Lisey’sStory Page 19

  Lisey opened the glove compartment and her unopened pack of cigarettes fell out. She rummaged until she came up with the little disposable flashlight that she had transferred from the glove compartment of her last car, a Lexus she had driven for four years. It had been a fine car, that Lexus. She had only traded it because she associated it with Scott, who called it Lisey’s Sexy Lexus. It was surprising how much small things could hurt when someone close to you died; talk about the princess and the smucking pea. Now she only hoped there was some juice left in the flashlight.

  There was. The beam shone out bright and steady and confident. Lisey shifted sideways, took a deep breath, and shone it into the mailbox. She was distantly aware that she’d folded her lips over her teeth and was pressing them together so tightly that it hurt. At first she saw only a darkish shape and a green glimmer, like light reflecting off a marble. And wetness on the corrugated metal floor of the mailbox. She supposed that was the blood she’d gotten on her fingers. She shifted farther left, settling her side all the way against the driver’s door, gingerly pushing the flashlight farther into the mailbox. The darkish shape grew fur, and ears, and a nose that probably would have been pink in daylight. There was no mistaking the eyes; even dulled in death, their shape was distinctive. There was a dead cat in her mailbox.

  Lisey began to laugh. It was not exactly normal laughter, but it wasn’t entirely hysterical, either. There was genuine humor in it. She didn’t need Scott to tell her that a slaughtered cat in the mailbox was too, too Fatal Attraction. That had been no Swedish-meatball movie with subtitles, and she had seen it twice. What made it funny was that Lisey didn’t own a cat.

  She let the laughter run its course, then lit a Salem Light and pulled into her driveway.

  VI. Lisey and The Professor

  (This Is What It Gets You)

  1

  Lisey felt no fear now, and her momentary lapse into amusement had been replaced by hard clean rage. She left the BMW parked in front of the locked barn doors and strode stilt-legged to the house, wondering if she would find her new friend’s missive at the kitchen door or the one in front. She never doubted there would be a missive, and she was right. It was in the back, a white business-length envelope sticking out from between the screen door and the jamb. Cigarette clamped between her front teeth, Lisey tore the envelope open and unfolded a single sheet of paper. The message was typewritten.

  Mrs: I am sorry to do this as I love aminals but btter your Cat than You. I don’t want to hurt You. I don’t want to but you need to call 412-298-8188 and tell “The Man” that you are donatinf those papers we talked about to the school library by way of Him. We don’t want to let any grass grow under our feet on this Mrs, so call him by 8 PM tonight ald he’ll get in touch with me. Let us finisg this business with no one hut except for your poor Pet about which I am so SORRY.

  Your freind,

  Zack

  PS: I’m not a bit mad you told me to go “F” myself. I know you were upsert.

  Z

  Lisey looked at the Z which was “Zack McCool”’s final bit of communication to her and thought of Zorro, galloping through the night with his cape billowing out behind him. Her eyes were watering. She thought for a moment that she was crying, then realized it was smoke. The cigarette between her teeth had burned down to the filter. She spat it to the brickwork of the walk and ground it grimly beneath her heel. She looked up at the high board fence that went all the way around their backyard…though solely for the sake of symmetry, as their only neighbors were on the south side, to Lisey’s left as she stood by her kitchen door with “Zack McCool”’s infuriating, poorly typed missive—his smucking ultimatum—in her hand. It was the Galloways on the other side of the board fence, and the Galloways had half a dozen cats—what were called “barncats” in this neck of the woods. They sometimes foraged in the Landons’ yard, especially when no one was home. Lisey had no doubt it was a Galloway barncat in her mailbox, just as she had no doubt it had been Zack in the PT Cruiser that had passed her not long after she finished locking up and left Amanda’s house. Mr. PT Cruiser had been heading east, coming almost directly out of the lowering sun, so she hadn’t been able to get a good look at him. The bastard had even had the balls to tip her a wave. Howdy, there, Missus, left you a little something in your mailbox! And she had waved back, because that was what you did out here in Sticksville.

