Bag of Bones (46 page)

When I was clear, I trod water and looked in at them. Whitmore had come all the way to the edge of the embankment, wanting to get every foot of distance she could. Hell, every damned inch. Devore was parked behind her in his wheelchair. They were both still grinning, and now their faces were as red as the faces of imps in hell. Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Another twenty minutes and it would be getting dark. Could I keep my head above water for another twenty minutes? I thought so, if I didn't panic again, but not much longer. I thought of drowning in the dark, looking up and seeing Venus just before I went under for the last time, and the panic-rat slashed me with its teeth again. The panic-rat was worse than Rogette and her rocks, much worse.

Maybe not worse than Devore.

I looked both ways along the lakefront, checking The Street wherever it wove out of the trees for a dozen feet or a dozen yards. I didn't care about being embarrassed anymore, but I saw no one. Dear God,
where was everybody? Gone to the Mountain View in Fryeburg for pizza, or the Village Cafe for milkshakes?

“What do you want?” I called in to Devore. “Do you want me to tell you I'll butt out of your business? Okay, I'll butt out!”

He laughed.

Well, I hadn't expected it to work. Even if I'd been sincere about it, he wouldn't have believed me.

“We just want to see how long you can swim,” Whitmore said, and threw another rock—a long, lazy toss that fell about five feet short of where I was.

They mean to kill me,
I thought.
They really do.

Yes. And what was more, they might well get away with it. A crazy idea, both plausible and implausible at the same time, rose in my mind. I could see Rogette Whitmore tacking a notice to the
COMMUNITY DOIN'S
board outside the Lakeview General Store.

TO THE MARTIANS OF TR-90, GREETINGS!

Mr. MAXWELL DEVORE,
everyone's
favorite Martian, will give each resident of the TR ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS if no one will use The Street on FRIDAY EVENING, THE 17th OF JULY, between the hours of SEVEN and NINE P.M. Keep our “SUMMER FRIENDS” away, too! And remember: GOOD MARTIANS are like GOOD MONKEYS: they
SEE
no evil,
HEAR
no evil, and
SPEAK
no evil!

I couldn't really believe it, not even in my current situation . . . and yet I almost could. At the very least I had to grant him the luck of the devil.

Tired. My sneakers heavier than ever. I tried to push one of them off and succeeded only in taking in another mouthful of lakewater. They stood watching me, Devore occasionally picking the mask up from his lap and having a revivifying suck.

I couldn't wait until dark. The sun exits in a hurry here in western Maine—as it does, I guess, in mountain country everywhere—but the twilights are long and lingering. By the time it got dark enough in the west to move without being seen, the moon would have risen in the east.

I found myself imagining my obituary in the
New York Times,
the headline reading
POPULAR ROMANTIC SUSPENSE NOVELIST DROWNS IN MAINE
. Debra Weinstock would provide them with the author photo from the forthcoming
Helen's Promise.
Harold Oblowski would say all the right things, and he'd also remember to put a modest (but not tiny) death notice in
Publishers Weekly.
He would go half-and-half with Putnam on it, and—

I sank, swallowed more water, and spat it out. I began pummelling the lake again and forced myself to stop. From the shore, I could hear Rogette Whitmore's tinkling laughter.
You bitch,
I thought.
You scrawny bi
—

Mike,
Jo said.

Her voice was in my head, but it wasn't the one I make when I'm imagining her side of a mental dialogue or when I just miss her and need to whistle her up for awhile. As if to underline this, something
splashed to my right, splashed hard. When I looked in that direction I saw no fish, not even a ripple. What I saw instead was our swimming float, anchored about a hundred yards away in the sunset-colored water.

“I can't swim that far, baby,” I croaked.

“Did you say something, Noonan?” Devore called from the shore. He cupped a mocking hand to one of his huge waxlump ears. “Couldn't quite make it out! You sound all out of breath!” More tinkling laughter from Whitmore. He was Johnny Carson; she was Ed McMahon.

You can make it. I'll help you.

