Lisey's Story

III. Lisey and The Silver Spade

(Wait for the Wind to Change)

1

Her vivid dream did nothing at all to free Lisey from her memories of Nashville, and from one memory in particular: Gerd Allen Cole turning the gun from the lung-shot, which Scott might be able to survive, to the heart-shot, which he most certainly would not. By then the whole world had slowed down, and what she kept returning to—as the tongue keeps returning to the surface of a badly chipped tooth—was how utterly smooth that movement had been, as if the gun had been mounted on a gimbal.

Lisey vacuumed the parlor, which didn't need vacuuming, then did a wash that didn't half-fill the machine; the laundry basket filled so slowly now that it was just her. Two years and she still couldn't get used to it. Finally she pulled on her old tank suit and did laps in the pool out back: five, then ten, then fifteen, then seventeen and winded. She clung to the lip at the shallow end with her legs trailing out behind her, panting, her dark hair clinging to her cheeks, brow, and neck like a shiny helmet, and still she saw the pale, long-fingered hand swiveling, saw the Ladysmith (it was impossible to think of it as just a gun once you knew its lethal cuntish name) swiveling, saw the little black hole with Scott's death tucked inside it moving left, and the silver shovel was so heavy. It seemed impossible that she could be in time, that she could outrace Cole's insanity.

She kicked her feet slowly, making little splashes. Scott had loved the pool, but actually swam in it only on rare occasions; he had been a book, beer, and inner-tube sort of guy. When he wasn't on the road, that was. Or in his study, writing with the music cranked. Or sitting up in the guestroom rocker in the broken heart of a winter night, bundled to the chin in one of Good Ma Debusher's afghans, two in the morning and his eyes wide-wide-wide as a terrible wind, one all the way down from Yellowknife, boomed outside—that was the other Scott; one went north, one went south, and oh dear, she had loved them both the same, everything the same.

"Stop it," Lisey said fretfully. "I was in time, I was, so let it go. The lung-shot was all that crazy baby ever got." Yet in her mind's eye (where the past is always present), she saw the Ladysmith again start its swivel, and Lisey shoved herself out of the pool in an effort to physically drive the image away. It worked, but Blondie was back again as she stood in the changing room, toweling off after a quick rinsing shower, Gerd Allen Cole was back, is back, saying I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, and 1988-Lisey is swinging the silver spade, but this time the smucking air in Lisey-time is too thick, she's going to be just an instant too late, she will see all of the second flame-corsage instead of just a portion, and a black hole will also open on Scott's left lapel as his sportcoat becomes his deathcoat—

"Quit it!" Lisey growled, and slung her towel in the basket. "Give it a rest!"

She marched back to the house nude, with her clothes under her arm—that's what the high board fence all the way around the backyard was for.

2

She was hungry after her swim—famished, actually—and although it was not quite five o'clock, she decided on a big skillet meal. What Darla, second-oldest of the Debusher girls, would have called comfort-food, and what Scott—with great relish— would have called eatin nasty. There was a pound of ground beef in the fridge and, lurking on a back shelf in the pantry, a wonderfully nasty selection: the Cheeseburger Pie version of Hamburger Helper. Lisey threw it together in a skillet with the ground beef. While it was simmering, she mixed herself a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid with double sugar. By five-twenty, the smells from the skillet had filled the kitchen, and all thoughts of Gerd Allen Cole had left her head, at least for the time being. She could think of nothing but food. She had two large helpings of the Hamburger Helper casserole, and two big glasses of Kool-Aid. When the second helping and the second glass were gone (all except for the white dregs of sugar in the bottom of the glass), she burped resoundingly and said: "I wish I had a goddam smucking cigarette."

It was true; she had rarely wanted one so badly. A Salem Light. Scott had been a smoker when they had met at the University of Maine, where he had been both a grad student and what he called The World's Youngest Writer in Residence. She was a part-time student (that didn't last long) and a fulltime waitress at Pat's Café downtown, slinging pizzas and burgers. She'd picked up the smoking habit from Scott, who'd been strictly a Herbert Tareyton man. They'd given up the butts together, rallying each other along. That had been in '87, the year before Gerd Allen Cole had resoundingly demonstrated that cigarettes weren't the only problem a person could have with his lungs. In the years since, Lisey went for days without thinking of them, then would fall into horrible pits of craving. Yet in a way, thinking about cigarettes was an improvement. It beat thinking about

(I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity and turns his wrist slightly)

Blondie

(smoothly)

and Nashville

(so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith points at the left side of Scott's chest)

and smuck, here she went, doing it again.

There was store-bought poundcake for dessert, and Cool Whip— perhaps the apex of eatin nasty—to put on top of it, but Lisey was too full to consider it yet. And she was distressed to find these rotten old memories returning even after she'd taken on a gutful of hot, high-calorie food. She supposed that now she had an idea of what war veterans had to deal with. That had been her only battle, but

(no, Lisey)

"Quit it," she whispered, and pushed her plate

(no, babyluv)

violently away from her. Christ, but she wanted

(you know better)

a cigarette. And even more than a ciggy, she wanted all these old memories to go aw—

Lisey!

That was Scott's voice, on top of her mind for a change and so clear she answered out loud over the kitchen table and with no self-consciousness at all: "What, hon?"

Find the silver shovel and all this crap will blow away…like the smell of the mill when the wind swung around and blew from the south. Remember?

Of course she did. Her apartment had been in the little town of Cleaves Mills, just one town east of Orono. There weren't any actual mills in Cleaves by the time Lisey lived there, but there had still been plenty in Oldtown, and when the wind blew from the north—especially if the day happened to be overcast and damp—the stench was atrocious. Then, if the wind changed…God! You could smell the ocean, and it was like being born again. For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage's interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA and smuck for fuck. Then it had fallen out of favor somewhere along the way, and she hadn't thought of it for years: wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don't give up yet. Maybe it had been the sort of sweetly optimistic attitude only a young marriage can sustain. She didn't know. Scott might have been able to offer an informed opinion; he'd kept a journal even back then, in their

(EARLY YEARS!)

scuffling days, writing in it for fifteen minutes each evening while she watched sitcoms or did the household accounts. And sometimes instead of watching TV or writing checks, she watched him. She liked the way the lamplight shone in his hair and made deep triangular shadows on his cheeks as he sat there with his head bent over his looseleaf notebook. His hair had been both longer and darker in those days, unmarked by the gray that had begun to show up toward the end of his life. She liked his stories, but she liked how his hair looked in the spill of the lamplight just as much. She thought his hair in the lamplight was its own story, he just didn't know it. She liked how his skin felt under her hand, too. Forehead or foreskin, both were good. She would not have traded one for the other. What worked for her was the whole package.

Lisey! Find the shovel!

She cleared the table, then stored the remaining Cheeseburger Pie in a Tupperware dish. She was certain she'd never eat it now that her madness had passed, but there was too much to scrape down the sink-pig; how the Good Ma Debusher who still kept house in her head would scream at waste like that! Better by far to hide it in the fridge behind the asparagus and the yogurt, where it would age quietly. And as she did these simple chores, she wondered how in the name of Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the Carpenter finding that silly ceremonial shovel could do anything for her peace of mind. Something about the magical properties of silver, maybe? She remembered watching some movie on the Late Show with Darla and Cantata, some supposedly scary thing about a werewolf…only Lisey hadn't been much frightened, if at all. She'd thought the werewolf more sad than scary, and besides—you could tell the movie-making people were changing his face by stopping the camera every now and then to put on more makeup and then running it again. You had to give them high marks for effort, but the finished product wasn't all that believable, at least in her humble opinion. The story was sort of interesting, though. The first part took place in an English pub, and one of the old geezers drinking there said you could only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. And had not Gerd Allen Cole been a kind of werewolf?

"Come on, kid," she said, rinsing off her plate and sticking it in the almost empty dishwasher, "maybe Scott could float that downriver in one of his books, but tall stories were never your department. Were they?" She closed the dishwasher with a thump. At the rate it was filling, she'd be ready to run the current load around July Fourth. "If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?"

Before she could answer this completely rhetorical question, Scott's voice came again—the clear one at the top of her mind.

I left you a note, babyluv.

Lisey froze in the act of reaching for a dishtowel to dry her hands. She knew that voice, of course she did. She still heard it three and four times a week, her voice mimicking his, a little bit of harmless company in a big empty house. Only coming so soon after all this shite about the shovel…

What note?

