Bag of Bones (23 page)

Bill Dean didn't describe their meeting in any detail; he only said, “They met at the field—she was runnin out the beer and he helped her out of a boghole when she got her handcart stuck.”

Mattie never said much about that part of it, so I don't know much. Except I do . . . and although some of the details might be wrong, I'd bet you a dollar to a hundred I got most of them right. That was my summer for knowing things I had no business knowing.

It's hot, for one thing—'94 is the hottest summer of the decade and July is the hottest month of the summer. President Clinton is being upstaged by Newt and the Republicans. Folks are saying old Slick Willie may not even run for a second term. Boris Yeltsin is reputed to be either dying of heart disease or in a dry-out clinic. The Red Sox are looking better than they have any right to. In Derry, Johanna Arlen Noonan is maybe starting to feel a little whoopsy in the morning. If so, she does not speak of it to her husband.

I see Mattie in her blue polo shirt with her name sewn in white script above her left breast. Her white shorts make a pleasing contrast to her tanned legs. I also see her wearing a blue gimme cap with the red
W
for Warrington's above the long bill. Her pretty dark-blonde hair is pulled through the hole at the back of the cap and falls to the collar of her shirt. I see her trying to yank the handcart out of the mud without
upsetting the keg of beer. Her head is down; the shadow thrown by the bill of the cap obscures all of her face but her mouth and small set chin.

“Luh-let m-me h-h-help,” Lance says, and she looks up. The shadow cast by the cap's bill falls away, he sees her big blue eyes—the ones she'll pass on to their daughter. One look into those eyes and the war is over without a single shot fired; he belongs to her as surely as any young man ever belonged to any young woman.

The rest, as they say around here, was just courtin.

The old man had three children, but Lance was the only one he seemed to care about. (“Daughter's crazier'n a shithouse mouse,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “In some laughin academy in California. Think I heard she caught her a cancer, too.”) The fact that Lance had no interest in computers and software actually seemed to please his father. He had another son who was capable of running the business. In another way, however, Lance Devore's older halfbrother wasn't capable at all: there would be no grandchildren from that one.

“Rump-wrangler,” Bill said. “Understand there's a lot of that goin around out there in California.”

There was a fair amount of it going around on the TR, too, I imagined, but thought it not my place to offer sexual instruction to my caretaker.

Lance Devore had been attending Reed College in Oregon, majoring in forestry—the kind of guy who falls in love with green flannel pants, red suspenders, and the sight of condors at dawn. A Brothers Grimm woodcutter, in fact, once you got past the academic jargon. In the summer between his junior and senior
years, his father had summoned him to the family compound in Palm Springs, and had presented him with a boxy lawyer's suitcase crammed with maps, aerial photos, and legal papers. These had little order that Lance could see, but I doubt that he cared. Imagine a comic-book collector given a crate crammed with rare old copies of
Donald Duck.
Imagine a movie collector given the rough cut of a never-released film starring Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. Then imagine this avid young forester realizing that his father owned not just acres or square miles in the vast unincorporated forests of western Maine, but entire
realms.

Although Max Devore had left the TR in 1933, he'd kept a lively interest in the area where he'd grown up, subscribing to area newspapers and getting magazines such as
Down East
and the
Maine Times.
In the early eighties, he had begun to buy long columns of land just east of the Maine–New Hampshire border. God knew there had been plenty for sale; the paper companies which owned most of it had fallen into a recessionary pit, and many had become convinced that their New England holdings and operations would be the best place to begin retrenching. So this land, stolen from the Indians and clear-cut ruthlessly in the twenties and fifties, came into Max Devore's hands. He might have bought it just because it was there, a good bargain he could afford to take advantage of. He might have bought it as a way of demonstrating to himself that he had really survived his childhood; had, in point of fact, triumphed over it.

Or he might have bought it as a toy for his beloved
younger son. In the years when Devore was making his major land purchases in western Maine, Lance would have been just a kid . . . but old enough for a perceptive father to see where his interests were tending.

