Bag of Bones (28 page)

I opened my mouth to ask who was there, but before I could, a woman's voice said “Hello?” She sounded perplexed and doubtful.

“Mattie?” In my confusion it never occurred to me to call her something more formal, like Ms. or Mrs. Devore. Nor did it seem odd that I should know who it was, based on a single word, even though our only previous conversation had been relatively brief. Maybe the guys in the basement recognized the background music and made the connection to Kyra.

“Mr. Noonan?” She sounded more bewildered than ever. “The phone never even rang!”

“I must have picked mine up just as your call was going through,” I said. “That happens from time to time.” But how many times, I wondered, did it happen when the person calling you was the one you yourself had been planning to call? Maybe quite often, actually. Telepathy or coincidence? Live or Memorex? Either way, it seemed almost magical. I looked across the long, low living room, into the glassy eyes of Bunter the moose, and thought:
Yes, but maybe this is a magic place now.

“I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “I apologize about calling in the first place—it's a presumption. Your number's unlisted, I know.”

Oh, don't worry about that,
I thought.
Everyone's got this old number by now. In fact, I'm thinking about putting it in the Yellow Pages.

“I got it from your file at the library,” she went on, sounding embarrassed. “That's where I work.” In the background, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” had given way to “The Farmer in the Dell.”

“It's quite all right,” I said. “Especially since you're the person I was picking up the phone to call.”

“Me? Why?”

“Ladies first.”

She gave a brief, nervous laugh. “I wanted to invite you to dinner. That is, Ki and I want to invite you to dinner. I should have done it before now. You were awfully good to us the other day. Will you come?”

“Yes,” I said with no hesitation at all. “With thanks. We've got some things to talk about, anyway.”

There was a pause. In the background, the mouse was taking the cheese. As a kid I used to think all these things happened in a vast gray factory called The Hi-Ho Dairy-O.

“Mattie? Still there?”

“He's dragged you into it, hasn't he? That awful old man.” Now her voice sounded not nervous but somehow dead.

“Well, yes and no. You could argue that fate dragged me into it, or coincidence, or God. I wasn't there that morning because of Max Devore; I was chasing the elusive Villageburger.”

She didn't laugh, but her voice brightened a little, and I was glad. People who talk in that dead, affectless way are, by and large, frightened people. Sometimes
people who have been outright terrorized. “I'm still sorry for dragging you into my trouble.” I had an idea she might start to wonder who was dragging whom after I pitched her on John Storrow, and was glad it was a discussion I wouldn't have to have with her on the phone.

“In any case, I'd love to come to dinner. When?”

“Would this evening be too soon?”

“Absolutely not.”

“That's wonderful. We have to eat early, though, so my little guy doesn't fall asleep in her dessert. Is six okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ki will be excited. We don't have much company.”

“She hasn't been wandering again, has she?”

I thought she might be offended. Instead, this time she
did
laugh. “God, no. All the fuss on Saturday scared her. Now she comes in to tell me if she's switching from the swing in the side yard to the sand-box in back. She's talked about you a lot, though. She calls you ‘that tall guy who carrot me.' I think she's worried you might be mad at her.”

“Tell her I'm not,” I said. “No, check that. I'll tell her myself. Can I bring anything?”

“Bottle of wine?” she asked, a little doubtfully. “Or maybe that's pretentious—I was only going to cook hamburgers on the grill and make potato salad.”

“I'll bring an unpretentious bottle.”

“Thank you,” she said. “This is sort of exciting. We never have company.”

I was horrified to find myself on the verge of saying that I thought it was sort of exciting, too, my first
date in four years and all. “Thanks so much for thinking of me.”

As I hung up I remembered John Storrow advising me to try and stay visible with her, not to hand over any extra grist for the town gossip mill. If she was barbecuing, we'd probably be out where people could see we had our clothes on . . . for most of the evening, anyway. She would, however, likely do the polite thing at some point and invite me inside. I would then do the polite thing and go. Admire her velvet Elvis painting on the wall, or her commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint, or whatever she had going in the way of trailer decoration; I'd let Kyra show me her bedroom and exclaim with wonder over her excellent assortment of stuffed animals and her favorite dolly, if that was required. There are all sorts of priorities in life. Some your lawyer can understand, but I suspect there are quite a few he can't.

