Lisey’s Story (70 page)

“Not at all, Mrs. Landon,” Partridge said, chuckling expansively, and Lisey knew he was afraid she might change her mind if given too long to think the matter over. “I've got a couple of young folks in mind who'll be perfect for the job. You wait and see.”

Less than an hour after her conversation with Bertram Partridge, Lisey's phone rang while she was making herself a tuna on rye for her supper: thin commons, but all she wanted. Outside, the heat lay on the land like a blanket. All color had been bleached from the sky; it was a perfect simmering white from horizon to horizon. As she mixed the tuna and mayonnaise with a little chopped onion, she had been thinking of how she'd found Amanda on one of those benches, looking out at the
Hollyhocks
, and this was strange, because she hardly ever thought of that anymore; it was like a dream to her. She remembered Amanda's asking if she'd have to drink any of that

(
bug-juuuuice
)

shitty punch if she came back—her way of trying to find out, Lisey supposed, if she'd have to remain incarcerated at Greenlawn—and Lisey had promised her no more punch, no more bug-juice. Amanda had agreed to return, although it had been clear she didn't really want to, that she would have been happy to continue sitting on the bench and looking out at the
Hollyhocks
until, in Good Ma's words, “eternity was halfway over.” Just sitting there among the scary shrouded things and silent gazers, a bench or two above the woman in the caftan. The one who had murdered her child.

Lisey put her sandwich down on the counter, suddenly cold all over. She couldn't know that. There was no
way
she could know that.

But she did.

Be quiet
, the woman had said.
Be quiet while I think of why I did it
.

And then Amanda had said something totally unexpected, hadn't she? Something about Scott. Although nothing Amanda said
then
could be important
now
, not with Scott dead and Jim Dooley also dead (or
wishing
he were), but still Lisey wished she could remember exactly what it might have been.

“Said she'd come back,” Lisey murmured. “Said she'd come back if it would keep Dooley from hurting me.”

Yes, and Amanda had kept her word, God bless her, but Lisey wanted to remember something she'd said
after
that.
I don't see what it can have to do with Scott
, Amanda had said in that faintly distracted voice of hers.
He's been dead such a long time . . . although . . . I think he told me something about
—

That was when the phone rang, shattering the fragile glass of Lisey's recollection. And as she picked it up, a crazy certainty came to her: it would be Dooley.
Hello, Missus
, the Black Prince of the Incunks would say.
I'm callin from inside the belly of the beast. How y'all doin today?

“Hello?” she said. She knew she was gripping the phone too tightly, but was helpless to do anything about it.

“Danny Boeckman here, Mrs. Landon,” the voice at the other end said, and the
Mrs
. was too close for comfort, but
here
came out
heah
, a comfortable Yankee pronunciation, and Deputy Boeckman sounded uncharacteristically excited, almost bubbly, and therefore boyish. “Guess what?”

“Can't guess,” Lisey said, but another crazy idea came to her: he was going to say they drew straws down at the Sheriff's Office to see who was going to call up and ask her out on a date and he drew the short one. Except why would he sound excited about
that?

“We found the dome-light cover!”

Lisey had no idea what he was talking about. “I beg pardon?”

“Doolin—the guy you knew as Zack McCool and then as Jim Dooley—stole that PT Cruiser and used it while he was stalking you, Mrs. Landon. We were positive of that. And he was keeping it stashed out in that old gravel pit between runs, we were positive of that, too. We just couldn't prove it, because—”

“He wiped off all his fingerprints.”

“Ayuh, and got em all. But every now n then me n Plug went out there—”

“Plug?”

“I'm sorry, Joe. Deputy Alston?”

Plug
, she thought. Aware for the first time, in a clear-seeing way, that these were real men with real lives. With nicknames.
Plug
, she thought.
Deputy Joe Alston, also known as Plug
.

“Mrs. Landon? Are you there?”

“Yes, Dan. May I call you Dan?”

“Sure, you bet. Anyway, every now n then we went sniffin round out there to see if we couldn't find some prizes, because there was plenty of sign that he'd spent time in that pit—candy-wrappers, a couple of RC bottles, things like that.”

