Bag of Bones

CHAPTER 3

Oace, when I was sixteen, a plane went supersonic directly over my head.

I was walking in the woods when it happened, thinking of some story I was going to write, perhaps, or how great it would be if Doreen Fournier weakened some Friday night and let me take off her panties while we were parked at the end of Cushman Road.

In any case I was travelling far roads in my own mind, and when that boom went off, I was caught totally by surprise. I went flat on the leafy ground with my hands over my head and my heart drumming crazily, sure I’d reached the end of my life (and while I was still a virgin). In my forty years, that was the only thing which equalled the final dream of the “Manderley series” for utter terror.

I lay on the ground, waiting for the hammer to fall, and when thirty seconds or so passed and no hammer did fall, I began to realize it had just been some jet-jockey from the Brunswick Naval Air Station, too eager to wait until he was out over the Atlantic before going to Mach 1.

But, holy shit, who ever could have guessed that it would be so loud?

I got slowly to my feet and as I stood there with my heart finally slowing down, I realized I wasn’t the only thing that had been scared witless by that sudden clear-sky boom. For the first time in my memory, the little patch of woods behind our house in Prout’s Neck was entirely silent. I stood there in a dusty bar of sunlight, crumbled leaves all over my tee-shirt and jeans, holding my breath, listening. I had never heard a silence like it. Even on a cold day in January, the woods would have been full of conversation.

At last a finch sang. There were two or three seconds of silence, and then a jay replied. Another two or three seconds went by, and then a crow added his two cents’ worth. A woodpecker began to hammer for grubs.

A chipmunk bumbled through some underbrush on my left. A minute after I had stood up, the woods were fully alive with little noises again; it was back to business as usual, and I continued with my own. I never forgot that unexpected boom, though, or the deathly silence which followed it. I thought of that June day often in the wake of the nightmare, and there was nothing so remarkable in that. Things had changed, somehow, or could change… but first comes silence while we assure ourselves that we are still unhurt and that the danger—if there was danger—is gone.

Derry was shut down for most of the following week, anyway. Ice and high winds caused a great deal of damage during the storm, and a sudden twenty-degree plunge in the temperature afterward made the digging out hard and the cleanup slow. Added to that, the atmosphere after a March storm is always dour and pessimistic; we get them up this way every year (and two or three in April for good measure, if we’re not lucky), but we never seem to expect them. Every time we get clouted, we take it personally.

On a day toward the end of that week, the weather finally started to break. I took advantage, going out for a cup of coffee and a mid-morning pastry at the little restaurant three doors down from the Rite Aid where Johanna did her last errand. I was sipping and chewing and working the newspaper crossword when someone asked, “Could I share your booth, Mr. Noonan? It’s pretty crowded in here today.”

I looked up and saw an old man that I knew but couldn’t quite place.

“Ralph Roberts,” he said. “I volunteer down at the Red Cross. Me and my wife, Lois.”

“Oh, okay, sure,” I said. I give blood at the Red Cross every six weeks or so. Ralph Roberts was one of the old parties who passed out juice and cookies afterward, telling you not to get up or make any sudden movements if you felt woozy. “Please, sit down.” He looked at my paper, folded open to the crossword and lying in a patch of sun, as he slid into the booth. “Don’t you find that doing the crossword in the Derry News is sort of like striking out the pitcher in a baseball game?” he asked. I laughed and nodded. “I do it for the same reason folks climb Mount Everest, Mr. Roberts… because it’s there. Only with the News crossword, no one ever falls off.”

“Call me Ralph. Please.”

“Okay. And I’m Mike.”

“Good.” He grinned, revealing teeth that were crooked and a little yellow, but all his own. “I like getting to the first names. It’s like being able to take off your tie. Was quite a little cap of wind we had, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it’s warming up nicely now.” The thermometer had made one of its nimble March leaps, climbing from twenty-five degrees the night before to fifty that morning. Better than the rise in air-temperature, the sun was warm again on your face. It was that warmth that had coaxed me out of the house. “Spring’ll get here, I guess. Some years it gets a little lost, but it always seems to find its way back home.” He sipped his coffee, then set the cup down. “Haven’t seen you at the Red Cross lately.”

“I’m recycling,” I said, but that was a fib; I’d come eligible to give another pint two weeks ago. The reminder card was up on the refrigerator. It had just slipped my mind.

“Next week, for sure.”

“I only mention it because I know you’re an A, and we can always use that.”

“Save me a couch.”

“Count on it. Everything going all right? I only ask because you look tired. If it’s insomnia, I can sympathize, believe me.” He did have the look of an insomniac, I thought—too wide around the eyes, somehow. But he was also a man in his mid- to late seventies, and I don’t think anyone gets that far without showing it. Stick around a little while, and life maybe only jabs at your cheeks and eyes. Stick around a long while and you end up looking like Jake La Motta after a hard fifteen. I opened my mouth to say what I always do when someone asks me if I’m all right, then wondered why I always felt I had to pull that tiresome Marlboro Man shit, just who I was trying to fool. What did I think would happen if I told the guy who gave me a chocolate-chip cookie down at the Red Cross after the nurse took the needle out of my arm that I wasn’t feeling a hundred percent? Earthquakes? Fire and flood? Shit. “No,” I said, “I really haven’t been feeling so great, Ralph.”

“Flu? It’s been going around.”

“Nah. The flu missed me this time, actually. And I’ve been sleeping all right.” Which was truemthere had been no recurrence of the Sara Laughs dream in either the normal or the high-octane version. “I think I’ve just got the blues.”

“Well, you ought to take a vacation,” he said, then sipped his coffee. When he looked up at me again, he frowned and set his cup down. “What? Is something wrong?” No, I thought of saying. You were just the first bird to sing into the silence, Ralph, that’s all. “No, nothing wrong,” I said, and then, because I sort of wanted to see how the words tasted coming out of my own mouth, I repeated them. “A vacation.”

“Ayuh,” he said, smiling. “People do it all the time.”

People do it allthe time. He was right about that; even people who couldn’t strictly afford to went on vacation. When they got tired. When they got all balled up in their own shit. When the world was too much with them, getting and spending. I could certainly afford a vacation, and I could certainly take the time off from work—what work, ha-ha? — and yet I’d needed the Red Cross cookie-man to point out what should have been self-evident to a college-educated guy like me: that I hadn’t been on an actual vacation since Jo and I had gone to Bermuda, the winter before she died. My particular grindstone was no longer turning, but I had kept my nose to it all the same.

It wasn’t until that summer, when I read Ralph Roberts’s obituary in the News (he was struck by a car), that I fully realized how much I owed him. That advice was better than any glass of orange juice I ever got after giving blood, let me tell you.

When I left the restaurant, I didn’t go home but tramped over half of the damned town, the section of newspaper with the partly completed crossword puzzle in it clamped under one arm. I walked until I was chilled in spite of the warming temperatures. I didn’t think about anything, and yet I thought about everything. It was a special kind of thinking, the sort I’d always done when I was getting close to writing a book, and although I hadn’t thought that way in years, I fell into it easily and naturally, as if I had never been away. It’s like some guys with a big truck have pulled up in your driveway and are moving things into your basement. I can’t explain it any better than that. You can’t see what these things are because they’re all wrapped up in padded quilts, but you don’t need to see them. It’s furniture, everything you need to make your house a home, make it just right, just the way you wanted it. When the guys have hopped back into their truck and driven away, you go down to the basement and walk around (the way I went walking around Derry that late morning, slopping up hill and down dale in my old galoshes), touching a padded curve here, a padded angle there.

Is this one a sofa? Is that’ one a dresser? It doesn’t matter.

Everything is here, the movers didn’t forget a thing, and although you’ll have to get it all upstairs yourself (straining your poor old back in the process, more often than not), that’s okay. The important thing is that the delivery was complete. This time I thought—hoped—the delivery truck had brought the stuff I needed for the back forty: the years I might have to spend in a No Writing Zone. To the cellar door they had come, and they had knocked politely, and when after several months there was still no answer, they had finally fetched a battering ram. HEY BUDDY, HOPE THE NOISE DIDN’T SCARE YOU TOO BAD, SORRY ABOUT THE DOOR!

I didn’t care about the door; I cared about the furniture. Any pieces broken or missing? I didn’t think so. I thought all I had to do was get it upstairs, pull off the furniture pads, and put it where it belonged.

On my way back home, I passed The Shade, Derry’s charming little revival movie house, which has prospered in spite of (or perhaps because of) the video revolution. This month they were showing classic SF from the fifties, but April was dedicated to Humphrey Bogart, Jo’s all-time favorite. I stood under the marquee for several moments, studying one of the Coming Attractions posters. Then I went home, picked a travel agent pretty much at random from the phone book, and told the guy I wanted to go to Key Largo. Key West, you mean, the guy said. No, I told him, I mean Key Largo, just like in the movie with Bogie and Bacall. Three weeks. Then I rethought that. I was wealthy, I was on my own, and I was retired. What was this “three weeks” shit? Make it six, I said. Find me a cottage or something. Going to be expensive, he said. I told him I didn’t care. When I came back to Derry, it would be spring. In the meantime, I had some furniture to unwrap.

I was enchanted with Key Largo for the first month and bored out of my mind for the last two weeks. I stayed, though, because boredom is good.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

I ate about a billion shrimp, drank about a thousand margaritas, and read twenty-three John D. MacDonald novels by actual count. I burned, peeled, and finally tanned. I bought a long-billed cap with PARROTHEAD printed on it in bright green thread. I walked the same stretch of beach until I knew everybody by first name. And I unwrapped furniture. A lot of it I didn’t like, but there was no doubt that it all fit the house. I thought about Jo and our life together. I thought about saying to her that no one was ever going to confuse Being Two with Look Homeward, Angel. “You aren’t going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you, Noonan?” she had replied… and during my time on Key Largo, those words kept coming back, always in Jo’s voice: crap, frustrated-artist crap, all that fucking schoolboy frustrated-artist crap. I thought about her long red woods apron, coming to me with a hatful of black trumpet mushrooms, laughing and triumphant: “Nobody on the TR eats better than the Noonans tonight/” she’d cried. I thought of her painting her toenails, bent over between her own thighs in the way only women doing that particular piece of business can manage. I thought of her throwing a book at me because I laughed at some new haircut. I thought of her trying to learn how to play a breakdown on her banjo and of how she looked braless in a thin sweater. I thought of her crying and laughing and angry. I thought of her telling me it was crap, all that frustrated-artist crap.

And I thought about the dreams, especially the culminating dream. I could do that easily, because it never faded as the more ordinary ones do. The final Sara Laughs dream and my very first wet dream (coming upon a girl lying naked in a hammock and eating a plum) are the only two that remain perfectly clear to me, year after year; the rest are either hazy fragments or completely forgotten.

There were a great many clear details to the Sara dreams—the loons, the crickets, the evening star and my wish upon it, just to name a few—but I thought most of those things were just verisimilitude. Scene-setting, if you will. As such, they could be dismissed from my considerations.

That left three major elements, three large pieces of furniture to be unwrapped.

As I sat on the beach, watching the sun go down between my sandy toes, I didn’t think you had to be a shrink to see how those three things went together.

In the Sara dreams, the major elements were the woods behind me, the house below me, and Michael Noonan himself, frozen in the middle. It’s getting dark and there’s danger in the woods. It will be frightening to go to the house below, perhaps because it’s been empty so long, but I never doubt I must go there; scary or not, it’s the only shelter I have.

Except I can’t do it. I can’t move. I’ve got writer’s walk.

In the nightmare I am finally able to go toward shelter, only the shelter proves false. Proves more dangerous than I had ever expected in my… well, yes, in my wildest dreams. My dead wife rushes out, screaming and still tangled in her shroud, to attack me. Even five weeks later and almost three thousand miles from Derry, remembering that speedy white thing with its baggy arms would make me shiver and look back over my shoulder.

But was it Johanna? I didn’t really know, did I? The thing was all wrapped up. The coffin looked like the one in which she had been buried, true, but that might just be misdirection.

Writer’s walk, writer’s block.

I can’t write, I told the voice in the dream. The voice says I can. The voice says the writer’s block is gone, and I believe it because the writer’s walk is gone, I’m finally headed down the driveway, going to shelter. I’m afraid, though. Even before the shapeless white thing makes its appearance, I’m terrified. I say it’s Mrs. Danvers I’m afraid of, but that’s just my dreaming mind getting Sara Laughs and Manderley all mixed up. I’m afraid of- “I’m afraid of writing,” I heard myself saying out loud. “I’m afraid to even try.”

This was the night before I finally flew back to Maine, and I was half-past sober, going on drunk. By the end of my vacation, I was drinking a lot of evenings. “It’s not the block that scares me, it’s undoing the block. I’m really fucked, boys and girls. I’m fucked big-time.”

Fucked or not, I had an idea I’d finally reached the heart of the matter. I was afraid of undoing the block, maybe afraid of picking up the strands of my life and going on without Jo. Yet some deep part of my mind believed I must do it; that’s what the menacing noises behind me in the woods were about. And belief counts for a lot. Too much, maybe, especially if you’re imaginative. When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

Things in the woods, yes, sir. I had one of them right there in my hand as I was thinking these things. I lifted my drink, holding it toward the western sky so that the setting sun seemed to be burning in the glass. I was drinking a lot, and maybe that was okay on Key Largo hell, people were supposed to drink a lot on vacation, it was almost the law—but I’d been drinking too much even before I left. The kind of drinking that could get out of hand in no time at all. The kind that could get a man in trouble.

Things in the woods, and the potentially safe place guarded by a scary bugbear that was not my wife, but perhaps my wife’s memory. It made sense, because Sara Laughs had always been Jo’s favorite place on earth.

