Bag of Bones (19 page)

“I understand you met my daughter-in-law today,” he said at last. He sounded annoyed.

“I may have done,” I said, trying not to sound surprised. “May I ask why you're calling, Mr. Devore?”

“I understand there was an incident.”

White lights danced in the sky—they could have been exploding spacecraft. Then, trailing after, the bangs.
I've discovered the secret of time travel,
I thought.
It's an auditory phenomenon.

My hand was holding the phone far too tightly, and I made it relax. Maxwell Devore. Half a billion dollars. Not in Palm Springs, as I had supposed, but close—right here on the TR, if the characteristic underhum on the line could be trusted.

“I'm concerned for my granddaughter.” His voice was raspier than ever. He was angry, and it showed—this was a man who hadn't had to conceal his emotions in a lot of years. “I understand my daughter-in-law's attention wandered again. It wanders often.”

Now half a dozen colored starbursts lit the night, blooming like flowers in an old Disney nature film. I could imagine the crowds gathered on Castle View sitting cross-legged on their blankets, eating ice cream cones and drinking beer and all going
Oooooh
at the same time. That's what makes any successful work of art, I think—everybody goes
Oooooh
at the same time.

You're scared of this guy, aren't you?
Jo asked.
Okay, maybe you're right to be scared. A man who feels he can be angry whenever he wants to at whoever he wants to . . . that's a man who can be dangerous.

Then Mattie's voice:
Mr. Noonan, I'm not a bad mother. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.

Of course that's what most bad mothers say in such circumstances, I imagined . . . but I had believed her.

Also, goddammit, my number was unlisted. I had been sitting here with a soda, watching the fireworks, bothering nobody, and this guy had—

“Mr. Devore, I don't have any idea what—”

“Don't give me that, with all due respect don't give me that, Mr. Noonan, you were seen talking to them.” He sounded as I imagine Joe McCarthy sounded to those poor schmucks who ended up being branded dirty commies when they came before his committee.

Be careful, Mike,
Jo said.
Beware of Maxwell's silver hammer.

“I did see and speak to a woman and a little girl this morning,” I said. “I presume they're the ones you're talking about.”

“No, you saw a
toddler
walking on the road
alone,
” he said. “And then you saw a woman chasing after her. My daughter-in-law, in that old thing she drives. The child could have been run down. Why are you protecting that young woman, Mr. Noonan? Did she promise you something? You're certainly doing the child no favors, I can tell you that much.”

She promised to take me back to her trailer and then take me around the world,
I thought of saying.
She promised to keep her mouth open the whole time if I'd keep mine shut—is that what you want to hear?

Yes,
Jo said.
Very likely that is what he wants to hear. Very likely what he wants to believe. Don't let him provoke you into a burst of your sophomore sarcasm, Mike—you could regret it.

Why was I bothering to protect Mattie Devore, anyway? I didn't know. Didn't have the slightest idea of what I might be getting into here, for that matter. I only knew that she had looked tired, and the child hadn't been bruised or frightened or sullen.

“There
was
a car. An old Jeep.”

“That's more like it.” Satisfaction. And sharp interest. Greed, almost. “What did—”

“I guess I assumed they came in the car together,” I said. There was a certain giddy pleasure in discovering my capacity for invention had not deserted me—I felt like a pitcher who can no longer do it in front of a crowd, but who can still throw a pretty good slider in the old back yard. “The little girl might have had some daisies.” All the careful qualifications, as if I were testifying in court instead of sitting on my deck. Harold would have been proud. Well, no. Harold would have been horrified that I was having such a conversation at all.

“I think I assumed they were picking wildflowers. My memory of the incident isn't all that clear, unfortunately. I'm a writer, Mr. Devore, and when I'm driving I often drift off into my own private—”

“You're lying.” The anger was right out in the open now, bright and pulsing like a boil. As I had suspected, it hadn't taken much effort to escort this guy past the social niceties.