“RC,” she said softly, and thought:
Bool, Dan. Bool, Plug. Bool, The End
.

“Right, that was the brand he seemed to favor, but not a single print on a single cast-off bottle matched up to one of his. The only match we got was to a fella who stole a car back in the late seventies and now clerks at the Quick-E-Mart over in Oxford. The other prints we got off the bottles, we surmise those were clerk-prints, too. But yest'y noon, Mrs. Landon—”

“Lisey.”

There was a pause while he considered this. Then he went on. “Yest'y noon, Lisey, on a little track leadin out of that pit, I found the grand prize—the cover to that dome-light. He'd pulled it off and threw it into the puckies.” Boeckman's voice rose, became triumphant—became not the voice of a Deputy Sheriff but perfectly human. “And that was the one thing he forgot to handle with gloves on or wipe off later! A big thumbprint on one side, a big fat old index-finger on the other! Where he gripped it. We got the results back by fax this morning.”

“John Doolin?”

“Ayuh. Nine points of comparison.
Nine!
” There was a pause, and when he spoke again, some of the triumph had gone out of his voice. “Now if we could only find the son-of-a-buck.”

“I'm sure he'll turn up in time,” she said, and cast a longing glance at her tuna sandwich. She'd lost her train of thought about Amanda, but had regained her appetite. To Lisey that seemed like a fair swap, especially on such a boogery-hot day. “Even if he doesn't, he's stopped harassing me.”

“He's left Castle County, I'd stake my reputation on that.” A note of unmistakable pride crept into Deputy Sheriff Dan Boeckman's voice. “Got a little too hot for him here, I guess, so he ditched his ride and left. Plug feels the same. Jim Dooley and Elvis have both left the building.”

“Plug, is that for chewing tobacco?”

“No, ma'am, not at all. In high school, he and I played the line on the Castle Hills Knights team that won the Class A State Championship. Bangor Rams was favored by three touchdowns, but we shocked em. Only team from our part of the state to win a gold football since the nineteen-fifties. And Joey, no one could stop him, not that whole season. Even with four guys hangin off him, he kept pluggin. So we called him Plug, and I still do.”

“If I called him that, do you think he'd swat me?”

Dan Boeckman laughed, delighted. “No! He'd be tickled!”

“Okay, then. I'm Lisey, you're Dan, and he's Plug.”

“That's square-john with me.”

“And thanks for the call. That was terrific police work.”

“Thanks for saying so, ma'am. Lisey.” She could hear the glow in his voice, and that made her feel good. “You be in touch, now, if there's anything else we can do. Or if you hear from that lowlife again.”

“I will.”

Lisey went back to her sandwich with a smile on her face and didn't think about Amanda, or the good ship
Hollyhocks
, or Boo'ya Moon, for the rest of the day. That night, however, she awoke to the sound of distant thunder and a sense that something vast was—not
hunting
her, exactly (it wouldn't bother), but
musing
on her. The idea that she should be in such a thing's unknowable mind made her feel like crying and like screaming. At the same time. It also made her want to sit up watching movies on TCM, smoking cigarettes and drinking high-tension coffee. Or beer. Beer might be better. Beer might call back
sleep. Instead of getting up, she turned off the bedside lamp and lay still.
I'll never go back to sleep
, she thought.
I'll just lie here like this until it gets light in the east. Then I can get up and make the coffee I want now
.

But three minutes after having this thought she was dozing. Ten minutes later she was sleeping deeply. Later still, when the moon rose and she dreamed of floating over a certain exotic beach of fine white sand on the
PILLSBURY
magic carpet, her bed was for a few moments empty and the room filled with the smells of frangipani and jasmine and night-blooming cereus, scents that were somehow longing and terrible at the same time. But then she was back and in the morning Lisey barely remembered her dream, her dream of flying, her dream of flying across the beach at the edge of the pool in Boo'ya Moon.