That thought led to another, one that made me swing my legs over the side of the chaise I’d been reclining on and sit up in excitement. Sara Laughs had also been the place where the ritual had begun. . champagne, last line, and the all-important benediction: Well, then, that’s all right, isn’t it? Did I want things to be all right again? Did I truly want that? A month or a year before I mightn’t have been sure, but now I was. The answer was yes. I wanted to move on—let go of my dead wife, rehab my heart, move on. But to do that, I’d have to go back. Back to the log house. Back to Sara Laughs. “Yeah,” I said, and my body broke out in gooseflesh. “Yeah, you got it.” So why not? The question made me feel as stupid as Ralph Roberts’s observation that I needed a vacation. if I needed to go back to Sara Laughs now that my vacation was over, indeed why not? It might be a little scary the first night or two, a hangover from my final dream, but just being there might dissolve the dream faster. And (this last thought I allowed in only one humble corner of my conscious mind) something might happen with my writing. It wasn’t likely… but it wasn’t impossible, either. Barring a miracle, hadn’t that been my thought on New Year’s Day as I sat on the rim of the tub, holding a damp washcloth to the cut on my forehead? Yes.

Barring a miracle. Sometimes blind people fall down, knock their heads, and regain their sight. Sometimes maybe cripples are able to throw their crutches away when they get to the top of the church steps. I had eight or nine months before Harold and Debra started really bugging me for the next novel. I decided to spend the time at Sara Laughs. It would take me a little while to tie things up in Derry, and awhile for Bill Dean to get the house on the lake ready for a year-round resident, but I could be down there by the Fourth of July, easily. I decided that was a good date to shoot for, not just the birthday of our country, but pretty much the end of bug season in western Maine. By the day I packed up my vacation gear (the John D. MacDonald paperbacks I left for the cabin’s next inhabitant), shaved a week’s worth of stubble off a face so tanned it no longer looked like my own to me, and flew back to Maine, I was decided: I’d go back to the place my subconscious mind had identified as shelter against the deepening dark; I’d go back even though my mind had also suggested that doing so would not be without risks. I would not go back expecting Sara to be Lourdes… but I would allow myself to hope, and when I saw the evening star peeping out over the lake for the first time, I would allow myself to wish on it.

Only one thing didn’t fit into my neat deconstruction of the Sara dreams, and because I couldn’t explain it, I tried to ignore it. I didn’t have much luck, though; part of me was still a writer, I guess, and a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave. It was the cut on the back of my hand. That cut had been in all the dreams, I would swear it had… and then it had actually appeared. You didn’t get that sort of shit in the works of Dr. Freud; stuff like that was strictly for the Psychic Friends hotline. It was a coincidence, that’s all, I thought as my plane started its descent. I was in seat A-2 (the nice thing about flying up front is that if the plane goes down, you’re first to the crash site) and looking at pine forests as we slipped along the glidepath toward Bangor International Airport. The snow was gone for another year; I had vacationed it to death. Only coincidence. How many times have you cut your hands? I mean, they’re always out front, aren’t they, waving themselves around? Practically begging for it. All that should have rung true, and yet somehow it didn’t, quite. It should have, but… well… It was the boys in the basement. They were the ones who didn’t buy it. The boys in the basement didn’t buy it at all. At that point there was a thump as the 737 touched down, and I put the whole line of thought out of my mind.

One afternoon shortly after arriving back home, I rummaged the closets until I found the shoeboxes containing Jo’s old photographs. I sorted them, then studied my way through the ones of Dark Score Lake. There were a staggering number of these, but because Johanna was the shutterbug, there weren’t many with her in them. I found one, though, that I remembered taking in 1990 or ’91. Sometimes even an untalented photographer can take a good picture—if seven hundred monkeys spent seven hundred years bashing away at seven hundred typewriters, and all that—and this was good. In it Jo was standing on the float with the sun going down red-gold behind her.

She was just out of the water, dripping wet, wearing a two-piece swimming suit, gray with red piping. I had caught her laughing and brushing her soaked hair back from her forehead and temples. Her nipples were very prominent against the cups of her halter. She looked like an actress on a movie poster for one of those guilty-pleasure B-pictures about monsters at Party Beach or a serial killer stalking the campus. I was sucker-punched by a sudden powerful lust for her. I wanted her upstairs just as she was in that photograph, with strands of her hair pasted to her cheeks and that wet bathing suit clinging to her. I wanted to suck her nipples through the halter top, taste the cloth and feel their hardness through it. I wanted to suck water out of the cotton like milk, then yank the bottom of her suit off and fuck her until we both exploded. Hands shaking a little, I put the photograph aside, with some others I liked (although there were no others I liked in quite that same way). I had a huge hard-on, one of those ones that feel like stone covered with skin. Get one of those and until it goes away you are good for nothing. The quickest way to solve a problem like that when there’s no woman around willing to help you solve it is to masturbate, but that time the idea never even crossed my mind. Instead I walked restlessly through the upstairs rooms of my house with my fists opening and closing and what looked like a hood ornament stuffed down the front of my jeans.

Anger may be a normal stage of the grieving process—I’ve read that it is—but I was never angry at Johanna in the wake of her death until the day I found that picture. Then, wow. There I was, walking around with a boner that just wouldn’t quit, furious with her. Stupid bitch, why had she been running on one of the hottest days of the year? Stupid, inconsiderate bitch to leave me alone like this, not even able to work.

I sat down on the stairs and wondered what I should do. A drink was what I should do, I decided, and then maybe another drink to scratch the first one’s back. I actually got up before deciding that wasn’t a very good idea at all. I went into my office instead, turned on the computer, and did a crossword puzzle. That night when I went to bed, I thought of looking at the picture of Jo in her bathing suit again. I decided that was almost as bad an idea as a few drinks when I was feeling angry and depressed. But I’ll have the dream tonight, I thought as I turned off the light. I’ll have the dreamier sure. I didn’t, though. My dreams of Sara Laughs seemed to be finished.

A week’s thought made the idea of at least summering at the lake seem better than ever. So, on a Saturday afternoon in early May when I calculated that any self-respecting Maine caretaker would be home watching the Red Sox, I called Bill Dean and told him I’d be at my lake place from the Fourth of July or so. . and that if things went as I hoped, I’d be spending the fall and winter there as well. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s real good news. A lot of folks down here’ve missed you, Mike. Quite a few that want to condole with you about your wife, don’t you know.” Was there the faintest note of reproach in his voice, or was that just my imagination? Certainly Jo and I had cast a shadow in the area; we had made significant contributions to the little library which served the Motton-Kashwakamak-Castle View area, and Jo had headed the successful fund drive to get an area bookmobile up and running. In addition to that, she had been part of a ladies’ sewing circle (afghans were her specialty), and a member in good standing of the Castle County Crafts Co-op. Visits to the sick… helping out with the annual volunteer fire department blood drive… womaning a booth during Summerfest in Castle Rock… and stuff like that was only where she had started. She didn’t do it in any ostentatious Lady Bountiful way, either, but unobtrusively and humbly, with her head lowered (often to hide a rather sharp smile, I should add—my Jo had a Biercean sense of humor). Christ, I thought, maybe old Bill had a right to sound reproachful. “People miss her,” I said. “Ayuh, they do.”

“I still miss her a lot myself. I think that’s why I’ve stayed away from the lake.

That’s where a lot of our good times were.”

“I s’pose so. But it’ll be damned good to see you down this way. I’ll get busy. The place is all right—you could move into it this afternoon, if you was a mind—but when a house has stood empty the way Sara has, it gets stale.”

“I know.”

“TII get Brenda Meserve to clean the whole shebang from top to bottom. Same gal you always had, don’t you know.”

“Brenda’s a little old for comprehensive spring cleaning, isn’t she?”

The lady in question was about sixty-five, stout, kind, and gleefully vulgar. She was especially fond of jokes about the travelling salesman who spent the night like a rabbit, jumping from hole to hole. No Mrs. Dan-vets she. “Ladies like Brenda Meserve never get too old to oversee the festivities,” Bill said. “She’ll get two or three girls to do the vacuuming and heavy lifting. Set you back maybe three hundred dollars.

Sound all right?”

“Like a bargain.”

“The well needs to be tested, and the gennie, too, although I’m sure both ofem’s okay. I seen a hornet’s nest by Jo’s old studio that I want to smoke before the woods get dry.

Oh, and the roof of the old house—you know, the middle piece—needs to be reshingled. I shoulda talked to you about that last year, but with you not using the place, I let her slide. You stand good for that, too?”

“Yes, up to ten grand. Beyond that, call me.”

“If we have to go over ten, I’ll smile and kiss a pig.”

“Try to have it all done before I get down there, okay?”

“Coss. You’ll want your privacy, I know that. . just so long’s you know you won’t get any right away. We was shocked when she went so young; all of us were. Shocked and sad. She was a dear.” From a Yankee mouth, that word rhymes with Leah. “Thank you, Bill.” I felt tears prickle my eyes. Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug. “Thanks for saying.”

“You’ll get your share of carrot-cakes, chummy.” He laughed, but a little doubtfully, as if afraid he was committing an impropriety. “I can eat a lot of carrot-cake,” I said, “and if folks overdo it, well, hasn’t Kenny Auster still got that big Irish wolfhound?”

“Yuh, that thing’d eat cake til he busted!” Bill cried in high good humor. He cackled until he was coughing. I waited, smiling a little myself. “Blueberry, he calls that dog, damned if I know why. Ain’t he the gormiest thing!” I assumed he meant the dog and not the dog’s master. Kenny Auster, not much more than five feet tall and neatly made, was the opposite of gormy, that peculiar Maine adjective that means clumsy, awkward, and clay-footed. I suddenly realized that I missed these people—Bill and Brenda and Buddy Jellison and Kenny Auster and all the others who lived year-round at the lake. I even missed Blueberry, the Irish wolfhound, who trotted everywhere with his head up just as if he had half a brain in it and long strands of saliva depending from his jaws. “I’ve also got to get down there and clean up the winter blowdown,” Bill said. He sounded embarrassed. “It ain’t bad this year—that last big storm was all snow over our way, thank God—but there’s still a fair amount of happy crappy I ain’t got to yet. I shoulda put it behind me long before now. You not using the place ain’t an excuse. I been cashing your checks.” There was something amusing about listening to the grizzled old fart beating his breast; Jo would have kicked her feet and giggled, I’m quite sure. “If everything’s right and running by July Fourth, Bill, I’ll be happy.”

“You’ll be happy as a clam in a mudflat, then. That’s a promise.” Bill sounded as happy as a clam in a mudflat himself, and I was glad. “Going-ter come down and write a book by the water? Like in the old days? Not that the last couple ain’t been fine, my wife couldn’t put that last one down, but—”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. And then an idea struck me.

“Bill, would you do me a favor before you clean up the driveway and turn Brenda Meserve loose?”

“Happy to if I can,” he said, so I told him what I wanted.

Four days later, I got a little package with this laconic return address: DEN/GEN DELV/Tg-90 (DAVA scoa0. I opened it and shook out twenty photographs which had been taken with one of those little cameras you use once and then throw away.

Bill had filled out the roll with various views of the house, most conveying that subtle air of neglect a place gets when it’s not used enough… even a place that’s caretook (to use Bill’s word) gets that neglected feel after awhile. I barely glanced at these. The first four were the ones I wanted, and I lined them up on the kitchen table, where the strong sunlight would fall directly on them. Bill had taken these from the top of the driveway, pointing the disposable camera down at the sprawl of Sara Laughs. I could see the moss which had grown not only on south wings, as well. I could see the litter of fallen branches and the drifts of pine needles on the driveway. Bill must have been tempted to clear all that away before taking his snaps, but he hadn’t. I’d told him exactly what I wanted—"warts and all” was the phrase I had used—and Bill had given it to me. The bushes on either side of the driveway had thickened a lot since Jo and I had spent any significant amount of time at the lake; they hadn’t exactly run wild, but yes, some of the longer branches did seem to yearn toward each other across the asphalt like separated lovers. Yet what my eye came back to again and again was the stoop at the foot of the driveway. The other resemblances between the photographs and my dreams of Sara Laughs might only be coincidental (or the writer’s often surprisingly practical imagination at work), but I could explain the sunflowers growing out through the boards of the stoop no more than I had been able to explain the cut on the back of my hand.

I turned one of the photos over. On the back, in a spidery script, Bill had written: These jgllows are way early… and trespassing. I flipped back to the picture side. Three sunflowers, growing up through the boards of the stoop. Not two, not four, but three large sunflowers with faces like searchlights. Just like the ones in my dream.

On July 3rd of 1998, I threw two suitcases and my Powerbook in the trunk of my mid-sized Chevrolet, started to back down the driveway, then stopped and went into the house again. It felt empty and somehow forlorn, like a faithful lover who has been dropped and cannot understand why. The furniture wasn’t covered and the power was still on (I understood that The Great Lake Experiment might turn out to be a swift and total failure), but 14 Benton Street felt deserted, all the same. Rooms too full of furniture to echo still did when I walked through them, and everywhere there seemed to be too much dusty light. In my study, the VDT was hooded like an executioner against the dust. I knelt before it and opened one of the desk drawers. Inside were four reams of paper. I took one, started away with it under my arm, then had a second thought and turned back. I had put that provocative photo of Jo in her swimsuit in the wide center drawer. Now I took it, tore the paper wrapping from the end of the ream of paper, and slid the photo halfway in, like a bookmark. if I did perchance begin to write again, and if the writing marched, I would meet Johanna right around page two hundred and fifty.

I left the house, locked the back door, got into my car, and drove away.

I have never been back.

I’d been tempted to go down to the lake and check out the work—which turned out to be quite a bit more extensive than Bill Dean had originally expected—on several occasions. What kept me away was a feeling, never quite articulated by my conscious mind but still very powerful, that I wasn’t supposed to do it that way; that when I next came to Sara, it should be to unpack and stay.

Bill hired out Kenny Auster to shingle the roof, and got Kenny’s cousin, Timmy Larribee, to “scrape the old girl down,” a cleansing process akin to pot-scrubbing that is sometimes employed with log homes. Bill also had a plumber in to check out the pipes, and got my okay to replace some of the older plumbing and the well-pump.

