Bag of Bones (58 page)

“Did she take the little stuffed dog from her Happy Meal out with her just now?”

A long pause. At last she said “My God” in a voice so low I could hardly hear it. Then again: “How—”

“I don't
know
how. I don't know if you're still in a . . . a bad situation, either, or why you might be, but I feel that you are. That you both are.” I could have said more, but I was afraid she'd think I'd gone entirely off the rails.

“He's
dead
!” she burst out. “That old man is
dead
! Why can't he leave us alone?”

“Maybe he has. Maybe I'm wrong about all this. But there's no harm in being careful, is there?”

“No,” she said. “Usually that's true.”

“Usually?”

“Why don't you come and see me, Mike? Maybe
we
could go to the Fair together.”

“Maybe this fall we will. All three of us.”

“I'd like that.”

“In the meantime, I'm thinking about the key.”

“Thinking is half your problem, Mike,” she said, and laughed again. Ruefully, I thought. And I saw what she meant. What she didn't seem to understand
was that feeling was the other half. It's a sling, and in the end I think it rocks most of us to death.

*   *   *

I worked for awhile, then carried the IBM back into the house and left the manuscript on top. I was done with it, at least for the time being. No more looking for the way back through the wardrobe; no more Andy Drake and John Shackleford until this was over. And, as I dressed in long pants and a button-up shirt for the first time in what felt like weeks, it occurred to me that perhaps something—some force—had been trying to sedate me with the story I was telling. With the ability to work again. It made sense; work had always been my drug of choice, even better than booze or the Mellaril I still kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Or maybe work was only the delivery system, the hypo with all the dreamy dreams inside it. Maybe the real drug was the zone. Being in the zone. Feeling it, you sometimes hear the basketball players say. I was in the zone and I was really feeling it.

I grabbed the keys to the Chevrolet off the counter and looked at the fridge as I did. The magnets were circled again. In the middle was a message I'd seen before, one that was now instantly understandable, thanks to the extra Magnabet letters:

help her

“I'm doing my best,” I said, and went out.

*   *   *

Three miles north on Route 68—by then you're on the part of it which used to be known as Castle Rock
Road—there's a greenhouse with a shop in front of it. Slips 'n Greens, it's called, and Jo used to spend a fair amount of time there, buying gardening supplies or just noodling with the two women who ran the place. One of them was Helen Auster, Kenny's wife.

I pulled in there at around ten o'clock that Sunday morning (it was open, of course; during tourist season almost every Maine shopkeeper turns heathen) and parked next to a Beamer with New York plates. I paused long enough to hear the weather forecast on the radio—continued hot and humid for another forty-eight hours at least—and then got out. A woman wearing a bathing suit, a skort, and a giant yellow sunhat emerged from the shop with a bag of peat moss cradled in her arms. She gave me a little smile. I returned it with eighteen per cent interest. She was from New York, and that meant she wasn't a Martian.

The shop was even hotter and damper than the white morning outside. Lila Proulx, the co-owner, was on the phone. There was a little fan beside the cash register and she was standing directly in front of it, flapping the front of her sleeveless blouse. She saw me and twiddled her fingers in a wave. I twiddled mine back, feeling like someone else. Work or no work, I was still zoning. Still feeling it.

I walked around the shop, picking up a few things almost at random, watching Lila out of the corner of my eye and waiting for her to get off the phone so I could talk to her . . . and all the time my own private hyperdrive was humming softly away. At last she hung up and I came to the counter.

“Michael Noonan, what a sight for sore eyes you
are!” she said, and began ringing up my purchases. “I was awfully sorry to hear about Johanna. Got to get that right up front. Jo was a pet.”

“Thanks, Lila.”

“Welcome. Don't need to say any more about it, but with a thing like that it's best to put it right up front. I've always believed it, always will believe it. Right up front. Going to do a little gardening, are you?”
Gointer do a little ga'adnin, aaa you?

“If it ever cools off.”

