Bag of Bones (53 page)

He picked up on the second ring, sounding both happy to hear from me and as if he'd gotten three or four cans further into the sixpack than I had so far done. We passed the usual pleasantries back and forth—most of my own almost entirely fictional, I was dismayed to find—and he mentioned that a famous neighbor of mine had kicked the bucket, according to the news. Had I met him? Yes, I said, remembering how Max Devore had run his wheelchair at me. Yes, I'd met him. Frank wanted to know what he was like. That was hard to say, I told him. Poor old guy was stuck in a wheelchair and suffering from emphysema.

“Pretty frail, huh?” Frank asked sympathetically.

“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, Frank, I called about Jo. I was out in her studio looking around, and I found my typewriter. Since then I've kind of gotten the idea she was writing something. It might have started as a little piece about our house, then widened. The place is named after Sara Tidwell, you know. The blues singer.”

A long pause. Then Frank said, “I know.” His voice sounded heavy, grave.

“What else do you know, Frank?”

“That she was scared. I think she found out something that scared her. I think that mostly because—”

That was when the light finally broke. I probably should have known from Mattie's description,
would
have known if I hadn't been so upset. “You were down here with her, weren't you? In July of 1994. You went to the softball game, then you went back up The Street to the house.”

“How do you know that?” he almost barked.

“Someone saw you. A friend of mine.” I was trying not to sound mad and not succeeding. I
was
mad, but it was a relieved anger, the kind you feel when your kid comes dragging into the house with a shamefaced grin just as you're getting ready to call the cops.

“I almost told you a day or two before we buried her. We were in that pub, do you remember?”

Jack's Pub, right after Frank had beaten the funeral director down on the price of Jo's coffin. Sure I remembered. I even remembered the look in his eyes when I'd told him Jo had been pregnant when she died.

He must have felt the silence spinning out, because he came back sounding anxious. “Mike, I hope you didn't get any—”

“What? Wrong ideas? I thought maybe she was having an affair, how's that for a wrong idea? You can call that ignoble if you want, but I had my reasons. There was a lot she wasn't telling me. What did she tell
you
?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Did you know she quit all her boards and committees? Quit and never said a word to me?”

“No.” I didn't think he was lying. Why would he, at this late date? “Jesus, Mike, if I'd known that—”

“What happened the day you came down here? Tell me.”

“I was at the printshop in Sanford. Jo called me from . . . I don't remember, I think a rest area on the turnpike.”

“Between Derry and the TR?”

“Yeah. She was on her way to Sara Laughs and wanted me to meet her there. She told me to park in
the driveway if I got there first, not to go in the house . . . which I could have; I know where you keep the spare key.”

Sure he did, in a Sucrets tin under the deck. I had shown him myself.

“Did she say why she didn't want you to go inside?”

“It'll sound crazy.”

“No it won't. Believe me.”

“She said the house was dangerous.”

For a moment the words just hung there. Then I asked, “
Did
you get here first?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And waited outside?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see or sense anything dangerous?”

There was a long pause. At last he said, “There were lots of people out on the lake—speedboaters, water-skiers, you know how it is—but all the engine-noise and the laughter seemed to kind of . . . stop dead when it got near the house. Have you ever noticed that it seems quiet there even when it's not?”

Of course I had; Sara seemed to exist in its own zone of silence. “Did it feel
dangerous,
though?”

“No,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Not to me, anyway. But it didn't feel exactly empty, either. I felt . . . fuck, I felt
watched.
I sat on one of those railroad-tie steps and waited for my sis. Finally she came. She parked behind my car and hugged me . . . but she never took her eyes off the house. I asked her what she was up to and she said she couldn't tell me, and that I couldn't tell you we'd been there. She said something like, ‘If he finds out on his own, then it's
meant to be. I'll have to tell him sooner or later, anyway. But I can't now, because I need his whole attention. I can't get that while he's working.' ”

I felt a flush crawl across my skin. “She said that, huh?”

“Yeah. Then she said she had to go in the house and do something. She wanted me to wait outside. She said if she called, I should come on the run. Otherwise I should just stay where I was.”

“She wanted someone there in case she got in trouble.”

“Yeah, but it had to be someone who wouldn't ask a lot of questions she didn't want to answer. That was me. I guess that was always me.”

“And?”

“She went inside. I sat on the hood of my car, smoking cigarettes. I was still smoking then. And you know, I
did
start to feel something then that wasn't right. As if there might be someone in the house who'd been waiting for her, someone who didn't like her. Maybe someone who wanted to hurt her. Probably I just picked that up from Jo—the way her nerves seemed all strung up, the way she kept looking over my shoulder at the house even while she was hugging me—but it seemed like something else. Like a . . . I don't know . . .”

“Like a vibe.”

“Yes!” he almost shouted. “A vibration. But not a good vibration, like in the Beach Boys song. A
bad
vibration.”

“What happened?”

“I sat and waited. I only smoked two cigarettes so I don't guess it could have been longer than twenty
minutes or half an hour, but it seemed longer. I kept noticing how the sounds from the lake seemed to make it most of the way up the hill and then just kind of . . . 
quit.
And how there didn't seem to be any birds, except far off in the distance.

“Once she came out. I heard the deck door bang, and then her footsteps on the stairs over on that side. I called to her, asked if she was okay, and she said fine. She said for me to stay where I was. She sounded a little short of breath, as if she was carrying something or had been doing some chore.”

“Did she go to her studio or down to the lake?”

“I don't know. She was gone another fifteen minutes or so—time enough for me to smoke another butt—and then she came back out the front door. She checked to make sure it was locked, and then she came up to me. She looked a lot better. Relieved. The way people look when they do some dirty job they've been putting off, finally get it behind them. She suggested we walk down that path she called The Street to the resort that's down there—”

“Warrington's.”