As it happened, Lisey's vision of dismantling the booksnake varied in only two respects from what she had foreseen, and these were minor variations indeed. First, one half of Mr. Partridge's two-person team turned out to be a girl—a strapping twentysomething with a caramel-colored ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox cap. Second, Lisey hadn't guessed how quickly the job would be done. In spite of the study's fearsome heat (not even three fans turning at top speed could do much about it), all the books were packed away in a dark blue UMO van in less than an hour. When Lisey asked the two librarians from Special Collections (who called themselves—only half-jokingly, Lisey thought—the Minions of Partridge) if they'd like iced tea, they agreed enthusiastically, and put away two large glasses each. The girl was Cory. She was the one who told Lisey how much she had liked Scott's books, especially
Relics
, which she claimed to have read three times. The boy was Mike, and he was the one who said they were very sorry for her loss. Lisey thanked them both for their kindness, and meant it.

“It must make you sad, seeing it so empty,” Cory said, and tipped her glass toward the barn. The ice cubes clinked in it. Lisey was careful not to look directly at the glass, lest she see something besides ice in there.

“It is a little sad, but it's freeing, too,” she said. “I put off the job of cleaning it out for too long. My sisters helped me. I'm glad we did it. More tea, Cory?”

“No thanks, but could I use your bathroom before we start back?”

“Of course. Through the living room, first door on the right.”

Cory excused herself. Absently—
almost
absently—Lisey moved the girl's glass behind the brown plastic iced-tea pitcher. “Another glass, Mike?”

“No thanks,” he said. “You'll be taking up the carpet, too, I guess.”

She laughed self-consciously. “Yes. Pretty bad, isn't it? From Scott's one experiment in wood-staining. It was a disaster.” Thinking:
Sorry, honey
.

“Looks a little like dried blood,” Mike said, and finished his iced tea. The sun, hazy and hot, ran across the surface of his glass, and for a moment an eye seemed to peer out of it at Lisey. When he set it down, she had to restrain an urge to snatch it and hide it behind the plastic pitcher with the other one.

“Everybody says that,” she agreed.

“World's worst shaving cut,” Mike said, and laughed. They both laughed. Lisey thought hers sounded almost as natural as his. She didn't look at his glass. She didn't think about the long boy that was now
her
long boy. She thought about nothing
but
the long boy.

“Sure you won't have a little more?” she asked.

“Better not, I'm driving,” Mike said, and they had another laugh.

Cory came back and Lisey thought Mike would also ask to use the bathroom, but he didn't—guys had bigger kidneys, bigger bladders, bigger somethings, or so Scott had claimed—and Lisey was glad, because that meant only the girl gave her that funny look before they drove away with the disassembled booksnake in the back of the van. Oh, she undoubtedly told Mike what she saw in the living room and found in the bathroom, told him on the long drive north to the University of Maine at Orono, but Lisey wasn't there to hear it. The girl's look wasn't so bad, come to that, because Lisey hadn't known what it meant at the time, although she
had
patted the side of her head, thinking maybe her hair had fallen funny across her ear or was standing up or something. Then,
later (after popping the iced-tea glasses into the dishwasher without so much as a look at them), she'd gone to use the bathroom herself and saw the towel hanging across the mirror in there. She remembered putting the hand-towel over the medicine cabinet mirror upstairs, remembered blinding that one perfectly well, but when had she done
this
one?

Lisey didn't know.

She went back to the living room and saw there was a sheet hung in a swag over the mirror above the mantel, as well. She should have noticed that on her way through, she imagined Cory had, it was pretty smucking obvious, but the truth was little Lisey Landon didn't spend much time studying her own reflection these days.

She did a walk-through and discovered all but two of the mirrors on the ground floor had been sheeted, toweled, or (in one case) taken down and turned to the wall; the last two survivors she now covered as well, in the spirit of in for a penny, in for a pound. As she did them, Lisey wondered exactly what the young librarian in the fashionable pink Red Sox baseball cap had thought. That the famous writer's widow was either Jewish or had adopted the Jewish custom of mourning, and that her mourning still continued? That she had decided Kurt Vonnegut was right, that mirrors weren't reflective surfaces but
leaks
, portholes to another dimension? And really, wasn't that what she
did
think?