Bag of Bones (78 page)

*   *   *

'T'wasn't the stawm of the century, chummy, and don't you go thinkin that it was. Nossir.

So said the old-timers who sat in front of the big Army medics' tent that served as the Lakeview General that late summer and fall. A huge elm had toppled across Route 68 and bashed the store in like a Saltines box. Adding injury to insult, the elm had carried a bunch of spitting live lines with it. They ignited propane from a ruptured tank, and the whole thing went kaboom. The tent was a pretty good warm-weather substitute, though, and folks on the TR took to saying they was goin down to the
MASH
for bread and beer—this because you could still see a faded red cross on both sides of the tent's roof.

The old-timers sat along one canvas wall in folding chairs, waving to other old-timers when they went
pooting by in their rusty old-timer cars (all certified old-timers own either Fords or Chevys, so I'm well on my way in that regard), swapping their undershirts for flannels as the days began to cool toward cider season and spud-digging, watching the township start to rebuild itself around them. And as they watched they talked about the ice storm of the past winter, the one that knocked out lights and splintered a million trees between Kittery and Fort Kent; they talked about the cyclones that touched down in August of 1985; they talked about the sleet hurricane of 1927. Now
there
was some stawms, they said.
There
was some stawms, by Gorry.

I'm sure they've got a point, and I don't argue with them—you rarely win an argument with a genuine Yankee old-timer, never if it's about the weather—but for me the storm of July 21, 1998, will always be
the
storm. And I know a little girl who feels the same. She may live until 2100, given all the benefits of modern medicine, but I think that for Kyra Elizabeth Devore that will always be
the
storm. The one where her dead mother came to her dressed in the lake.

*   *   *

The first vehicle to come down my driveway didn't arrive until almost six o'clock. It turned out to be not a Castle County police car but a yellow bucket-loader with flashing yellow lights on top of the cab and a guy in a Central Maine Power Company slicker working the controls. The guy in the other seat was a cop, though—was in fact Norris Ridgewick, the County Sheriff himself. And he came to my door with his gun drawn.

The change in the weather the TV guy had promised had already arrived, clouds and storm-cells driven east by a chilly wind running just under gale force. Trees had continued to fall in the dripping woods for at least an hour after the rain stopped. Around five o'clock I made us toasted-cheese sandwiches and tomato soup . . . comfort food, Jo would have called it. Kyra ate listlessly, but she did eat, and she drank a lot of milk. I had wrapped her in another of my tee-shirts and she tied her own hair back. I offered her the white ribbons, but she shook her head decisively and opted for a rubber band instead. “I don't like those ribbons anymore,” she said. I decided I didn't, either, and threw them away. Ki watched me do it and offered no objection. Then I crossed the living room to the woodstove.

“What are you doing?” She finished her second glass of milk, wriggled off her chair, and came over to me.

“Making a fire. Maybe all those hot days thinned my blood. That's what my mom would have said, anyway.”

She watched silently as I pulled sheet after sheet from the pile of paper I'd taken off the table and stacked on top of the woodstove, balled each one up, and slipped it in through the door. When I felt I'd loaded enough, I began to lay bits of kindling on top.

“What's written on those papers?” Ki asked.

“Nothing important.”

“Is it a story?”

“Not really. It was more like . . . oh, I don't know. A crossword puzzle. Or a letter.”

“Pretty long letter,” she said, and then laid her head against my leg as if she were tired.

“Yeah,” I said. “Love letters usually are, but keeping them around is a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because they . . .”
Can come back to haunt you
was what rose to mind, but I wouldn't say it. “Because they can embarrass you in later life.”

“Oh.”

“Besides,” I said. “These papers are like your ribbons, in a way.”

“You don't like them anymore.”

“Right.”

She saw the box then—the tin box with
JO'S NOTIONS
written on the front. It was on the counter between the living room and the sink, not far from where old Krazy Kat had hung on the wall. I didn't remember bringing the box up from the studio with me, but I suppose I might not have; I was pretty freaked. I also think it could have come up . . . kind of by itself. I
do
believe such things now; I have reason to.

Kyra's eyes lit up in a way they hadn't since she had wakened from her short nap to find out her mother was dead. She stood on tiptoe to take hold of the box, then ran her small fingers across the gilt letters. I thought about how important it was for a kid to own a tin box. You had to have one for your secret stuff—the best toy, the prettiest bit of lace, the first piece of jewelry. Or a picture of your mother, perhaps.

“This is so . . . 
pretty,
” she said in a soft, awed voice.

“You can have it if you don't mind it saying
JO'S
NOTIONS
instead of
KI'S NOTIONS
. There are some papers in it I want to read, but I could put them somewhere else.”

She looked at me to make sure I wasn't kidding, saw I wasn't.

“I'd love it,” she said in the same soft, awed voice.

I took the box from her, scooped out the steno books, notes, and clippings, then handed it back to Ki. She practiced taking the lid off and then putting it back on.

“Guess what I'll put in here,” she said.

“Secret treasures?”

“Yes!” she said, and actually smiled for a moment. “Who was Jo, Mike? Do I know her? I do, don't I? She was one of the fridgeafator people.”

“She—” A thought occurred. I shuffled through the yellowed clippings. Nothing. I thought I'd lost it somewhere along the way, then saw a corner of what I was looking for peeking from the middle of one of the steno notebooks. I slid it out and handed it to Ki.

“What is it?”

“A backwards photo. Hold it up to the light.”

She did, and looked for a long time, rapt. Faint as a dream I could see my wife in her hand, my wife standing on the swimming float in her two-piece suit.

“That's Jo,” I said.

“She's pretty. I'm glad to have her box for my things.”