What note?

Lisey wiped her hands and put the towel back to air-dry on its rod. Then she turned around so her back was to the sink and her kitchen lay before her. It was full of lovely summerlight (and the aroma of Hamburger Helper, a lot less yummy now that her low appetite for the stuff had been satisfied). She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then sprang them open again. Lateday summerlight boomed around her. Into her.

"Scott?" she said, feeling absurdly like her big sister Amanda. Half-nuts, in other words. "You haven't gone ghost on me, have you?"

She expected no answer—not little Lisey Debusher, who had cheered on the thunderstorms and sneered at the Late Show werewolf, dismissing him as just bad time-lapse photography. But the sudden rush of wind that poured in through the open window over the sink—belling the curtains, lifting the ends of her still-damp hair, and bringing the heartbreaking aroma of flowers—could almost have been taken for an answer. She closed her eyes again and seemed to hear faint music, not that of the spheres but just an old Hank Williams country tune: Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh…

Her arms prickled up in goosebumps.

Then the breeze died away and she was just Lisey again. Not Mandy, not Canty, not Darla; certainly not

(one went south)

run-off-to-Miami Jodi. She was Thoroughly Modern Lisey, 2006Lisey, the widow Landon. There were no ghosts. She was Lisey Alone.

But she did want to find that silver spade, the one that had saved her husband for another sixteen years and seven novels. Not to mention for the Newsweek cover in '92 that had featured a psychedelic Scott with MAGICAL REALISM AND THE CULT OF LANDON in Peter Max lettering. She wondered how Roger "The Jackrabbit" Dashmiel had liked them apples.

Lisey decided she'd look for the spade right away, while the long light of the early-summer evening still held. Ghosts or no ghosts, she didn't want to be out in the barn—or the study above it—once night had fallen.

3

The stalls opposite her never-quite-completed office were dark and musty affairs that had once held tools, tack, and spare parts for farm vehicles and machinery back when the Landon home had been Sugar Top Farm. The largest bay had held chickens, and although it had been swamped out by a

professional cleaning company and then whitewashed (by Scott, who did it with many references to Tom Sawyer), it still held the faint, ammoniac reek of long-gone fowl. It was a smell Lisey remembered from her youngest childhood and

hated…probably because her Granny D had keeled over and died while feeding the chickens.

Two of the cubbies were stacked high with boxes—liquor-store cartons, for the most part—but there were no digging implements, silver or otherwise. There was a sheeted double bed in the erstwhile chicken pen, the single leftover from their brief nine-month Germany experiment. They had bought the bed in Bremen and had it shipped back at paralyzing expense— Scott had insisted. She had forgotten all about the Bremen bed until now.

Talk about what fell out of the dog's ass! Lisey thought with a kind of miserable exultation, and then said aloud, "If you think I'd ever sleep in a bed after it sat twenty-some years out in a goddam chicken pen, Scott—"

—then you're crazy! was how she meant to finish, and couldn't. She burst out laughing instead. Christ, the curse of money! The smucking curse of it! How much had that bed cost? A thousand bucks American? Say a thousand. And how much to ship it back? Another thou? Maybe. And here it sat, rah-cheer, Scott might have said, in the chickenshit shadows. And rahcheer it could continue to sit until the world ended in fire or ice, as far as she was concerned. The whole Germany thing had been such a bust, no book for Scott, an argument with the landlord that had come within a hair of degenerating into a fist-fight, even Scott's lectures had gone badly, the audiences either had no sense of humor or didn't get his, and—

And behind the door across the way, the one wearing the HIGH VOLTAGE! sign, the telephone began to shout again. Lisey froze where she was, feeling more goosebumps. And yet there was also a sense of inevitability, as if this was what she'd come out here for, not the silver spade at all but to take a call.

She turned as the phone rang a second time, and crossed the barn's dim center aisle. She reached the door as the third ring began. She thumbed the old-fashioned latch and the door opened easily, just screaming a little on its unused hinges, welcome to the crypt, little Lisey, we've been dying to meet you, heh-heh-heh. A draft whooshed in around her, flapping her blouse against the small of her back. She felt for the lightswitch and flicked it, not sure what to expect, but the overhead went on. Of course it did. As far as Central Maine Power was concerned, all of this was The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road. Upstairs or downstairs, to CMP it was a clearcut case of everything the same.

