Bag of Bones (22 page)

It was true. Bill was four years older and a little grayer around the edges, but otherwise the same. Sixty-five? Seventy? It didn't matter. There was no waxy look of ill health about him, and none of the falling-away in the face, principally around the eyes and in the cheeks, that I associate with encroaching infirmity.

“So're you,” he said, letting go of my hand. “We was all so sorry about Jo, Mike. Folks in town thought the world of her. It was a shock, with her so young. My wife asked if I'd give you her condolences special. Jo made her an afghan the year she had the pneumonia, and Yvette ain't never forgot it.”

“Thanks,” I said, and my voice wasn't quite my own for a moment or two. It seemed that on the TR my wife was hardly dead at all. “And thank Yvette, too.”

“Yuh. Everythin okay with the house? Other'n the air conditioner, I mean. Buggardly thing! Them at the Western Auto promised me that part last week, and now they're saying maybe not until August first.”

“It's okay. I've got my PowerBook. If I want to use it, the kitchen table will do fine for a desk.” And I
would
want to use it—so many crosswords, so little time.

“Got your hot water okay?”

“All that's fine, but there is one problem.”

I stopped. How did you tell your caretaker you thought your house was haunted? Probably there was no good way; probably the best thing to do was to go at it head-on. I had questions, but I didn't want just to nibble around the edges of the subject and be coy. For one thing, Bill would sense it. He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn't stupid.

“What's on your mind, Mike? Shoot.”

“I don't know how you're going to take this, but—”

He smiled in the way of a man who suddenly understands and held up his hand. “Guess maybe I know already.”

“You do?” I felt an enormous sense of relief and I could hardly wait to find out what he had experienced in Sara, perhaps while checking for dead light-bulbs or making sure the roof was holding the snow all right. “What did
you
hear?”

“Mostly what Royce Merrill and Dickie Brooks have been telling,” he said. “Beyond that, I don't know much. Me and mother's been in Virginia, remember. Only got back last night around eight o'clock. Still, it's the big topic down to the store.”

For a moment I remained so fixed on Sara Laughs that I had no idea what he was talking about. All I could think was that folks were gossiping about the strange noises in my house. Then the name Royce Merrill clicked and everything else clicked with it.
Merrill was the elderly possum with the gold-headed cane and the salacious wink. Old Four-Teeth. My caretaker wasn't talking about ghostly noises; he was talking about Mattie Devore.

“Let's get you a cup of coffee,” I said. “I need you to tell me what I'm stepping in here.”

*   *   *

When we were seated on the deck, me with fresh coffee and Bill with a cup of tea (“Coffee burns me at both ends these days,” he said), I asked him first to tell me the Royce Merrill–Dickie Brooks version of my encounter with Mattie and Kyra.

It turned out to be better than I had expected. Both old men had seen me standing at the side of the road with the little girl in my arms, and they had observed my Chevy parked halfway into the ditch with the driver's-side door open, but apparently neither of them had seen Kyra using the white line of Route 68 as a tightrope. As if to compensate for this, however, Royce claimed that Mattie had given me a big
my hero
hug and a kiss on the mouth.

“Did he get the part about how I grabbed her by the ass and slipped her some tongue?” I asked.

Bill grinned. “Royce's imagination ain't stretched that far since he was fifty or so, and that was forty or more year ago.”

“I never touched her.” Well . . . there had been that moment when the back of my hand went sliding along the curve of her breast, but that had been inadvertent, whatever the young lady herself might think about it.

“Shite, you don't need to tell me that,” he said. “
But . . .
”

He said that
but
the way my mother always had,
letting it trail off on its own, like the tail of some illomened kite.

“But what?”

“You'd do well to keep your distance from her,” he said. “She's nice enough—almost a town girl, don't you know—but she's trouble.” He paused. “No, that ain't quite fair to her. She's
in
trouble.”

“The old man wants custody of the baby, doesn't he?”

Bill set his teacup down on the deck rail and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. Reflections from the lake ran up his cheek in ripples, giving him an exotic look. “How'd you know?”

“Guesswork, but of the educated variety. Her father-in-law called me Saturday night during the fireworks. And while he never came right out and stated his purpose, I doubt if Max Devore came all the way back to TR-90 in western Maine to repo his daughter-in-law's Jeep and trailer. So what's the story, Bill?”

For several moments he only looked at me. It was almost the look of a man who knows you have contracted a serious disease and isn't sure how much he ought to tell you. Being looked at that way made me profoundly uneasy. It also made me feel that I might be putting Bill Dean on the spot. Devore had roots here, after all. And, as much as Bill might like me, I didn't. Jo and I were from away. It could have been worse—it could have been Massachusetts or New York—but Derry, although in Maine, was still away.

“Bill? I could use a little navigational help if you—”

“You want to stay out of his way,” he said. His easy smile was gone. “The man's mad.”

For a moment I thought Bill only meant Devore was pissed off at me, and then I took another look at his face. No, I decided, he didn't mean pissed off; he had used the word “mad” in the most literal way.

“Mad how?” I asked. “Mad like Charles Manson? Like Hannibal Lecter? How?”

