Bag of Bones (29 page)

“It's a strange pair to read in tandem,” I said, putting them back down.

“The Patterson I'm reading for pleasure,” Mattie said. She went into the kitchen, looked briefly (and with some longing, I thought) at the bottle of wine, then opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of Kool-Aid. On the fridge door were words her daughter had already assembled from her Magnabet bag:
KI
and
MATTIE
and
HOHO
(Santa Claus, I presumed). “Well, I'm reading them both for pleasure, I guess, but we're due to discuss ‘Bartleby' in this little group I'm a part of. We meet Thursday nights at the library. I've still got about ten pages to go.”

“A readers' circle.”

“Uh-huh. Mrs. Briggs leads. She formed it long before I was born. She's the head librarian at Four Lakes, you know.”

“I do. Lindy Briggs is my caretaker's sister-in-law.”

Mattie smiled. “Small world, isn't it?”

“No, it's a big world but a small town.”

She started to lean back against the counter with her glass of Kool-Aid, then thought better of it. “Why don't we go outside and sit? That way anyone passing can see that we're still dressed and that we don't have anything on inside-out.”

I looked at her, startled. She looked back with a kind of cynical good humor. It wasn't an expression that looked particularly at home on her face.

“I may only be twenty-one, but I'm not stupid,” she said. “He's watching me. I know it, and you probably do, too. On another night I might be tempted to say fuck him if he can't take a joke, but it's cooler out there and the smoke from the hibachi will keep the worst of the bugs away. Have I shocked you? If so, I'm sorry.”

“You haven't.” She had, a little. “No need to apologize.”

We carried our drinks down the not-quite-steady cinderblock steps and sat side-by-side in a couple of lawn-chairs. To the left of us the coals in the hibachi glowed soft rose in the growing gloom. Mattie leaned back, placed the cold curve of her glass briefly against her forehead, then drank most of what was left, the ice cubes sliding against her teeth with a click and a rattle. Crickets hummed in the woods behind the trailer and across the road. Farther up Highway 68, I could see the bright white fluorescents over the gas island at the Lakeview General. The seat of my chair was a little baggy, the interwoven straps a little frayed, and the old girl canted pretty severely to the left, but there was still no place I'd rather have been sitting just then. This evening had turned out to be a quiet little miracle . . . at least, so far. We still had John Storrow to get to.

“I'm glad you came on a Tuesday,” she said. “Tuesday nights are hard for me. I'm always thinking of the ballgame down at Warrington's. The guys'll be picking up the gear by now—the bats and bases and catcher's mask—and putting it back in the storage cabinet
behind home plate. Drinking their last beers and smoking their last cigarettes. That's where I met my husband, you know. I'm sure you've been told all that by now.”

I couldn't see her face clearly, but I could hear the faint tinge of bitterness which had crept into her voice, and guessed she was still wearing the cynical expression. It was too old for her, but I thought she'd come by it honestly enough. Although if she didn't watch out, it would take root and grow.

“I heard a version from Bill, yes—Lindy's brother-in-law.”

“Oh ayuh—our story's on retail. You can get it at the store, or the Village Cafe, or at that old blabbermouth's garage . . . which my father-in-law rescued from Western Savings, by the way. He stepped in just before the bank could foreclose. Now Dickie Brooks and his cronies think Max Devore is walking talking Jesus. I hope you got a fairer version from Mr. Dean than you'd get at the All-Purpose. You must've, or you wouldn't have risked eating hamburgers with Jezebel.”

I wanted to get away from that, if I could—her anger was understandable but useless. Of course it was easier for me to see that; it wasn't my kid who had been turned into the handkerchief tied at the center of a tug-of-war rope. “They still play softball at Warrington's? Even though Devore bought the place?”

“Yes indeed. He goes down to the field in his motorized wheelchair every Tuesday evening and watches. There are other things he's done since he came back here that are just attempts to buy the
town's good opinion, but I think he genuinely loves the softball games. The Whitmore woman goes, too. Brings an extra oxygen tank along in a little red wheelbarrow with a whitewall tire on the front. She keeps a fielder's mitt in there, too, in case any foul pops come up over the backstop to where he sits. He caught one near the start of the season, I heard, and got a standing O from the players and the folks who come to watch.”

