Lisey's Story(25)

"Lisey?" Darla sounding really distressed for the first time, and Lisey returned to the present in a hurry. Of course Darla sounded distressed. Canty was in Boston for a week or maybe more, shopping while her husband took care of his wholesale auto business -

buying program cars, auction cars, and off-lease rental cars in places like Malden and Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin. Darla's Matt, meanwhile, was in Canada, lecturing on the migration patterns of various North American Indian tribes. This, Darla had once told Lisey, was a surprisingly profitable venture. Not that money would help them now. Now it was down to just the two of them. To sister-power. "Lise, did you hear me? Are you still th - "

"I'm here," Lisey said. "I just lost you for a few seconds, sorry. Maybe it's the phone -

Chapter 4

no one's used this one for a long time. It's downstairs in the barn. What was going to be my office, before Scott died?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure." Darla sounded completely mystified. Has no smucking idea what I'm talking about, Lisey thought. "Can you hear me now?"

"Clear as a bell." Looking at the silver spade as she spoke. Thinking of Gerd Allen Cole. Thinking I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias. Darla took a deep breath. Lisey heard it, like a wind blowing down the telephone line.

"She won't exactly admit it, but I think she...well...drank her own blood this time, Lise

- her lips and chin were all bloody when I got here, but nothing inside her mouth's cut. She looked the way we used to when Good Ma'd give us one of her lipsticks to play with."

What Lisey flashed on wasn't those old dress-up and makeup days, those clunk-aroundin-GoodMa's-high-heels days, but that hot afternoon in Nashville, Scott lying on the pavement shivering, his lips smeared with candy-colored blood. Nobody loves a clown at midnight. Listen, little Lisey. I'll make how it sounds when it looks around. But in the corner the silver spade gleamed...and was it dented? She believed it was. If she ever doubted that she'd been in time...if she ever woke in the dark, sweating, sure she'd been just a second too late and the remaining years of her marriage had consequently been lost...

"Lisey, will you come? When she's in the clear, she's asking for you."

Alarm bells went off in Lisey's head. "What do you mean, when she's in the clear? I thought you said she was okay."

"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 - "