The telephone on the desk rang a fourth time. Before Ring #5 could wake up the answering machine, Lisey snagged the receiver. "Hello?"

There was a moment of silence. She was about to say hello again when the voice at the other end did it for her. The tone was perplexed, but Lisey recognized who it was, just the same. That one word had been enough. You knew your own.

"Darla?"

"Lisey—it is you!"

"Sure it's me."

"Where are you?"

"Scott's old study."

"No, you're not. I already tried there."

Lisey only had to consider this briefly. Scott had liked his music loud—in truth he'd liked it at levels normal people would have considered ridiculous—and the telephone up there was located in the soundproofed area he had been amused to call My Padded Cell. It wasn't surprising she hadn't heard it down here. None of this seemed worth explaining to her sister.

"Darla, where did you get this number, and why are you calling?"

There was another pause. Then Darla said, "I'm at Amanda's. I got the number from her book. She's got four for you. I just ran through all of them. This was the last."

Lisey felt a sinking sensation in her chest and stomach. As children, Amanda and Darla had been bitter rivals. They'd gotten into any number of scratching matches—over dolls, library books, clothes. The last and gaudiest confrontation had been over a boy named Richie Stanchfield, and had been serious enough to land Darla in the Central Maine General ER, where six stitches had been needed to close the deep scratch over her left eye. She still wore the scar, a thin white dash. They got on better as adults only to this extent: there had been plenty of arguments but no more spilled blood. They stayed out of each other's way as much as possible. The once- or twice-monthly Sunday dinners (with spouses) or sisterlunches at Olive Garden or Outback could be difficult, even with Manda and Darla sitting apart and Lisey and Canty mediating. For Darla to be calling from Amanda's house was not a good thing.

"Is something wrong with her, Darl?" Dumb question. The only real question was how wrong.

"Mrs. Jones heard her screaming and carrying on and breaking stuff. Doing one of her Big Ts."

One of her Big Tantrums. Check.

"She tried Canty first, but Canty and Rich are in Boston. When Mrs. Jones got that message on their answering machine she called me."

That made sense. Canty and Rich lived a mile or so north of Amanda on Route 19; Darla lived roughly two miles south. In a way, it was like their father's old rhyme: one went north, one went south, one couldn't shut her everlasting mouth. Lisey herself was about five miles away. Mrs. Jones, who lived across the road from Mandy's weather-tight little Cape Cod, would have known well enough to call Canty first, and not just because Canty was closer in terms of distance, either.

Screaming and carrying on and breaking stuff.

"How bad is it this time?" Lisey heard herself asking in a flat, strangely businesslike tone of voice. "Should I come?" Meaning, of course, How fast should I come?

"She's…I think she's okay for now," Darla said. "But she's been doing it again. On her arms, also a couple of places high up on her thighs. The…you know."

Lisey knew, all right. On three previous occasions, Amanda had lapsed into what Jane Whitlow, her shrink, called "passive semi-catatonia." It was different from what had happened

(hush about that)

(I won't)

from what had happened to Scott in 1996, but pretty damned scary, all the same. And each time, the state had been preceded by bouts of excitability—the sort of excitability Manda had been exhibiting up in Scott's study, Lisey realized— followed by hysteria, then brief spasms of self-mutilation. During one of these, Manda had apparently tried to excise her navel. She had been left with a ghostly fairy-ring of scartissue around it. Lisey had once broached the possibility of cosmetic surgery, not knowing if it would be possible but wanting Manda to know she, Lisey, would be willing to pay if Amanda wanted at least to explore the possibility. Amanda had declined with a harsh caw of amusement. "I like that ring," she'd said. "If I'm ever tempted to start cutting myself again, maybe I'll look at that and stop."

Maybe, it seemed, had been the operant word.

"How bad is it, Darl? Really?"

"Lisey…hon…"

Lisey realized with alarm (and a further sinking in her vital parts) that her older sister was struggling with tears. "Darla! Take a deep breath and tell me."

"I'm okay. I just…it's been a long day."