“Ayuh! Isn't it wicked?” She flapped the top of her blouse again to show me how wicked it was, then pointed at one of my purchases. “Want this one in a special bag? Always safe, never sorry, that's my motto.”

I nodded, then looked at the little blackboard tilted against the counter.
FRESH BLUEBERRYS
, the chalked message read.
THE CROP IS IN!

“I'll have a pint of berries, too,” I said. “As long as they're not Friday's. I can do better than Friday.”

She nodded vigorously, as if to say she knew damned well I could. “These were on the bush yest'y. That fresh enough for you?”

“Good as gold,” I said. “Blueberry's the name of Kenny's dog, isn't it?”

“Ain't he a funny one? God, I love a big dog, if he's behaved.” She turned, got a pint of berries from her little fridge, and put them in another bag for me.

“Where's Helen?” I asked. “Day off?”

“Not her,” Lila said. “If she's in town, you can't get her out of this place 'less you beat her with a stick. She and Kenny and the kids went down Taxachusetts. Them and her brother's family club
together and get a seaside cottage two weeks every summer. They all went. Old Blueberry, he'll chase seagulls until he drops.” She laughed—it was a loud and hearty one. It made me think of Sara Tidwell. Or maybe it was the way Lila looked at me as she did it. There was no laughter in her eyes. They were small and considering, coldly curious.

Would you for Christ's sake quit it?
I told myself.
They can't all be in on it together, Mike!

Couldn't they, though? There
is
such a thing as town consciousness—anyone who doubts it has never been to a New England town meeting. Where there's a consciousness, is there not likely to be a subconscious? And if Kyra and I were doing the old mind-meld thing, could not other people in TR-90 also be doing it, perhaps without even knowing it? We all shared the same air and land; we shared the lake and the aquifer which lay below everything, buried water tasting of rock and minerals. We shared The Street as well, that place where good pups and vile dogs could walk side-by-side.

As I started out with my purchases in a cloth carry-handle bag, Lila said: “What a shame about Royce Merrill. Did you hear?”

“No,” I said.

“Fell down his cellar stairs yest'y evening. What a man his age was doing going down such a steep flight of steps is beyond me, but I suppose once you get to his age, you have your own reasons for doing things.”

Is he dead?
I started to ask, then rephrased. It wasn't the way the question was expressed on the TR. “Did he pass?”

“Not yet. Motton Rescue took him to Castle
County General. He's in a coma.”
Comber,
she said it. “They don't think he'll ever wake up, poor fella. There's a piece of history that'll die with him.”

“I suppose that's true.”
Good riddance,
I thought. “Does he have children?”

“No. There have been Merrills on the TR for two hundred years; one died at Cemetery Ridge. But all the old families are dying out now. You have a nice day, Mike.” She smiled. Her eyes remained flat and considering.

I got into my Chevy, put the bag with my purchases in it on the passenger seat, then simply sat for a moment, letting the air conditioner pour cool air on my face and neck. Kenny Auster was in Taxachusetts. That was good. A step in the right direction.

But there was still my caretaker.

*   *   *

“Bill's not here,” Yvette said. She stood in the door, blocking it as well as she could (you can only do so much in that regard when you're five-three and weigh roughly a hundred pounds), studying me with the gimlet gaze of a nightclub bouncer denying reentry to a drunk who's been tossed out on his ear once already.

I was on the porch of the neat-as-ever-you-saw Cape Cod which stands at the top of Peabody Hill and looks all the way across New Hampshire and into Vermont's back yard. Bill's equipment sheds were lined up to the left of the house, all of them painted the same shade of gray, each with its own sign:
DEAN CARETAKING
, No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3. Parked in front of No. 2 was Bill's Dodge Ram. I looked at it, then back at Yvette. Her lips tightened a little more.
Another notch and I figured they'd be gone entirely.

“He went to North Conway with Butch Wiggins,” she said. “They went in Butch's truck. To get—”

“No need lying for me, dear heart,” Bill said from behind her.

