Lisey's Story(61)

"No!" Woodbody nearly wailed. "Listen to me - of course I have an e-mail address at Pitt, but I never gave it to Dooley! It would have been insane! I have two grad students who regularly access the mail there, not to mention the English Department secretary!"

"And at home?"

"I gave him my home e-mail address, yes, but he's never used it."

"What about the phone number you have for him?"

There was a moment of silence on the line, and when Woodbody spoke again, he sounded honestly puzzled. This scared her worse still. She looked at the wide living room window and saw that the sky in the northeast was turning lavender. It would soon be night. She had an idea this might be a long one.

"Phone number?" Woodbody said. "He never gave me a phone number. Just an e-mail address that worked twice, then quit.

He was either lying or fantasizing."

"Which do you think it was?"

Woodbody nearly whispered, "I don't know."

Lisey thought this was Woodbody's chickenshit way of trying not to admit what he really thought: that Dooley was crazy. "Hold on a minute." She started to put the handset down on the sofa, then thought better of it. "You better be there when I get back, Professor."

There was no need to use one of the stove-burners, after all. There were long decorative matches for lighting the fireplace in a brass cuspidor next to the fire-tools. She picked a Salem Light up off the floor and scraped one of the long matches alight on a hearthstone. She took one of the ceramic vases for a temporary ashtray, laying aside the flowers that had been in it and reflecting (not for the first time, either) that smoking was one of the world's nastier habits. Then she went back to the sofa, sat down, and picked up the phone. "Tell me what happened."

"Mrs. Landon, my wife and I have plans to go out - "

"Your plans have changed," Lisey said. "Start at the beginning."

6

Well of course in the beginning were the Incunks, those pagan worshippers of original texts and unpublished manuscripts, and Professor Joseph Woodbody, who was their king, as far as Lisey was concerned. God knew how many scholarly articles he'd published concerning the works of Scott Landon, or how many of them might even now be quietly gathering dust in the booksnake above the barn. Nor did she care how badly tormented Professor Woodbody had been by the thought of the unpublished works that might also be gathering dust in Scott's study. What mattered was that Woodbody made a habit of having two or three beers two or three evenings a week on his way home from campus, always at the same bar, a place called The Place. There were plenty of college-type drinking establishments near Pitt, some of them by-the-pitcher beerdives, some of them the smart-bars where faculty and class-conscious grad students went to drink - the kind of places with spider-plants in the windows and Bright Eyes on the jukebox instead of My Chemical Romance. The Place was a workingman's bar a mile from the campus and the closest thing to rock on the jukebox was a Travis Tritt-John Mellencamp duet. Woodbody said he liked going there because it was quiet on weekday afternoons and early evenings, also because the ambience made him think of his father, who had worked in one of U.S. Steel's rolling mills. (Lisey didn't give a sweet smuck about Woodbody's father.) It was in this bar that he had met the man who called himself Jim Dooley. Dooley was another late afternoon/early evening drinker, a soft-spoken fellow who favored blue chambray work shirts and the kind of Dickies with cuffs that Woodbody's father had worn. Woodbody described Dooley as about six-one, lanky, slightly stooped, with thinning dark hair that often tumbled over his brow. He thought Dooley's eyes had been blue, but wasn't sure, although they had drunk together over a period of six weeks and had become what Woodbody described as "sort of buddies." They had exchanged not life stories but patchwork pieces of life stories, as men do in bars. For his part, Woodbody claimed to have told the truth. He now had reasons to doubt that Dooley had done the same. Yes, Dooley might well have drifted down to The Burg from West Virginia twelve or fourteen years ago, and probably had worked a series of low-paying manual-labor jobs since then. Yes, he might have done some prison time; he had that institutional look about him, always seeming to glance up into the backbar mirror as he reached for his beer, always looking back over his shoulder at least once on his way to the men's. And yes, he might really have come by the scar just above his right wrist during a brief but vicious fight in the prison laundry. Or not. Hey, maybe he had just tripped over his trike when he was a kid and landed wrong. All Woodbody knew for sure was that Dooley had read all of Scott Landon's books and was able to discuss them intelligently. And he had listened sympathetically to Woodbody's tale of woe concerning the intransigent Widow Landon, who was sitting on an intellectual treasure-trove of unpublished Landon manuscripts, a completed novel among them, according to rumor. But sympathy was really too mild a word. He had listened with growing outrage.

According to Woodbody, it was Dooley who had started calling her Yoko.

Woodbody characterized their meetings at The Place as "occasional, bordering on regular." Lisey parsed this intellectual bullshit and decided it meant Woodbody-Dooley bitchfests about Yoko Landon four and sometimes five afternoons a week, and that when Woodbody said "a beer or two," he probably meant a pitcher or two. So there they were, this intellectual Oscar and Felix, getting soused just about every weekday afternoon, at first talking about how great Scott's books were and then progressing naturally to what a miserable withholding bitch his widow had turned out to be.