“Going to the games puts him in touch with his son, you think?”

Mattie smiled grimly. “I don't think Lance so much as crosses his mind, not when he's at the ballfield. They play hard at Warrington's—slide into home with their feet up, jump into the puckerbrush for the flyballs, curse each other when they do something wrong—and that's what old Max Devore enjoys, that's why he never misses a Tuesday-evening game. He likes to watch them slide and get up bleeding.”

“Is that how Lance played?”

She thought about it carefully. “He played hard, but he wasn't crazed. He was there just for the fun of it. We all were. We women—shit, really just us girls, Barney Therriault's wife, Cindy, was only sixteen—we'd stand behind the backstop on the first-base side, smoking cigarettes or waving punks to keep the bugs away, cheering our guys when they did something good, laughing when they did something stupid. We'd swap sodas or share a can of beer. I'd admire Helen Geary's twins and she'd kiss Ki under the chin until Ki giggled. Sometimes we'd go down to the Village Cafe afterward and Buddy'd make us pizzas, losers pay. All friends again, you know, after the game.
We'd sit there laughing and yelling and blowing straw-wrappers around, some of the guys half-loaded but nobody mean. In those days they got all the mean out on the ballfield. And you know what? None of them come to see me. Not Helen Geary, who was my best friend. Not Richie Lattimore, who was Lance's best friend—the two of them would talk about rocks and birds and the kinds of trees there were across the lake for hours on end. They came to the funeral, and for a little while after, and then . . . you know what it was like? When I was a kid, our well dried up. For awhile you'd get a trickle when you turned on the tap, but then there was just air. Just air.” The cynicism was gone and there was only hurt in her voice. “I saw Helen at Christmas, and we promised to get together for the twins' birthday, but we never did. I think she's scared to come near me.”

“Because of the old man?”

“Who else? But that's okay, life goes on.” She sat up, drank the rest of her Kool-Aid, and set the glass aside. “What about you, Mike? Did you come back to write a book? Are you going to name the TR?” This was a local
bon mot
that I remembered with an almost painful twinge of nostalgia. Locals with great plans were said to be bent on naming the TR.

“No,” I said, and then astonished myself by saying: “I don't do that anymore.”

I think I expected her to leap to her feet, overturning her chair and uttering a sharp cry of horrified denial. All of which says a good deal about me, I suppose, and none of it flattering.

“You've retired?” she asked, sounding calm and remarkably unhorrified. “Or is it writer's block?”

“Well, it's certainly not
chosen
retirement.” I realized the conversation had taken a rather amusing turn. I'd come primarily to sell her on John Storrow—to shove John Storrow down her throat, if that was what it took—and instead I was for the first time discussing my inability to work. For the first time with anyone.

“So it's a block.”

“I used to think so, but now I'm not so sure. I think novelists may come equipped with a certain number of stories to tell—they're built into the software. And when they're gone, they're gone.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “Maybe you'll write now that you're down here. Maybe that's part of the reason you came back.”

“Maybe you're right.”

“Are you scared?”

“Sometimes. Mostly about what I'll do for the rest of my life. I'm no good at boats in bottles, and my wife was the one with the green thumb.”

“I'm scared, too,” she said. “Scared a lot. All the time now, it seems like.”

“That he'll win his custody case? Mattie, that's what I—”

“The custody case is only part of it,” she said. “I'm scared just to be here, on the TR. It started early this summer, long after I knew Devore meant to get Ki away from me if he could. And it's getting worse. In a way it's like watching thunderheads gather over New Hampshire and then come piling across the lake. I can't put it any better than that, except . . .” She shifted, crossing her legs and then bending forward to pull the skirt of her dress against the line of her shin,
as if she were cold. “Except that I've woken up several times lately, sure that I wasn't in the bedroom alone. Once when I was sure I wasn't in the
bed
alone. Sometimes it's just a feeling—like a headache, only in your nerves—and sometimes I think I can hear whispering, or crying. I made a cake one night—about two weeks ago, this was—and forgot to put the flour away. The next morning the cannister was overturned, and the flour was spilled on the counter. Someone had written ‘hello' in it. I thought at first it was Ki, but she said she didn't do it. Besides, it wasn't her printing, hers is all straggly. I don't know if she could even write hello. Hi, maybe, but . . . Mike, you don't think he could be sending someone around to try and freak me out, do you? I mean that's just stupid, right?”