Bill fussed about all these expenses over the telephone; I let him. When it comes to fifth- or sixth-generation Yankees and the expenditure of money, you might as well just stand back and let them get it out of their systems. Laying out the green just seems wrong to a Yankee, somehow, like petting in public. As for myself, I didn’t mind the outgo a bit. I live frugally, for the most part, not out of any moral code but because my imagination, very lively in most other respects, doesn’t work very well on the subject of money. My idea of a spree is three days in Boston, a Red Sox game, a trip to Tower Records and Video, plus a visit to the Wordsworth bookstore in Cambridge. Living like that doesn’t make much of a dent in the interest, let alone the principal; I had a good money manager down in Waterville, and on the day I locked the door of the Derry house and headed west to TR-90, I was worth slightly over five million dollars. Not much compared to Bill Gates, but big numbers for this area, and I could afford to be cheerful about the high cost of house repairs.

That was a strange late spring and early summer for me. What I did mostly was wait, close up my town affairs, talk to Bill Dean when he called with the latest round of problems, and try not to think. I did the Publishers Ig3ekly interview, and when the interviewer asked me if I’d had any trouble getting back to work “in the wake of my bereavement,” I said no with an absolutely straight face. Why not? It was true. My troubles hadn’t started until I’d finished All the yfrom the bp; until then, I had been going on like gangbusters.

In mid-June, I met Frank Arlen for lunch at the Starlite Cafe. The Starlite is in Lewiston, which is the geographical midpoint between his town and mine. Over dessert (the Starlite’s famous strawberry shortcake), Frank asked if I was seeing anyone. I looked at him with surprise.

“What are you gaping at?” he asked, his face registering one of the nine hundred unnamed emotions—this one of those somewhere between amusement and irritation. “I certainly wouldn’t think of it as two-timing Jo. She’ll have been dead four years come August.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not seeing anybody.”

He looked at me silently. I looked back for a few seconds, then started fiddling my spoon through the whipped cream on top of my shortcake. The biscuits were still warm from the oven, and the cream was melting. It made me think of that silly old song about how someone left the cake out in the rain.

“Have you seen anybody, Mike?”

“I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. On your vacation? Did you—”

I made myself look up from the melting whipped cream. “No,” I said.

He was silent for another moment or two. I thought he was getting ready to move on to another topic. That would have been fine with me. Instead, he came right out and asked me if I had been laid at all since Johanna died. He would have accepted a lie on that subject even if he didn’t entirely believe it—men lie about sex all the time. But I told the truth… and with a certain perverse pleasure.

“No.”

“Not a single time?”

“Not a single time.”

“What about a massage parlor? You know, to at least get a—”

He sat there tapping his spoon against the rim of the bowl with his dessert in it. He hadn’t taken a single bite. He was looking at me as though I were some new and oogy specimen of bug. I didn’t like it much, but I suppose I understood it.

I had been close to what is these days called “a relationship” on two occasions, neither of them on Key Largo, where I had observed roughly two thousand pretty women walking around dressed in only a stitch and a promise. Once it had been a red-haired waitress, Kelli, at a restaurant out on the Extension where I often had lunch. After awhile we got talking, joking around, and then there started to be some of that eye-contact, you know the kind I’m talking about, looks that go on just a little too long. I started to notice her legs, and the way her uniform pulled against her hip when she turned, and she noticed me noticing.

And there was a woman at Nu You, the place where I used to work out. A tall woman who favored pink jog-bras and black bike shorts. Quite yummy.

Also, I liked the stuff she brought to read while she pedalled one of the stationary bikes on those endless aerobic trips to nowhere—not Mademoiselle or Cosmo, but novels by people like John Irving and Ellen Gilchrist. I like people who read actual books, and not just because I once wrote them myself. Book-readers are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.

The name of the blonde in the pink tops and black shorts was Adria Bundy. We started talking about books as we pedalled side by side ever deeper into nowhere, and there came a point where I was spotting her one or two mornings a week in the weight room. There’s something oddly intimate about spotting. The prone position of the lifter is part of it, I suppose (especially when the lifter is a woman), but not all or even most of it. Mostly it’s the dependence factor. Although it hardly ever comes to that point, the lifter is trusting the spotter with his or her life. And, at some point in the winter of 1996, those looks started as she lay on the bench and I stood over her, looking into her upside-down face. The ones that go on just a little too long.

Kelli was around thirty, Adria perhaps a little younger. Kelli was divorced, Adria never married. In neither case would I have been robbing the cradle, and I think either would have been happy to go to bed with me on a provisional basis. Kind of a honey-bump test-drive. Yet what I did in Kelli’s case was to find a different restaurant to eat my lunch at, and when the YMCA sent me a free exercise-tryout offer, I took them up on it and just never went back to Nu You. I remember walking past Adria Bundy one day on the street six months or so after I made the change, and although I said hi, I made sure not to see her puzzled, slightly hurt gaze.

In a purely physical way I wanted them both (in fact, I seem to remember a dream in which I had them both, in the same bed and at the same time), and yet I wanted neither. Part of it was my inability to write—my life was quite fucked up enough, thank you, without adding any additional complications. Part of it was the work involved in making sure that the woman who is returning your glances is interested in you and not your rather extravagant bank account.

Most of it, I think, was that there was just too much Jo still in my head and heart. There was no room for anyone else, even after four years. It was sorrow like cholesterol, and if you think that’s funny or weird, be grateful.

“What about friends?” Frank asked, at last beginning to eat his strawberry shortcake. “You’ve got friends you see, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Plenty of friends.” Which was a lie, but I did have lots of crosswords to do, lots of books to read, and lots of movies to watch on my VCR at night; I could practically recite the FBI warning about unlawful copying by heart. When it came to real live people, the only ones I called when I got ready to leave Derry were my doctor and my dentist, and most of the mail I sent out that June consisted of change-of address cards to magazines like Harper’s and National Geographic. “Frank,” I said, “you sound like a Jewish mother.”

“Sometimes when I’m with you IJEL like a Jewish mother,” he said. “One who believes in the curative powers of baked potatoes instead of matzo balls. You look better than you have in a long time, finally put on some weight, I think—”

“Too much.”

“Bullshit, you looked like Ichabod Crane when you came for Christmas.

Also, you’ve got some sun on your face and arms.”

“I’ve been walking a lot.”

“So you look better… except for your eyes. Sometimes you get this look in your eyes, and I worry about you every time I see it. I think Jo would be glad someone’s worrying.”

“What look is that?” I asked.

“Your basic thousand-yard stare. Want the truth? You look like someone who’s caught on something and can’t get loose.”

I left Derry at three-thirty, stopped in Rumford for supper, then drove slowly on through the rising hills of western Maine as the sun lowered.

I had planned my times of departure and arrival carefully, if not quite consciously, and as I passed out of Motton and into the unincorporated township of TR-90, I became aware of the heavy way my heart was beating.

There was sweat on my face and arms in spite of the car’s air conditioning. Nothing on the radio sounded right, all the music like screaming, and I turned it off.

I was scared, and had good reason to be. Even setting aside the peculiar cross-pollination between the dreams and things in the real world (as I was able to do quite easily, dismissing the cut on my hand and the sunflowers growing through the boards of the back stoop as either coincidence or so much psychic fluff), I had reason to be scared.

Because they hadn’t been ordinary dreams, and my decision to go back to the lake after all this time hadn’t been an ordinary decision. I didn’t feel like a modern fin-de-millgnaire man on a spiritual quest to face his fears (I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s all have an emotional circle-jerk while William Acker-man plays softly in the background); I felt more like some crazy Old Testament prophet going out into the desert to live on locusts and alkali water because God had summoned him in a dream.

I was in trouble, my life was a moderate-going-on-severe mess, and not being able to write was only part of it. I wasn’t raping kids or running around Times Square preaching conspiracy theories through a bullhorn, but I was in trouble just the same. I had lost my place in things and couldn’t find it again. No surprise there; after all, life’s not a book.

What I was engaging in on that hot July evening was self-induced shock therapy, and give me at least this much credit—I knew it.

You come to Dark Score this way: 1-95 from Derry to Newport;

Route 2 from Newport to Bethel (with a stop in Rumford, which used to stink like hell’s front porch until the paper-driven economy pretty much ground to a halt during Reagan’s second term); Route 5 from Bethel to Waterford. Then you take Route 68, the old County Road, across Castle View, through Motton (where downtown consists of a converted barn which sells videos, beer, and second-hand rifles), and then past the sign which reads TR-90 and the one reading GAME WARDEN IS BEST ASSISTANCE IN EMERGENCY, DIAL 1-800-555-GAME OR *72 ON CELLULAR PHONE. To this, in spray paint, someone has added FUCK THE EAGLES.

Five miles past that sign, you come to a narrow lane on the right, marked only by a square of tin with the faded number 42 on it. Above this, like umlauts, are a couple of. 22 holes.

I turned into this lane just about when I had expected to—it was 7:16 P.M… EDT, by the clock on the Chevrolet’s dashboard.

And the feeling was coming home.

I drove in two tenths of a mile by the odometer, listening to the grass which crowned the lane whickering against the undercarriage of my car, listening to the occasional branch which scraped across the roof or knocked on the passenger side like a fist. At last I parked and turned the engine off. I got out, walked to the rear of the car, lay down on my belly, and began pulling all of the grass which touched the Chevy’s hot exhaust system. It had been a dry summer, and it was best to take precautions. I had come at this exact hour in order to replicate my dreams, hoping for some further insight into them or for an idea of what to do next. What I had not come to do was start a forest fire.

Once this was done I stood up and looked around. The crickets sang, as they had in my dreams, and the trees huddled close on either side of the lane, as they always did in my dreams. Overhead, the sky was a fading strip of blue.

I set off, walking up the right hand wheelrut. Jo and I had had one neighbor at this end of the road, old Lars Washburn, but now Lars’s driveway was overgrown with juniper bushes and blocked by a rusty length of chain. Nailed to a tree on the left of the chain was NO Trespassing.

Nailed to one on the right was NEXT CENTURY REAL ESTATE, and a local number. The words were faded and hard to read in the growing gloom.

I walked on, once more conscious of my heavily beating heart and of the way the mosquitoes were buzzing around my face and arms. Their peak season was past, but I was sweating a lot, and that’s a smell they like.

It must remind them of blood.

Just how scared was I as I approached Sara Laughs? I don’t remember. I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I’d had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves. But in places like Lane Forty-two, you find that all the smoke and mirrors have been removed. What’s left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of the sky as the day’s blue blood runs out of its cheek.

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step. It is here; you slip across it on a kind of breathless curve like a skater turning for home.

I stopped for a moment about half a mile south of where I’d left the car, and still half a mile north of the driveway. Here the road curves sharply, and on the right is an open field which slants steeply down toward the lake. Tidwell’s Meadow is what the locals call it, or sometimes the Old Camp. It was here that Sara Tidwell and her curious tribe built their cabins, at least according to Marie Hingerman (and once, when I asked Bill Dean, he agreed this was the place. . although he didn’t seem interested in continuing the conversation, which struck me at the time as a bit odd).

I stood there for a moment, looking down at the north end of Dark Score.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset, without a single ripple or a single small craft to be seen. The boat-people would all be down at the marina or at Warrington’s Sunset Bar by now, I guessed, eating lobster rolls and drinking big mixed drinks. Later a few of them, buzzed on speed and martinis, would go bolting up and down the lake by moonlight. I wondered if I would be around to hear them. I thought there was a fair chance that by then I’d be on my way back to Derry, either terrified by what I’d found or disillusioned because I had found nothing at all.

“You funny little man, said Strickland.”

I didn’t know I was going to speak until the words were out of my mouth, and why those words in particular I had no idea. I remembered my dream of Jo under the bed and shuddered. A mosquito whined in my ear. I slapped it and walked on.

In the end, my arrival at the head of the driveway was almost too perfectly timed, the sense of having re-entered my dream almost too complete. Even the balloons tied to the SARA LAUGHS sign (one white and one blue, both with WELCOME BACK MIKE, carefully printed on them in black ink) and floating against the ever-darkening backdrop of the trees seemed to intensify the deja vu I had quite deliberately induced, for no two dreams are exactly the same, are they? Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

I walked to the sign, feeling the mystery of this place at twilight. I squeezed down on the board, feeling its rough reality, and then I ran the ball of my thumb over the letters, daring the splinters and reading with my skin like a blind man reading braille: S and A and R and A; L and A and U and G and H and S.

The driveway had been cleared of fallen needles and blown-down branches, but Dark Score glimmered a fading rose just as it had in my dreams, and the sprawled hulk of the house was the same. Bill had thoughtfully left the light over the back stoop burning, and the sunflowers growing through the boards had long since been cut down, but everything else was the same.

I looked overhead, at the slot of sky over the lane. Nothing. . I waited… and nothing… waiting still… and then there it was, right where the center of my gaze had been trained. At one moment there was only the fading sky (with indigo just starting to rise up from the edges like an infusion of ink), and at the next Venus was glowing there, bright and steady. People talk about watching the stars come out, and I suppose some people do, but I think that was the only time in my life that I actually saw one appear. I wished on it, too, but this time it was real time, and I did not wish for Jo. “Help me,” I said, looking at the star. I would have said more, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what kind of help I needed.

That’s enough, a voice in my mind said uneasily. That’s enough, now. Go on back and get your car. Except that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to go down the driveway, just as I had in the final dream, the nightmare.

The plan was to prove to myself that there was no shroud-wrapped monster lurking in the shadows of the big old log house down there. The plan was pretty much based on that bit of New Age wisdom which says the word “fear” stands for Face Everything And Recover. But, as I stood there and looked down at that spark of porch light (it looked very small in the growing darkness), it occurred to me that there’s another bit of wisdom, one not quite so good-morning-starshine, which suggests fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Standing there by myself in the woods as the light left the sky, that seemed like the smarter interpretation, no two ways about it. I looked down and was a little amused to see that I had taken one of the balloons—untied it without even noticing as I thought things over. It floated serenely up from my hand at the end of its string, the words printed on it now impossible to read in the growing dark. Maybe it’s all moot, anyway; maybe I won’t be able to move. Maybe that old devil writer’s walk has got hold of me again, and I’ll just stand here like a statue until someone comes along and hauls me away. But this was real time in the real world, and in the real world there was no such thing as writer’s walk. I opened my hand.

