Later Page 5

Mom groaned and slapped the heel of her palm against her poor clumped-up bangs.

  I grabbed for the door handle, and surprise surprise, there wasn’t one. I told Liz to let me out and she did. We all got out.

  “Knock on the door,” Liz said. “If no one answers, we’ll go around and boost Jamie up so he can look in the windows.”

  We could do that because the shutters—with fancy little ornamental doodads carved into them—were all open. My mother ran to try the door, and for the moment Liz and I were alone.

  “You don’t really think you can see dead people like the kid in that movie, do you, Champ?”

  I didn’t care if she believed me or not, but something about her tone—as if this was all a big joke—pissed me off. “Mom told you about Mrs. Burkett’s rings, didn’t she?”

  Liz shrugged. “That might have been a lucky guess. You didn’t happen to see any dead folks on the way here, did you?”

  I said no, but it can be hard to tell unless you talk to them…or they talk to you. Once when me and Mom were on the bus I saw a girl with cuts in her wrists so deep they looked like red bracelets, and I was pretty sure she was dead, although she was nowhere near as gooshy as the Central Park man. And just that day, as we drove out of the city, I spotted an old woman in a pink bathrobe standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue. When the sign turned to WALK, she just stood there, looking around like a tourist. She had those roller things in her hair. She might have been dead, but she also might have been a live person just wandering around, the way Mom said Uncle Harry used to do sometimes before she had to put him in that first care home. Mom told me that when Uncle Harry started doing that, sometimes in his pj’s, she gave up thinking he might get better.

  “Fortune tellers guess lucky all the time,” Liz said. “And there’s an old saying about how even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

  “So you think my mother’s crazy and I’m helping her be crazy?”

  She laughed. “That’s called enabling, Champ, and no, I don’t think that. What I think is she’s upset and grasping at straws. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah. That she’s crazy.”

  Liz shook her head again, more emphatically this time. “She’s under a lot of stress. I totally get it. But making things up won’t help her. I hope you get that.”

  Mom came back. “No answer, and the door’s locked. I tried it.”

  “Okay,” Liz said. “Let’s go window-peeking.”

  We walked around the house. I could look in the dining room windows, because they went all the way to the ground, but I was too short for most of the other ones. Liz made a hand-step so I could look into those. I saw a big living room with a wide-screen TV and lots of fancy furniture. I saw a dining room with a table long enough to seat the starting team of the Mets, plus maybe their bullpen pitchers. Which was crazy for a guy who hated company. I saw a room that Mom called the small parlor, and around back was the kitchen. Mr. Thomas wasn’t in any of the rooms.

  “Maybe he’s upstairs. I’ve never been up there, but if he died in bed…or in the bathroom…he might still be…”

  “I doubt if died on the throne, like Elvis, but I suppose it’s possible.”

  That made me laugh, calling the toilet the throne always made me laugh, but I stopped when I saw Mom’s face. This was serious business, and she was losing hope. There was a kitchen door, and she tried the knob, but it was locked, just like the front door.

  She turned to Liz. “Maybe we could…”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Liz said. “No way are we breaking in, Tee. I’ve got enough problems at the Department without setting off a recently deceased bestselling author’s security system and trying to explain what we’re doing here when the guys from Brinks or ADT show up. Or the local cops. And speaking of the cops…he died alone, right? The housekeeper found him?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Quayle. She called me, I told you that—”

  “The cops will want to ask her some questions. Probably doing it right now. Or maybe the medical examiner. I don’t know how they do things in Westchester County.”

  “Because he’s famous? Because they think someone might have murdered him?”

  “Because it’s routine. And yeah, because he’s famous, I suppose. The point is, I’d like for us to be gone when they show up.”

  Mom’s shoulders slumped. “Nothing, Jamie? No sign of him?”

  I shook my head.

  Mom sighed and looked at Liz. “Maybe we should check the garage?”

  Liz gave her a shrug that said it’s your party.

  “Jamie? What do you think?”