“I don't know,” I said. I thought of something thumping the insulation in the dark as I stood on the stairs. I thought of hello printed with magnets on my refrigerator door, and a child sobbing in the dark. My skin felt more than cold; it felt numb. A headache in the nerves, that was good, that was exactly how you felt when something reached around the wall of the real world and touched you on the nape of the neck.

“Maybe it's ghosts,” she said, and smiled in an uncertain way that was more frightened than amused.

I opened my mouth to tell her about what had been happening at Sara Laughs, then closed it again. There was a clear choice to be made here: either we could be sidetracked into a discussion of the paranormal, or we could come back to the visible world. The one where Max Devore was trying to steal himself a kid.

“Yeah,” I said. “The spirits are about to speak.”

“I wish I could see your face better. There was something on it just then. What?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But right now I think we'd better talk about Kyra. Okay?”

“Okay.” In the faint glow of the hibachi I could see her settling herself in her chair, as if to take a blow.

“I've been subpoenaed to give a deposition in Castle Rock on Friday. Before Elmer Durgin, who is Kyra's guardian
ad litem
—”

“That pompous little toad isn't Ki's anything!” she burst out. “He's in my father-in-law's hip pocket, just like Dickie Osgood, old Max's pet real-estate guy! Dickie and Elmer Durgin drink together down at The Mellow Tiger, or at least they did until this business really got going. Then someone probably told them it would look bad, and they stopped.”

“The papers were served by a deputy named George Footman.”

“Just one more of the usual suspects,” Mattie said in a thin voice. “Dickie Osgood's a snake, but George Footman's a junkyard dog. He's been suspended off the cops twice. Once more and he can work for Max Devore full-time.”

“Well, he scared me. I tried not to show it, but he did. And people who scare me make me angry. I called my agent in New York and then hired a lawyer. One who makes a specialty of child-custody cases.”

I tried to see how she was taking this and couldn't, although we were sitting fairly close together. But she still had that set look, like a woman who expects to take some hard blows. Or perhaps for Mattie the blows had already started to fall.

Slowly, not allowing myself to rush, I went through my conversation with John Storrow. I emphasized what Storrow had said about sexual equality—that it was apt to be a negative force in her case, making it easier for Judge Rancourt to take Kyra away. I also came down hard on the fact that Devore could have all the lawyers he wanted—not to mention sympathetic witnesses, with Richard Osgood running around the TR and spreading Devore's dough—but that the court wasn't obligated to treat her to so much as an ice cream cone. I finished by telling her that John wanted to talk to one of us tomorrow at eleven, and that it should be her. Then I waited. The silence spun out, broken only by crickets and the faint revving of some kid's unmuffled truck. Up Route 68, the white fluorescents went out as the Lakeview Market finished another day of summer trade. I didn't like Mattie's quiet; it seemed like the prelude to an explosion. A
Yankee
explosion. I held my peace and waited for her to ask me what gave me the right to meddle in her business.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low and defeated. It hurt to hear her sounding that way, but like the cynical look on her face earlier, it wasn't surprising. And I hardened myself against it as best I could. Hey, Mattie, tough old world. Pick one.

“Why would you do this?” she asked. “Why would you hire an expensive New York lawyer to take my case? That
is
what you're offering, isn't it? It's got to be, because
I
sure can't hire him. I got thirty thousand dollars' insurance money when Lance died, and was lucky to get that. It was a policy he bought from one of his Warrington's friends, almost as a joke, but
without it I would have lost the trailer last winter. They may love Dickie Brooks at Western Savings, but they don't give a rat's ass for Mattie Stanchfield Devore. After taxes I make about a hundred a week at the library. So you're offering to pay. Right?”