“I am too, Ki.” I kissed the top of her head.

*   *   *

When Sheriff Ridgewick hammered on the door, I thought it wise to answer with my hands up. He
looked wired. What seemed to ease the situation was a simple, uncalculated question.

“Where's Alan Pangborn these days, Sheriff?”

“Over New Hampshire,” Ridgewick said, lowering his pistol a little (a minute or two later he holstered it without even seeming to be aware he had done so). “He and Polly are doing real well. Except for her arthritis. That's nasty, I guess, but she still has her good days. A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again, that's what I think. Mr. Noonan, I have a lot of questions for you. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“First off and most important, do you have the child? Kyra Devore?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“I'll be happy to show you.”

We walked down the north-wing corridor and stood just outside the bedroom doorway, looking in. The duvet was pulled up to her chin and she was sleeping deeply. The stuffed dog was curled in one hand—we could just see its muddy tail poking out of her fist at one end and its nose poking out at the other. We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, watching her sleep in the light of a summer evening. In the woods the trees had stopped falling, but the wind still blew. Around the eaves of Sara Laughs it made a sound like ancient music.

I
t snowed for Christmas—a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in
It's a Wonderful Life.
By the time I came back from checking Kyra for the third time, it was quarter past one on the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the snow had stopped. A late moon, plump but pale, was peeking through the unravelling fluff of clouds.

I was Christmasing with Frank again, and we were the last two up. The kids, Ki included, were dead to the world, sleeping off the annual bacchanal of food and presents. Frank was on his third Scotch—it had been a three-Scotch story if there ever was one, I guess—but I'd barely drunk the top off my first one. I think I might have gotten into the bottle quite heavily if not for Ki. On the days when I have her I usually don't drink so much as a glass of beer. And to have her three days in a row . . . but shit,
kemo sabe,
if you can't spend Christmas with your kid, what the hell is Christmas for?

“Are you all right?” Frank asked when I sat down again and took another little token sip from my glass.

I grinned at that. Not is
she
all right but are
you
all right. Well, nobody ever said Frank was stupid.

“You should've seen me when the Department of Human Services let me have her for a weekend in October. I must have checked on her a dozen times before I went to bed . . . and then I
kept
checking. Getting up and peeking in on her, listening to her breathe. I didn't sleep a wink Friday night, caught maybe three hours on Saturday. So this is a big improvement. But if you ever blab any of what I've told you, Frank—if they ever hear about me filling up that bathtub before the storm knocked the gennie out—I can kiss my chances of adopting her goodbye. I'll probably have to fill out a form in triplicate before they even let me attend her high-school graduation.”

I hadn't meant to tell Frank the bathtub part, but once I started talking, almost everything spilled out. I suppose it had to spill to someone if I was ever to get on with my life. I'd assumed that John Storrow would be the one on the other side of the confessional when the time came, but John didn't want to talk about any of those events except as they bore on our ongoing legal business, which nowadays is all about Kyra Elizabeth Devore.

“I'll keep my mouth shut, don't worry. How goes the adoption battle?”

“Slow. I've come to loathe the State of Maine court system, and DHS as well. You take the people who work in those bureaucracies one by one and they're mostly fine, but when you put them together . . .”

“Bad, huh?”

“I sometimes feel like a character in
Bleak House.
That's the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers. John tells me to be patient and count my blessings, that we're making amazing progress considering that I'm that most untrustworthy of creatures, an unmarried white male of middle age, but Ki's been in two foster-home situations since Mattie died, and—”

“Doesn't she have kin in one of those neighboring towns?”

“Mattie's aunt. She didn't want anything to do with Ki when Mattie was alive and has even less interest now. Especially since—”

“—since Ki's not going to be rich.”

“Yeah.”

“The Whitmore woman was lying about Devore's will.”

“Absolutely. He left everything to a foundation that's supposed to foster global computer literacy. With due respect to the number-crunchers of the world, I can't imagine a colder charity.”

“How is John?”

“Pretty well mended, but he's never going to get the use of his right arm back entirely. He damned near died of blood-loss.”

Frank had led me away from the entwined subjects of Ki and custody quite well for a man deep into his third Scotch, and I was willing enough to go. I could hardly bear to think of her long days and longer nights in those homes where the Department of Human Services stores away children like knickknacks nobody wants. Ki didn't live in those places but only existed in them, pale and listless, like a well-fed rabbit kept in a cage. Each time she saw my car turning in or pulling up she came alive, waving her arms and dancing like Snoopy on his doghouse. Our weekend in October had been wonderful (despite my obsessive need to check her every half hour or so after she was asleep), and the Christmas holiday had been even better. Her emphatic desire to be with me was helping in court more than anything else . . . yet the wheels still turned slowly.

Maybe in the spring, Mike,
John told me. He was a new John these days, pale and serious. The slightly arrogant eager beaver who had wanted nothing more than to go head to head with Mr. Maxwell “Big Bucks” Devore was no longer in evidence. John had learned something about mortality on the twenty-first of July, and something about the world's idiot cruelty, as well. The man who had taught himself to shake with his left hand instead of his right was no longer interested in partying 'til he puked. He was seeing a girl in Philly, the daughter of one of his mother's friends. I had no idea if it was serious or not, Ki's “Unca John” is close-mouthed about that part of his life, but when a young man is of his own accord seeing the daughter of one of his mother's friends, it usually is.

Maybe in the spring: it was his mantra that late fall and early winter.
What am I doing wrong?
I asked him once—this was just after Thanksgiving and another setback.

Nothing,
he replied.
Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the
putative adopter is a man, it's worse.
At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, poking the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist.