Lisey’s Story (69 page)

“Yes you do,” Amanda said. Then she folded her hands in her lap, put her head back against the rest, and closed her eyes.

Lisey turned on the radio, and wasn't a bit surprised to get Ole Hank singing “Honky Tonkin'.” She sang along, low. She knew every word.
This did not surprise her, either. Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.

That was good.

“You are the call and I am the answer,

You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,

You are the night, and I the day.

  What else? It is perfect enough.

  It is perfectly complete,

  You and I,

  What more—?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!”

—D. H. Lawrence
“Bei Hennef”     

Once Lisey actually got going on emptying out Scott's study, the job went faster than she ever would have believed. And she never would have believed she'd end up doing it with Darla and Canty as well as Amanda. Canty remained standoffish and suspicious for a time—it felt like a
long
time to Lisey—but Amanda was completely unfazed. “It's an act. She'll drop it and come around. Just give her time, Lisey. Sisterhood is powerful.”

Eventually Cantata
did
come around, although Lisey had a feeling Canty never entirely rid herself of the idea that Amanda had been faking in order to Get Attention, and that she and Lisey had been Up To Something. Probably Something No Good. Darla was puzzled about Amanda's recovery, and the sisters' odd trip to the old farm in Lisbon, but she, at least, never believed Amanda had been faking.

Darla had seen her, after all.

In any case, the four sisters cleaned and emptied the long, rambling suite over the barn during the week after the Fourth of July, hiring a couple of husky high school boys to help with the heavy lifting. The worst of said heavy lifting turned out to be Dumbo's Big Jumbo, which had to be disassembled (the component parts reminded Lisey of the Exploded Man in high school biology class, only you'd have to call this version the Exploded Desk), and then lowered with a rented winch. The high school boys bawled encouragement to each other as the pieces went
down. Lisey stood by with her sisters, praying like mad that neither of the boys would lose a finger or thumb in one of the slings or pulleys. Neither did, and by the end of the week, everything in Scott's study had been taken away, marked either for donation or long-term storage while Lisey figured out what the hell to do with it.

Everything, that was, except for the booksnake. That remained, dozing in the long, empty main room—the
hot
main room, now that the air conditioners had been removed. Even with the skylights open in the daytime and a couple of fans to keep the air circulating, it was hot. And why wouldn't it be? The place was nothing but a glorified barn loft with a literary pedigree.

Then there were those ugly maroon smudges on the carpet—the oyster-white carpet that couldn't be taken up until the booksnake was gone. She'd dismissed the stains as careless slops of Wood Coat varnish when Canty asked about them, but Amanda knew better, and Lisey had an idea that Darla might have a few suspicions, as well. The carpet had to go, but the books had to go first, and Lisey wasn't quite ready to dispose of them. Just why she wasn't sure. Maybe only because they were the last of Scott's things still up here, the very last of him.

So she waited.

On the third day of the sisters' cleaning binge, Deputy Boeckman called to tell Lisey that an abandoned PT Cruiser with Delaware plates had been found in a gravel pit on the Stackpole Church Road, about three miles from her house. Would Lisey come down to the Sheriff's Office and take a look? They had it back in the parking lot, the deputy said, where they kept the impounds and a few “drug-rides” (whatever they were). Lisey went with Amanda. Neither Darla nor Canty was much interested; all they knew was that a kook had been sniffing around, making a pest of himself about Scott's papers. Kooks were nothing new in their sister's life; over the years of Scott's celebrity, any number of them had been drawn to him like moths to a bug-light. The most
famous, of course, had been Cole. Neither Lisey nor Amanda had said anything to give Darla and Canty the idea that this one was in Cole's class. Certainly there was no mention of the dead cat in the mailbox, and Lisey had been at some pains to impress discretion on the Sheriff's deputies, as well.

The car in Stall 7 was a PT Cruiser, no more and no less, beige in color, nondescript once you got past the slightly flamboyant body-type. It could have been the one Lisey saw as she drove home from Greenlawn on that long, long Thursday; it could have been one of several thousand others. This was what she told Deputy Boeckman, reminding him that she'd seen it coming almost directly out of the setting sun. He nodded sadly. What she knew in her heart was that it
was
the one. She could smell Dooley on it. She thought:
I am going to hurt you places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances
and had to repress a shiver.

