Lisey’s Story (12 page)

“Lisey?” Darla sounding really distressed for the first time, and Lisey returned to the present in a hurry. Of
course
Darla sounded distressed. Canty was in Boston for a week or maybe more, shopping while her husband took care of his wholesale auto business—buying program cars, auction cars, and off-lease rental cars in places like Malden and
Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin. Darla's Matt, meanwhile, was in Canada, lecturing on the migration patterns of various North American Indian tribes. This, Darla had once told Lisey, was a surprisingly profitable venture. Not that money would help them now. Now it was down to just the two of them. To sister-power. “Lise, did you hear me? Are you still th—”

“I'm here,” Lisey said. “I just lost you for a few seconds, sorry. Maybe it's the phone—no one's used this one for a long time. It's downstairs in the barn. What was going to be my office, before Scott died?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Darla sounded completely mystified.
Has no smucking idea what I'm talking about,
Lisey thought. “Can you hear me now?”

“Clear as a bell.” Looking at the silver spade as she spoke. Thinking of Gerd Allen Cole. Thinking
I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias.

Darla took a deep breath. Lisey heard it, like a wind blowing down the telephone line. “She won't exactly admit it, but I think she . . . well . . . drank her own blood this time, Lise—her lips and chin were all bloody when I got here, but nothing inside her mouth's cut. She looked the way we used to when Good Ma'd give us one of her lipsticks to play with.”

What Lisey flashed on wasn't those old dress-up and makeup days, those clunk-around-in-Good-Ma's-high-heels days, but that hot afternoon in Nashville, Scott lying on the pavement shivering, his lips smeared with candy-colored blood. Nobody loves a clown at midnight.

Listen, little Lisey. I'll make how it sounds when it looks around.

But in the corner the silver spade gleamed . . . and was it
dented?
She believed it was. If she ever doubted that she'd been in time . . . if she ever woke in the dark, sweating, sure she'd been just a second too late and the remaining years of her marriage had consequently been lost . . .

“Lisey, will you come? When she's in the clear, she's asking for you.”

Alarm bells went off in Lisey's head. “What do you mean, when she's in the clear? I thought you said she was okay.”

“She is . . . I
think
she is.” A pause. “She asked for you, and she asked for tea. I made her some, and she drank it. That was good, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” Lisey said. “Darl, do you know what brought this on?”

“Oh, you bet. I guess it's common chat around town, although I didn't know until Mrs. Jones told me over the phone.”

“What?” But Lisey had a pretty good idea.

“Charlie Corriveau's back in town,” Darla said. Then, lowering her voice: “Good old Shootin' Beans. Everyone's favorite banker. He brought a girl with him. A little French postcard from up in the St. John Valley.” She gave this the Maine pronunciation, so it came out slurry-lyrical, almost
Senjun.

Lisey stood looking at the silver spade, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That there
was
another she had no doubt.

“They're married, Lisey,” Darla said, and through the phone came a series of choked gurgles Lisey at first took for smothered sobs. A moment later she realized her sister was trying to laugh without being overheard by Amanda, who was God knew where in the house.

“I'll be there as quick as I can,” she said. “And Darl?”

No answer, just more of those choking noises—
whig, whig, whig
was what they sounded like over the phone.

“If she hears you laughing, the next one she takes the knife to is apt to be you.”

At that the laughing sounds stopped. Lisey heard Darla take a long, steadying breath. “Her shrink isn't around anymore, you know,” Darla said at last. “The Whitlow woman? The one who always wore the beads? She moved to Alaska, I think it was.”

Lisey thought Montana, but it hardly mattered. “Well, we'll see how bad she is. There's the place Scott looked into . . . Greenlawn, up in the Twin Cities—”

“Oh,
Lisey!”
The voice of Good Ma, the very voice.

“Lisey-what?” she asked sharply. “Lisey-
what
? Are
you
going to move in with her and keep her from carving Charlie Corriveau's initials on her boobs the next time she goes Freak City? Or maybe you've got Canty tapped for the job.”

