Lisey's Story(29)

She was gripping the handle of the silver spade, and hard. It was a real thing in what suddenly felt like a very cobwebby world. She opened her eyes again and said, "Scott, was this just a goof, or are you still messing with me?"

No answer. Of course. And she had a couple of sisters that needed seeing to. Surely Scott would have understood her shoving all this on the back burner for the time being. In any case, she decided to take the spade along.

She liked the way it felt in her hand.

6

Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the damned thing could start ringing again. Outside the sun was setting and a strong westerly wind had gotten up, explaining the draft that had whooshed past her when she had opened the door to take the first of her two upsetting telephone calls: no ghosts there, babyluv. This day seemed at least a month long, but that wind, lovely and somehow finegrained, like the one in her dream the night before, soothed and refreshed her. She crossed from the barn to the kitchen without fearing "Zack McCool" was lurking somewhere nearby.

She knew how calls from cell phones sounded way out here: crackly and barely there. According to Scott, it was the power-lines (which he liked to call "UFO refueling stations").

Her buddy "Zack" had been coming in clear as a bell. That particular Deep Space Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like hell if her next-door neighbor had loaned him their phone so he could threaten her.

She got her car-keys and slipped them into the side pocket of her jeans (unaware that she was still carrying Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions in the back pocket - although she would become aware, in the fullness of time); she also got the bulkier ring with all the keys to the Landon kingdom domestic on it, each still labeled in Scott Landon's neat hand. She locked the house, then trudged back to lock the barn's sliding doors together and the door to Scott's study at the top of the outside stairs. Once that was done, she went to her car with the spade on her shoulder and her shadow trailing out long beside her on the dooryard dirt in the last of that day's fading red Junelight.

IV. Lisey and The Blood-Bool

(All the Bad-Gunky)

1

Driving to Amanda's along the recently widened and repaved Route 17 was a matter of fifteen minutes, even slowing for the blinker where 17 crossed the Deep Cut Road to Harlow. Lisey spent more of it than she wanted to thinking about bools in general and one bool in particular: the first. That one had been no joke.

"But the little idiot from Lisbon Falls went ahead and married him anyway," she said, laughing, then took her foot off the gas. Here was Patel's Market on the left - Texaco self-serve pumps on clean black asphalt under blinding white lights - and she felt an amazingly strong urge to pull in and grab a pack of cigarettes. Good old Salem Lights. And while she was there, she could get some of those Nissen doughnuts Manda liked, the squash ones, and maybe some HoHos for herself.

"You numbah one crazy baby," she said, smiling, and stepped smartly down on the gas again. Patel's receded. She was running with her dims on now, although there was still plenty of twilight. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw the silly silver shovel lying on the back seat, and said it again, this time laughing: "You numbah one crazy baby, ah so!"

And what if she was? Ah so what?

2

Lisey parked behind Darla's Prius and was only halfway to the door of Amanda's trim little Cape Cod when Darla came out, not quite running and struggling not to cry.

"Thank God you're here," she said, and when Lisey saw the blood on Darla's hands she thought of bools again, thought of her husband-to-be coming out of the dark and holding out his hand to her, only it hadn't really looked like a hand anymore.

"Darla, what - "

"She did it again! That crazy bitch went and cut herself again! All I did was go to use the bathroom...I left her drinking tea in the kitchen...'Are you okay, Manda,' I said...and..."

"Hold on," Lisey told her, forcing herself to at least sound calm. She'd always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it's not that bad. Wasn't that supposed to be the oldest child's job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.

"Oh, she's not gonna die, but what a mess," Darla said, beginning to cry after all. Sure, now that I'm here you let go, Lisey thought. Never occurs to any of you that little Lisey might have a few problems of her own, does it?

Darla blew first one side of her nose and then the other onto Amanda's darkening lawn in a pair of unladylike honks. "What a freakin mess, maybe you're right, maybe a place like Greenlawn's the answer...if it's private, that is...and discreet...I just don't know...maybe you can do something with her, probably you can, she listens to you, she always has, I'm at my wits' end..."

"Come on, Darl," Lisa said soothingly, and here was a revelation: she didn't really want cigarettes at all. Cigarettes were yesterday's bad habit. Cigarettes were as dead as her late husband, collapsed at a reading two years ago and died shortly thereafter in a Kentucky hospital, bool, the end.

What she wanted to be holding wasn't a Salem Light but the handle of that silver spade.

There was comfort you didn't even have to light.

3

It's a bool, Lisey!

She heard it again as she turned on the light in Amanda's kitchen. And saw him again, walking toward her up the shadowy lawn behind her apartment in Cleaves Mills. Scott who could be crazy, Scott who could be brave, Scott who could be both at the same time, under the right circumstances.