  I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Thomas would be hanging out in his garage, but I guessed it was possible. Maybe he had a favorite car. “I guess we should. As long as we’re here.”

  We started for the garage, but then I stopped. There was a gravel path beyond Mr. Thomas’s swimming pool, which had been drained. The path was lined with trees, but because it was late in the season and most of the leaves were gone, I could see a little green building. I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

  Mom gave her forehead another slap. I was starting to worry she might give herself a brain tumor, or something. “Oh my God, La Petite Maison dans le Bois! Why didn’t I think of it first?”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “His study! Where he writes! If he’s anywhere, it would there! Come on!”

  She grabbed my hand and ran me around the shallow end of the pool, but when we got to where the gravel path started, I set my feet and stopped. Mom kept going, and if Liz hadn’t grabbed me by the shoulder, I probably would have face-planted.

  “Mom? Mom!”

  She turned around, looking impatient. Except that’s not the right word. She looked halfway to crazy. “Come on! I’m telling you if he’s anywhere here, it will be there!”

  “You need to calm down, Tee,” Liz said. “We’ll check out his writing cabin, and then I think we should go.”

  “Mom!”

  My mother ignored me. She was starting to cry, which she hardly ever did. She didn’t do it even when she found out how much the IRS wanted, that day she just pounded her fists on her desk and called them a bunch of bloodsucking bastards, but she was crying now. “You go if you want, but we’re staying here until Jamie’s sure it’s a bust. This might be just a pleasure jaunt for you, humoring the crazy lady—”

  “That’s unfair!”

  “—but this is my life we’re talking about—”

  “I know that—”

  “—and Jamie’s life, and—”

  “MOM!”

  One of the worst things about being a kid, maybe the very worst, is how grownups ignore you when they get going on their shit. “MOM! LIZ! BOTH OF YOU! STOP!”

  They stopped. They looked at me. There we stood, two women and a little boy in a New York Mets hoodie, beside a drained pool on an overcast November day.

  I pointed to the gravel path leading to the little house in the woods where Mr. Thomas wrote his Roanoke books.

  “He’s right there,” I said.

  12

  He came walking toward us, which didn’t surprise me. Most of them, not all but most, are attracted to living people for awhile, like bugs to a bug-light. That’s kind of a horrible way to put it, but it’s all I can think of. I would have known he was dead even if I didn’t know he was dead, because of what he was wearing. It was a chilly day, but he was dressed in a plain white tee, baggy shorts, and those strappy sandals Mom calls Jesus shoes. Plus there was something else, something weird: a yellow sash with a blue ribbon pinned to it.

  Liz was saying something to my mother about how there was no one there and I was just pretending, but I paid no attention. I pulled free of Mom’s hand and walked toward Mr. Thomas. He stopped.

  “Hello, Mr. Thomas,” I said. “I’m Jamie Conklin. Tia’s son. I’ve never met you.”

  “Oh, come on,” Liz said from behind me.

  “Be quiet,” Mom said, but s
ome of Liz’s skepticism must have gotten through, because she asked me if I was sure Mr. Thomas was really there.

  I ignored this, too. I was curious about the sash he was wearing. Had been wearing when he died.

  “I was at my desk,” he said. “I always wear my sash when I’m writing. It’s my good luck charm.”

  “What’s the blue ribbon for?”

  “The Regional Spelling Bee I won when I was in the sixth grade. Spelled down kids from twenty other schools. I lost in the state competition, but I got this blue ribbon for the Regional. My mother made the sash and pinned the ribbon on it.”

  In my opinion I thought that was sort of a weird thing to still be wearing, since sixth grade must have been a zillion years ago for Mr. Thomas, but he said it without any embarrassment or self-consciousness. Some dead people can feel love—remember me telling you about Mrs. Burkett kissing Mr. Burkett’s cheek?—and they can feel hate (something I found out in due time), but most of the other emotions seem to leave when they die. Even the love never seemed all that strong to me. I don’t like to tell you this, but hate stays stronger and lasts longer. I think when people see ghosts (as opposed to dead people), it’s because they are hateful. People think ghosts are scary because they are.

