a series of them—about the township where our summerhouse was located, and that some of the locals had apparently been cheesed off by her curiosity. Some still were. Had she talked to Bonnie? Perhaps showed her an early draft?

“No, huh-uh. ” Bonnie sounded honestly surprised. “She used to show me her photos, and more herb samples than I honestly cared to see, but she never showed me anything she was writing. In fact, I remember her once saying that she’d decided to leave the writing to you and just—”

“—take a little taste of everything else, right? ”

“Yes. ”

I thought this was a good place to end the conversation, but the guys in the basement seemed to have other ideas. “Was she seeing anyone, Bonnie? ”

Silence from the other end. With a hand that seemed at least four miles down my arm, I plucked the fax sheets out of the basket. Ten of them—November of 1993 to August of 1994. Jottings everywhere in Jo’s neat hand. Had we even had a fax before she died? I couldn’t remember.

There was so fucking much I couldn’t remember.

“Bonnie? If you know something, please tell me. Jo’s dead, but I’m not.

I can forgive her if I have to, but I can’t forgive what I don’t underst—”

“I’m sorry, ” she said, and gave a nervous little laugh. “It’s just that I didn’t understand at first. “Seeing anyone, ’ that was just so. . . so foreign to Jo. . . the Jo I knew. . . that I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about. I thought maybe you meant a shrink, but you didn’t, did you? You meant seeing someone like seeing a guy. A boyfriend. ”

“That’s what I meant. ” Thumbing through the faxed calendar sheets now, my hand not quite back to its proper distance from my eyes but getting there, getting there. I felt relief at the honest bewilderment in Bonnie’s voice, but not as much as I’d expected. Because I’d known. I hadn’t even needed the woman in the old Perry Mason episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all.

J0.

“Mike, ” Bonnie was saying, very softly, as if I might be crazy, “she loved you. She loved you. ’i “Yes. I suppose she did. ” The calendar pages showed how busy my wife had been. How productive. S-Ks of Maine. . . the soup kitchens. Womshel, a county-to-county network of shelters for battered women. Teenshel.

Friends of Me. Libes. She had been at two or three meetings a month-two or three a week at some points —and I’d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. “I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn’t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meet ings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries? ” Silence from the other end. “Bonnie? ”

I took the phone away from my ear to see if the red LOW BATTERY light was on, and it squawked my name. I put it back.

“Bonnie, what is it? ”

“There were no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there were no long drives. She quit. ”

I thumbed through the fax-sheets again. Meetings noted everywhere in Jo’s neat hand, Soup Kitchens of Maine among them.

“I don’t understand. She quit the Soup Kitchens board? ”

Another moment of silence. Then, speaking carefully: “No, Mike. She quit all of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of ’93—her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries. . . she resigned in October or November of 1993. ”

Meetings noted on all the sheets Ward had sent me. Dozens of them.

Meetings in 1993, meetings in 1994. Meetings of boards to which she’d no longer belonged. She had been down here. On all those supposed meeting-days, Jo had been on the TR. I would have bet my life on it.

But why?

Devore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn’t have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained. From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.

I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon—my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street—I’d go as far as I could and still be assured of getting home by dark, and as I went I’d think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I’d think about them the way I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.

I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was—just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn’t exactly young, but I could go north, all right. For awhile, at least.

Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written. . . for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and. . .

help im drown The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness passed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so blighted, in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming. No, I tried to say, but the word wouldn’t come out.

My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands.

They were holding me down.

“Won’t it stop doing that? ” someone asked—almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. “Won’t it ever stop doing that? ”

What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head.

They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture. . . or inside a Japanese lantern.

help I’m drown help I’m drown blue-cap man say git me blue-cap man say dassn’t let me ramble help I’m drown lost my berries they on the path he holdin me he face shimmer n look bad lemme up lemme up 0 sweet Jesus lemme up oxen free allee allee oxen free? pounds, SE OXEN FREE you go on and stop now ALLEE OXEN FREE she scream my name she scream it so LOUD I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of. . .

Nothing at all.

The horror of it passed and yet it didn’t pass. I still felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo’s fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward halfa dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening’s flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamp-post.

The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank—an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn’t.

Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I’ll do anything only stop, I tried to say, and still nothing came out. Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods. . . but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.

My mouth filled with the unmerciful iron of the lake again. Help me, lemme up, help I’m drown. I leaned out, screaming inside my head, screaming down at the dead face, and I realized I was looking up at myself, looking up through the rose-shimmer of sunset water at a white man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt holding onto a trembling, birch and trying to scream, his liquid face in motion, his eyes momentarily blotted out by the passage of a small perch coursing after a tasty bug, I was both the dark boy and the white man, drowned in the water and drowning in the air, is this right, is this what’s happening, tap once for yes twice for no.

I retched nothing but a single runner of spit, and, impossibly, a fish jumped at it. They’ll jump at almost anything at sunset; something in the dying light must make them crazy. The fish hit the water again about seven feet from the bank, spanking out a circular silver ripple, and it was gone—the taste in my mouth, the horrible smell, the shimmering drowned face of the Negro child—a Negro, that was how he would have thought of himself whose name had almost surely been Tidwell.

I looked to my right and saw a gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought, There, right there, and as if in confirmation, that horrible putrescent smell puffed at me again, seemingly from the ground.

I closed my eyes, still hanging onto the birch for dear life, feeling weak and sick and ill, and that was when Max Devore, that madman, spoke from behind me. “Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore? ”

I turned and there he was, with Rogette Whitmore by his side. It was the only time I ever met him, but once was enough. Believe me, once was more than enough.

His wheelchair hardly looked like a wheelchair at all. What it looked like was a motorcycle sidecar crossed with a lunar lander. Half a dozen chrome wheels ran along both sides. Bigger wheels four of them, I think—ran in a row across the back. None looked to be exactly on the same level, and I realized each was tied into its own suspension-bed.

Devore would have a smooth ride over ground a lot rougher than The Street. Above the back wheels was an enclosed engine compartment. Hiding Devore’s legs was a fiberglass nacelle, black with red pinstriping, that would not have looked out of place on a racing car. Implanted in the center of it was a gadget that looked like my DSS satellite dish. . . some sort of computerized avoidance system, I guessed. Maybe even an autopilot.

The armrests were wide and covered with controls. Holstered on the left side of this machine was a green oxygen tank four feet long. A hose went to a clear plastic accordion tube; the accordion tube led to a mask which rested in Devore’s lap. It made me think of the old guy’s Stenomask. Coming on the heels of what had just happened, I might have considered this Tom Clancyish vehicle a hallucination, except for the bumper-sticker on the nacelle, below the dish. I BLEED DODGER BLUE, it said.

This evening the woman I had seen outside The Sunset Bar at War-rington’s was wearing a white blouse with long sleeves and black pants so tapered they made her legs look like sheathed swords. Her narrow face and hollow cheeks made her resemble Edvard Munch’s screamer more than ever. Her white hair hung around her face in a lank cowl. Her lips were painted so brightly red she seemed to be bleeding from the mouth.

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