Lisey's Story(155)

"Over the teeth," Lisey said.

"Over the gums," Amanda said.

"Look out guts, here it comes," they said together, and drank.

Amanda bent and blew out a gust of breath. When she straightened up, there were roses in her formerly pale cheeks, a line of red forming on her brow, and a tiny saddle of scarlet on the bridge of her nose. Tears stood in her eyes.

"Shit-a-goddam! What was that? "

Lisey, whose throat felt as hot as Manda's face looked, took hold of the bottle and read the label. STAR BRANDY, it said. A PRODUCT OF ROMANIA.

"Romanian brandy?" Amanda looked aghast. "Ain't no such animal! Where'd you get it?"

"It was a gift to Scott. He got it for doing something - I forget what - but I think they threw in a pen set, too."

"It's probably poison. You pour it out and I'll pray we don't die."

"You pour it out. I'll make the hot chocolate. Swiss. Not from Romania."

She began to turn away, but Amanda touched her shoulder. "Maybe we should skip the hot chocolate and just get out of here before any of those Sheriff's deputies come back to check on you."

"Do you think so?" Even as she asked the question, Lisey knew Amanda was right.

"Yes. Do you dare to go up in the study again?"

"Of course I do."

"Then get my little gun. Don't forget the lights are out up there."

Lisey opened the top of the little desk where she wrote her checks and pulled out the long-barreled flashlight she kept in there. She turned it on. The light was nice and bright. Amanda was rinsing their glasses. "If someone found out we were here, that wouldn't be the end of the world. But if your deputies found out we came with a gun...and that man just happened to disappear off the face of the earth around the same time..."

Lisey, who had thought only as far as getting Dooley to the Bell-and-Spade Tree (and the long boy had never been a part of her imaginings), realized she still had work to do and had better get busy doing it. Professor Woodbody wasn't ever going to report his old drinking buddy missing, but the man might have relatives somewhere, and if anybody in the world had a motive for getting rid of the Black Prince of the Incunks, it was Lisey Landon. Of course there was no body (what Scott had sometimes been pleased to refer to as the corpus delicious), but still, she and her sister had spent what some might construe as an extremely suspicious afternoon and evening. Plus the County Sheriff's Department knew Dooley had been harassing her; she'd told them so herself.

"I'll get his shite," she said.

Amanda did not smile. "Good."

14

The flashlight cut a wide swath, and the study wasn't as spooky on her own as Lisey had feared it might be. Having stuff to do no doubt helped. She began by putting the Pathfinder back in its shoebox, then went prospecting along the floor with the light. She found both of the lenses that went with the night-vision goggles, plus half a dozen double-A batteries. She assumed these were from the gadget's power-pack. The pack must have traveled, although she couldn't remember actually seeing it; the batteries obviously hadn't. Then she picked up Dooley's terrible paper bag. Amanda had either forgotten the bag or hadn't even realized Dooley had it, but the stuff in here would look bad for her if it were found. Especially when combined with the gun. Lisey knew they could do tests on the Pathfinder that would show it had been fired recently; she wasn't dumb (and she watched CSI). She also knew the tests wouldn't show it had been fired only once, into the ceiling. She tried to handle the paper bag so it wouldn't clank, and it clanked anyway. She looked around for other signs of Dooley and saw none. There were bloodstains on the rug, but if that were ever tested, both the type and the DNA would match hers. Blood on her rug would look very bad in combination with the stuff in the bag she now held in her hand, but with the bag gone, they'd be all right. Probably all right.

Where's his car? His PT Cruiser? Because I know that car I saw was his. She couldn't worry about that now. It was dark. This was what she had to worry about, this stuff rah-cheer. And her sisters. Darla and Canty, currently on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride way the hell and gone up to Acadia Mental Health in Derry. So they wouldn't get caught in the Jim Dooley version of Mr. Silver's potato-grader.

But did she really have to worry about those two? No. They'd be royally pissed, of course...and royally curious...but in the end they'd keep quiet if she and Amanda told them they absolutely had to, and why? Because of the sister thing, that was why. She and Amanda would have to be careful with them, and there would have to be some sort of story (what kind could possibly cover this Lisey had no idea, although she was sure Scott could have come up with something). There had to be a story because, unlike Amanda and Lisey, Darla and Cantata had husbands. And husbands were all too often the back door by which secrets escaped into the outside world.

As Lisey turned to go, her eye was caught by the booksnake sleeping against the wall. All those quarterly reviews and scholarly journals, all those year-end annuals, bound reports, and copies of theses done on Scott's work. Many containing pictures of a gone life - call it SCOTT AND LISEY! THE MARRIED YEARS!

She could easily see a couple of college kids dismantling the snake and loading its component parts into cardboard boxes with liquor brands printed on the sides, then stacking the boxes in the back of a truck and driving them away. To Pitt? Bite your tongue, Lisey thought. She didn't consider herself a grudge-holding woman, but after Jim Dooley, it would be a snowy day in hell before she put any more of Scott's stuff where Woodsmucky could look at it without buying a plane ticket. No, the Fogler Library at the University of Maine would do just fine - right down the road from Cleaves Mills. She could see herself standing by and watching the final packing-up, maybe bringing out a pitcher of iced tea to the kids when the work was done. And when the tea was finished, they would set their glasses down and thank her. One of them might tell her how much he'd liked her husband's books, and the other might say they were very sorry for her loss. As if he had died two weeks ago. She'd thank them. Then she would watch them drive away with all those frozen images of her life with him locked inside their truck. You can really let go?