"When does Matt get back from Montreal?"

"Week after next. Don't even think about asking me to call him, either—he's earning our trip to St. Bart's next winter, and he's not to be disturbed. We can handle this ourselves."

"Can we?"

"Definitely."

"Then tell me what it is we're supposed to be handling."

"Okay. Right." Lisey heard Darla take a breath. "The cuts on her upper arms were shallow. Band-Aid stuff. The ones on her thighs were deeper and they'll scar, but they clotted over, thank God. No arterial shit. Uh, Lisey?"

"What? Just str…just spit it out."

She'd almost told Darla to just strap it on, which would have meant zip to her big sister. Whatever Darla had to tell her next, it was going to be something rotten. She could tell that by Darla's voice, which had been in and out of Lisey's ears from the cradle on. She tried to brace herself for it. She leaned back against the desk, her gaze shifted…and holy Mother of God, there it was in the corner, leaning nonchalantly next to another stack of liquor-store boxes (which were indeed labeled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS!). In the angle where the north wall met the east one was the silver spade from Nashville, big as Billy-be-damned. It was a blue-eyed wonder she hadn't seen it when she came in, surely would have if she hadn't been in a lather to grab the phone before the answering machine kicked in. She could read the words incised into the silver bowl from here: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. She could almost hear the southern-fried chickenshit telling her husband that Toneh would be rahtin it up for the year-end review, and would he like a copeh. And Scott replying—

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

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

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

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

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

What Lisey flashed on wasn't those old dress-up and makeup days, those clunk-around-in-Good-

Ma's-high-heels days, but that hot afternoon in Nashville, Scott lying on the pavement shivering, his lips smeared with candy-colored blood. Nobody loves a clown at midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" But Lisey had a pretty good idea.

"Charlie Corriveau's back in town," Darla said. Then, lowering her voice: "Good old Shootin' Beans. Everyone's favorite banker. He brought a girl with him. A little French postcard from up in the St. John Valley." She gave this the Maine pronunciation, so it came out slurry-lyrical, almost Senjun. Lisey stood looking at the silver spade, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That there was another she had no doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lisey, I didn't mean—"

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

"Lisey—"

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

"Lisey, I'm sorry…I just—"

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

"Yes." Relief in Darla's voice. "Okay."

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

"Get here as soon as you can."

"I will. G'bye."

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

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

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

IKE COMES HOME

By Scott Landon

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

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

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

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

4

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

"What is it, Darl?"

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

It was Lisey's turn to pause as she ran through a list of male names. Pretty short list these days; it was amazing how your husband's death pruned your catalogue of acquaintances. There was Jacob Montano, their lawyer in Portland; Arthur Williams, the accountant in New York who wouldn't let go of a dollar until the eagle shrieked for mercy (or died of asphyxiation); Deke Williams—no relation to Arthur—the contractor from Bridgton who'd turned the empty haylofts over the barn into Scott's study and who'd also remodeled the second floor of their house, transforming previously dim rooms into

wonderlands of light; Smiley Flanders, the plumber from over in Motton with the endless supply of jokes both clean and dirty; Charlie Haddonfield, Scott's agent, who called on business from time to time (foreign rights and short-story anthologies, mostly); plus the handful of Scott's friends who still kept in touch. But none of those people would call on this number, surely, even if it were listed. Was it? She couldn't remember. In any case, none of the names seemed to fit how she knew (or thought she knew) the voice. But, damn it—

"Mrs. Landon?"

"Who is this?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

"Zack what?"

"Zack McCool."

"Uh-huh, and I'm Liz Taylor."

"You wanted a name, I gave you one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a moment Lisey said nothing. She reflected on how her caller had pronounced husband—almost husbun, as though Scott had been some exotic breakfast treat, now consumed. How he called her Missus. Not a Maine man, not a Yankee, and probably not an educated man, at least in the sense Scott would have used the word; she guessed that "Zack McCool" had never been to college. She also reflected that the wind had indeed changed. She was no longer scared. What she was, at least for the time being, was angry. More than angry. Pissed like a bear.

In a low, choked voice she hardly recognized, she said: "Woodbody. That's who you're talking about, isn't it? Joseph Woodbody. That Incunk son of a bitch."

