Lisey's Story(57)

"Lisey," he says. "Little Lisey."

He goes back to sleep with his hand still covering hers, and that's perfectly okay with Lisey. She can turn the pages of her book with one hand.

16

Lisey stirred like a woman awaking from a doze, looked out the driver's-side window of her BMW, and saw the shadow of her car had grown noticeably longer on Mr. Patel's clean black pavement. There was not one butt in her ashtray, or two, but three. She looked out through the windshield and saw a face looking back at her from one of the small windows at the rear of the Market, in what had to be the storage area. It was gone before she could tell if it was Mr. Patel's wife or one of his two teenage daughters, but she had time to mark the expression: curiosity or concern. Either way it was time to move on. Lisey backed out of her space, glad she had at least butted her cigarettes in her own ashtray instead of tossing them out onto that weirdly clean asphalt, and once again turned for home.

Remembering that day in the hospital - and what the nurse said - that was another station of the bool.

Yes? Yes.

Something had been in bed with her this morning, and for now she would go on believing it had been Scott. He had for some reason sent her on a bool hunt, just like the ones his big brother Paul had made for him when they were a pair of unhappy boys growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only instead of little riddles leading her from one station to the next, she was being led...

"You're leading me into the past," she said in a low voice. "But why would you do that? Why, when that's where the bad-gunky is?"

The one you're on is a good bool. It goes behind the purple.

"Scott, I don't want to go behind the purple." Approaching the house now. "I'll be smucked if I want to go behind the purple."

But I don't think I have any choice.

If that was true, and if the next station of the bool meant reliving their weekend visit to The Antlers - Scott's frontloaded honeymoon - then she wanted Good Ma's cedar box. It was all she had of her mother now that the ( africans) afghans were gone, and Lisey supposed it was her more humble version of the memory nook in Scott's office. It was a place where she'd stored all sorts of mementos from (SCOTT AND LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!) the first decade of their marriage: photos, postcards, napkins, matchbooks, menus, drink-coasters, stupid stuff like that. How long had she collected those things? Ten years?

No, not that long. Six at most. Probably less. After Empty Devils, the changes had come thick and fast - not just the Germany experiment but everything. Their married life had become something like the berserk merry-go-round (sort of a pun there, she thought - merry-go-round, marry-go-round) at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. She'd quit saving things like cocktail napkins and souvenir matchbooks because there'd been too many lounges and too many restaurants in too many hotels. Pretty soon she'd quit saving everything. And Good Ma's cedar box that smelled so sweet when you opened it, where was that? Somewhere in the house, she was sure of it, and she meant to find it.

Maybe it'll turn out to be the next station of the bool, she thought, and then she saw her mailbox up ahead. The door was down and a clutch of letters was rubber-banded to it. Curious, Lisey pulled up next to the pole. She'd often come home to a full mailbox when Scott was alive, but since then her mail tended to be on the thin side, and more often than not addressed to OCCUPANT or MR. AND MRS. HOME OWNER. In truth, this current sheaf looked pretty thin: four envelopes and a postcard. Mr. Simmons, the RFD 3 mailman, must have tucked a package in the box, although on fair days he was more apt to use a rubber band or two to attach them to the sturdy metal flag. Lisey glanced at the letters - bills, advertising come-ons, a postcard from Cantata - and then reached into the mailbox. She touched something soft, furry, and wet. She screamed in surprise, yanked her hand back, saw the blood on her fingers, and screamed again, this time in horror. In that first moment she was positive she'd been bitten: something had climbed the cedar mailbox pole and then wormed its way inside. Maybe a rat, maybe something even worse - something rabid, like a woodchuck or a baby coon.

She wiped her hand on her blouse, breathing in audible gasps that weren't quite moans, then reluctantly raised her hand to see how many wounds there were. And how deep. For a moment her conviction that she must have been bitten was so strong that she actually saw the marks. Then she blinked her eyes and reality re-asserted itself. There were smears of blood, but no cuts or bites or breaks in the skin. Something was in her mailbox, all right, some horrible furry surprise, but its biting days were done. Lisey opened the glove compartment and her unopened pack of cigarettes fell out. She rummaged until she came up with the little disposable flashlight that she had transferred from the glove compartment of her last car, a Lexus she had driven for four years. It had been a fine car, that Lexus. She had only traded it because she associated it with Scott, who called it Lisey's Sexy Lexus. It was surprising how much small things could hurt when someone close to you died; talk about the princess and the smucking pea. Now she only hoped there was some juice left in the flashlight.

There was. The beam shone out bright and steady and confident. Lisey shifted sideways, took a deep breath, and shone it into the mailbox. She was distantly aware that she'd folded her lips over her teeth and was pressing them together so tightly that it hurt. At first she saw only a darkish shape and a green glimmer, like light reflecting off a marble. And wetness on the corrugated metal floor of the mailbox. She supposed that was the blood she'd gotten on her fingers. She shifted farther left, settling her side all the way against the driver's door, gingerly pushing the flashlight farther into the mailbox. The darkish shape grew fur, and ears, and a nose that probably would have been pink in daylight. There was no mistaking the eyes; even dulled in death, their shape was distinctive. There was a dead cat in her mailbox.