“Right, right. She said she'd buy me a beer and a sandwich. Which she did, out at the end of this long floating dock.”

The Sunset Bar, where I had first glimpsed Rogette.

“Then you went to have a look at the softball game.”

“That was Jo's idea. She had three beers to my one, and she insisted. Said someone was going to hit a longshot homer into the trees, she just knew it.”

Now I had a clear picture of the part Mattie had
seen and told me about. Whatever Jo had done, it had left her almost giddy with relief. She had ventured into the house, for one thing. Had dared the spirits in order to do her business and survived. She'd had three beers to celebrate and her discretion had slipped . . . not that she had behaved with any great stealth on her previous trips down to the TR. Frank remembered her saying if I found out on my own then it was meant to be—
que sera, sera.
It wasn't the attitude of someone hiding an affair, and I realized now that all her behavior suggested a woman keeping a short-term secret. She would have told me when I finished my stupid book, if she had lived. If.

“You watched the game for awhile, then went back to the house along The Street.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did either of you go in?”

“No. By the time we got there, her buzz had worn off and I trusted her to drive. She was laughing while we were at the softball game, but she wasn't laughing by the time we got back to the house. She looked at it and said, ‘I'm done with her. I'll never go through that door again, Frank.'”

My skin first chilled, then prickled.

“I asked her what was wrong, what she'd found out. I knew she was writing something, she'd told me that much—”

“She told everyone but me,” I said . . . but without much bitterness. I knew who the man in the brown sportcoat had been, and any bitterness or anger—anger at Jo, anger at myself—paled before the relief of that. I hadn't realized how much that fellow had been on my mind until now.

“She must have had her reasons,” Frank said. “You know that, don't you?”

“But she didn't tell you what they were.”

“All I know is that it started—whatever it was—with her doing research for an article. It was a lark, Jo playing Nancy Drew. I'm pretty sure that at first not telling you was just to keep it a surprise. She read books but mostly she talked to people—listened to their stories of the old days and teased them into looking for old letters . . . diaries . . . she was good at that part of it, I think. Damned good. You don't know any of this?”

“No,” I said heavily. Jo hadn't been having an affair, but she
could
have had one, if she'd wanted. She could have had an affair with Tom Selleck and been written up in
Inside View
and I would have gone on tapping away at the keys of my PowerBook, blissfully unaware.

“Whatever she found out,” Frank said, “I think she just stumbled over it.”

“And you never told me. Four years and you never told me any of it.”

“That was the last time I was with her,” Frank said, and now he didn't sound apologetic or embarrassed at all. “And the last thing she asked of me was that I not tell you we'd been to the lake house. She said she'd tell you everything when she was ready, but then she died. After that I didn't think it mattered. Mike, she was my sister. She was my sister and I promised.”

“All right. I understand.” And I did—just not enough. What had Jo discovered? That Normal Auster had drowned his infant son under a handpump?
That back around the turn of the century an animal trap had been left in a place where a young Negro boy would be apt to come along and step into it? That another boy, perhaps the incestuous child of Son and Sara Tidwell, had been drowned by his mother in the lake, she maybe laughing that smoke-broken, lunatic laugh as she held him down? You gotta wiggle when you wobble, honey, and hold that young 'un way down deep.

“If you need me to apologize, Mike, consider it done.”

“I don't. Frank, do you remember anything else she might have said that night? Anything at all?”

“She said she knew how you found the house.”

“She said
what
?”

“She said that when it wanted you, it called you.”

At first I couldn't reply, because Frank Arlen had completely demolished one of the assumptions I'd made about my married life—one of the biggies, one of those that seem so basic you don't even think about questioning them. Gravity holds you down. Light allows you to see. The compass needle points north. Stuff like that.

This assumption was that Jo was the one who had wanted to buy Sara Laughs back when we saw the first real money from my writing career, because Jo was the “house person” in our marriage, just as I was the “car person.” Jo was the one who had picked our apartments when apartments were all we could afford, Jo who hung a picture here and asked me to put up a shelf there. Jo was the one who had fallen in love with the Derry house and had finally worn down my resistance to the idea that it was too big, too busy,
and too broken to take on. Jo had been the nest-builder.

She said that when it wanted you, it called you.

And it was probably true. No, I could do better than that, if I was willing to set aside the lazy thinking and selective remembering. It was
certainly
true. I was the one who had first broached the idea of a place in western Maine. I was the one who collected stacks of real-estate brochures and hauled them home. I'd started buying regional magazines like
Down East
and always began at the back, where the real-estate ads were. It was I who had first seen a picture of Sara Laughs in a glossy handout called
Maine Retreats,
and it was I who had made the call first to the agent named in the ad, and then to Marie Hingerman after badgering Marie's name out of the Realtor.

Johanna had also been charmed by Sara Laughs—I think anyone would have been charmed by it, seeing it for the first time in autumn sunshine with the trees blazing all around it and drifts of colored leaves blowing up The Street—but it was I who had actively sought the place out.

Except that was more lazy thinking and selective remembering. Wasn't it? Sara had sought
me
out.

Then how could I not have known it until now? And how was I led here in the first place, full of unknowing happy ignorance?

The answer to both questions was the same. It was also the answer to the question of how Jo could have discovered something distressing about the house, the lake, maybe the whole TR, and then gotten away with not telling me. I'd been gone, that's all. I'd been
zoning, tranced out, writing one of my stupid little books. I'd been hypnotized by the fantasies going on in my head, and a hypnotized man is easy to lead.