“It's a stolen car, isn't it?” Amanda asked.

“You bet your bippy,” Boeckman said.

A deputy Lisey didn't know strolled over. He was tall, probably six and a half feet; it seemed a rule that these men should be tall. Broad-shouldered, too. He introduced himself as Deputy Andy Clutterbuck and shook Lisey's hand.

“Ah,” she said, “the acting Sheriff.”

His smile was brilliant. “Nope, Norris is back. He's in court this afternoon, but he's back, all right. I'm just plain old Deputy Clutter-buck again.”

“Congratulations. This is my sister, Amanda Debusher.”

Clutterbuck shook Amanda's hand. “Pleased, Ms. Debusher.” Then, to both of them: “That car was stolen out of a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.” He stared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt. “Did you know that in France, they call PT Cruisers
le car Jimmy Cagney?
”

Amanda seemed unimpressed by this information. “Were there fingerprints?”

“Nary a one,” he said. “Wiped clean. Plus whoever was driving it took the cover off the dome-light and broke the bulb. What do you think of that?”

“I think it sounds
beaucoup
suspicious,” Amanda said.

Clutterbuck laughed. “Yeah. But there's a retired carpenter in Delaware who's going to be very happy to get his car back, busted dome-light and all.”

Lisey said, “Have you found out anything about Jim Dooley?”

“That would be John Doolin, Mrs. Landon. Born in Shooter's Knob, Tennessee. Moved to Nashville at age five with his family, then went to live with his aunt and uncle in Moundsville, West Virginia, when his parents and older sister were killed in a fire in the winter of 1974. Doolin was then age nine. The official cause of the deaths was down to defective Christmas tree lights, but I talked to a retired detective who worked that case. He said there was some suspicion the boy might have had something to do with it. No proof.”

Lisey saw no reason to pay close attention to the rest, because whatever he called himself, her persecutor was never coming back from the place where she had taken him. Yet she did hear Clutterbuck say that Doolin had spent a good many years in a Tennessee mental institution, and she continued to believe that he had met Gerd Allen Cole there, and caught Cole's obsession

(
ding-dong for the freesias
)

like a virus. Scott had had a queer saying, one Lisey had never fully understood until the business of McCool/Dooley/Doolin. Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.

“In any case, you want to keep your eyes peeled for the guy,” Clutterbuck told the two women, “and if it looks like he's still around—”

“Or takes some time off and then decides to come back,” Boeckman put in.

Clutterbuck nodded. “Yep, that's a possibility, too. If he shows up again, I think we ought to have a meeting with your family, Mrs. Landon—put them all in the picture. Do you agree?”

“If he shows up, we'll certainly do that,” Lisey said. She spoke seriously, almost solemnly, but on their way out of town, she and Amanda indulged in a bout of hysterical laughter at the idea of Jim Dooley ever showing up again.

An hour or two before dawn the next morning, shuffling into the bathroom with one eye open, thinking of nothing but peeing and going back to bed, Lisey thought she saw something moving in the bedroom behind her. That brought her awake in a hurry, and turning on her heels. There was nothing there. She took a hand-towel from the rod beside the sink and hung it over the medicine cabinet mirror in which she'd seen the movement, wedging the towel carefully until it would stay on its own. Then and only then did she finish her business.

She was sure Scott would have understood.

The summer slipped by, and one day Lisey noticed that
SCHOOL SUPPLIES
signs had appeared in the windows of several stores on Castle Rock's Main Street. And why not? It was suddenly half-past August. Scott's study was—except for the booksnake and the stained white carpet upon which it dozed—waiting for the next thing. (If there
was
a next thing; Lisey had begun to consider the possibility of putting the house up for sale.) Canty and Rich threw their annual Midsummer Night's Dream party on August fourteenth. Lisey set out to get righteously smashed on Rich Lawlor's Long Island Iced Tea, a thing she hadn't done since Scott had died. She asked Rich for a double to get started, then set it down untasted on one of the caterer's tables. She thought she had seen something moving either on the surface of the glass, as if reflected there, or deep within the amber depths, as if swimming there. It was utter shite, of course, but she found her urge to get absolutely stinko was gone. In truth, she wasn't sure she
dared
to get drunk (or even high). Wasn't sure she dared let her defenses down in such a way. Because if she had attracted the long boy's attention, if it was watching her from time to time . . . or even just
thinking
about her . . . well . . .