As the string I’d been holding floated free, I walked under the rising balloon and started down the driveway. Foot followed foot, pretty much as they had ever since I’d first learned this trick back in 1959. I went deeper and deeper into the clean but sour smell of pine, and once I caught myself taking an extra-big step, avoiding a fallen branch that had been in the dream but wasn’t here in reality. My heart was still thudding hard, and sweat was still pouring out of me, oiling my skin and drawing mosquitoes. I raised a hand to brush the hair off my brow, then stopped, holding it splay-fingered out in front of my eyes. I put the other one next to it. Neither was marked; there wasn’t even a shadow of scar from the cut I’d given myself while crawling around my bedroom during the ice storm. “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m all right.” You funny little man, said Strickland, a voice answered. It wasn’t mine, wasn’t Jo’s; it was the UFO voice that had narrated my nightmare, the one which ’had driven me on even when I wanted to stop. The voice of some outsider. I started walking again. I was better than halfway down the driveway now. I had reached the point where, in the dream, I told the voice that I was afraid of Mrs. Danvers. “I’m afraid of Mrs. D…” I said, trying the words aloud in the growing dark. “What if the bad old housekeeper’s down there?” A loon cried on the lake, but the voice didn’t answer. I suppose it didn’t have to. There was no Mrs. Danvers, she was only a bag of bones in an old book, and the voice knew it. I began walking again. I passed the big pine that Jo had once banged into in our Jeep, trying to back up the driveway. How she had sworn! Like a sailor! I had managed to keep a straight face until she got to “Fuck a duck,” and then I’d lost it, leaning against the side of the Jeep with the heels of my hands pressed against my temples, howling until tears rolled down my cheeks, and Jo glaring hot blue sparks at me the whole time. I could see the mark about three feet up on the trunk of the tree, the white seeming to float above the dark bark in the gloom. It was just here that the unease which pervaded the other dreams had skewed into something far worse.

Even before the shrouded thing had come bursting out of the house, I had felt something was all wrong, all twisted up; I had felt that somehow the house itself had gone insane. It was at this point, passing the old scarred pine, that I had wanted to run like the gingerbread man.

I didn’t feel that now. I was afraid, yes, but not in terror. There was nothing behind me, for one thing, no sound of slobbering breath. The worst thing a man was likely to come upon in these woods was an irritated moose. Or, I supposed, if he was really unlucky, a pissed-off bear.

In the dream there had been a moon at least three quarters full, but there was no moon in the sky above me that night. Nor would there be; in glancing over the weather page in that morning’s Derry News, I had noticed that the moon was new.

Even the most powerful d6j? vu is fragile, and at the thought of that moonless sky, mine broke. The sensation of reliving my nightmare departed so abruptly that I even wondered why I had done this, what I had hoped to prove or accomplish. Now I’d have to go all the way back down the dark lane to retrieve my car.

All right, but I’d do it with a flashlight from the house. One of them would surely still be just inside the- A series of jagged explosions ran themselves off on the far side of the lake, the last loud enough to echo against the hills. I stopped, drawing in a quick breath. Moments before, those unexpected bangs probably would have sent me running back up the driveway in a panic, but now I had only that brief, startled moment. It was firecrackers, of course, the last one—the loudest one—maybe an M-80. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and across the lake kids were celebrating early, as kids are wont to do.

I walked on. The bushes still reached like hands, but they had been pruned back and their reach wasn’t very threatening. I didn’t have to worry about the power being out, either; I was now close enough to the back stoop to see moths fluttering around the light Bill Dean had left on for me. Even if the power had been out (in the western part of the state a lot of the lines are still above ground, and it goes out a lot), the gennie would have kicked in automatically.

Yet I was awed by how much of my dream was actually here, even with the powerful sense of repetition—of reliving—departed. Jo’s planters were where they’d always been, flanking the path which leads down to Sara’s little lick of beach; I suppose Brenda Meserve had found them stacked in the cellar and had had one of her crew set them out again. Nothing was growing in them yet, but I suspected that stuff would be soon. And even without the moon of my dream, I could see the black square on the water, standing about fifty yards offshore. The swimming float.

No oblong shape lying overturned in front of the stoop, though; no coffin. Still, my heart was beating hard again, and I think if more firecrackers had gone off on the Kashwakamak side of the lake just then, I might have screamed.

You funny little man, said Strickland.

Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

I had reached the point where, in my nightmare, the door banged open and that white shape came hurtling out with its wrapped arms upraised. I took one more step and then stopped, hearing the harsh sound of my respiration as I drew each breath down my throat and then pushed it back out over the dry floor of my tongue. There was no sense of dji vu, but for a moment I thought the shape would appear anyway—here in the real world, in real time. I stood waiting for it with my sweaty hands clenched. I drew in another dry breath, and this time I held it.

The soft lap of water against the shore.

A breeze that patted my face and rattled the bushes.

A loon cried out on the lake; moths battered the stoop light.

No shroud-monster threw open the door, and through the big windows to the left and right of the door, I could see nothing moving, white or otherwise. There was a note above the knob, probably from Bill, and that was it. I let out my breath in a rush and walked the rest of the way down the driveway to Sara Laughs.

The note was indeed from Bill Dean. It said that Brenda had done some shopping for me; the supermarket receipt was on the kitchen table, and I would find the pantry well stocked with canned goods. She’d gone easy with the perishables, but there was milk, butter, half-and-half, and hamburger, that staple of single-guy cuisine. I will see you next Mon… Bill had written. if I had my druthers I’d be here to say hello in person but the good wi3 says it’s our turn to do the holiday trotting and so we are going down to l’rginia (hot!!) to spend the 4th with her sister. If you need anything or run into problems… He had jotted his sister-in-law’s phone number in Virginia as well as Butch Wiggins’s number in town, which locals just call “the TR,” as in “Me and mother got tired of Bethel and moved our trailer over to the TR.” There were other numbers, as well—the plumber, the electrician, Brenda Meserve, even the TV guy over in Harrison who had repositioned the DSS dish for maximum reception. Bill was taking no chances. I turned the note over, imagining a final P.S.: Say, Mike, if nuclear war should break out bej3re me and Yvette get back from l, qrginia-Something moved behind me.

I whirled on my heels, the note dropping from my hand. It fluttered to the boards of the back stoop like a larger, whiter version of the moths banging the bulb overhead. In that instant I was sure it would be the shroud-thing, an insane revenant in my wife’s decaying body, Give me my dust-catcher, give it to me, how dare you come down here and disturb my rest, how dam you come to Manderley again, and now that you’re here, how will you ever get away? Into the mystery with you, you silly little man.

Into the mystery with you. Nothing there. It had just been the breeze again, stirring the bushes around a little… except I had felt no breeze against my sweaty skin, not that time. “Well it must have been, there’s nothing there,” I said. The sound of your voice when you’re alone can be either scary or reassuring. That time it was the latter. I bent over, picked up Bill’s note, and stuffed it into my back pocket.

Then I rummaged out my keyring. I stood under the stoop light in the big, swooping shadows of the light-struck moths, picking through my keys until I found the one I wanted.!t had a funny disused look, and as I rubbed my thumb along its serrated edge, I wondered again why I hadn’t come down here-except for a couple of quick broad daylight errands—in all the months and years since Jo had died. Surely if she had been alive, she would have insisted- But then a peculiar realization came to me: it wasn’t just a matter of since Jo died. It was easy to think of it that way—never once during my six weeks on Key Largo had I thought of it any other way—but now, actually standing here in the shadows of the dancing moths (it was like standing under some weird organic disco ball) and listening to the loons out on the lake, I remembered that although Johanna had died in August of 1994, she had died in Derry. It had been miserably hot in the city… so why had we been there? Why hadn’t we been sitting out on our shady deck on the lake side of the house, drinking iced tea in our bathing suits, watching the boats go back and forth and commenting on the form of the various water-skiers? What had she been doing in that damned Rite Aid parking lot to begin with, when during any other August we would have been miles from there? Nor was that all. We usually stayed at Sara until the end of September—it was a peaceful, pretty time, as warm as summer. But in ’93 we’d left with August only a week gone. I knew, because I could remember Johanna going to New York with me later that month, some kind of publishing deal and the usual attendant publicity crap. It had been dog-hot in Manhattan, the hydrants spraying in the East Village and the uptown streets sizzling. On one night of that trip we’d seen The Phantom of the Opera.

Near the end Jo had leaned over to me and whispered, “Oh fuck! The Phantom is snivelling again!” I had spent the rest of the show trying to keep from bursting into wild peals of laughter. Jo could be evil that way. Why had she come with me that August? Jo didn’t like New York even in April or October, when it’s sort of pretty. I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. All I was sure of was’ that she had never been back to Sara Laughs after early August of 1993… and before long I wasn’t even sure of that.

I slipped the key into the lock and turned it. I’d go inside, flip on the kitchen overheads, grab a flashlight, and go back for the car. If I didn’t, some drunk guy with a cottage at the far south end of the lane would come in too fast, rear-end my Chevy, and sue me for a billion dollars. The house had been aired out and didn’t smell a bit musty; instead of still, stale air, there was a faint and pleasing aroma of pine. I reached for the light inside the door, and then, somewhere in the blackness of the house, a child began to sob. My hand froze where it was and my flesh went cold. I didn’t panic, exactly, but all rational thought left my mind. It was weeping, a child’s weeping, but I hadn’t a clue as to where it was coming from. Then it began to fade. Not to grow softer but to fade, as if someone had picked that kid up and was carrying it away down some long corridor… not that any such corridor existed in Sara Laughs.

Even the one running through the middle of the house, connecting the central section to the two wings, isn’t really long. Fading… faded… almost gone. I stood in the dark with my cold skin crawling and my hand on the lightswitch. Part of me wanted to boogie, to just go flying out of there as fast as my little legs could carry me, running like the gingerbread man. Another part, however—the rational part—was already reasserting itself. I flicked the switch, the part that wanted to run saying forget it, it won’t work, it’s the dream, stupid, it’s your dream coming true. But it did work. The foyer light came on in a shadow-dispelling rush, revealing Jo’s lumpy little pottery collection to the left and the bookcase to the right, stuff I hadn’t looked at in four years or more, but still here and still the same. On a middle shelf of the bookcase I could see the three early Elmore Leonard novelswag, The Big Bounce, and Mr. Majestyk—that I had put aside against a spell of rainy weather; you have to be ready for rain when you’re at camp.

Without a good book, even two days of rain in the woods can be enough to drive you bonkers. There was a final whisper of weeping, then silence.

In it, I could hear ticking from the kitchen. The clock by the stove, one of Jo’s rare lapses into bad taste, is Felix the Cat with big eyes that shift from side to side as his pendulum tail flicks back and forth.

I think it’s been in every cheap horror movie ever made. “Who’s here?” I called. I took a step toward the kitchen, just a dim space floating beyond the foyer, then stopped. In the dark the house was a cavern. The sound of the weeping could have come from anywhere. Including my own imagination. “Is someone here?”

No answer… but I didn’t think the sound had been in my head. If it had been, writer’s block was the least of my worries. Standing on the bookcase to the left of the Elmore Leonards was a long-barrelled flashlight, the kind that holds eight D-cells and will temporarily blind you if someone shines it directly into your eyes. I grasped it, and until it nearly slipped through my hand I hadn’t really realized how heavily I was sweating, or how scared I was. I juggled it, heart beating hard, half-expecting that creepy sobbing to begin again, half-expecting the shroud-thing to come floating out of the black living room with its shapeless arms raised; some old hack of a politician back from the grave and ready to give it another shot. Vote the straight Resurrection ticket, brethren, and you will be saved. I got control of the light and turned it on. It shot a bright straight beam into the living room, picking out the moosehead over the fieldstone fireplace; it shone in the head’s glass eyes like two lights burning under water. I saw the old cane-and-bamboo chairs; the old couch; the scarred dining-room table you had to balance by shimming one leg with a folded playing card or a couple of beer coasters; I saw no ghosts; I decided this was a seriously fucked-up carnival just the same. In the words of the immortal Cole Porter, let’s call the whole thing off. If I headed east as soon as I got back to my car, I could be in Derry by midnight. Sleeping in my own bed. I turned out the foyer light and stood with the flash drawing its line across the dark. I listened to the tick of that stupid cat-clock, which Bill must have set going, and to the familiar chugging cycle of the refrigerator. As I listened to them, I realized that I had never expected to hear either sound again. As for the crying… Had there been crying? Had there really? Yes. Crying or something. Just what now seemed moot. What seemed germane was that coming here had been a dangerous idea and a stupid course of action for a man who has taught his mind to misbehave. As I stood in the foyer with no light but the flash and the glow falling in the windows from the bulb over the back stoop, I realized that the line between what I knew was real and what I knew was only my imagination had pretty much disappeared.

I left the house, checked to make sure the door was locked, and walked back up the driveway, swinging the flashlight beam from side to side like a pendulum—like the tail of old Felix the Krazy Kat in the kitchen. It occurred to me, as I struck north along the lane, that I would have to make up some sort of story for Bill Dean. It wouldn’t do to say, “Well, Bill, I got down there and heard a kid bawling in my locked house, and it scared me so bad I turned into the gingerbread man and ran back to Derry. I’ll send you the flashlight I took; put it back on the shelf next to the paperbacks, would you?” That wasn’t ’any good because the story would get around and people would say, “Not surprised.