  I turned back to Mom and Liz. “Mom, did you know Mr. Thomas wears a sash when he writes?”

  Her eyes widened. “That was in the Salon interview he did five or six years ago. He’s wearing it now?”

  “Yeah. It’s got a blue ribbon on it. From—”

  “The spelling bee he won! In the interview, he laughed and called it ‘my silly affectation.’ ”

  “Maybe so,” Mr. Thomas said, “but most writers have silly affectations and superstitions. We’re like baseball players that way, Jimmy. And who can argue with nine straight New York Times bestsellers?”

  “I’m Jamie,” I said.

  Liz said, “You told Champ there about the interview, Tee. Must have. Or he read it himself. He’s a hell of a good reader. He knew, that’s all, and he—”

  “Be quiet,” my mother said fiercely. Liz raised her hands, like surrendering.

  Mom stepped up beside me, looking at what to her was just a gravel path with nobody on it. Mr. Thomas was standing right in front of her with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. They were loose, and I hoped he wouldn’t push down on his pockets too hard, because it looked to me like he wasn’t wearing any undies.

  “Tell him what I told you to tell him!”

  What Mom wanted me to tell him was that he had to help us or the thin financial ice we’d been walking on for a year or more was going to break and we’d drown in a sea of debt. Also that the agency had begun to bleed clients because some of her writers knew we were in trouble and might be forced to close. Rats deserting a sinking ship was what she called them one night when Liz wasn’t there and Mom was into her fourth glass of wine.

  I didn’t bother with all that blah-de-blah, though. Dead people have to answer your questions—at least until they disappear—and they have to tell the truth. So I just cut to the chase.

  “Mom wants to know what The Secret of Roanoke is about. She wants to know the whole story. Do you know the whole story, Mr. Thomas?”

  “Of course.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and now I could see a little line of hair running down the middle of his stomach from below his navel. I didn’t want to see that, but I did. “I always have everything before I write anything.”

  “And keep it all in your head?”

  “I have to. Otherwise someone might steal it. Put it on the Internet. Spoil the surprises.”

  If he’d been alive, that might have come out sounding paranoid. Dead, he was just stating a fact, or what he believed was a fact. And hey, I thought he had a point. Computer trolls were always spilling stuff on the Net, everything from boring shit like political secrets to the really important things, like what was going to happen in the season finale of Fringe.

  Liz walked away from me and Mom, sat on one of the benches beside the pool, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. She had apparently decided to let the lunatics run the asylum. That was okay with me. Liz had her good points, but that morning she was basically in the way.

  “Mom wants you to tell me everything,” I said to Mr. Thomas. “I’ll tell her, and she’ll write the last Roanoke book. She’ll say you sent her almost all of it before you died, along with notes about how to finish the last couple of chapters.”

  Alive, he would have howled at the idea of someone else finishing his book; his work was the most important thing in his life and he was very possessive of it. But now the rest of him was lying on a mortician’s table somewhere, dressed in the khaki shorts and the yellow sash he’d been wearing as he wrote his last few sentences. The version of him talking to me was no longer jealous or possessive of his secrets.

  “Can she do that?” was all he asked.

  Mom had assured me (and Liz) on the way out to Cobblestone Cottage that she really could do that. Regis Thomas insisted that no copyeditor should sully a single one of his precious words, but in fact Mom had been copyediting his books for years without telling him—even back when Uncle Harry was still in his right mind and running the business. Some of the changes were pretty big, but he never knew… or at least never said anything. If anyone in the world could copy Mr. Thomas’s style, it was my mother. But style wasn’t the problem. The problem was story.

  “She can,” I said, because it was simpler than telling him all of that.

  “Who is that other woman?” Mr. Thomas asked, pointing at Liz.

  “That’s my mother’s friend. Her name is Liz Dutton.” Liz looked up briefly, then lit another cigarette.

  “Are she and your mother fucking?” Mr. Thomas asked.

  s“Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “I thought so. It’s how they look at each other.”