There was a pause on the other end. Then her new friend said: "I'm not following you, Missus."

Lisey felt her rage come all the way up and welcomed it. "I think you're following me fine. Professor Joseph Woodbody, King of the Incunks, hired you to call and try to scare me into…what? Just turning over the keys to my husband's study, so he can go through Scott's manuscripts and take what he wants? Is that what…does he really think…" She pulled herself down. It wasn't easy. The anger was bitter but it was sweet, too, and she wanted to trip on it. "Just tell me, Zack. Yes or no. Are you working for Professor Joseph Woodbody?"

"That's none of your bi'ness, Missus."

Lisey couldn't reply to this. She was struck dumb, at least temporarily, by the sheer effrontery of it. What Scott might have called the puffickly huh-yooge

(none of your bi'ness)

ludicrosity of it.

"And nobody hired me to try and do nothing." A pause. "Anything, I mean. Now Missus. You want to close your mouth and listen. Are you listen to me?"

She stood with the telephone's receiver curled against her ear, considering that—Are you listen to me?—and said nothing.

"I can hear you breathing, so I know you are. That's good. When I'm hired, Missus, this mother's son don't try, he does. I know you don't know me, but that's your disadvantage, not mine. This ain't…iddn't just brag. I don't try, I do. You are going to give this man what he wants, all right? He is going to call me on the telephone or e-mail me in this special way we have and say, 'Everything's okay, I got what I want.' If that don't…if it dutn't happen in a certain run of time, I'm going to come to where you are and I'm going to hurt you. I am going to hurt you places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances."

Lisey had closed her eyes at some point during this lengthy speech, which had the feel of a memorized set-piece. She could feel hot tears trickling down her cheeks, and didn't know if they were tears of rage or…

Shame? Could they actually be tears of shame? Yes, there was something shameful in being talked to like this by a stranger. It was like being in a new school and getting scolded by the teacher on your first day.

Smuck that, babyluv, Scott said. You know what to do.

Sure she did. In a situation like this you either strapped it on or you didn't. She'd never actually been in a situation like this, but it was still pretty obvious.

"Missus? Do you understand what I just told you?"

She knew what she wanted to say to him, but he might not understand. So Lisey decided to settle for the more common usage.

"Zack?" Speaking very low.

"Yes, Missus." He immediately fell into the same low tone. What he perhaps took for one of mutual conspiracy.

"Can you hear me?"

"You're a bit low-pitch, but…yes, Missus."

She pulled air deep into her lungs. Held it for a moment, imagining this man who said Missus and husbun and dutn't for doesn't. Imagined him with the telephone screwed tightly against his ear, straining toward the sound of her voice. When she had the picture clearly in the forefront of her mind, she screamed into that ear with all her force. "THEN GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

Lisey slammed the phone back into the cradle hard enough to make dust fly up from the handset.

5

The telephone began to ring again almost immediately, but Lisey had no interest in further conversation with "Zack McCool." She suspected that any chance of having what the TV talking heads called a dialogue was gone. Not that she wanted one. Nor did she want to listen to him on the answering machine and find out if he'd lost that tone of weary good nature and now wanted to call her a bitch, a cunt, or a cooze. She traced the telephone cord back to the wall—the plate was close to that stack of liquor-store boxes—and yanked the jack. The phone fell silent halfway through the third ring. So much for "Zack McCool," at least for the time being. She might have doings with him later, she supposed—or about him—but right now there was Manda to deal with. Not to mention Darla, waiting for her and counting on her. She'd just go back to the kitchen, grab her car-keys off the peg…and she'd take two minutes to lock the house up, as well, a thing she didn't always bother with in the daytime.

The house and the barn and the study.

Yes, especially the study, although she was damned if she'd capitalize it the way Scott had done, like it was some extraspecial big deal. But speaking of extra-special big deals… She found herself looking into the top box again. She hadn't closed the flaps, so looking in was easy to do.

IKE COMES HOME

By Scott Landon

Curious—and this would, after all, take only a second—Lisey leaned the silver spade against the wall, lifted the titlepage, and looked beneath. On the second sheet was this:

Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine.

BOOL! THE END!

Nothing else.