Wrote too many books, probably. Work like that has got to soften a man’s head. Now he’s scared of his own shadow. Occupational hazard.” Even if I never came down here again in my life, I didn’t want to leave people on the TR with that opinion of me, that half-contemptuous, see-what-you-get-for-thinking-too-much attitude. It’s one a lot of folks seem to have about people who live by their imaginations. I’d tell Bill I got sick. In a way it was true. Or no… better to tell him someone else got sick… a friend… someone in Derry I’d been seeing… a lady-friend, perhaps. “Bill, this friend of mine, this lady-friend of mine got sick, you see, and so…” I stopped suddenly, the light shining on the front of my car. I had walked the mile in the dark without noticing many of the sounds in the woods, and dismissing even the bigger of them as deer settling down for the night. I hadn’t turned around to see if the shroud-thing (or maybe some spectral crying child) was following me. I had gotten involved in making up a story and then embellishing it, doing it in my head instead of on paper this time but going down all the same well-known paths. I had gotten so involved that I had neglected to be afraid. My heartbeat was back to normal, the sweat was drying on my skin, and the mosquitoes had stopped whining in my ears. And as I stood there, a thought occurred to me. It was as if my mind had been waiting patiently for me to calm down enough so it could remind me of some essential fact. The pipes. Bill had gotten my go-ahead to replace most of the old stuff, and the plumber had done so. Very recently he’d done so.

“Air in the pipes,” I said, running the beam of the eight-cell flashlight over the grille of my Chevrolet. “That’s what I heard.” I waited to see if the deeper part of my mind would call this a stupid, rationalizing lie. It didn’t… because, I suppose, it realized it could be true. Airy pipes can sound like people talking, dogs barking, or children crying. Perhaps the plumber had bled them and the sound had been something else… but perhaps he hadn’t. The question was whether or not I was going to jump in my car, back two tenths of a mile to the highway, and then return to Derry, all on the basis of a sound I had heard for ten seconds (maybe only five), and while in an excited, stressful state of mind. I decided the answer was no. It might take only one more peculiar thing to turn me around—probably gibbering like a character on Tales from the Crypt—but the sound I’d heard in the foyer wasn’t enough. Not when making a go of it at Sara Laughs might mean so much. I hear voices in my head, and have for as long as I can remember.

I don’t know if that’s part of the necessary equipment for being a writer or not; I’ve never asked another one. I never felt the need to, because I know all the voices I hear are versions of me. Still, they often seem like very real versions of other people, and none is more real to me-or more familiar—than Jo’s voice. Now that voice came, sounding interested, amused in an ironic but gentle way… and approving. Going to fight, Mike? “Yeah,” I said, standing there in the dark and picking out gleams of chrome with my flashlight. “Think so, babe.” Well, then—that’s all right, isn’t it? Yes. It was. I got into my car, started it up, and drove slowly down the lane. And when I got to the driveway, I turned in.

There was no crying the second time I entered the house. I walked slowly through the downstairs, keeping the flashlight in my hand until I had turned on every light I could find; if there were people still boating on the north end of the lake, old Sara probably looked like some weird Spielbergian flying saucer hovering above them. I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer. In my life Johanna had been dead nearly four years, but to Sara, she was much nearer than that.

It wasn’t until I was actually inside, with all the lights on and the flash returned to its spot on the bookshelf, that I realized how much I had been dreading my arrival. Of having my grief reawakened by signs of Johanna’s interrupted life. A book with a corner turned down on the table at one end of the sofa, where Jo had liked to recline in her nightgown, reading and eating plums; the cardboard cannister of Quaker Oats, which was all she ever wanted for breakfast, on a shelf in the pantry; her old green robe hung on the back of the bathroom door in the south wing, which Bill Dean still called “the new wing,” although it had been built before we ever saw Sara Laughs. Brenda Meserve had done a good job—a humane job-of removing these signs and signals, but she couldn’t get them all. Jo’s hardcover set of Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels still held pride of place at the center of the living-room bookcase. Jo had always called the moosehead over the fireplace Bunter, and once, for no reason I could remember (certainly it seemed a very un-Bunterlike accessory), she had hung a bell around the moose’s hairy neck. It hung there still, on a red velvet ribbon. Mrs. Meserve might have puzzled over that bell, wondering whether to leave it up or take it down, not knowing that when Jo and I made love on the living-room couch (and yes, we were often overcome there), we referred to the act as “ringing Bunter’s bell.” Brenda Meserve had done her best, but any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map.

What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours. I walked around, touching things, looking at things, seeing them new. Jo seemed everywhere to me, and after a little while I dropped into one of the old cane chairs in front of the TV. The cushion wheezed under me, and I could hear Jo saying, “Well excuse yourself, Michael!” I put my face in my hands and cried. I suppose it was the last of my mourning, but that made it no easier to bear. I cried until I thought something inside me would break if I didn’t stop. When it finally let me go, my face was drenched, I had the hiccups, and I thought I had never felt so tired in my life. I felt strained all over my body—partly from the walking I’d done, I suppose, but mostly just from the tension of getting here… and deciding to stay here. To fight. That weird phantom crying I’d heard when I first stepped into the place, although it seemed very distant now, hadn’t helped. I washed my face at the kitchen sink, rubbing away the tears with the heels of my hands and clearing my clogged nose. Then I carried my suitcases down to the guest bedroom in the north wing. I had no intention of sleeping in the south wing, in the master bedroom where I had last slept with Jo. That was a choice Brenda Meserve had foreseen. There was a bouquet of fresh wildflowers on the bureau, and a card: WELCOME BACK, MR. NOONAN. If I hadn’t been emotionally exhausted, I suppose looking at that message, in Mrs. Meserve’s spiky copperplate handwriting, would have brought on another fit of the weeps. I put my face in the flowers and breathed deeply. They smelled good, like sunshine. Then I took off my clothes, leaving them where they dropped, and turned back the coverlet on the bed. Fresh sheets, fresh pillowcases; same old Noonan sliding between the former and dropping his head onto the latter. I lay there with the bedside lamp on, looking up at the shadows on the ceiling, almost unable to believe I was in this place and this bed. There had been no shroud-thing to greet me, of course… but I had an idea it might well find me in my dreams.

Sometimes—for me, at least—there’s a transitional bump between waking and sleeping. Not that night. I slipped away without knowing it, and woke the next morning with sunlight shining in through the window and the bedside lamp still on. There had been no dreams that I could remember, only a vague sensation that I had awakened sometime briefly in the night and heard a bell ringing, very thin and far away.

The little girl—actually she wasn’t much more than a baby-came walking up the middle of Route 68, dressed in a red bathing suit, yellow plastic flip-flops, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap turned around backward. I had just driven past the Lakeview General Store and Dickie Brooks’s All-Purpose Garage, and the speed limit there drops from fifty-five to thirty-five. Thank God I was obeying it that day, otherwise I might have killed her. It was my first day back. I’d gotten up late and spent most of the morning walking in the woods which run along the lakeshore, seeing what was the same and what had changed. The water looked a little lower and there were fewer boats than I would have expected, especially on summer’s biggest holiday, but otherwise I might never have been away.

I even seemed to be slapping at the same bugs. Around eleven my stomach alerted me to the fact that I’d skipped breakfast. I decided a trip to the Village Cafe was in order. The restaurant at Warrington’s was trendier by far, but I’d be stared at there. The Village Cafe would be better—if it was still doing business. Buddy Jelli-son was an ill-tempered fuck, but he had always been the best fry-cook in western Maine and what my stomach wanted was a big greasy Vil-lageburger. Now this little girl, walking straight up the white line and looking like a majorette leading an invisible parade. At thirty-five miles per hour I saw her in plenty of time, but this road was busy in the summer, and very few people bothered creeping through the reduced-speed zone. There were only a dozen Castle County police cruisers, after all, and not many of them bothered with the TR unless they were specifically called there. I pulled over to the shoulder, put the Chevy in t,^vac, and was out before the dust had even begun to settle. The day was muggy and close and still, the clouds seeming Low enough to touch. The kid—a little blondie with a snub nose and scabbed knees—stood on the white line as if it were a tightrope and watched me approach with no more fear than a fawn.

“Hi,” she said. “I go beach. Mummy ’on’t take me and I’m mad as hell.”

She stamped her foot to show she knew as well as anybody what mad as hell was all about. Three or four was my guess. Well-spoken in her fashion and cute as hell, but still no more than three or four. “Well, the beach is a good place to go on the Fourth, all right,” I said, “but—”

“Fourth of July and fireworks too,” she agreed, making “too”

sound exotic and sweet, like a word in Vietnamese. “—but if you try to walk there on the highway, you’re more apt to wind up in Castle Rock Hospital.” I decided I wasn’t going to stand there playing Mister Rogers with her in the middle of Route 68, not with a curve only fifty yards to the south and a car apt to come wheeling around it at sixty miles an hour at any time. I could hear a motor, actually, and it was revving hard. I picked the kid up and carried her over to where my car was idling, and although she seemed perfectly content to be carried and not frightened a bit, I felt like Chester the Molester the second I had my arm locked under her bottom. I was very aware that anyone sitting around in the combined office and waiting room of Brooksie’s Garage could look out and see me. This is one of the strange midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching. . or without thinking, way down deep in the sewers of our psyches, that there probably is something lecherous in it. I got her out of the road, though. I did that much. Let the Marching Mothers of Western Maine come after me and do their worst. “You take me beach?” the little girl asked.

She was bright-eyed, smiling. I figured that she’d probably be pregnant by the time she was twelve, especially given the cool way she was wearing her baseball cap. “Got your suitie?”

“Actually I think I left my suitie at home. Don’t you hate that? Honey, where’s your mom?” As if in direct answer to my question, the car I’d heard came busting out of a road on the near side of the curve. It was a Jeep Scout with mud splashed high up on both sides. The motor was growling like something up a tree and pissed off about it. A woman’s head was poked out the side window. Little curie’s mom must have been too scared to sit down; she was driving in a mad crouch, and if a car had been coming around that particular curve in Route 68 when she pulled out, my friend in the red bathing suit would likely have become an orphan on the spot. The Scout fishtailed, the head dropped back down inside the cab, and there was a grinding as the driver upshifted, trying to take her old heap from zero to sixty in maybe nine seconds. If pure terror could have done the job, I’m sure she would have succeeded. “That’s Mattie,” the girl in the bathing suit said. “I’m mad at her. I’m running away to have a Fourth at the beach. If she’s mad I go to my white nana.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but it did cross my mind that Miss Bosox of 1998

could have her Fourth at the beach; I would settle for a fifth of something whole-grain at home. Meanwhile, I was waving the arm not under the kid’s butt back and forth over my head, and hard enough to blow around wisps of the girl’s fine blonde hair. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, lady! I got her!” The Scout sped by, still accelerating and still sounding pissed off about it. The exhaust was blowing clouds of blue smoke. There was a further hideous grinding from the Scout’s old transmission. It was like some crazy version of Let’s Make a Deal.” “Mattie, you’ve succeeded in getting into second gear—would you like to quit and take the Maytag washer, or do you want to try for third?” I did the only thing I could think of, which was to step out onto the road, turn toward the Jeep, which was now speeding away from me (the smell of the oil was thick and acrid), and hold the kid up high over my head, hoping Mattie would see us in her rearview mirror. I no longer felt like Chester the Molester; now I felt like a cruel auctioneer in a Disney cartoon, offering the cutest li’l piglet in the litter to the highest bidder. It worked, though. The Scout’s mudcaked taillights came on and there was a demonic howling as the badly used brakes locked. Right in front of Brooksie’s, this was. If there were any old-timers in for a good Fourth of July gossip, they would now have plenty to gossip about. I thought they would especially enjoy the part where Mom screamed at me to unhand her baby.

When you return to your summer home after a long absence, it’s always nice to get off on the right foot. The backup lights flared and the Jeep began reversing down the road at a good twenty miles an hour. Now the transmission sounded not pissed off but panicky—please, it was saying, please stop, you’re killing me. The Scout’s rear end wagged from side to side like the tail of a happy dog. I watched it coming at me, hypnotized—now in the northbound lane, now across the white line and into the southbound lane, now overcorrecting so that the left-hand tires spumed dust off the shoulder. “Mattie go fast,” my new girlfriend said in a conversational, isn’t-this-interesting voice. She had one arm slung around my neck; we were chums, by God. But what the kid said woke me up.

Mattie go fast, all right, too fast. Mattie would, more likely than not, clean out the rear end of my Chevrolet. And if I just stood here, Baby Snooks and I were apt to end up as toothpaste between the two vehicles.

I backed the length of my car, keeping my eyes fixed on the Jeep and yelling, “Slow down, Mattie! Slow down!” Curie-pie liked that. “S’yo down!” she yelled, starting to laugh. “S’yo down, you old Mattie, s’yo down!”

The brakes screamed in fresh agony. The Jeep took one last walloping, unhappy jerk backward as Mattie stopped without benefit of the clutch.

That final lunge took the Scout’s rear bumper so close to the rear bumper of my Chevy that you could have bridged the gap with a cigarette.

The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry. The kid was waving a hand in front of her face and coughing theatrically. The driver’s door flew open; Mattie Devore flew out like a circus acrobat shot from a cannon, if you can imagine a circus acrobat dressed in old paisley shorts and a cotton smock top. My first thought was that the little girl’s big sister had been babysitting her, that Mattie and Mummy were two different people. I knew that little kids often spend a period of their development calling their parents by their first names, but this pale-cheeked blonde girl looked all of twelve, fourteen at the outside.

I decided her mad handling of the Scout hadn’t been terror for her child (or not just terror) but total automotive inexperience. There was something else, too, okay? Another assumption that I made. The muddy four-wheel-drive, the baggy paisley shorts, the smock that all but screamed Kmart, the long yellow hair held back with those little red elastics, and most of all the inattention that allows the three-year-old in your care to go wandering off in the first place… all those things said trailer-trash to me. I know how that sounds, but I had some basis for it. Also, I’m Irish, goddammit. My ancestors were trailer-trash when the trailers were still horse-drawn caravans. “Stinky-phew!” the little girl said, still waving a pudgy hand at the air in front of her face.

