Lisey's Story(156)

She thought she could. Still, that snake drowsing along the wall drew the eye. So many shut books, sleeping deep - they drew the eye. She looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman's high firm br**sts. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn't ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

"I always loved you, Scott," she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. "You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn't I?"

Then, shining the flashlight's beam ahead of her, she went back down the stairs with the shoebox in one hand and Dooley's awful paper bag in the other. 15

Amanda was standing at the kitchen door when Lisey came back in.

"Good," Amanda said. "I was getting worried. What's in the bag?"

"You don't want to know."

"Oh...kay," Amanda said. "Is he...you know, gone from up there?"

"I think so, yes."

"I hope so." Amanda shivered. "He was a scary guy."

You don't know the half of it, Lisey thought.

"Well," Amanda said, "I guess we better get going."

"Going where?"

"Lisbon Falls," Amanda said. "The old farm."

"What - " Then she stopped. It made a weird kind of sense.

"I came around at Greenlawn, just like you told that Dr. Alberness, and you took me to my house so I could change my clothes. Then I got freaky and started talking about the farm. Come on, Lisey, let's go, let's blow this pop-shop before someone comes."

Amanda led her out into the dark.

Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late nineteen-eighties paid the property taxes.

"Why did you want to go to the old farm?" Lisey asked as she slipped behind the BMW's wheel. "I'm not clear on that."

"Because I wasn't," Amanda said as Lisey turned in a circle and started down the long drive. "I just said I had to go there and see the old place if I wasn't going to, you know, slip back into the Twilight Zone, so of course you took me."

"Of course I did," Lisey said. She looked both ways, saw no one coming - especially no County Sheriff's Department cars, praise God - and turned left, the direction that would take her through Mechanic Falls, Poland Springs, and eventually to Gray and Lisbon beyond. "And why did we send Darla and Canty in the wrong direction?"

"I absolutely insisted," Amanda said. "I was afraid if they showed up, they'd take me back to my house or your house or even to Greenlawn before I got a chance to visit with Mom and Dad and then spend some time at the home place." For a moment Lisey had no idea what Manda was talking about -  spend time with Mom and Dad? Then she got it. The Debusher family plot was at nearby Sabbatus Vale Cemetery. Both Good Ma and Dandy were buried there, along with Grampy and Granny D and God knew how many others.

She asked, "But weren't you afraid I'd take you back?"

Amanda eyed her indulgently. "Why would you take me back? You were the one who took me out. "

"Maybe because you started acting crazy, asking to visit a farm that's been deserted for thirty years or more?"

"Foof!" Amanda waved a dismissive hand. "I could always wrap you around my finger, Lisey - Canty and Darla both know this."

"Bull shit you could!"

Amanda only gave her a maddening smile, her complexion a rather weird green in the glow of the dashboard lights, and said nothing. Lisey opened her mouth to renew the argument, then closed it again. She thought the story would work, because it came down to a pair of easily grasped ideas: Amanda had been acting crazy (nothing new there) and Lisey had been humoring her (understandable, given the circumstances). They could work with it. As for the shoebox with the gun in it...and Dooley's bag...

"We're going to stop in Mechanic Falls," she told Amanda. "Where the bridge goes over the Androscoggin River. I've got a couple of things to get rid of."

"Yes you do," Amanda said. Then she folded her hands in her lap, put her head back against the rest, and closed her eyes.

Lisey turned on the radio, and wasn't a bit surprised to get Ole Hank singing "Honky Tonkin'." She sang along, low. She knew every word. This did not surprise her, either. Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera - things like songs and moonlight and kisses - were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.

That was good.

Part 3: Lisey's Story

"You are the call and I am the answer,

You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,

You are the night, and I the day.

What else? It is perfect enough.