Devore asked Lance to spend the summer of 1994 surveying purchases which were, for the most part, already ten years old. He wanted the boy to put the paperwork in order, but he wanted more than that—he wanted Lance to make sense of it. It wasn't a land-use recommendation he was looking for, exactly, although I guess he would have listened if Lance had wanted to make one; he simply wanted a sense of what he had purchased. Would Lance take a summer in western Maine trying to find out what
his
sense of it was? At a salary of two or three thousand dollars a month?

I imagine Lance's reply was a more polite version of Buddy Jellison's “Does a crow shit in the pine tops?”

The kid arrived in June of 1994 and set up shop in a tent on the far side of Dark Score Lake. He was due back at Reed in late August. Instead, though, he decided to take a year's leave of absence. His father wasn't pleased. His father smelled what he called “girl trouble.”

“Yeah, but it's a damned long sniff from California to Maine,” Bill Dean said, leaning against the driver's door of his truck with his sunburned arms folded. “He had someone a lot closer than Palm Springs doin his sniffin for him.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“'Bout
talk.
People do it for free, and most are willing to do even more if they're paid.”

“People like Royce Merrill?”

“Royce might be one,” he agreed, “but he wouldn't be the only one. Times around here don't go between bad and good; if you're a local, they mostly go between bad and worse. So when a guy like Max Devore sends a guy out with a supply of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills . . .”

“Was it someone local? A lawyer?”

Not a lawyer; a real-estate broker named Richard Osgood (“a greasy kind of fella” was Bill Dean's judgment of him) who denned and did business in Motton. Eventually Osgood
had
hired a lawyer from Castle Rock. The greasy fella's initial job, when the summer of '94 ended and Lance Devore remained on the TR, was to find out what the hell was going on and put a stop to it.

“And then?” I asked.

Bill glanced at his watch, glanced at the sky, then centered his gaze on me. He gave a funny little shrug, as if to say, “We're both men of the world, in a quiet and settled sort of way—you don't need to ask a silly question like that.”

“Then Lance Devore and Mattie Stanchfield got married in the Grace Baptist Church right up there on Highway 68. There were tales made the rounds about what Osgood might've done to keep it from comin off—I heard he even tried to bribe Reverend Gooch into refusin to hitch em, but I think that's stupid, they just would have gone someplace else. 'Sides, I don't see much sense in repeating what I don't know for sure.”

Bill unfolded an arm and began to tick items off on the leathery fingers of his right hand.

“They got married in the middle of September,
1994, I know that.” Out popped the thumb. “People looked around with some curiosity to see if the groom's father would put in an appearance, but he never did.” Out popped the forefinger. Added to the thumb, it made a pistol. “Mattie had a baby in April of '95, making the kiddie a dight premature . . . but not enough to matter. I seen it in the store with my own eyes when it wasn't a week old, and it was just the right size.” Out with the second finger. “I don't know that Lance Devore's old man absolutely refused to help em financially, but I
do
know they were living in that trailer down below Dickie's Garage, and that makes me think they were havin a pretty hard skate.”

“Devore put on the choke-chain,” I said. “It's what a guy used to getting his own way would do . . . but if he loved the boy the way you seem to think, he might have come around.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He glanced at his watch again. “Let me finish up quick and get out of your sunshine . . . but you ought to hear one more little story, because it really shows how the land lies.

“In July of last year, less'n a month before he died, Lance Devore shows up at the post-office counter in the Lakeview General. He's got a manila envelope he wants to send, but first he needs to show Carla DeCinces what's inside. She said he was all fluffed out, like daddies sometimes get over their kids when they're small.”

I nodded, amused at the idea of skinny, stuttery Lance Devore all fluffed out. But I could see it in my mind's eye, and the image was also sort of sweet.

“It was a studio pitcher they'd gotten taken over in
the Rock. Showed the kid . . . what's her name? Kayla?”

“Kyra.”

“Ayuh, they call em anything these days, don't they? It showed Kyra sittin in a big leather chair, with a pair of joke spectacles on her little snub of a nose, lookin at one of the aerial photos of the woods over across the lake in TR-100 or TR-110—part of what the old man had picked up, anyway. Carla said the baby had a surprised look on her face, as if she hadn't suspected there could be so much woods in the whole world. Said it was
awful
cunnin, she did.”

“Cunnin as a cat a-runnin,” I murmured.

“And the envelope—Registered, Express Mail—was addressed to Maxwell Devore, in Palm Springs, California.”

“Leading you to deduce that the old man either thawed enough to ask for a picture of his only grandchild, or that Lance Devore thought a picture
might
thaw him.”

Bill nodded, looking as pleased as a parent whose child has managed a difficult sum. “Don't know if it did,” he said. “Wasn't enough time to tell, one way or the other. Lance had bought one of those little satellite dishes, like what you've got here. There was a bad storm the day he put it up—hail, high wind, blow-downs along the lakeshore, lots of lightnin. That was along toward evening. Lance put his dish up in the afternoon, all done and safe, except around the time the storm commenced he remembered he'd left his socket wrench on the trailer roof. He went up to get it so it wouldn't get all wet n rusty—”

“He was struck by lightning? Jesus, Bill!”

“Lightnin struck, all right, but it hit across the way. You go past the place where Wasp Hill Road runs into 68 and you'll see the stump of the tree that stroke knocked over. Lance was comin down the ladder with his socket wrench when it hit. If you've never had a lightnin bolt tear right over your head, you don't know how scary it is—it's like havin a drunk driver veer across into your lane, headed right for you, and then swing back onto his own side just in time. Close lightnin makes your hair stand up—makes your damned
prick
stand up. It's apt to play the radio on your steel fillins, it makes your ears hum, and it makes the air taste roasted. Lance fell off the ladder. If he had time to think anything before he hit the ground, I bet he thought he
was
electrocuted. Poor boy. He loved the TR, but it wasn't lucky for him.”

“Broke his neck?”

“Ayuh. With all the thunder, Mattie never heard him fall or yell or anything. She looked out a minute or two later when it started to hail and he still wasn't in. And there he was, layin on the ground and lookin up into the friggin hail with his eyes open.”

Bill looked at his watch one final time, then swung open the door to his truck. “The old man wouldn't come for their weddin, but he came for his son's funeral and he's been here ever since. He didn't want nawthin to do with the young woman—”

“But he wants the kid,” I said. It was no more than what I already knew, but I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach just the same.
Don't talk about this,
Mattie had asked me on the morning of the Fourth.
It's not a good time for Ki and me.
“How far along in the process has he gotten?”

“On the third turn and headin into the home stretch, I sh'd say. There'll be a hearin in Castle County Superior Court, maybe later this month, maybe next. The judge could rule then to hand the girl over, or put it off until fall. I don't think it matters which, because the one thing that's never goin to happen on God's green earth is a rulin in favor of the mother. One way or another, that little girl is goin to grow up in California.”

Put that way, it gave me a very nasty little chill.

Bill slid behind the wheel of his truck. “Stay out of it, Mike,” he said. “Stay away from Mattie Devore and her daughter. And if you get called to court on account of seein the two of em on Saturday, smile a lot and say as little as you can.”

“Max Devore's charging that she's unfit to raise the child.”

“Ayuh.”

“Bill, I
saw
the child, and she's fine.”

He grinned again, but this time there was no amusement in it. “'Magine she is. But that's not the point. Stay clear of their business, old boy. It's my job to tell you that; with Jo gone, I guess I'm the only caretaker you got.” He slammed the door of his Ram, started the engine, reached for the gearshift, then dropped his hand again as something else occurred to him. “If you get a chance, you ought to look for the owls.”

“What owls?”