Part of her was sure that was crap.

Part of her was positive it wasn't.

As August waned and the hottest weather of the summer rolled into New England, testing tempers and the northeast power-grid, something even more distressing began happening to Lisey . . . except, like the things she sometimes thought she
might
be glimpsing in certain reflective surfaces, she wasn't entirely sure it was happening at all.

Sometimes she'd flounder up from sleep in the mornings an hour or maybe two before her usual time, gasping and covered with sweat even with the air-conditioning on, feeling as she had when coming out of nightmares as a child: that she hadn't really escaped the grip of whatever had been after her, that it was still under the bed and would curl its cold distorted hand around her ankle or reach right up through her pillow and grab her by the neck. During these panicky wakings she would run her hands over the sheets and then up to the head of her bed before opening her eyes, wanting to be sure, absolutely sure, that she wasn't . . . well, somewhere else.
Because once you stretch those tendons
, she sometimes thought, opening her eyes and looking at her familiar bedroom with great and inexpressible relief,
it's ever so much easier to do it next time
. And she had stretched a certain set of tendons, hadn't she? Yes. First by yanking Amanda, then by yanking Dooley. She had stretched them but good.

It seemed to her that after she'd awakened half a dozen times and discovered she was right where she belonged, in the bedroom that had once been hers and Scott's and was now hers alone, matters should have improved, but they didn't. They got worse instead. She felt like a loose tooth in a sick socket. And then, on the first day of the big heat-wave—a heatwave to match the cold-snap of ten years before, and the ironic balance of this, coincidental though it might have been, was not lost on her—what she feared finally happened.

She lay back on the couch in the living room just to rest her eyes for a few moments. The unquestionably idiotic but occasionally entertaining
Jerry Springer was babbling away on the idiot box—My Mother Stole My Boyfriend, My Boyfriend Stole My Mother, something like that. Lisey reached out to pick up the remote and shut the damn thing off, or maybe she only dreamed she did, because when she opened her eyes to see where the remote was, she was lying not on the couch but on the hill of lupin in Boo'ya Moon. It was full daylight and there was no sense of danger—certainly no sense that Scott's long boy (for so she thought of it and always would, although she supposed it was her long boy now, Lisey's long boy) was near, but she was terrified nevertheless, almost to the point of screaming helplessly. Instead of doing that she closed her eyes, visualized her living room, and suddenly she could hear the “guests” on the
Springer Show
yelling at each other and feel the oblong of the remote control in her left hand. A second later she was starting up from the couch, eyes wide and skin all a-prickle. She could almost believe she had dreamed the whole deal (it certainly made sense, given her current level of anxiety on the subject), but the vividness of what she had seen in those few seconds argued against that idea, comforting as it was. So did the smear of purple on the back of the hand holding the TV controller.

The next day she called the Fogler Library and spoke to Mr. Bertram Partridge, the head of Special Collections. That gentleman grew steadily more excited as Lisey described the books still remaining in Scott's study. He called them “associational volumes” and said Fogler Special Collections would be very happy to have them, “and to work with her on the tax-credit question.” Lisey said that would be very nice, just as though she had been asking herself the tax-credit question for years. Mr. Partridge said he would send “a team of removers” out the very next day to box the volumes up and bring them the hundred and twenty miles to the University of Maine's Orono campus. Lisey reminded him that the weather was supposed to be very hot, and that Scott's study, which was no longer air-conditioned, had reverted to its former loftish nature. Perhaps,
she said, Mr. Partridge would like to hold his removers in abeyance until cooler weather.