  “You bastard,” she murmured, so angry she didn’t even know which one she was cursing, Zack or the crazed Incunk who had sicced Zack on her. But since Zack had so considerately provided her with Woodbody’s phone number (she had recognized the Pittsburgh area code instantly), she knew which one she intended to deal with first, and she found she was looking forward to it. But before she dealt with anyone, she had a distasteful housekeeping chore to perform.

  Lisey stuffed “Zack McCool”’s letter into her back pocket, briefly touching Amanda’s Little Notebook of Compulsions without even being aware of it, and yanked out her housekeys. She was still too angry to be aware of much, including the possibility of the sender’s fingerprints on the letter. Nor was she thinking about calling the County Sheriff’s Office, although that had certainly been on her To Do list earlier. Rage had narrowed coherent thought to something very like the beam of the little flashlight she had used to look into the mailbox, and right now that limited her to just a pair of ideas: take care of the cat, then call Woodbody and tell him to take care of “Zack McCool.” To call him off. Or else.

  2

  From the cabinet under her kitchen sink she got a pair of floor-buckets, some clean rags, an old pair of Playtex rubber gloves, and a garbage bag that she tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. She squirted Top Job into one of the buckets and filled it with hot water, using the sink’s hand-held spray attachment to make the soap foam up faster. Then she went outside, pausing only to get a pair of tongs out of what Scott had called the kitchen’s Things Drawer—the big ones she used on the rare occasions when she decided to barbecue. She heard herself singing the kick-out line of “Jambalaya” over and over again as she went about these small, grim chores: “Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou!”

  Big fun. No doubt.

  Outside, she filled the second bucket with cold rinse from the hose-bib and then walked up the driveway, a bucket in each hand, the rags tossed over her shoulder, the long tongs sticking out of one back pocket and the Hefty bag in the other. When she got to the mailbox, she set the buckets down and wrinkled her nose. Could she smell blood, or was that only her imagination? She peered into the mailbox. Hard to see; the light was going the wrong way. Should have brought the flash, she thought, but she was damned if she was going to go back and get it. Not while she was strapped and ready.

  Lisey probed with the tongs, stopping when they hit something that wasn’t soft but wasn’t quite hard, either. She opened them as wide as she could, clamped them down, and pulled. At first nothing happened. Then the cat—really just a sense of weight at the end of her arm—began to move reluctantly forward.

  The tongs lost their hold and clicked together. Lisey pulled them out. There was blood and a few gray hairs on the spatulate ends—what Scott had always called “the grabbers.” She remembered telling him grabbers was one fish he must have found floating dead on the surface of his precious pool. That had made him laugh.

  Lisey bent and peered into the mailbox. The cat had come about halfway and was easy enough to see now. It was a nondescript smoke color, a Galloway barncat for sure. She clicked the tongs together twice—for luck—and was about to reach in again when she heard a car approaching from the east. She turned with a sinking in her belly. She didn’t just think it was Zack returning in his sporty little PT Cruiser; she knew it. He’d pull over and lean out and ask her if she wanted a little hep with that. He’d call it hep. Missus, he’d say, do you want a little hep with that. But it was some kind of SUV, and a woman behind the wheel.

  You’re getting paranoid, little Lisey.

>   Probably so. And under the circumstances, she had a right to be.

  Get it done. You came out here to do it, so do it.

  She reached in with the tongs again, this time looking at what she was doing, and as she opened the grabbers and positioned them around one of the unlucky barncat’s stiffening paws, she thought of Dick Powell in some old black-and-white movie, carving a turkey and asking Who wants a leg? And yes, she could smell the thing’s blood. She gagged a little, bent her head, spat between her sneakers.

  Get it done.

  Lisey closed the grabbers (not such a bad word after all, not once you made friends with it) and pulled. She fumbled the green garbage bag open with her other hand and in the cat tumbled, headfirst. She twirled the bag closed and knotted the neck, since stupid little Lisey had also forgotten to bring one of the yellow plastic ties. Then she resolutely began to scrub her mailbox clean of the blood and fur.