  “What did he say?” Mom asked anxiously.

  “He asked if you and Liz were close friends,” I said. Kind of lame, but all I could think of on the spur of the moment. “So will you tell us The Secret of Roanoke?” I asked Mr. Thomas. “I mean the whole book, not just the secret part.”

  “Yes.”

  “He says yes,” I told Mom, and she took both her phone and a little tape recorder out of her bag. She didn’t want to miss a single word.

  “Tell him to be as detailed as he can.”

  “Mom says to be—”

  “I heard her,” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m dead, not deaf.” His shorts were lower than ever.

  “Cool,” I said. “Listen, maybe you better pull up your shorts, Mr. Thomas, or your willy’s gonna get chilly.”

  He pulled up his shorts so they hung off his bony hips. “Is it chilly? It doesn’t feel that way to me.” Then, with no change in tone: “Tia is starting to look old, Jimmy.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him again that my name was Jamie. Instead I looked at my mother and holy God, she did look old. Was starting to, anyway. When had that happened?

  “Tell us the story,” I said. “Begin at the beginning.”

  “Where else?” Mr. Thomas said.

  13

  It took an hour and a half, and by the time we were done, I was exhausted and I think Mom was, too. Mr. Thomas looked just the same at the end as when we started, standing there with that somehow sorry yellow sash falling down over his poochy belly and low-slung shorts. Liz parked her car between the gateposts with the dashboard light blipping, which was probably a good idea, because the news of Mr. Thomas’s death had begun to spread, and people were showing up out front to snap pictures of Cobblestone Cottage. Once she came back to ask how much longer we’d be and Mom just waved her off, told her to inspect the grounds or something, but mostly Liz hung in.

  It was stressful as well as exhausting, because our future depended on Mr. Thomas’s book. It wasn’t fair for me to have to bear the weight of that responsibility, not at nine, but there was no choice. I had to repeat everything Mr. Thomas
said to Mom—or rather to Mom’s recording devices—and Mr. Thomas had plenty to say. When he told me he was able to keep everything in his head, he wasn’t just blowing smoke. And Mom kept asking questions, mostly for clarification. Mr. Thomas didn’t seem to mind (didn’t seem to care one way or the other, actually), but the way Mom was dragging things out started bugging the shit out of me. Also, my mouth got wickedly dry. When Liz brought me her leftover Coke from Burger King, I gulped down the few swallows that were left and gave her a hug.

  “Thank you,” I said, handing back the paper cup. “I needed that.”

  “Very welcome.” Liz had stopped looking bored. Now she looked thoughtful. She couldn’t see Mr. Thomas, and I don’t think she still totally believed he was there, but she knew something was going on, because she’d heard a nine-year-old boy spieling out a complicated plot featuring half a dozen major characters and at least two dozen minor ones. Oh, and a threesome (under the influence of bulbous canary grass supplied by a helpful Native American of the Nottoway People) consisting of George Threadgill, Purity Betancourt, and Laura Goodhugh. Who ended up getting pregnant. Poor Laura always got the shitty end of the stick.

  At the end of Mr. Thomas’s summary, the big secret came out, and it was a dilly. I’m not going to tell you what it was. Read the book and find out for yourself. If you haven’t read it already, that is.

  “Now I’ll tell you the last sentence,” Mr. Thomas said. He seemed as fresh as ever…although “fresh” is probably the wrong word to use with a dead person. His voice had started to fade, though. Just a little. “Because I always write that first. It’s the beacon I row to.”

  “Last sentence coming up,” I told Mom.

  “Thank God,” she said.

  Mr. Thomas raised one finger, like an old-time actor getting ready to give his big speech. “‘On that day, a red sun went down over the deserted settlement, and the carved word that would puzzle generations glowed as if limned in blood: CROATOAN.’ Tell her croatoan in capital letters, Jimmy.”

  I told her (although I didn’t know exactly what “limbed in blood” meant), then asked Mr. Thomas if we were done. Just as he said we were, I heard a brief siren from out front—two whoops and a blat.