Lisey’s Story (36 page)

Even if the memories are insane.

“I don't
have
to remember,” she said, bending the menu swiftly back and forth in her hands. “I don't
have
to, I don't
have
to, I don't
have
to unbury the dead, crazy shite like that doesn't happen, it

“It isn't what you think.”

She will think what she thinks, however; she may love Scott Landon, but she isn't bound to the wheel of his terrible past, and she will think what she thinks. She will know what she knows.

“And you were ten when it happened? When your father—?”

“Yes.”

Just ten years old when his father killed his beloved older brother. When his father
murdered
his beloved older brother. And Part Four of this story has its own dark inevitability, doesn't it? There's no doubt in her mind. She knows what she knows. The fact that he was only ten doesn't change it. He was, after all, a prodigy in other ways.

“And did you kill
him
, Scott? Did you kill your father? You did, didn't you?”

His head is lowered. His hair hangs, obscuring his face. Then from below that dark curtain comes a single hard dry barking sob. It is followed by silence, but she can see his chest heaving, trying to unlock. Then:

“I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun and then dump him down the old dry well. It was in March, during the bad sleet-storm.
I drug him outside by the feet. I tried to take him where Paul was burrit but I coont. I trite, I trite and I trite, but Lisey he woon't go. He was like the firs' shovel. So I dump him down the well. So far as I know he's still there, although when they auctioned the farm I was . . . I . . . Lisey . . . I . . . I . . . I was
afraid
 . . .”

He reaches out for her blindly and if she hadn't been there he would have gone right on his face but she
is
there and then they are

They are

Somehow they are

“
No!”
Lisey snarled. She threw the menu, now so strenuously bent it was almost a tube, back into the cedar box and slammed the lid. But it was too late. She had gone too far. It was too late because

Somehow they're outside in the pouring snow.

She took him in her arms under the yum-yum tree, and then

(
boom! bool!
)

they are outside in the snow.

Lisey sat in her kitchen with the cedar box on the table before her, eyes closed. The sunlight pouring in the east window came through her lids and made a dark red beet soup that moved with the rhythm of her heart—a rhythm that was just now much too fast.

She thought:
All right, that one got through. But I guess I can live with just one. Just one won't kill me.

I trite and I trite.

She opened her eyes and looked at the cedar box sitting there on the table. The box for which she had searched so diligently. And thought of something Scott's father had told him.
The Landons—and the Landreaus before them—split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky.

The bad-gunky was—among other things—a species of homicidal mania.

And gomers? Scott had given her the lowdown on those that night. Gomers were your garden-variety catatonics, like her very own sister, up there in Greenlawn.

“If this is all about saving Amanda, Scott,” Lisey whispered, “you can forget it. She's my sis and I love her, but not quite that much. I'd go back into that . . . that
hell
 . . . for you, Scott, but not for her or anyone else.”

In the living room the telephone began to ring. Lisey jumped in her seat as if stabbed, and screamed.

If Lisey didn't sound like herself, Darla didn't notice. She was too guilty. Also too happy and relieved. Canty was coming back from Boston to “help out with Mandy.” As if she could.
As if anyone can, including Hugh Alberness and the entire Greenlawn staff
, Lisey thought, listening to Darla prattle on.

You can help
, Scott murmured—Scott, who would always have his say. It seemed that not even death would stop him.
You can, babyluv.

“—entirely her own idea,” Darla was assuring.

“Uh-huh,” Lisey said. She could have pointed out that Canty would still be enjoying her time away with her husband, entirely unaware that Amanda had a problem if Darla hadn't felt the need to call her (hadn't
stuck her oar in
, as the saying was), but the last thing Lisey wanted right now was an argument. What she wanted was to put the damned cedar box back under the
mein gott
bed and see if she could forget she had ever found it in the first place. While talking to Darla, another of Scott's old maxims had occurred to her: the harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside. She was sure you could adapt that to missing items—cedar boxes, for instance.

“Her flight gets into the Portland Jetport just a little past noon,” Darla was saying, all in a rush. “She said she'd rent a car and I said no, that's silly, I said I'll come down and pick you up.” Here she paused, gathering herself for the final leap. “You could meet us there, Lisey. If
you wanted. We could have lunch at the Snow Squall—just us girls, like in the good old days. Then we could go up to see Amanda.”

Now which good old days would those be?
Lisey thought.
The ones when you used to pull my hair, or the ones when Canty used to chase me around and call me Miss Lisa No Tits?
What she said was, “You go on down and I'll join you if I can, Darl. I've got some things here I have to—”

“More cooking?” Now that she had confessed to guilting Cantata into coming north, Darla sounded positively roguish.

“No, this has to do with donating Scott's old papers.” And in a way, it was the truth. Because no matter how the business with Dooley/McCool turned out, she wanted Scott's study
emptied.
No more dawdling. Let the papers go to Pitt, that
was
undoubtedly where they belonged, but with the stipulation that her professor pal should have nothing to do with them. Woodsmucky could go hang.

“Oh,” Darla said, sounding suitably impressed. “Well, in
that
case . . .”

“I'll join you if I can,” Lisey repeated. “If not, I'll see you both this afternoon, at Greenlawn.”

That was jake with Darla. She passed on Canty's flight information, which Lisey obediently wrote down. Hell, she supposed she might even go down to Portland. At the very least it would get her out of the house—away from the phone, the cedar box, and most of the memories that now seemed poised above her head like the contents of some terrible sagging
piñata.

