Lisey's Story(142)

"Well, if you're sure it won't be bothering you..."

"Do I look like I'm studying for finals? Go ahead."

Amanda went back into the alcove. "Sure hope this VCR still works." She sounded like a woman who has discovered a wind-up gramophone and a stack of ancient acetate records.

Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo's Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now...and probably was. She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here. Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives. Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end. But all the real horses were out of the barn. The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers - people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sun-porch - all that stuff had been published. The Secret Pearl, published a month after his death, had been the last.

No, Lisey, a voice whispered, and at first she thought it was Scott's, and then - how crazy - she thought it was the voice of Ole Hank. But that was crazy, because it wasn't a man's voice at all. Was that Good Ma's voice, going whisper-whisper-whisper in her head?

I think he wanted me to tell you something. Something about a story. Not Good Ma's voice - although Good Ma's yellow afghan had figured in it somewhere - but Amanda's. They had been sitting together on those stone benches, looking out at the good ship Hollyhocks, which always rode at anchor but never quite set sail. Lisey had never realized how much alike their mother and her oldest sister sounded until this memory of the benches. And -

Something about a story. Your story. Lisey's story.

Had Amanda actually said that? It was like a dream now and Lisey couldn't be completely sure, but she thought yes.

And the afghan. Only -

"Only he called it an african," Lisey said in a low voice. "He called it an african, and he called it a bool. Not a boop, not a beep, a bool."

"Lisey?" Amanda called from the other room. "Did you say something?"

"Just talking to myself, Manda."

"Means you've got money in the bank," Amanda said, and then there was only the soundtrack of the movie. Lisey seemed to remember every line of it, every scratchy snatch of music.

If you left me a story, Scott, where is it? Not up here in the study, I'd bet money on it. Not in the barn, either - nothing down there but false bools like Ike Comes Home. But that wasn't quite true. There had been at least two true prizes in the barn: the silver spade and Good Ma's cedar box, tucked away under the Bremen bed. With the delight square in it. Was that what Amanda had been talking about?

Lisey didn't think so. There was a story in that box, but it was their story - Scott & Lisey: Now We Are Two. So what was her story? And where was it?

And speaking of wheres, where was the Black Prince of the Incunks?

Not on the answering machine at Amanda's; not on the answering machine here, either. Lisey had found only one message, on the recorder in the house. It had been from Deputy Alston.

"Mrs. Landon, this storm has done quite a lot of damage in town, particularly at the south end. Someone - I hope me or Dan Boeckman - is gonna check back on you as soon as possible, but in the meantime I want to remind you to keep your doors locked and don't let anyone in you can't identify. That means gettin em to take off their hats or push back the hoods of their slickers even if it's pourin down cats n dogs, okay? And keep that cell phone with you at all times. Remember, in an emergency all you have to do is hit SPEED-DIAL and the 1-key. The call will go right through to the Sheriff's."

"Great," Amanda had commented. "Our blood'll still be runny instead of clotted when they get here. Probably speed up their DNA tests."

Lisey hadn't bothered replying. She had no intention of letting the Castle County Sheriff's Department handle Jim Dooley. As far as she was concerned, Jim Dooley might as well have cut his own throat with her Oxo can opener.

The light on the answering machine in her barn office had been flashing, the number 1

showing in the MESSAGES RECEIVED window, but when Lisey hit the PLAY button, there had been only three seconds of silence, one soft, indrawn breath, and a hang-up. It could have been a wrong number, people dialed wrong numbers and hung up all the time, but she knew it hadn't been.

No. It had been Dooley.

Lisey sat back in the office chair, ran a finger down the rubber grip of the .22, then picked it up and swung open the cylinder. It was easy enough to do, once you'd done it a couple of times. She loaded the chambers, then swung the cylinder closed again. It made a small but final click.

In the other room, Amanda laughed at something in the movie. Lisey smiled a little herself. She didn't believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn't even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes - if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered - it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book. Lisey supposed the Roger Dashmiels of the world didn't believe it and the Joseph Woodbodys thought it had to be something grander