Lisey’sStory Read online

  “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 ca
se, 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 long-fingered 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, no-nonsense 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 extra-special 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 title-page, 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 “text-crazies,” 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—