  3

  When she was finished with the mailbox, Lisey trudged back down the driveway with her buckets in the long evening light. Breakfast had been coffee and oatmeal, lunch little more than a scoop of tuna and mayo on a scrap of lettuce, and dead cat or no dead cat, she was starved. She decided to put off her call to Woodbody until she had some food in her belly. The thought of calling the Sheriff’s Office—anyone in a blue uniform, for that matter—hadn’t yet returned to her.

  She washed her hands for three minutes, using very hot water and making sure any speck of blood was gone from under her nails. Then she found the Tupperware dish containing the leftover Cheeseburger Pie, scraped it onto a plate, and blasted it in the microwave. While she waited for the chime, she hunted a Pepsi out of the fridge. She remembered thinking she’d never finish the Hamburger Helper stuff once her initial lust for it had been slaked. You could add that to the bottom of the long, long list of Things in Life Lisey Has Been Wrong About, but so what? Big diddly, as Cantata had been fond of saying in her teenage years.

  “I never claimed to be the brains of the outfit,” Lisey told the empty kitchen, and the microwave bleeped as if to second that.

  The reheated gloop was almost too hot to eat but Lisey gobbled it anyway, cooling her mouth with fizzy mouthfuls of cold Pepsi. As she was finishing the last bite, she remembered the low whispering sound the cat’s fur had made against the tin sleeve of the mailbox, and the weird pulling sensation she’d felt as the body began, reluctantly, to come forward. He must have really crammed it in there, she thought, and Dick Powell once more came to mind, black-and-white Dick Powell, this time saying And have some stuffing!

  She was up and rushing for the sink so fast she knocked her chair over, sure she was going to vomit everything she’d just eaten, she was going to blow her groceries, toss her cookies, throw her heels, donate her lunch. She hung over the sink, eyes closed, mouth open, midsection locked and straining. After a pregnant five-second pause, she produced one monstrous cola-burp that buzzed like a cicada. She leaned there a moment longer, wanting to make absolutely sure that was all. When she was, she rinsed her mouth, spat, and pulled “Zack McCool”’s letter from her jeans pocket. It was time to call Joseph Woodbody.

  4

  She expected to reach his office at Pitt—who’d give a looneytune like her new friend Zack his home phone number?—and she was prepared to leave what Scott might have called “a huh-yoogely provocative message” on Woodbody’s answering machine. Instead the telephone was answered on the second ring and a woman’s voice, quite pleasant and perhaps lubricated by that all-important first before-dinner drink, told Lisey that she had reached the Woodbody residence and then asked who was calling. For the second time that day Lisey identified herself as Mrs. Scott Landon.

  “I’d like to speak to Professor Woodbody,” she said. Her voice was mild and pleasant.

  “May I say what this is regarding?”

  “My late husband’s papers,” Lisey said, spinning her opened pack of Salem Lights on the coffee table in front of her. She realized that she once again had cigarettes and no fire. Perhaps it was a warning that she should give the habit up again, after all, before it could settle its little yellow hooks back into her brain stem. She thought of adding I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me and didn’t bother. His wife would know that.

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Lisey waited. She hadn’t planned what she was going to say. This was in accordance with another of Landon’s Rules: you only planned out what you were going to say for disagreements. When you were really angry—when you wanted to tear someone a new asshole, as the saying was—it was usually best to just rare back and let it rip.

  So she sat there, mind a careful blank, spinning her pack of cigarettes. Around and around it went.

  At last a smooth masculine voice she thought she remembered said, “Hello, Mrs. Landon, this is a pleasant surprise.”

  SOWISA, she thought. SOWISA, babyluv.

  “No,” Lisey said, “it’s not going to be pleasant at all.”

  There was a pause. Then, cautiously: “I beg pardon? Is this Lisa Landon? Mrs. Scott L—”

  “Listen to me, you son of a bitch. There’s a man harassing me. I think he’s a dangerous man. Yesterday he threatened to hurt me.”