It was still over an hour shy of noon, and on the Lord's Day to boot, but I had never heard a man who sounded more tired. He clumped down the hall, and as he came out of its shadows and into the light—the sun was finally burning through the murk—I saw that Bill now looked his age. Every year of it, and maybe ten more to grow on. He was wearing his usual khaki shirt and pants—Bill Dean would be a Dickies man until the day he died—but his shoulders looked slumped, almost sprained, as if he'd spent a week lugging buckets that were too heavy for him. The falling-away of his face had finally begun, an indefinable something that makes the eyes look too big, the jaw too prominent, the mouth a bit loose. He looked old. There were no children to carry on the family line of work, either; all the old families were dying out, Lila Proulx had said. And maybe that was a good thing.

“Bill—” she began, but he raised one of his big hands to stop her. The callused fingertips shook a little.

“Go in the kitchen a dight,” he told her. “I need to talk to my
compadre
here. 'T'won't take long.”

Yvette looked at him, and when she looked back at me, she had indeed reached zero lip-surface. There was just a black line where they had been, like a mark dashed off with a pencil. I saw with woeful clarity that she hated me.

“Don't you tire him out,” she said to me. “He hasn't been sleepin. It's the heat.” She walked back down the hall, all stiff back and high shoulders, disappearing into shadows that were probably cool. It always seems to be cool in the houses of old people, have you noticed?

Bill came out onto the porch and put his big hands into the pockets of his pants without offering to shake with me. “I ain't got nothin to say to you. You and me's quits.”

“Why, Bill? Why are we quits?”

He looked west, where the hills stepped into the burning summer haze, disappearing in it before they could become mountains, and said nothing.

“I'm trying to help that young woman.”

He gave me a look from the corners of his eyes that I could read well enough. “Ayuh. Help y'self right into her pants. I see men come up from New York and New Jersey with their young girls. Summer weekends, ski weekends, it don't matter. Men who go with girls that age always look the same, got their tongues run out even when their mouths are shut. Now you look the same.”

I felt both angry and embarrassed, but I resisted the urge to chase him in that direction. That was what he wanted.

“What happened here?” I asked him. “What did your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers do to Sara Tidwell and her family? You didn't just move them on, did you?”

“Didn't have to,” Bill said, looking past me at the hills. His eyes were moist almost to the point of tears, but his jaw was set and hard. “They moved on themselves.
Never was a nigger who didn't have an itchy foot, my dad used to say.”

“Who set the trap that killed Son Tidwell's boy? Was it your father, Bill? Was it Fred?”

His eyes moved; his jaw never did. “I dunno what you're talking about.”

“I hear him crying in my house. Do you know what it's like to hear a dead child crying in your house?
Some bastard trapped him like a weasel and I hear him crying in my fucking house!
”

“You're going to need a new caretaker,” Bill said. “I can't do for you no more. Don't want to. What I want is for you to get off my porch.”

“What's happening? Help me, for Christ's sake.”

“I'll help you with the toe of my shoe if you don't get going on your own.”

I looked at him a moment longer, taking in the wet eyes and the set jaw, his divided nature written on his face.

“I lost my wife, you old bastard,” I said. “A woman you claimed to love.”

Now his jaw moved at last. He looked at me with surprise and injury. “That didn't happen
here,
” he said. “That didn't have anything to do with
here.
She might've been off the TR because . . . well, she might've had her reasons to be off the TR . . . but she just had a stroke. Would have happened anywhere.
Anywhere.
”

“I don't believe that. I don't think you do, either.
Something followed her to Derry,
maybe because she was pregnant . . .”

Bill's eyes widened. I gave him a chance to say something, but he didn't take it.

“. . . or maybe just because she knew too much.”

“She had a stroke.” Bill's voice wasn't quite even. “I read the obituary myself. She had a damn
stroke.
”

“What did she find out? Talk to me, Bill. Please.”