“Mr. Devore. The computer Devore, I assume?”

“You assume correctly.”

Jo always grew cooler in tone and expression as her not inconsiderable temper grew hotter. Now I heard myself emulating her in a way that was frankly eerie. “Mr. Devore, I'm not accustomed to being called in
the evening by men I don't know, nor do I intend to prolong the conversation when a man who does so calls me a liar. Good evening, sir.”

“If everything was fine, then why did you stop?”

“I've been away from the TR for some time, and I wanted to know if the Village Cafe was still open. Oh, by the way—I don't know where you got my telephone number, but I know where you can put it. Good night.”

I broke the connection with my thumb and then just looked at the phone, as if I had never seen such a gadget in my life. The hand holding it was trembling. My heart was beating hard; I could feel it in my neck and wrists as well as my chest. I wondered if I could have told Devore to stick my phone number up his ass if I hadn't had a few million rattling around in the bank myself.

The Battle of the Titans, dear,
Jo said in her cool voice.
And all over a teenage girl in a trailer. She didn't even have any breasts to speak of.

I laughed out loud. War of the Titans? Hardly. Some old robber baron from the turn of the century had said, “These days a man with a million dollars thinks he's rich.” Devore would likely have the same opinion of me, and in the wider scheme of things he would be right.

Now the western sky was alight with unnatural, pulsing color. It was the finale.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

No answer; only a loon calling across the lake. Protesting all the unaccustomed noise in the sky, as likely as not.

I got up, went inside, and put the phone back in its
charging cradle, realizing as I did that I was expecting it to ring again, expecting Devore to start spouting movie clichés:
If you get in my way I'll
and
I'm warning you, friend, not to
and
Let me give you a piece of good advice before you.

The phone didn't ring. I poured the rest of my soda down my gullet, which was understandably dry, and decided to go to bed. At least there hadn't been any weeping and wailing out there on the deck; Devore had pulled me out of myself. In a weird way, I was grateful to him.

I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and lay down. I thought about the little girl, Kyra, and the mother who could have been her older sister. Devore was pissed at Mattie, that much was clear, and if I was a financial nonentity to the guy, what must she be to him? And what kind of resources would she have if he had taken against her? That was a pretty nasty thought, actually, and it was the one I fell asleep on.

I got up three hours later to eliminate the can of soda I had unwisely downed before retiring, and as I stood before the bowl, pissing with one eye open, I heard the sobbing again. A child somewhere in the dark, lost and frightened . . . or perhaps just
pretending
to be lost and frightened.

“Don't,” I said. I was standing naked before the toilet bowl, my back alive with gooseflesh. “Please don't start up with this shit, it's scary.”

The crying dwindled as it had before, seeming to diminish like something carried down a tunnel. I went back to bed, turned on my side, and closed my eyes.

“It was a dream,” I said. “Just another Manderley dream.”

I knew better, but I also knew I was going back to sleep, and right then that seemed like the important thing. As I drifted off, I thought in a voice that was purely my own:
She is alive. Sara is alive.

And I understood something, too: she belonged to me. I had reclaimed her. For good or ill, I had come home.

A
t nine o'clock the following morning I filled a squeeze-bottle with grapefruit juice and set out for a good long walk south along The Street. The day was bright and already hot. It was also silent—the kind of silence you experience only after a Saturday holiday, I think, one composed of equal parts holiness and hangover. I could see two or three fishermen parked far out on the lake, but not a single power boat burred, not a single gaggle of kids shouted and splashed. I passed half a dozen cottages on the slope above me, and although all of them were likely inhabited at this time of year, the only signs of life I saw were bathing suits hung over the deck rail at the Passendales' and a half-deflated fluorescent-green seahorse on the Batchelders' stub of a dock.

But did the Passendales' little gray cottage still belong to the Passendales? Did the Batchelders' amusing circular summer-camp with its Cinerama picture-window pointing at the lake and the mountains
beyond still belong to the Batchelders? No way of telling, of course. Four years can bring a lot of changes.