And then, before she could stop it, one more fell out. She thought:
You didn't just go out from under the willow into the snow, Lisey. There was a little more to it than that. He took you
—

“
NO!”
she shouted, and slapped the table. The sound of herself shouting was frightening but it did the trick, lopped off the dangerous train of thought cleanly and completely. It might grow back, though—that was the trouble.

Lisey looked at the cedar box sitting on the table. It was the look a woman might give a well-loved dog that has bitten her for no particular reason.
Back under the bed with you
, she thought.
Back under the
mein gott
bed, and then what?

“Bool-the-end, that's what,” she said. Then she left the house, crossing
the dooryard to the barn, holding the cedar box out before her as if it contained something either breakable or highly explosive.

Her office door stood open. From its foot a bright rectangle of electric light lay across the barn floor. The last time Lisey had been in there, she'd left laughing. What she
didn't
remember was if she'd left the door open or shut. She
thought
the light had been off, thought she'd never turned it on in the first place. On the other hand, at one point she'd been absolutely positive that Good Ma's cedar box had been in the attic, hadn't she? Was it possible one of the deputies had gone in there for a peek and left the light on? Lisey supposed it was. She supposed anything was possible.

Clutching the cedar box to her middle almost protectively, she went to the open office door and looked in. It was empty . . .
appeared
to be empty . . . but . . .

Without the least self-consciousness, she applied one eye to the crack between the jamb and the door. “Zack McCool” wasn't standing back there. No one was. But when she looked into the office again, she could see that the answering machine's message window was once more lit up with a bright red
1
. She went in, tucked the box under one arm, and pushed the
PLAY
button. There was a moment of silence, and then Jim Dooley's calm voice spoke.

“Missus, I thought we agreed on eight o'clock last night,” he said. “Now I see cops around the place. Seems like you don't understand how serious this bi'ness is, although I sh'd think a dead cat in a mailbox would be pretty hard to misunderstand.” A pause. She looked down at the answering machine, fascinated.
I can hear him breathing
, she thought. “I'll be seeing you, Missus,” he said.

“Smuck you,” she whispered.

“Now Missus, that ain't—
isn't
—nice,” said Jim Dooley, and for a moment she thought the answering machine had, well, answered her. Then she realized this second version of Dooley's voice was in living
color, so to speak, and had come from behind her. Once again feeling like an inhabitant in one of her own dreams, Lisey Landon turned around to face him.

She was dismayed by his ordinariness. Even standing in the doorway of her little never-was barn office with a gun in one hand (he had what looked like a lunch-sack in the other), she wasn't sure she could have picked him out of a police lineup, assuming the other men in it were also slim, dressed in summerweight khaki workclothes, and wearing Portland Sea Dogs baseball caps. His face was narrow and unlined, the eyes bright blue—the face of a million Yankees, in other words, not to mention six or seven million hillbilly men from the mid- and deep South. He might have been six feet tall; he might have been a little under. The lick of hair which escaped the ball cap's round rim was an unremarkable sandy brown.

Lisey looked into the black eye of the pistol he held and felt the strength run out of her legs. This was no cheap hockshop .22, this was the real deal, a big automatic (she thought it was an automatic) that would make a big hole. She sat down on the edge of her desk. If the desk hadn't been there, she was pretty sure she would have gone sprawling on the floor. For a moment she was almost positive she was going to wet her pants, but she managed to hold her water. For the time being, at least.

“Take what you want,” she whispered through lips that felt Novo-cain-numb. “Take all of it.”

“Come upstairs, Missus,” he said. “We'll talk about it upstairs.”

The idea of being in Scott's study with this man filled her with horror and revulsion. “No. Just take his papers and go. Leave me alone.”

He stared at her patiently. At first glance he looked thirty-five. Then you saw the little fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth and realized he was five more than that, five at least. “Upstairs, Missus, unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot. That'd be
a painful way to talk bi'ness. There's a lot of bones and tendons in a person's foot.”

“You won't . . . you don't dare . . . the noise . . .” Her voice sounded farther away with each word. It was as if her voice were on a train, and the train was pulling out of the station; her voice was leaning out of its window to bid her a fond farewell.
Bye-bye, little Lisey, voice must leave you now, soon you'll be mute.

“Oh, the noise wouldn't fuss me a bit,” Dooley said, looking amused. “Your next-door neighbors are gone—off to work, I 'magine—and your pet cop's off on a run.” His smile faded, yet he still managed to look amused. “You've come all over gray. Reckon you've had quite a shock to the system. Reckon you're gonna pass clean out, Missus. Save me some trouble if you do, maybe.”

“Stop . . . stop calling me . . .”
Missus
was how she wanted to finish, but a series of wings seemed to be enfolding her, wings of darker and darker gray. Before they grew too dark and too thick to see through, she was faintly aware of Dooley shoving the gun into the waistband of his pants (
Blow your balls off
, Lisey thought dreamily,
do the world a favor
) and darting forward to catch her. She didn't know if he made it. Before the issue was decided, Lisey had fainted.

She became aware of something wet stroking her face and at first thought a dog was licking her—Louise, maybe. Except Lou had been their Collie back in Lisbon Falls, and Lisbon Falls had been a long time ago. She and Scott had never had a dog, maybe because they'd never had kids and the two things just naturally seemed to go together like peanut butter and jelly, or peaches and cr—

Come upstairs, Missus . . . unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot.

That brought her back fast. She opened her eyes and saw Dooley squatting before her with a damp washcloth in one hand, watching her: those bright blue eyes. She tried to pull away from them. There was a
metallic rattle, then a dull thud of pain in her shoulder as something snubbed tight and stopped her. “
Ow!”