Lisey looked at it for nearly a minute, although God knew she had things to do and places to go. Her skin was prickling again, but this time the feeling was almost pleasant…and hell, there was really no almost about it, was there? A small, bemused smile was playing around her mouth. Ever since she'd begun the work of cleaning out his study—ever since she'd lost it and trashed what Scott had been pleased to call his "memory nook," if you wanted to be exact—she had felt his presence…but never as close as this. Never as actual. She reached into the box and thumbed through a deep thickness of the pages stacked there, pretty sure of what she would find. And did. All the pages were blank. She riffled a bunch of the ones crammed in sideways, and they were, too. In Scott's childhood lexicon, a boom had been a short trip and a bool…well, that was a little more complicated, but in this context it almost certainly meant a joke or harmless prank. This giant bogus novel was Scott Landon's idea of a knee-slapper.

Were the other two boxes in the stack also bools? And the ones in the bins and cubbies across the way? Was the joke that elaborate? And if so, whom was it supposed to be on? Her? Incunks like Woodbody? That made a certain amount of sense, Scott liked to poke fun at the folks he'd called "textcrazies," but that idea pointed toward a rather terrible possibility: that he might have intuited his own

(Died Young)

coming collapse

(Before His Time)

and said nothing to her. And it led to a question: would she have believed him if he'd told her? Her first impulse was to say no—to say, if only to herself, I was the practical one, the one who checked his luggage to see if he had enough underwear and called ahead to make sure the flights were running on time. But she remembered the way the blood on his lips had turned his smile into a clown's grin; she remembered how he had once explained to her—with what had seemed like perfect lucidity—that it was unsafe to eat any kind of fresh fruit after sunset, and that food of all kinds should be avoided between midnight and six. According to Scott, "nightfood" was often poisonous, and when he said it, it sounded logical. Because—

(hush)

"I would have believed him, leave it at that," she whispered, and put her head down, and closed her eyes against tears that did not come. Eyes that had wept at "Zack McCool"'s set speech were now dry as stones. Silly smucking eyes!

The manuscripts in the crammed drawers of his desks and the main filing cabinet upstairs were most certainly not bools; this Lisey knew. Some were copies of published short stories, some were alternate versions of those stories. In the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo she had marked at least three unfinished novels and what appeared to be a finished novella—and wouldn't Woodbody just drool. There were also half a dozen finished short stories Scott had apparently never cared enough to send out for publication, most of them years old from the look of the typefaces. She wasn't qualified to say what was trash and what was treasure, although she was sure it would all be of interest to Landon scholars. This, however…this bool, to use Scott's word…

She was gripping the handle of the silver spade, and hard. It was a real thing in what suddenly felt like a very cobwebby world. She opened her eyes again and said, "Scott, was this just a goof, or are you still messing with me?"

No answer. Of course. And she had a couple of sisters that needed seeing to. Surely Scott would have understood her shoving all this on the back burner for the time being.

In any case, she decided to take the spade along.

She liked the way it felt in her hand.

6

Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the damned thing could start ringing again. Outside the sun was setting and a strong westerly wind had gotten up, explaining the draft that had whooshed past her when she had opened the door to take the first of her two upsetting telephone calls: no ghosts there, babyluv. This day seemed at least a month long, but that wind, lovely and somehow finegrained, like the one in her dream the night before, soothed and refreshed her. She crossed from the barn to the kitchen without fearing "Zack McCool" was lurking somewhere nearby. She knew how calls from cell phones sounded way out here: crackly and barely there. According to Scott, it was the power-lines (which he liked to call "UFO refueling stations"). Her buddy "Zack" had been coming in clear as a bell. That particular Deep Space Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like hell if her next-door neighbor had loaned him their phone so he could threaten her.

She got her car-keys and slipped them into the side pocket of her jeans (unaware that she was still carrying Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions in the back pocket—although she would become aware, in the fullness of time); she also got the bulkier ring with all the keys to the Landon kingdom domestic on it, each still labeled in Scott Landon's neat hand. She locked the house, then trudged back to lock the barn's sliding doors together and the door to Scott's study at the top of the outside stairs. Once that was done, she went to her car with the spade on her shoulder and her shadow trailing out long beside her on the dooryard dirt in the last of that day's fading red Junelight.