“Scoutie stink I” Where Scoutie’s bathing suitie? I thought, and then my new girlfriend was snatched out of my arms. Now that she was closer, my idea that Mattie was the bathing beauty’s sister took a hit. Mattie wouldn’t be middle-aged until well into the next century, but she wasn’t twelve or fourteen, either. I now guessed twenty, maybe a year younger.

When she snatched the baby away, I saw the wedding ring on her left hand. I also saw the dark circles under her eyes, gray skin dusting to purple. She was young, but I thought it was a mother’s terror and exhaustion I was looking at. I expected her to swat the tot, because that’s how trailer-trash moms react to being tired and scared. When she did, I would stop her, one way or another distract her into turning her anger on me, if that was what it took. There was nothing very noble in this, I should add; all I really wanted to do was to postpone the fanny-whacking, shoulder-shaking, and in-your-face shouting to a time and place where I wouldn’t have to watch it. It was my first day back in town; I didn’t want to s. pend any of it watching an inattentive slut abuse her child. Instead of shaking her and shouting “Where did you think you were going, you little bitch?” Mattie first hugged the child (who hugged back enthusiastically, showing absolutely no sign of fear)

and then covered her face with kisses. “Why did you do that?” she cried.

“What was in your head? When I couldn’t find you, I died.” Mattie burst into tears. The child in the bathing suit looked at her with an expression of surprise so big and complete it would have been comical under other circumstances. Then her own face crumpled up. I stood back, watched them crying and hugging, and felt ashamed of my preconceptions.

A car went by and slowed down. An elderly couple—Ma and Pa Kettle on their way to the store for that holiday box of Grape-Nuts—gawked out. I gave them an impatient wave with both hands, the kind that says what areyou staring at, go on, put an egg in your shoe and beat it. They sped up, but I didn’t see an out-of-state license plate, as I’d hoped I might. This version of Ma and Pa were locals, and the story would be fleeting its rounds soon enough: Mattie the teenage bride and her little bundle of joy (said bundle undoubtedly conceived in the back seat of a car or the bed of a pickup truck some months before the legit-imizing ceremony), bawling their eyes out at the side of the road. With a stranger. No, not exactly a stranger. Mike Noonan, the writer fella from upstate. “I wanted to go to the beach and suh-suh-swim!” the little girl wept, and now it was “swim” that sounded exotic—the Vietnamese word for “ecstasy,” perhaps. “I said I’d take you this afternoon.” Mattie was still sniffing, but getting herself under control. “Don’t do that again, little guy, please don’t you ever do that again, Mommy was so scared.”

“I won’t,” the kid said “I really won’t.” Still crying, she hugged the older girl tight, laying her head against the side of Mattie’s neck. Her baseball cap fell off. I picked it up, beginning to feel very much like an outsider here. I poked the blue-and-red cap at Mattie’s hand until her fingers closed on it.

I decided I also felt pretty good about the way things had turned out, and maybe I had a right to. I’ve presented the incident as if it was amusing, and it was, but it was the sort of amusing you never see until later. When it was happening, it was terrifying. Suppose there had been a truck coming from the other direction? Coming around that curve, and coming too fast?

A vehicle did come around it, a pickup of the type no tourist ever drives. Two more locals gawked their way by.

“Ma’am?” I said. “Mattie? I think I’d better get going. Glad your little girl is all right.” The minute it was out, I felt an almost irresistible urge to laugh. I could picture me drawling this speech to Mattie (a name that belonged in a movie like The Unj3rgiven or? ue Grit if any name ever did) with my thumbs hooked into the belt of my chaps and my Stetson pushed back to reveal my noble brow. I felt an insane urge to add, “You’re right purty, ma’am, ain’t you the new schoolmarm?”

She turned to me and I saw that she was right purty. Even with circles under her eyes and her blonde hair sticking off in gobs to either side of her head. And I thought she was doing okay for a girl probably not yet old enough to buy a drink in a bar. At least she hadn’t belted the baby.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “Was she right in the road?” Say she wasn’t, her eyes begged. At least say she was walking along the shoulder. “Well—”

“I walked on the line,” the girl said, pointing. “It’s like the cross-mock.” Her voice took on a faintly righteous tone. “Crossmock is safe.”

Mattie’s cheeks, already white, turned whiter. I didn’t like seeing her that way, and didn’t like to think of her driving home that way, especially with a kid.

“Where do you live, Mrs. — ?”

“Devore,” she said. “I’m Mattie Devore.” She shifted the child and put out her hand. I shook it. The morning was warm, and it was going to be hot by mid-afternoon—beach weather for sure—but the fingers I touched were icy. “We live just there.”

She pointed to the intersection the Scout had shot out of, and I could see—surprise, surprise—a doublewide trailer set off in a grove of pines about two hundred feet up the little feeder road. Wasp Hill Road, I recalled. It ran about half a mile from Route 68 to the water—what was known as the Middle Bay. Ah yes, doc, it’s all coming back to me now. I’m once more riding the Dark Score range. Saving little kids is my specialty.

Still, I was relieved to see that she lived close by—less than a quarter of a mile from the place where our respective vehicles were parked with their tails almost touching—and when I thought about it, it stood to reason. A child as young as the bathing beauty couldn’t have walked far… although this one had already demonstrated a fair degree of determination.

I thought Mother’s haggard look was even more suggestive of the daughter’s will. I was glad I was too old to be one of her future boyfriends; she would have them jumping through hoops all through high school and college. Hoops of fire, likely.

Well, the high-school part, anyway. Girls from the doublewide side of town did not, as a general rule, go to college unless there was a juco or a voke-tech handy. And she would only have them jumping until the right boy (or more likely the wrong one) came sweeping around the Great Curve of Life and ran her down in the highway, her all the while unaware that the white line and the crossmock were two different thngs. Then the whole cycle would repeat itself.

Christ almighty, Noonan, quit it, I told myself. She’s three years old and you’ve already got her with three kids of her own, two with ringworm and one retarded.

“Thank you so much,” Mattie repeated.

“That’s okay,” I said, and snubbed the little girl’s nose. Although her cheeks were still wet with tears, she grinned at me sunnily enough in response. “This is a very verbal little girl.”

“Very verbal, and very willful.” Now Mattie did give her child a little shake, but the kid showed no fear, no sign that shaking or hitting was the order of most days. On the contrary, her smile widened. Her mother smiled back. And yes-once you got past the slopped-together look of her, she was most extraordinarily pretty. Put her in a tennis dress at the Castle Rock Country Club (where she’d likely never go in her life, except maybe as a maid or a waitress), and she would maybe be more than pretty. A young Grace Kelly, perhaps. Then she looked back at me, her eyes very wide and grave. “Mr. Noonan, I’m not a bad mother,” she said.

I felt a start at my name coming from her mouth, but it was only momentary. She was the right age, after all, and my books were probably better for her than spending her afternoons in front of General hospital and One Life to Live. A little, anyway. “We had an argument about when we were going to the beach. I wanted to hang out the clothes, have lunch, and go this afternoon. Kyra wanted—” She broke off. “What? What did I say?”

“Her name is Kia? Did—” Before I could say anything else, the most extraordinary thing happened: my mouth was full of water. So full I felt a moment’s panic, like someone who is swimming in the ocean and swallows a wave-wash. Only this wasn’t a salt taste; it was cold and fresh, with a faint metal tang like blood. I turned my head aside and spat. I expected a gush of liquid to pour out of my mouth—the sort of gush you sometimes get when commencing artificial respiration on a near-drowning victim. What came out instead was what usually comes out when you spit on a hot day: a little white pellet. And that sensation was gone even before the little white pellet struck the dirt of the shoulder. In an instant, as if it had never been there. “That man spirted,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “Sorry,” I said. I was also bewildered. What in God’s name had that been about? “I guess I had a little delayed reaction.” Mattie looked concerned, as though I were eighty instead of forty. I thought that maybe to a girl her age, forty is eighty. “Do you want to come up to the house? I’ll give you a glass of water.”

“No, I’m fine now.”

“All right. Mr. Noonan… all I mean is that nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I was hanging sheets… she was inside watching a Mighty Mouse cartoon on the VCR…

then, when I went in to get more pins…” She looked at the girl, who was no longer smiling. It was starting to get through to her now. Her eyes were big, and ready to fill with tears. “She was gone. I thought for a minute I’d die of fear.” Now the kid’s mouth began to tremble, and her eyes filled up right on schedule. She began to weep. Mattie stroked her hair, soothing the small head until it lay against the Kmart smock top. “That’s all right, Ki,” she said. “It turned out okay this time, but you can’t go out in the road. It’s dangerous. Little things get run over in the road, and you’re a little thing. The most precious little thing in the world.” She cried harder. It was the exhausted sound of a child who needed a nap before any more adventures, to the beach or anywhere else. “Kia bad, Kia bad,” she sobbed against her mother’s neck.

“No, honey, only three,” Mattie said, and if I had harbored any further thoughts about her being a bad mother, they melted away then. Or perhaps they’d already gone—after all, the kid was round, comely, well-kept, and unbruised. On one level, those things registered. On another I was trying to cope with the strange thing that had just happened, and the equally strange thing I thought I was hearing—that the little girl I had carried off the white line had the name we had planned to give our child, if our child turned out to be a girl. “Kia,” I said. Marvelled, really. As if my touch might break her, I tentatively stroked the back of her head. Her hair was sun-warm and fine. “No,” Mattie said. “That’s the best she can say it now. Kyra, not Kia. It’s from the Greek. It means ladylike.” She shifted, a little self-conscious. “I picked it out of a baby-name book. While I was pregnant, I kind of went Oprah. Better than going postal, I guess.”

“It’s a lovely name,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re a bad mom.” What went through my mind right then was a story Frank Arlen had told over a meal at Christmas—it had been about Petie, the youngest brother, and Frank had had the whole table in stitches. Even Petie, who claimed not to remember a bit of the incident, laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks. One Easter, Frank said, when Petie was about five, their folks had gotten them up for an Easter-egg hunt. The two parents had hidden loo lol over a hundred colored hard-boiled eggs around the house the evening before, after getting the kids over to their grandparents’. A high old Easter morning was had by all, at least until Johanna looked up from the patio, where she was counting her share of the spoils, and shrieked.

There was Petie, crawling gaily around on the second-floor overhang at the back of the house, not six feet from the drop to the concrete patio.

Mr. Arlen had rescued Petie while the rest of the family stood below, holding hands, frozen with horror and fascination. Mrs. Arlen had repeated the Hail Mary over and over (“so fast she sounded like one of the Chipmunks on that old “Witch Doctor’ record,” Frank had said, laughing harder than ever) until her husband had disappeared back into the open bedroom window with Petie in his arms. Then she had swooned to the pavement, breaking her nose. When asked for an explanation, Petie had told them he’d wanted to check the rain-gutter for eggs. I suppose every family has at least one story like that; the survival of the world’s Peties and Kyras is a convincing argument—in the minds of parents, anyway for the existence of God. “I was so scared,” Mattie said, now looking fourteen again. Fifteen at most.

“But it’s over,” I said. “And Kyra’s not going to go walking in the road anymore. Are you, Kyra?” She shook her head against her mother’s shoulder without raising it. I had an idea she’d probably be asleep before Mattie got her back to the good old doublewide. “You don’t know how bizarre this is for me,” Mattie said. “One of my favorite writers comes out of nowhere and saves my kid. I knew you had a place on the TR, that big old log house everyone calls Sara Laughs, but folks say you don’t come here anymore since your wife died.”

“For a long time I didn’t,” I said. “If Sara was a marriage instead of a house, you’d call this a trial reconciliation.”

She smiled fleetingly, then looked grave again. “I want to ask you for something. A favor.”

“Ask away.”

“Don’t talk about this. It’s not a good time for Ki and me.”

“Why not?”

She bit her lip and seemed to consider answering the question—one I might not have asked, given an extra moment to consider—and then shook her head. “It’s just not. And I’d be so grateful if you didn’t talk about what just happened in town. More grateful than you’ll ever know.”

“No problem.”

“You mean it?”

“Sure. I’m basically a summer person who hasn’t been around for awhile. . which means I don’t have many folks to talk to, anyway.” There was Bill Dean, of course, but I could keep quiet around him. Not that he wouldn’t know. If this little lady thought the locals weren’t going to find out about her daughter’s attempt to get to the beach by shank’s mare, she was fooling herself. “I think we’ve been noticed already, though. Take a look up at Brooksie’s Garage. Peek, don’t stare.” She did, and sighed. Two old men were standing on the tarmac where there had been gas pumps once upon a time. One was very likely Brookshe himself; I thought I could see the remnants of the flyaway red hair which had always made him look like a downeast version of Bozo the Clown. The other, old enough to make Brooksie look like a wee slip of a lad, was leaning on a gold-headed cane in a way that was queerly vulpine. “I can’t do anything about them,” she said, sounding depressed. “Nobody can do anything about them. I guess I should count myself lucky it’s a holiday and there’s only two of them.”

“Besides,” I added, “they probably didn’t see much.” Which ignored two things: first, that half a dozen cars and pick-em-ups had gone by while we had been standing here, and second, that whatever Brooksie and his elderly friend hadn’t seen, they would be more than happy to make up. On Mattie’s shoulder, Kyra gave a ladylike snore. Mattie glanced at her and gave her a smile full of rue and love. “I’m sorry we had to meet under circumstances that make me look like such a dope, because I really am a big fan. They say at the bookstore in Castle Rock that you’ve got a new one coming out this summer.” I nodded. “It’s called Helen’s Promise.”

She grinned. “Good title.”

“Thanks. You better get your buddy back home before she breaks your arm.”

“Yeah.” There are people in this world who have a knack for asking embarrassing, awkward questions without meaning to—it’s like a talent for walking into doors. I am one of that tribe, and as I walked with her toward the passenger side of the Scout, I found a good one. And yet it was hard to blame myself too enthusiastically. I had seen the wedding ring on her hand, after all. “Will you tell your husband?” Her smile stayed on, but it paled somehow. And tightened. If it were possible to delete a spoken question the way you can delete a line of type when you’re writing a story, I would have done it. “He died last August.”