I walked and made no effort to think—an old trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs. I made my way past camps where Jo and I had once had drinks and barbecues and attended the occasional card-party, I soaked up the silence like a sponge, I drank my juice, I armed sweat off my forehead, and I waited to see what thoughts might come.

The first was an odd realization: that the crying child in the night seemed somehow more real than the call from Max Devore. Had I actually been phoned by a rich and obviously bad-tempered techno-mogul on my first full evening back on the TR? Had said mogul actually called me a liar at one point? (I was, considering the tale I had told, but that was beside the point.) I knew it had happened, but it was actually easier to believe in The Ghost of Dark Score Lake, known around some campfires as The Mysterious Crying Kiddie.

My next thought—this was just before I finished my juice—was that I should call Mattie Devore and tell her what had happened. I decided it was a natural impulse but probably a bad idea. I was too old to believe in such simplicities as The Damsel in Distress Versus The Wicked Stepfather . . . or, in this case, Father-in-Law. I had my own fish to fry this summer, and I didn't want to complicate my job by getting into a potentially ugly dispute between Mr. Computer and Ms. Doublewide. Devore had rubbed my fur the wrong way—and vigorously—but that probably wasn't personal, only something he did as a matter
of course. Hey, some guys snap bra-straps. Did I want to get in his face on this? No. I did not. I had saved Little Miss Red Sox, I had gotten myself an inadvertent feel of Mom's small but pleasantly firm breast, I had learned that Kyra was Greek for ladylike. Any more than that would be gluttony, by God.

I stopped at that point, feet as well as brain, realizing I'd walked all the way to Warrington's, a vast barnboard structure which locals sometimes called the country club. It was, sort of—there was a six-hole golf course, a stable and riding trails, a restaurant, a bar, and lodging for perhaps three dozen in the main building and the eight or nine satellite cabins. There was even a two-lane bowling alley, although you and your competition had to take turns setting up the pins. Warrington's had been built around the beginning of World War I. That made it younger than Sara Laughs, but not by much.

A long dock led out to a smaller building called The Sunset Bar. It was there that Warrington's summer guests would gather for drinks at the end of the day (and some for Bloody Marys at the beginning). And when I glanced out that way, I realized I was no longer alone. There was a woman standing on the porch to the left of the floating bar's door, watching me.

She gave me a pretty good jump. My nerves weren't in their best condition right then, and that probably had something to do with it . . . but I think she would have given me a jump in any case. Part of it was her stillness. Part was her extraordinary thinness. Most of it was her face. Have you ever seen that Edvard Munch drawing,
The Cry
? Well, if you imagine that screaming face at rest, mouth closed and eyes
watchful, you'll have a pretty good image of the woman standing at the end of the dock with one long-fingered hand resting on the rail. Although I must tell you that my first thought was not
Edvard Munch
but
Mrs. Danvers.

She looked about seventy and was wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. The combination looked strangely formal, a variation on the ever-popular little black cocktail dress. Her skin was cream-white, except above her nearly flat bosom and along her bony shoulders. There it swam with large brown age-spots. Her face was a wedge featuring prominent skull-like cheekbones and an unlined lamp of brow. Beneath that bulge, her eyes were lost in sockets of shadow. White hair hung scant and lank around her ears and down to the prominent shelf of her jaw.

God, she's thin,
I thought.
She's nothing but a bag of—

A shudder twisted through me at that. It was a strong one, as if someone were spinning a wire in my flesh. I didn't want her to notice it—what a way to start a summer day, by revolting a guy so badly that he stood there shaking and grimacing in front of you—so I raised my hand and waved. I tried to smile, as well. Hello there, lady standing out by the floating bar. Hello there, you old bag of bones, you scared the living shit out of me but it doesn't take much these days and I forgive you. How the fuck ya doin? I wondered if my smile looked as much like a grimace to her as it felt to me.