  “Mrs. Landon—”

  “In places I didn’t let the boys touch at the junior high school dances was how he put it, I think. And tonight—”

  “Mrs. Landon, I don’t—”

  “Tonight he left a dead cat in my mailbox and a letter stuck in my door, and the letter had a telephone number on it, this number, so don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about when I know you do!” On the last word, Lisey batted the pack of cigarettes with the side of her hand. Batted it like a badminton birdie. It flew all the way across the room, shedding Salem Lights as it went. She was breathing hard and fast, but with her mouth wide open. She didn’t want Woodbody to hear her doing it and mistake her rage for fear.

  Woodbody made no reply. Lisey gave him time. When he still didn’t talk, she said, “Are you there? You better be.”

  She knew it was the same man who replied, but the smooth round lecture-hall tones were gone. This man sounded both younger and somehow older. “I’m going to put you on hold, Mrs. Landon, and take this in my study.”

  “Where your wife can’t hear, is what you mean.”

  “Hold on, please.”

  “It better not be long, Woodsmucky, or—”

  There was a click, then silence. Lisey wished she had used the cordless phone in the kitchen; she wanted to pace around, maybe snag one of her cigarettes and light it off a stove-burner. But maybe this was better. This way she couldn’t blow off any of her rage. This way she had to stay strapped so tight it hurt.

  Ten seconds went by. Twenty. Thirty. She was preparing to hang up when there was another click on the line and the King of the Incunks spoke to her again in his new young-old voice. It had picked up a funny little hiccupping tremor. It’s his heartbeat, she thought. It was her thought, but it could have been Scott’s insight. His heart’s beating so hard I can actually hear it. I wanted to scare him? I scared him. Now why should that scare me?

  And yes, all of a sudden she was scared. It was like a yellow thread weaving in and out of the bright red overblanket of her rage.

  “Mrs. Landon, is he a man named Dooley? James or Jim Dooley? Tall and skinny, with a little bit of a hill accent? Like West Vir—”

  “I don’t know his name. He called himself Zack McCool on the phone, and that’s the name he signed to his—”

  “Fuck,” Woodbody said. Only he stretched it out—Fuu-uuuck—and turned it into something almost incantatory. This was followed by a sound that might have been a groan. In Lisey’s mind, a second bright yellow thread joined the first.

  “What?” she asked sharply.

  “That’s him,” Woodbody said. “It has to be. The e-mail address he gave me was Zack991.”

  “You told him to scare me into giving you Scott’s unpublished papers, didn’t you?
That was the deal.”

  “Mrs. Landon, you don’t understa—”

  “I think I do. I’ve dealt with some fairly crazy people since Scott died, and the academics put the collectors to shame, but you make the rest of the academics look normal, Woodsmucky. That’s probably why you were able to hide it at first. The really crazy people have to be able to do that. It’s a survival skill.”

  “Mrs. Landon, if you’ll only let me expl—”

  “I’m being threatened and you’re responsible, you don’t need to explain that. So listen up, and listen up good: call him off right now. I haven’t given your name to the authorities yet, but I really think the police getting your name is the least of your worries. If I get one more call, one more letter, or one more dead animal from this Deep Space Cowboy, I’ll go to the newspapers.” Inspiration struck. “I’ll start with the ones in Pittsburgh. They’ll love it. CRAZED ACADEMIC THREATENS FAMOUS WRITER’S WIDOW. When that shows up on page one, a few questions from the cops in Maine will be the least of your problems. Goodbye, tenure.”

  Lisey thought all of this sounded good, and it hid those yellow threads of fear—at least for the moment. Unfortunately, what Woodbody said next brought them back again, brighter than ever.

  “You don’t understand, Mrs. Landon. I can’t call him off.”

  5

  For a moment Lisey was too flabbergasted to speak. Then she said, “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I mean I’ve already tried.”

  “You have his e-mail address! Zack999 or whatever it was—”

  “Zack991 at Sail-dot-com, for what it’s worth. Might as well be triple zero. It doesn’t work. It did the first couple of times I used it, but since then my e-mails just bounce back marked CANNOT DELIVER.”