The float, I realized, might be my only chance—there wasn't another one on this part of the shore, and it was at least ten yards beyond Whitmore's longest rockshot so far. I began to dogpaddle in that direction, my arms now as leaden as my feet. Each time I felt my head on the verge of going under I paused, treading water, telling myself to take it easy, I was in pretty good shape and doing okay, telling myself that if I didn't panic I'd be all right. The old bitch and the even older bastard resumed pacing me, but they saw where I was headed and the laughter stopped. So did the taunts.

For a long time the swimming float seemed to draw no closer. I told myself that was just because the light was fading, the color of the water draining from red to purple to a near-black that was the color of Devore's gums, but I was able to muster less and less conviction for this idea as my breath shortened and my arms grew heavier.

When I was still thirty yards away a cramp struck
my left leg. I rolled sideways like a swamped sailboat, trying to reach the bunched muscle. More water poured down my throat. I tried to cough it out, then retched and went under with my stomach still trying to heave and my fingers still looking for the knotted place above the knee.

I'm really drowning,
I thought, strangely calm now that it was happening.
This is how it happens, this is it.

Then I felt a hand seize me by the nape of the neck. The pain of having my hair yanked brought me back to reality in a flash—it was better than an epinephrine injection. I felt another hand clamp around my left leg; there was a brief but terrific sense of heat. The cramp let go and I broke the surface swimming—
really
swimming this time, not just dogpaddling, and in what seemed like seconds I was clinging to the ladder on the side of the float, breathing in great, snatching gasps, waiting to see if I was going to be all right or if my heart was going to detonate in my chest like a hand grenade. At last my lungs started to overcome my oxygen debt, and everything began to calm down. I gave it another minute, then climbed out of the water and into what was now the ashes of twilight. I stood facing west for a little while, bent over with my hands on my knees, dripping on the boards. Then I turned around, meaning this time to flip them not just a single bird but that fabled double eagle. There was no one to flip it to. The Street was empty. Devore and Rogette Whitmore were gone.

*   *   *

Maybe
they were gone. I'd do well to remember there was a lot of Street I couldn't see.

I sat cross-legged on the float until the moon rose,
waiting and watching for any movement. Half an hour, I think. Maybe forty-five minutes. I checked my watch, but got no help there; it had shipped some water and stopped at 7:30
P.M.
To the other satisfactions Devore owed me I could now add the price of one Timex Indiglo—that's $29.95, asshole, cough it up.

At last I climbed back down the ladder, slipped into the water, and stroked for shore as quietly as I could. I was rested, my head had stopped aching (although the knot above the nape of my neck still throbbed steadily), and I no longer felt off-balance and incredulous. In some ways, that had been the worst of it—trying to cope not just with the apparition of the drowned boy, the flying rocks, and the lake, but with the pervasive sense that none of this could be happening, that rich old software moguls did not try to drown novelists who strayed into their line of sight.

Had
tonight's adventure been a case of simple straying into Devore's view, though? A coincidental meeting, no more than that? Wasn't it likely he'd been having me watched ever since the Fourth of July . . . maybe from the other side of the lake, by people with high-powered optical equipment? Paranoid bullshit, I would have said . . . at least I would have said it before the two of them almost sank me in Dark Score Lake like a kid's paper boat in a mudpuddle.

I decided I didn't care who might be watching from the other side of the lake. I didn't care if the two of them were still lurking on one of the tree-shielded parts of The Street, either. I swam until I could feel strands of waterweed tickling my ankles and see the crescent of my beach. Then I stood up, wincing at the
air, which now felt cold on my skin. I limped to shore, one hand raised to fend off a hail of rocks, but no rocks came. I stood for a moment on The Street, my jeans and polo shirt dripping, looking first one way, then the other. It seemed I had this little part of the world to myself. Last, I looked back at the water, where weak moonlight beat a track from the thumbnail of beach out to the swimming float.

“Thanks, Jo,” I said, then started up the railroad ties to the house. I got about halfway, then had to stop and sit down. I had never been so utterly tired in my whole life.