“Am I handling this right, Bunter?” I asked the stuffed moose. “Bellow once for yes, twice for no.”

I was halfway down the hall leading to the north wing, thinking of nothing but a cool shower, when from behind me, very soft, came a brief ring of the bell around Bunter's neck. I stopped, head cocked, my shirt held in one hand, waiting for the bell to ring again. It didn't. After a minute, I went the rest of the way to the bathroom and flipped on the shower.

*   *   *

The Lakeview General had a pretty good selection of wines tucked away in one corner—not much local demand for it, maybe, but the tourists probably bought a fair quantity—and I selected a bottle of Mondavi red. It was probably a bit more expensive
than Mattie had had in mind, but I could peel the price-sticker off and hope she wouldn't know the difference. There was a line at the checkout, mostly folks with damp tee-shirts pulled on over their bathing suits and sand from the public beach sticking to their legs. While I was waiting my turn, my eye happened on the impulse items which are always stocked near the counter. Among them were several plastic bags labeled
MAGNABET
, each bag showing a cartoon refrigerator with the message
BACK SOON
stuck to it. According to the written info, there were two sets of consonants in each Magnabet,
PLUS EXTRA VOWELS
. I grabbed two sets . . . then added a third, thinking that Mattie Devore's kid was probably just the right age for such an item.

*   *   *

Kyra saw me pulling into the weedy dooryard, jumped off the slumpy little swingset beside the trailer, bolted to her mother, and hid behind her. When I approached the hibachi which had been set up beside the cinderblock front steps, the child who'd spoken to me so fearlessly on Saturday was just a peeking blue eye and a chubby hand grasping a fold of her mother's sundress below the hip.

Two hours brought considerable changes, however. As twilight deepened, Kyra sat on my lap in the trailer's living room, listening carefully—if with growing wooziness—as I read her the ever-enthralling story of Cinderella. The couch we were on was a shade of brown which can by law only be sold in discount stores, and extremely lumpy into the bargain, but I still felt ashamed of my casual preconceptions about what I would find inside this trailer. On
the wall above and behind us there was an Edward Hopper print—that one of a lonely lunch counter late at night—and across the room, over the small Formica-topped table in the kitchen nook, was one of Vincent van Gogh's
Sunflowers
series. Even more than the Hopper, it looked at home in Mattie Devore's doublewide. I have no idea why that should have been true, but it was.

“Glass slipper will cut her footie,” Ki said in a muzzy, considering way.

“No way,” I said. “Slipper-glass was specially made in the Kingdom of Grimoire. Smooth and unbreakable, as long as you didn't sing high C while wearing them.”

“I get a pair?”

“Sorry, Ki,” I said, “no one knows how to make slipper-glass anymore. It's a lost art, like Toledo steel.” It was hot in the trailer and she was hot against my shirt, where her upper body lay, but I wouldn't have changed it. Having a kid on my lap was pretty great. Outside, her mother was singing and gathering up dishes from the card table we'd used for our picnic. Hearing her sing was also pretty great.

“Go on, go on,” Kyra said, pointing to the picture of Cinderella scrubbing the floor. The little girl peeking nervously around her mother's leg was gone; the angry I'm-going-to-the-damn-beach girl of Saturday morning was gone; here was only a sleepy kid who was pretty and bright and trusting. “Before I can't hold it anymore.”

“Do you need to go pee-pee?”

“No,” she said, looking at me with some disdain.
“Besides, that's you-rinating. Peas are what you eat with meatloaf, that's what Mattie says. And I already went. But if you don't go fast on the story, I'll fall to sleep.”

“You can't hurry stories with magic in them, Ki.”

“Well go as fast as you can.”