“Mattie, I’m sorry. Open mouth, insert foot.”

“You couldn’t know. A girl my age isn’t even supposed to be married, is she? And if she is, her husband’s supposed to be in the army, or something.” There was a pink baby-seat—also Kmart, I guessed in the passenger side of the Scout.

Mattie tried to boost Kyra in, but I could see she was struggling. I stepped forward to help her, and for just a moment, as I reached past her to grab a plump leg, the back of my hand brushed her breast. She couldn’t step back unless she wanted to risk Kyra’s slithering out of the seat and onto the floor, but I could feel her recording the touch.

My husband’s dead, not a threat, so the big-deal writer thinks it’s okay to cop a little feel on a hot summer morning. And what can I say? Mr. Big Deal came along and hauled my kid out of the road, maybe saved her life. No, Mattie, I may be forty going on a hundred, but I was not copping a el. Except I couldn’t say that; it would only make things worse. I felt my cheeks flush a little. “How old are you?” I asked, when we had the baby squared away and were back at a safe distance. She gave me a look. Tired or not, she had it together again. “Old enough to know the situation I’m in.” She held out her hand. “Thanks again, Mr. Noonan.

God sent you along at the right time.”

“Nah, God just told me I needed a hamburger at the Village Cafe,” I said. “Or maybe it was His opposite number. Please say Buddy’s still doing business at the same old stand.” She smiled. It warmed her face back up again, and I was happy to see it. “He’ll still be there when Ki’s kids are old enough to try buying beer with fake IDS. Unless someone wanders in off the road and asks for something like shrimp tetrazzini. If that happened he’d probably drop dead of a heart attack.”

“Yeah. Well, when I get copies of the new book, I’ll drop one off.” The smile continued to hang in there, but now it shaded toward caution. “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Noonan.”

“No, but I will. My agent gets me fifty comps. I find that as I get older, they go further.” Perhaps she heard more in my voice than I had meant to put there—people do sometimes, I guess. ’11 right. I’ll look forward to it.” I took another look at the baby, sleeping in that queerly casual way they have—her head tilted over on her shoulder, her lovely little lips pursed and blowing a bubble. Their skin is what kills me—so fine and perfect there seem to be no pores at all. Her Sox hat was askew. Mattie watched me reach in and readjust it so the visor’s shade fell across her closed eyes. “Kyra,” I said. Mattie nodded. “Ladylike.”

“Kia is an African name,” I said. “It means ’season’s beginning.” “I left her then, giving her a little wave as I headed back to the driver’s side of the Chevy. I could feel her curious eyes on me, and I had the oddest feeling that I was going to cry. That feeling stayed with me long after the two of them were out of sight; was still with me when I got to the Village Cafe. I pulled into the dirt parking lot to the left of the off-brand gas pumps and just sat there for a little while, thinking about Jo and about a home pregnancy-testing kit which had cost twenty-two-fifty. A little secret she’d wanted to keep until she was absolutely sure. That must have been it; what else could it have been? “Kia,” I said. “Season’s beginning.” But that made me feel like crying again, so I got out of the car and slammed the door hard behind me, as if I could keep the sadness inside that way.

Buddy Jellison was just the same, all right—same dirty cooks’ whites and splotchy white apron, same black hair under a paper cap stained with either beef-blood or strawberry juice. Even, from the look, the same oatmeal-cookie crumbs caught in his ragged mustache. He was maybe fifty-five and maybe seventy, which in some genetically favored men seems to be still within the farthest borders of middle age. He was huge and shambly—probably six-four, three hundred pounds—and just as full of grace, wit, and joie de vivre as he had been four years before. “You want a menu or do you remember?” he grunted, as if I’d last been in yesterday. “You still make the Villageburger Deluxe?”

“Does a crow still shit in the pine tops?” Pale eyes regarding me. No condolences, which was fine by me. “Most likely. I’ll have one with everything—a Villageburger, not a crow—plus a chocolate frappe. Good to see you again.” I offered my hand. He looked surprised but touched it with his own. Unlike the whites, the apron, and the hat, the hand was clean. Even the nails were clean. “Yuh,” he said, then turned to the sallow woman chopping onions beside the grill. “Villageburger, Audrey,” he said.

“Drag it through the garden.” I’m ordinarily a sit-at-the-counter kind of guy, but that day I took a booth near the cooler and waited for Buddy to yell that it was ready—Audrey short-orders, but she doesn’t waitress. I wanted to think, and Buddy’s was a good place to do it.

There were a couple of locals eating sandwiches and drinking sodas straight from the can, but that was about it; people with summer cottages would have to be starving to eat at the Village Cafe, and even then you’d likely have to haul them through the door kicking and screaming. The floor was faded green linoleum with a rolling topography of hills and valleys. Like Buddy’s uniform, it was none too clean (the summer people who came in probably failed to notice his hands). The woodwork was greasy and dark. Above it, where the plaster started, there were a number of bumper-stickers—Buddy’s idea of decoration.

HORN BROKEN—WATCH FOR FINGER.

WIFE AND DOG MISSING. REWARD FOR DOG.

THERE’s NO TOWN DRUNK HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS. Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin. Three overhead fans paddled apathetically at the hot air, and to the left of the soft-drink cooler were two dangling strips of flypaper, both liberally stippled with wildlife, some of it still struggling feebly. If you could look at those and still eat, your digestion was probably doing okay. I thought about a similarity of names which was surely, had to be, a coincidence. I thought about a young, pretty girl who had become a mother at sixteen or seventeen and a widow at nineteen or twenty. I thought about inadvertently touching her breast, and how the world judged men in their forties who suddenly discovered the fascinating world of young women and their accessories.

Most of all I thought of the queer thing that had happened to me when Mattie had told me the kid’s name—that sense that my mouth and throat were suddenly flooded with cold, mineral-tangy water. That rush. When my burger was ready, Buddy had to call twice. When I went over to get it, he said: “You back to stay or to clear out?”

“Why?” I asked. “Did you miss me, Buddy?”

“Nup,” he said, “but at least you’re from in-state. Did you know that “Massachusetts’ is Piscataqua for ’asshole’?”

“You’re as funny as ever,” I said. “Yuh. I’m going on fuckin Letterman. Explain to him why God gave seagulls wings.”

“Why was that, Buddy?”

“So they could beat the fuckin Frenchmen to the dump.” I got a newspaper from the rack and a straw for my frappe. Then I detoured to the pay phone and, tucking my paper under my arm, opened the phone book. You could actually walk around with it if you wanted; it wasn’t tethered to the phone. Who, after all, would want to steal a Castle County telephone directory? There were over twenty Devores, which didn’t surprise me very much—it’s one of those names, like Pelkey or Bowie or Toothaker, that you kept coming across if you lived down here. I imagine it’s the same everywhere—some families breed more and travel less, that’s all. There was a Devore listing for “RD Wsp HI1 Rd,” but it wasn’t for a Mattie, Mathilda, Martha, or M. It was for Lance. I looked at the front of the phone book and saw it was a 1997 model, printed and mailed while Mattie’s husband was still in the land of the living.

Okay… but there was something else about that name. Devote, Devote, let us now praise famous Devores; wherefore art thou Devore? But it wouldn’t come, whatever it was. I ate my burger, drank my liquefied ice cream, and tried not to look at what was caught on the flypaper.

While I was waiting for the sallow, silent Audrey to give me my change (you could still eat all week in the Village Cafe for fifty dollars… if your blood-vessels could stand it, that was), I read the sticker pasted to the cash register. It was another Buddy Jellison special:

CYBERSPACE SCARED ME SO BAD I DOWNLOADED IN MY PANTS. This didn’t exactly convulse me with mirth, but it did provide the key for solving one of the day’s mysteries: why the name Devore had seemed not just familiar but evocative. I was financially well off, rich by the standards of many. There was at least one person with ties to their, however, who was rich by the standards of everybody, and filthy rich by the standards of most year-round residents of the lakes region. If, that was, he was still eating, breathing, and walking around. “Audrey, is Max Devore still alive?” She gave me a little smile. “Oh, ayuh. But we don’t see him in here too often.” That got the laugh out of me that all of Buddy’s joke stickers hadn’t been able to elicit. Audrey, who had always been yellowish and who now looked like a candidate for a liver transplant, snickered herself. Buddy gave us a librarian’s prim glare from the far end of the counter, where he was reading a flyer about the holiday NASCAR race at Oxford Plains. I drove back the way I had come. A big hamburger is a bad meal to eat in the middle of a hot day; it leaves you feeling sleepy and heavy-witted. All I wanted was to go home (I’d been there less than twenty-four hours and was already thinking of it as home), flop on the bed in the north bedroom under the revolving fan, and sleep for a couple of hours. When I passed Wasp Hill Road, I slowed down. The laundry was hanging listlessly on the lines, and there was a scatter of toys in the front yard, but the Scout was gone. Mattie and Kyra had donned their suities, I imagined, and headed on down to the public beachie. I’d liked them both, and quite a lot. Mattie’s short-lived marriage had probably hooked her somehow to Max Devote. .

but looking at the rusty doublewide trailer with its dirt driveway and balding front yard, remembering Mat-tie’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock top, I had to doubt that the hook was a strong one. Before retiring to Palm Springs in the late eighties, Maxwell William Devote had been a driving force in the computer revolution. It’s primarily a young people’s revolution, but Devore did okay for a golden oldie—knew the playing-field and understood the rules. He started when memory was stored on magnetic tape instead of in computer chips and a warehouse-sized cruncher called UNIVAC was state-of-the-art. He was fluent in COBOL and spoke FORTRAN like a native. As the field expanded beyond his ability to keep up, expanded to the point where it began to define the world, he bought the talent he needed to keep growing.

His company, Visions, had created scanning programs which could upload hard copy onto floppy disks almost instantaneously; it created graphic-imaging programs which had become the industry standard; it created Pixel Easel, which allowed laptop users to mouse-paint. . to actually fingerpaint, if their gadget came equipped with what Jo had called “the clitoral cursor.” Devore had invented none of this later stuff, but he’d understood that it could be invented and had hired people to do it. He held dozens of patents and co-held hundreds more. He was supposedly worth something like six hundred million dollars, depending on how technology stocks were doing on any given day.

On the TR he was reputed to be crusty and unpleasant. No surprise there; to a Nazarene, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And folks said he was eccentric, of course. Listen to the old-timers who remember the rich and successful in their salad days (and all the old-timers claim they do), and you’ll hear that they ate the wallpaper, fucked the dog, and showed up at church suppers wearing nothing but their pee-stained BVDS. Even if all that was true in Devore’s case, and even if he was Scrooge Mcduck in the bargain, I doubted that he’d allow two of his closer relatives to live in a doublewide trailer.

I drove up the lane above the lake, then paused at the head of my driveway, looking at the sign there: SAK LAUGHS burned into a length of varnished board nailed to a handy tree. It’s the way they do things down here. Looking at it brought back the last dream of the Manderley series.

In that dream someone had slapped a radio-station sticker on the sign, the way you’re always seeing stickers slapped on turnpike toll-collection baskets in the exact-change lanes.

I got out of my car, went to the sign, and studied it. No sticker. The sunflowers had been down there, growing out of the stoop—I had a photo in my suitcase that proved it—but there was no radio-station sticker on the house sign. Proving exactly what? Come on, Noonan, get a grip.

I started back to the car—the door was open, the Beach Boys spilling out of the speakers—then changed my mind and went back to the sign again. In the dream, the sticker had been pasted just above the of SAK and the LAU of LAUGHS. I touched my fingers to that spot and thought they came away feeling slightly sticky. Of course that could have been the feel of varnish on a hot day. Or my imagination.

I drove down to the house, parked, set the emergency brake (on the slopes around Dark Score and the dozen or so other lakes in western Maine, you always set your brake), and listened to the rest of “Don’t Worry, Baby,” which I’ve always thought was the best of the Beach Boys’ songs, great not in spite of the sappy lyrics but because of them. If you knew how much I love you, baby, Brian Wilson sings, nothing could go wrong with you. And oh folks, wouldn’t that be a world.

I sat there listening and looked at the cabinet set against the right side of the stoop. We kept our garbage in there to foil the neighborhood raccoons. Even cans with snap-down lids won’t always do that; if the coons are hungry enough, they somehow manage the lids with their clever little hands.

You’re not going to do what you’re thinking of doing, I told myself. I mean… are you?

It seemed I was-or that I was at least going to have a go. When the Beach Boys gave way to Rare Earth, I got out of the car, opened the storage cabinet, and pulled out two plastic garbage cans. There was a guy named Stan Proulx who came down to yank the trash twice a week (or there was four years ago, I reminded myself), one of Bill Dean’s farflung network of part-timers working for cash off the books, but I didn’t think Stan would have been down to collect the current accumulation of swill because of the holiday, and I was right. There Were two plastic garbage bags in each can. I hauled them out (cursing myself for a fool even while I was doing it) and untwisted the yellow ties.

I really don’t think I was so obsessed that I would have dumped a bunch of wet garbage out on my stoop if it had come to that (of course I’ll never know for sure, and maybe that’s for the best), but it didn’t. No one had lived in the house for four years, remember, and it’s occupancy that produces garbage—everything from coffee-grounds to used sanitary napkins. The stuff in these bags was dry trash swept together and carted out by Brenda Meserve’s cleaning crew.

There were nine vacuum-cleaner disposal bags containing forty-eight months of dust, dirt, and dead flies. There were wads of paper towels, some smelling of aromatic furniture polish and others of the sharper but still pleasant aroma of Windex. There was a moldy mattress pad and a silk jacket which had that unmistakable dined-upon-by-moths look. The jacket certainly caused me no regrets; a mistake of my young manhood, it looked like something from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” era.