“Lisey, I didn't mean—”

“Or maybe Billy can come home from Tufts and take care of her. What's one more Dean's List student, more or less?”

“Lisey—”

“Well what
are
you proposing?” She heard the hectoring tone in her voice and hated it. This was another thing money did to you after ten or twenty years—made you think you had the right to kick your way out of any tight corner you found yourself in. She remembered Scott saying that people shouldn't be allowed houses with more than two toilets to shit in, it gave them delusions of grandeur. She glanced at the shovel again. It gleamed at her. Calmed her.
You saved him,
it said.
Not on your watch,
it said. Was that true? She couldn't remember. Was it another of the things she'd forgotten on purpose? She couldn't remember that, either. What a hoot. What a bitter hoot.

“Lisey, I'm sorry . . . I just—”

“I know.” What she knew was that she was tired and confused and ashamed of her outburst. “We'll work it out. I'll come right now. Okay?”

“Yes.” Relief in Darla's voice. “Okay.”

“That Frenchman,” Lisey said. “What a jerk. Good riddance to bad trash.”

“Get here as soon as you can.”

“I will. G'bye.”

Lisey hung up. She walked over to the northeast corner of the room and grasped the shaft of the silver spade. It was as if she were doing it for the first time, and was that so strange? When Scott passed it to her, she'd only been interested in the glittering silver scoop with its engraved message, and by the time she got ready to swing the darn thing, her hands had been moving on their own . . . or so it had seemed; she supposed some primitive, survival-oriented part of her brain had actually been moving them for the rest of her, for Thoroughly Modern Lisey.

She slid one palm down the smooth wood, relishing the smooth slide, and as she bent, her eyes once more fell on the three stacked boxes with their exuberant message slashed across the side of each one in black Magic Marker:
SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS!
The box on top had once contained Gilbey's Gin, and the flaps had been folded together rather than taped. Lisey brushed away the dust, marveling at how thick it was, marveling at the realization that the last hands to touch this box—to
fill it and fold the flaps and place it atop the others—now lay folded themselves, and under the ground.

The box was full of paper. Manuscripts, she presumed. The slightly yellowed title sheet on top was capitalized, underlined, and centered. Scott's name neatly typed beneath, also centered. All this she recognized as she would have recognized his smile—it had been his style of presentation when she met him as a young man, and had never changed. What she didn't recognize was the title of this one:

IKE COMES HOME

By Scott Landon

Was it a novel? A short story? Just looking into the box, it was impossible to tell. But there had to be a thousand or more pages in there, most of them in a single high stack under that title-page but still more crammed in sideways in two directions, like packing. If it was a novel, and this box contained all of it, it had to be longer than
Gone With the Wind.
Was that possible? Lisey supposed it might be. Scott always showed her his work when it was done, and he was happy to show her work in progress if she asked about it (a privilege he accorded no one else, not even his longtime editor, Carson Foray), but if she didn't ask, he usually kept it to himself. And he'd been prolific right up until the day he died. On the road or at home, Scott Landon
wrote.

But a thousand-pager? Surely he would have mentioned that. I bet it's only a short story, and one he didn't like, at that. And the rest of the stuff in this box, the stuff underneath and crammed in at the side? Copies of his first couple of novels, probably. Or galley-pages. What he used to call “foul matter.”

But hadn't he shipped all the foul matter back to Pitt when he was done with it, for the Scott Landon Collection in their library? For the Incunks to drool over, in other words? And if there were copies of his early manuscripts in these boxes, how come there were more copies (carbons from the dark ages, mostly) in the closets marked
STORAGE
upstairs? And now that she thought about it, what about the cubbies on either side of the erstwhile chicken pen? What was stored in those?

She looked upward, almost as if she were Supergirl and could see the
answer with her X-ray vision, and that was when the telephone on her desk once more began to ring.