“Okay.” I turned the page. Here was Cinderella, trying to be a good sport, waving goodbye to her asshole sisters as they went off to the ball dressed like starlets at a disco. “ ‘No sooner had Cinderella said goodbye to Tammy Faye and Vanna—' ”

“Those are the sisters' names?”

“The ones I made up for them, yes. Is that okay?”

“Sure.” She settled more comfortably on my lap and dropped her head against my chest again.

“ ‘No sooner had Cinderella said goodbye to Tammy Faye and Vanna than a bright light suddenly appeared in the corner of the kitchen. Stepping out of it was a beautiful lady in a silver gown. The jewels in her hair glowed like stars.' ”

“Fairy godmother,” Kyra said matter-of-factly.

“Yes.”

Mattie came in carrying the remaining half-bottle of Mondavi and the blackened barbecue implements. Her sundress was bright red. On her feet she wore low-topped sneakers so white that they seemed to flash in the gloom. Her hair was tied back and although she still wasn't the gorgeous country-club babe I had briefly envisioned, she was very pretty. Now she looked at Kyra, looked at me, raised her eyebrows, made a lifting gesture with her arms. I shook my head, sending back a message that neither of us was ready quite yet.

I resumed reading while Mattie went to work
scrubbing her few cooking tools. She was still humming. By the time she had finished with the spatula, Ki's body had taken on an additional relaxation which I recognized at once—she'd conked out, and hard. I closed the
Little Golden Treasury of Fairy Tales
and put it on the coffee-table beside a couple of other stacked books—whatever Mattie was reading, I presumed. I looked up, saw her looking back at me from the kitchen, and flicked her the V-for-Victory sign. “Noonan, the winner by a technical knockout in the eighth round,” I said.

Mattie dried her hands on a dishtowel and came over. “Give her to me.”

I stood up with Kyra in my arms instead. “I'll carry. Where?”

She pointed. “On the left.”

I carried the baby down the hallway, which was narrow enough so I had to be careful not to bump her feet on one side or the top of her head on the other. At the end of the hall was the bathroom, stringently clean. On the right was a closed door which led, I assumed, into the bedroom Mattie had once shared with Lance Devore and where she now slept alone. If there was a boyfriend who overnighted even some of the time, Mattie had done a good job of erasing his presence from the trailer.

I slid carefully through the door on the left and looked at the little bed with its ruffled coverlet of cabbage roses, the table with the dollhouse on it, the picture of the Emerald City on one wall, the sign (done in shiny stick-on letters) on another one that read
CASA KYRA
. Devore wanted to take her away from here, a place where nothing was wrong—where,
to the contrary, everything was perfectly right. Casa Kyra was the room of a little girl who was growing up okay.

“Put her on the bed and then go pour yourself another glass of wine,” Mattie said. “I'll zip her into her pj's and join you. I know we've got stuff to talk about.”

“Okay.” I put her down, then bent a little farther, meaning to plant a kiss on her nose. I almost thought better of it, then did it anyway. When I left, Mattie was smiling, so I guess it was okay.

*   *   *

I poured myself a little more wine, walked back into the scrap of living room with it, and looked at the two books beside Ki's fairy-tale collection. I'm always curious about what people are reading; the only better insight into them is the contents of their medicine cabinets, and rummaging through your host's drugs and nostrums is frowned upon by the better class.

The books were different enough to qualify as schizoid. One, with a playing-card bookmark about three quarters of the way through, was the paperback edition of Richard North Patterson's
Silent Witness.
I applauded her taste; Patterson and DeMille are probably the best of the current popular novelists. The other, a hardcover tome of some weight, was
The Collected Short Works of Herman Melville.
About as far from Richard North Patterson as you could get. According to the faded purple ink stamped on the thickness of the pages, this volume belonged to Four Lakes Community Library. That was a lovely little stone building about five miles south of Dark Score Lake, where Route 68 passes off the TR and into Motton.
Where Mattie worked, presumably. I opened to her bookmark, another playing card, and saw she was reading “Bartleby.”

“I don't understand that,” she said from behind me, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the books. “I like it—it's a good enough story—but I haven't the slightest idea what it means. The other one, now, I've even figured out who did it.”