Goo-goo-joob, baby. There was a box filled with broken glass… another filled with unrecognizable (and presumably out-of-date) plumbing fixtures. . a torn and filthy square of carpet. . done-to-death dishtowels, faded and ragged. . the old oven-gloves I’d used when cooking burgers and chicken on the barbecue… The sticker was in a twist at the bottom of the second bag. I’d known I would find it—from the moment I’d felt that faintly tacky patch on the sign, I’d known—but I’d needed to see it for myself. The same way old Doubting Thomas had needed to get the blood under his fingernails, I suppose. I placed my find on a board of the sunwarmed stoop and smoothed it out with my hand.

It was shredded around the edges. I guessed Bill had probably used a putty-knife to scrape it off. He hadn’t wanted Mr. Noo-nan to come back to the lake after four years and discover some beered-up kid had slapped a radio-station sticker on his driveway sign. Gorry, no, ’t’wouldn’t be proper, deah. So off it had come and into the trash it had gone and here it was again, another piece of my nightmare unearthed and not much the worse for wear. I ran my fingers over it. WBLM, 102.9, PORTLAND’s ROCK AND ROLL BLIMP. I told myself didn’t have to be afraid. That it meant nothing, just as all the rest of it meant nothing. Then I got the broom out of the cabinet, swept all the trash together, and dumped it back in the plastic bags. The sticker went in with the rest.

I went inside meaning to shower the dust and grime away, then spied my own bathing suitie, still lying in one of my open suitcases, and decided to go swimming instead. The suit was a jolly number, covered with spouting whales, that I had purchased in Key Largo. I thought my pal in the Bosox cap would have approved. I checked my watch and saw that I had finished my Villageburger forty-five minutes ago. Close enough for government work, kemo sabe, especially after engaging in an energetic game of Trash-Bag Treasure Hunt. I pulled on my suit and walked down the railroad-tie steps which lead from Sara to the water. My flip-flops snapped and flapped. A few late mosquitoes hummed. The lake gleamed in front of me, still and inviting under that low humid sky. Running north and south along its edge, bordering the entire east side of the lake, was a right-of-way path (it’s called “common property” in the deeds)

which folks on the TR simply call The Street. If one were to turn left onto The Street at the foot of my steps, one could walk all the way down to the Dark Score Marina, passing Warrington’s and Buddy Jellison’s scuzzy little eatery on the way. . not to mention four dozen summer cottages, discreetly tucked into sloping groves of spruce and pine. Turn right and you could walk to Halo Bay, although it would take you a day to do it with The Street overgrown the way it is now. I stood there for a moment on the path, then ran forward and leaped into the water. Even as I flew through the air with the greatest of ease, it occurred to me that the last time I had jumped in like this, I had been holding my wife’s hand. Touching down was almost a catastrophe. The water was cold enough to remind me that I was forty, not fourteen, and for a moment my heart stopped dead in my chest. As Dark Score Lake closed over my head, I felt quite sure that I wasn’t going to come up alive. I’d be found drifting facedown between the swimming float and my little stretch of The Street, a victim of cold water and a greasy Villageburger. They’d carve Your Mother Always Said To Wait At Least An Hour on my tombstone.

Then my feet landed in the stones and slimy weedstuffgrowing along the bottom, my heart kick-started, and I shoved upward like a guy planning to slam-dunk home the last score of a close basketball game. As I returned to the air, I gasped. Water went in my mouth and I coughed it back out, patting one hand against my chest in an effort to encourage my heart—come on, baby, keep going, you can do it. I came back down standing waist-deep in the lake and with my mouth full of that cold taste—lakewater with an undertinge of miner als, the kind you’d have to correct for when you washed your clothes. It was exactly what I had tasted while standing on the shoulder of Route 68. It was what I had tasted when Mattie Devore told me her daughter’s name. I made a psychological connection, that’s all. From the similarity of the names to my dead wi) to this lake. Which-“Which I have tasted a time or two before,” I said out loud. As if to underline the fact, I scooped up a palmful of water—some of the cleanest and clearest in the state, according to the analysis reports I and all the other members of the so-called Western Lakes Association get each year—and drank it down.

There was no revelation, no sudden weird flashes in my head. It was just Dark Score, first in my mouth and then in my stomach. I swam out to the float, climbed the three-rung ladder on the side, and flopped on the hot boards, feeling suddenly very glad I had come. In spite of everything.

Tomorrow I would start putting together some sort of life down here… trying to, anyway. For now it was enough to be lying with my head in the crook of one arm, on the verge of a doze, confident that the day’s adventures were over. As it happened, that was not quite true.

During our first summer on the TR, Jo and I discovered it was possible to see the Castle Rock fireworks show from the deck overlooking the lake. I remembered this just as it was drawing down toward dark, and thought that this year I would spend that time in the living room, watching a movie on the video player. Reliving all the Fourth of July twilights we had spent out there, drinking beer and laughing as the big ones went off, would be a bad idea. I was lonely enough without that, lonely in a way of which I had not been conscious in Derry. Then I wondered what I had come down here for, if not to finally face Johanna’s memory—all of it—and put it to loving rest. Certainly the possibility of writing again had never seemed more distant than it did that night.

There was no beer—I’d forgotten to get a sixpack either at the General Store or at the Village Cafe—but there was soda, courtesy of Brenda Meserve. I got a can of Pepsi and settled in to watch the lightshow, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much. Hoping, I supposed, that I wouldn’t cry.

Not that I was kidding myself; there were more tears here, all right.

I’d just have to get through them. The first explosion of the night had just gone off a spangly burst of blue with the bang travelling far behind—when the phone rang. It made me jump as the faint explosion from Castle Rock had not. I decided it was probably Bill Dean, calling long-distance to see if I was settling in all right. In the summer before Jo died, we’d gotten a wireless phone so we could prowl the downstairs while we talked, a thing we both liked to do. I went through the sliding glass door into the living room, punched the pickup button, and said, “Hello, this is Mike,” as I went back to my deck-chair and sat down. Far across the lake, exploding below the low clouds hanging over Castle View, were green and yellow starbursts, followed by soundless flashes that would eventually reach me as noise. For a moment there was nothing from the phone, and then a man’s raspy voice—an elderly voice but not Bill Dean’s—said, “Noonan? Mr. Noonan?”

“Yes?” A huge spangle of gold lit up the west, shivering the low clouds with brief filigree.

It made me think of the award shows you see on television, all those beautiful women in shining dresses. “Devore.”

“Yes?” I said again, cautiously. “Max Devore.” don’t see him in here too often, Audrey had said. I had taken that for Yankee wit, but apparently she’d been serious. Wonders never ceased. Okay, what next? I was at a total loss for conversational gambits. I thought of asking him how he’d gotten my number, which was unlisted, but what would be the point? When you were worth over half a billion dollars—if this really was the Max Devore I was talking to—you could get any old unlisted number you wanted. I settled for saying yes again, this time without the little uptilt at the end. Another silence followed. When I broke it and began asking questions, he would be in charge of the conversation… if we could be said to be having a conversation at that point. A good gambit, but I had the advantage of my long association with Harold Oblowski to fall back on,Harold, master of the pregnant pause. I sat tight, cunning little cordless phone to my ear, and watched the show in the west. Red bursting into blue, green into gold; unseen women walked the clouds in glowing award-show evening dresses. “I understand you met my daughter-in-law today,” he said at last. He sounded annoyed. “I may have done,” I said, trying not to sound surprised. “May I ask why you’re calling, Mr. Devore?”

“I understand there was an incident.” White lights danced in the sky—they could have been exploding spacecraft. Then, trailing after, the bangs. I’ve discovered the secret of time travel, I thought.

It’s an auditory phenomenon. My hand was holding the phone far too tightly, and I made it relax. Maxwell Devore. Half a billion dollars.

Not in Palm Springs, as I had supposed, but close—right here on the TR, if the characteristic under-hum on the line could be trusted. “I’m concerned for my granddaughter.” His voice was raspier than ever. He was angry, and it showed—this was a man who hadn’t had to conceal his emotions in a lot of years. “I understand my daughter-in-law’s attention wandered again. It wanders often.” Now half a dozen colored starbursts lit the night, blooming like flowers in an old Disney nature film. I could imagine the crowds gathered on Castle View sitting cross-legged on their blankets, eating ice cream cones and drinking beer and all going Oooooh at the same time. That’s what makes any successful work of art, I think-everybody goes Oooooh at the same time. “You’re scared of this guy, aren’t you? Jo asked. Okay, maybe you’re right to be scared. A man who feels he can be angry whenever he wants to at whoever he wants to…

that’s a man who can be dangerous. Then Mattie’s voice: Mr. Noonan, I’m not a bad mother. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Of course that’s what most bad mothers say in such circumstances, I imagined… but I had believed her.

Also, goddammit, my number was unlisted. I had been sitting here with a soda, watching the fireworks, bothering nobody, and this guy had-“Mr. Devore, I don’t have any idea what—”

“Don’t give me that, with all due respect don’t give me that, Mr. Noonan, you were seen talking to them.”

He sounded as I imagine Joe Mccarthy sounded to those poor schmucks who ended up being branded dirty commies when they came before his committee. Be careful, Mike, Jo said. Beware of Maxwell’s silver hammer.

“I did see and speak to a woman and a little girl this morning,” I said.

“I presume they’re the ones you’re talking about.”

“No, you saw a toddler walking on the road alone,” he said. “And then you saw a woman chasing after her. My daughter-in-law, in that old thing she drives. The child could have been run down. Why are you protecting that young woman, Mr. Noonan? Did she promise you something? You’re certainly doing the child no favors, I can tell you that much.” She promised to take me back to her trailer and then take me around the world, I thought of saying.

She promised to keep her mouth open the whole time if I’d keep mine shut—is that what you want to hear? Is, Jo said. Very likely that is what he wants to hear. Very likely what he wants to believe. Don’t let him provoke you into a burst of your sophomore sarcasm, Mike—you could regret it. Why was I bothering to protect Mattie Devore, anyway? I didn’t know. Didn’t have the slightest idea of what I might be getting into here, for that matter. I only knew that she had looked tired, and the child hadn’t been bruised or frightened or sullen. “There was a car.

An old Jeep."

“That’s more like it.” Satisfaction. And sharp interest.

Greed, almost. “What did—”

“I guess I assumed they came in the car together,” I said. There was a certain giddy pleasure in discovering my capacity for invention had not deserted me—I felt like a pitcher who can no longer do it in front of a crowd, but who can still throw a pretty good slider in the old back yard. “The little girl might have had some daisies.” All the careful qualifications, as if I were testifying in court instead of sitting on my deck. Harold would have been proud.

Well, no. Harold would have been horrified that I was having such a conversation at all. “I think I assumed they were picking wildflowers.

My memory of the incident isn’t all that clear, unfortunately. I’m a writer, Mr. Devore, and when I’m driving I often drift off into my own private—”

“You’re lying.” The anger was right out in the open now, bright and pulsing like a boil. As I had suspected, it hadn’t taken much effort to escort this guy past the social niceties. “Mr. Devore. The computer Devore, I assume?”

“You assume correctly.” Jo always grew cooler in tone and expression as her not inconsiderable temper grew hotter. Now I heard myself emulating her in a way that was frankly eerie. “Mr. Devore, I’m not accustomed to being called in the evening by men I don’t know, nor do I intend to prolong the conversation when a man who does so calls me a liar. Good evening, sir.”

“If everything was fine, then why did you stop?”

“I’ve been away from the TR for some time, and I wanted to know if the Village Cafe was still open. Oh, by the way—I don’t know where you got my telephone number, but I know where you can put it. Good night.” I broke the connection with my thumb and then just looked at the phone, as if I had never seen such a gadget in my life. The hand holding it was trembling. My heart was beating hard; I could feel it in my neck and wrists as well as my chest. I wondered if!

could have told Devote to stick my phone number up his ass if I hadn’t had a few million rattling around in the bank myself. The Battle of the Titans, dear, Jo said in her cool voice. And all over a teenage girl in a trailer. She didn’t even have any breasts to speak off I laughed out loud. War of the Titans? Hardly. Some old robber baron from the turn of the century had said, “These days a man with a million dollars thinks he’s rich.” Devore would likely have the same opinion of me, and in the wider scheme of things he would be right. Now the western sky was alight with unnatural, pulsing color. It was the finale.

“What was that all about?” I asked. No answer; only a loon calling across the lake. Protesting all the unaccustomed noise in the sky, as likely as not. I got up, went inside, and put the phone back in its charging cradle, realizing as I did that I was expecting it to ring again, expecting Devore to start spouting movie cliches: If you get in my way 17l and I’m warning you, friend, not to and Let me give you a piece of good advice here you. The phone didn’t ring. I poured the rest of my soda down my gullet, which was understandably dry, and decided to go to bed. At least there hadn’t been any weeping and wailing out there on the deck; Devore had pulled me out of myself. In a weird way, I was grateful to him. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and lay down.

I thought about the little girl, Kyra, and the mother who could have been her older sister. Devote was pissed at Mattie, that much was clear, and if I was a financial nonentity to the guy, what must she be to him?

And what kind of resources would she have if he had taken against her?

That was a pretty nasty thought, actually, and it was the one I fell asleep on. I got up three hours later to eliminate the can of soda I had unwisely downed before retiring, and as I stood before the bowl, pissing with one eye open, I heard the sobbing again. A child somewhere in the dark, lost and frightened… or perhaps just pretending to be lost and frightened. “Don’t,” I said. I was standing naked before the toilet bowl, my back alive with gooseflesh. “Please don’t start up with this shit, it’s scary.” The crying dwindled as it had before, seeming to diminish like something carried down a tunnel. I went back to bed, turned on my side, and closed my eyes. “It was a dream,” I said. “Just another Manderley dream.” I knew better, but I also knew I was going back to sleep, and right then that seemed like the important thing. As I drifted off, I thought in a voice that was purely my own: She is alive.

Sara is alive. And I understood something, too: she belonged to me. I had reclaimed her. For good or ill, I had come home.