She crossed to the desk and snared the handset with a mixture of dread and irritation . . . but quite a bit heavier on the irritation. It was possible—just—that Amanda had decided to whack off an ear à la Van Gogh or maybe slit her throat instead of just a thigh or a forearm, but Lisey doubted it. All her life Darla had been the sister most apt to call back three minutes later, starting off with
I just remembered
or
I forgot to tell you.

“What is it, Darl?”

There was a moment or two of silence, and then a male voice—one she thought she knew—said: “Mrs. Landon?”

It was Lisey's turn to pause as she ran through a list of male names. Pretty short list these days; it was amazing how your husband's death pruned your catalogue of acquaintances. There was Jacob Montano, their lawyer in Portland; Arthur Williams, the accountant in New York who wouldn't let go of a dollar until the eagle shrieked for mercy (or died of asphyxiation); Deke Williams—no relation to Arthur—the contractor from Bridgton who'd turned the empty haylofts over the barn into Scott's study and who'd also remodeled the second floor of their house, transforming previously dim rooms into wonderlands of light; Smiley Flanders, the plumber from over in Motton with the endless supply of jokes both clean and dirty; Charlie Haddonfield, Scott's agent, who called on business from time to time (foreign rights and short-story anthologies, mostly); plus the handful of Scott's friends who still kept in touch. But none of those people would call on this number, surely, even if it were listed.
Was
it? She couldn't remember. In any case, none of the names seemed to fit how she knew (or thought she knew) the voice. But, damn it—

“Mrs. Landon?”

“Who is this?” she asked.

“My name doesn't matter, Missus,” the voice replied, and Lisey had a sudden vivid image of Gerd Allen Cole, lips moving in what might have been a prayer. Except for the gun in his long-fingered poet's hand.
Dear God, don't let this be another one of those,
she thought.
Don't let it be another Blondie.
Yet she saw she once more had the silver spade in her hand—she'd grasped its wooden shaft without thinking when she picked up the phone—and that seemed to promise her that it was, it was.

“It matters to me,” she said, and was astounded at her businesslike tone of voice. How could such a brisk, no-nonsense sentence emerge from such a suddenly dry mouth? And then, whoomp, just like that, where she'd heard the voice before came to her: that very afternoon, on the answering machine attached to this very phone. And it was really no wonder she hadn't been able to make the connection right away, because then the voice had only spoken three words:
I'll try again.
“You identify yourself this minute or I'm going to hang up.”

There was a sigh from the other end. It sounded both tired and good-natured. “Don't make this hard on me, Missus; I'm tryin-a help you. I really am.”

Lisey thought of the dusty voices from Scott's favorite movie,
The Last Picture Show
; she thought again of Hank Williams singing “Jambalaya.”
Dress in style, go hog-wile, me-oh-my-oh.
She said, “I'm hanging up now, goodbye, have a nice life.” Although she did not so much as stir the phone from her ear. Not yet.

“You can call me Zack, Missus. That's as good a name as any. All right?”

“Zack what?”

“Zack McCool.”

“Uh-huh, and I'm Liz Taylor.”

“You wanted a name, I gave you one.”

He had her there. “And how did you get this number, Zack?”

“Directory Assistance.” So it
was
listed—that explained that. Maybe. “Now will you listen a minute?”

“I'm listening.” Listening . . . and gripping the silver spade . . . and waiting for the wind to change. Maybe that most of all. Because a change was coming. Every nerve in her body said so.

“Missus, there was a man came see you a little while ago to have a look through your late husband's papers, and may I say I'm sorry for your loss.”

Lisey ignored this last. “Lots of people have asked me to let them look through Scott's papers since he died.” She hoped the man on the other end of the line wouldn't be able to guess or intuit how hard her heart was now beating. “I've told them all the same thing: eventually I'll get around to sharing them with—”

“This fella's from your late husband's old college, Missus. He says he is the logical choice, since these papers're apt to wind up there, anyway.”