“Say like Howard Hughes,” he said. “Ever read any of the stories about him? The lengths he'd go to to get the things he wanted? It didn't matter if it was a special kind of hot dog they only sold in L.A. or an airplane designer he wanted to steal from Lockheed or McDonnell-Douglas, he had to have what he wanted, and he wouldn't rest until it was under his hand. Devore is the same way. He always was—even as a boy he was willful, according to the stories you hear in town.

“My own dad had one he used to tell. He said little Max Devore broke into Scant Larribee's tack-shed one winter because he wanted the Flexible Flyer Scant give his boy Scooter for Christmas. Back around 1923, this would have been. Devore cut both his hands on broken glass, Dad said, but he got the sled. They found him near midnight, sliding down Sugar Maple Hill, holding his hands up to his chest when he went down. He'd bled all over his mittens and his snowsuit. There's other stories you'll hear about Maxie Devore as a kid—if you ask you'll hear fifty different ones—and some may even be true. That one about the sled
is
true, though. I'd bet the farm on it. Because my father didn't lie. It was against his religion.”

“Baptist?”

“Nosir, Yankee.”

“1923 was many moons ago, Bill. Sometimes people change.”

“Ayuh, but mostly they don't. I haven't seen Devore since he come back and moved into Warring-ton's, so I can't say for sure, but I've heard things that make me think that if he
has
changed, it's for the worse. He didn't come all the way across the country 'cause he wanted a vacation. He wants the
kid.
To him she's just another version of Scooter Larribee's Flexible Flyer. And my strong advice to you is that you don't want to be the window-glass between him and her.”

I sipped my coffee and looked out at the lake. Bill gave me time to think, scraping one of his workboots across a splatter of birdshit on the boards while I did it. Crowshit, I reckoned; only crows crap in such long and exuberant splatters.

One thing seemed absolutely sure: Mattie Devore was roughly nine miles up Shit Creek with no paddle. I'm not the cynic I was at twenty—is anyone?—but I wasn't naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer . . . not if Mr. Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he'd taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so?

“What's the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me.”

*   *   *

It didn't take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn't to say they're not often interesting.

Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanch-field, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanchfield missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulp-truck into Kewadin Pond, his widow “kinda lost heart,” as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder.

Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh? Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rust-bucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there:
Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children.

Mattie is the princess of the piece—poor but beautiful (that she
was
beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he's a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore. The child of Max Devore's sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington's, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.

Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington's, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play. Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you're standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn't matter if you're gangly. And it sure doesn't matter if you stutter.

“He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington's,” Bill said. “They didn't know which team he belonged on—the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn't care; either side was fine with him. Some weeks he'd play for one, some weeks t'other. Either one was more than happy to have him, too, as he could hit a ton and field like an angel. They'd put him at first base a lot because he was tall, but he was really wasted there. At second or shortstop . . . my! He'd jump and twirl around like that guy Noriega.”

“You might mean Nureyev,” I said.

He shrugged. “Point is, he was somethin to see. And folks liked him. He fit in. It's mostly young folks that play, you know, and to them it's how you do, not who you are. Besides, a lot of em don't know Max Devore from a hole in the ground.”

“Unless they read the
Wall Street Journal
and the computer magazines,” I said. “In those, you run across the name Devore about as often as you run across the name of God in the Bible.”

“No foolin?”

“Well, I guess that in the computer magazines God is more often spelled Gates, but you know what I mean.”

“I s'pose. But even so, it's been sixty-five years since Max Devore spent any real time on the TR. You know what happened when he left, don't you?”

“No, why would I?”

He looked at me, surprised. Then a kind of veil seemed to fall over his eyes. He blinked and it cleared. “Tell you another time—it ain't no secret—but I need to be over to the Harrimans' by eleven to check their sump-pump. Don't want to get sidetracked. Point I
was tryin to make is just this: Lance Devore was accepted as a nice young fella who could hit a softball three hundred and fifty feet into the trees if he struck it just right. There was no one old enough to hold his old man against him—not at Warrington's on Tuesday nights, there wasn't—and no one held it against him that his family had dough, either. Hell, there are lots of wealthy people here in the summer. You know that. None worth as much as Max Devore, but bein rich is only a matter of degree.”

That wasn't true, and I had just enough money to know it. Wealth is like the Richter scale—once you pass a certain point, the jumps from one level to the next aren't double or triple but some amazing and ruinous multiple you don't even want to think about. Fitzgerald had it straight, although I guess he didn't believe his own insight: the very rich
are
different from you and me. I thought of telling Bill that, and decided to keep my mouth shut. He had a sump-pump to fix.

*   *   *

Kyra's parents met over a keg of beer stuck in a mud-hole. Mattie was running the usual Tuesday-night keg out to the softball field from the main building on a handcart. She'd gotten it most of the way from the restaurant wing with no trouble, but there had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the cart finally bogged down in a soft spot. Lance's team was up, and Lance was sitting at the end of the bench, waiting his turn to hit. He saw the girl in the white shorts and blue Warrington's polo shirt struggling with the bogged handcart, and got up to help her. Three weeks later they were inseparable and Mattie was pregnant;
ten weeks later they were married; thirty-seven months later, Lance Devore was in a coffin, done with softball and cold beer on a summer evening, done with what he called “woodsing,” done with fatherhood, done with love for the beautiful princess. Just another early finish, hold the happily-ever-after.