I
climbed the stairs to the deck instead of going around to the front door, still moving slowly and marvelling at how my legs felt twice their normal weight. When I stepped into the living room I looked around with the wide eyes of someone who has been away for a decade and returns to find everything just as he left it—Bunter the moose on the wall, the
Boston Globe
on the couch, a compilation of
Tough Stuff
crossword puzzles on the end-table, the plate on the counter with the remains of my stir-fry still on it. Looking at these things brought the realization home full force—I had gone for a walk, leaving all this normal light clutter behind, and had almost died instead. Had almost been murdered.

I began to shake. I went into the north-wing bathroom, took off my wet clothes, and threw them into the tub—
splat.
Then, still shaking, I turned and stared at myself in the mirror over the washbasin. I looked like someone who has been on the losing side
in a barroom brawl. One bicep bore a long, clotting gash. A blackish-purple bruise was unfurling what looked like shadowy wings on my left collarbone. There was a bloody furrow on my neck and behind my ear, where the lovely Rogette had caught me with the stone in her ring.

I took my shaving mirror and used it to check the back of my head. “Can't you get that through your thick skull?” my mother used to shout at me and Sid when we were kids, and now I thanked God that Ma had apparently been right about the thickness factor, at least in my case. The spot where Devore had struck me with his cane looked like the cone of a recently extinct volcano. Whitmore's bull's-eye had left a red wound that would need stitches if I wanted to avoid a scar. Blood, rusty and thin, stained the nape of my neck all around the hairline. God knew how much had flowed out of that unpleasant-looking red mouth and been washed away by the lake.

I poured hydrogen peroxide into my cupped palm, steeled myself, and slapped it onto the gash back there like aftershave. The bite was monstrous, and I had to tighten my lips to keep from crying out. When the pain started to fade a little, I soaked cotton balls with more peroxide and cleaned my other wounds.

I showered, threw on a tee-shirt and a pair of jeans, then went into the hall to phone the County Sheriff. There was no need for directory assistance; the Castle Rock P.D. and County Sheriff's numbers were on the
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
card thumbtacked to the bulletin board, along with numbers for the fire department, the ambulance service, and the 900-number
where you could get three answers to that day's
Times
crossword puzzle for a buck-fifty.

I dialled the first three numbers fast, then began to slow down. I got as far as 955-960 before stopping altogether. I stood there in the hall with the phone pressed against my ear, visualizing another headline, this one not in the decorous
Times
but the rowdy
New York Post.
NOVELIST TO AGING COMPU-KING: “YOU BIG BULLY!”
Along with side-by-side pictures of me, looking roughly my age, and Max Devore, looking roughly a hundred and six. The
Post
would have great fun telling its readers how Devore (along with his companion, an elderly lady who might weigh ninety pounds soaking wet) had lumped up a novelist half his age—a guy who looked, in his photograph, at least, reasonably trim and fit.

The phone got tired of holding only six of the required seven numbers in its rudimentary brain, double-clicked, and dumped me back to an open line. I took the handset away from my ear, stared at it for a moment, and then set it gently back down in its cradle.

I'm not a sissy about the sometimes whimsical, sometimes hateful attention of the press, but I'm wary, as I would be around a bad-tempered fur-bearing mammal. America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any “celeb” who dares complain about his or her treatment. “Quitcha bitchin!” cry the newspapers and the TV gossip shows (the tone is one of mingled triumph and indignation). “Didja really think we paid ya the big bucks just to sing a song or swing a
Louisville Slugger? Wrong, asshole! We pay so we can be amazed when you do it well—whatever ‘it' happens to be in your particular case—and also because it's gratifying when you fuck up. The truth is you're supplies. If you cease to be amusing, we can always kill you and eat you.”

They can't
really
eat you, of course. They can print pictures of you with your shirt off and say you're running to fat, they can talk about how much you drink or how many pills you take or snicker about the night you pulled some starlet onto your lap at Spago and tried to stick your tongue in her ear, but they can't really eat you. So it wasn't the thought of the
Post
calling me a crybaby or being a part of Jay Leno's opening monologue that made me put the phone down; it was the realization that I had no proof. No one had seen us. And, I realized, finding an alibi for himself and his personal assistant would be the easiest thing in the world for Max Devore.