Lisey's Story(63)
Lisey didn't mind. She was adding up her situation here and not liking the total. Dooley had told her she could turn off the heat by giving Woodbody Scott's papers and unpublished manuscripts. The Professor would then call the madman, tell him everything was cool, and that would be that. Only the former King of the Incunks claimed he no longer had any way of getting in touch with Dooley, and Lisey believed him. Was it an oversight on Dooley's part? A glitch in his planning? She didn't think so. She thought that Dooley really might have some vague intention of showing up at Woodbody's office (or suburban castle) with Scott's papers...but before he did, he planned to first terrorize her and then hurt her in places she'd never let the boys touch at the junior high school dances. And why would he do that, after going to such great lengths to assure both the Professor and Lisey herself that there was a fail-safe system in place to keep bad things from happening if she cooperated?
Maybe because he needs to give himself permission.
That rang true. And later on - after she was dead, maybe, or so grotesquely maimed she wished she were dead - Jim Dooley's conscience would be able to assure itself that Lisey herself had been to blame. I gave her every chance, her friend "Zack"
would think. It was nobody's fault but her own. She had to be Yoko to the bitter end.
Okay. Okay, then. If he showed up, she'd just give him the keys to the barn and the study and tell him to take whatever he wanted. I'll tell him to knock himself out, have a ball.
But at this thought Lisey's lips thinned into the humorless moon-smile perhaps only her sisters and her late husband, who called it Lisey's Tornado Look, would have recognized. "The smuck I will," she muttered, and looked around for the silver spade. It wasn't there. She'd left it in the car. If she wanted it, she'd better go out and get it before it got completely dar -
"Mrs. Landon?" It was the Professor, sounding more anxious than ever. She'd forgotten all about him. "Are you still there?"
"Yeah," she said. "This is what it gets you, you know."
"I beg pardon?"
"You know what I'm talking about. All the stuff you wanted so bad, the stuff you thought you had to have? This is what it gets you. How you feel right now. Plus the questions you'll have to answer when I hang up, of course."
"Mrs. Landon, I don't - "
"If the police call you, I want you to tell them everything you've told me. Which means you better answer your wife's questions first, don't you think?"
"Mrs. Landon, please!" Woodbody sounded panicky now.
"You bought into this. You and your friend Dooley."
"Stop calling him my friend!"
Lisey's Tornado Look grew stronger, the lips thinning until they showed the tops of her teeth. At the same time, her eyes narrowed until they were no more than blue sparks. It was a feral look, and it was all Debusher.
"But he is!" she cried. "You're the one who drank with him, and told him your tale of woe, and laughed when he called me Yoko Landon. You were the one who set him on me, whether you said it in so many words or not, and now it turns out he's just as crazy as a shithouse rat and you can't pull him off. So yes, Professor, I'm going to call the County Sheriff, and yessirree, I'll be giving them your name, I'll be giving them anything that'll help them find your friend, because he's not done, you know it and so do I, because he doesn't want to be done, he's having a good smucking time, and this is what it gets you. You bought it, you own it! Okay? Okay?"
No answer. But she could hear the wet sound of breathing and knew the former King of the Incunks was trying not to cry. She hung up, snagged another ciggy off the floor, lit it. She went back to the telephone, then shook her head. She'd call the Sheriff's Office in a minute. First she wanted to get the silver spade out of the Beemer, and she wanted to do it right away, before all the light was gone and her part of the world swapped day for night.
8
The side yard - which she supposed she'd go to her grave thinking of as the dooryard - was already too dark for comfort, although Venus, the wishing-star, had yet to make her appearance in the sky. The shadows where the barn joined the toolshed were especially dark, and the BMW was parked less than twenty feet from there. Of course Dooley wasn't hiding in that well of shadows, and if he was on the place, he might be anywhere: leaning against the changing-hut by the pool, peering around the corner of the house where the kitchen was, crouched behind the cellar bulkhead...
Lisey whirled on her heels at that idea, but there was still enough light to see there was nothing on either side of the bulkhead. And the bulkhead doors themselves were locked, so she didn't have to worry about Dooley in the cellar. Unless, of course, he'd broken into the house somehow and hidden down there before she got home.
Stop it Lisey you're creeping yourself ou -
She paused with her fingers curled around the handle of the BMW's rear door. She stood that way for maybe five seconds, then let her cigarette drop from her free hand and stamped out the butt. There was someone standing in the deep angle where the barn and the toolshed met. Standing there very tall and still.
Lisey opened the Beemer's rear passenger door and snatched out the silver spade. The light inside the car stayed on when she closed the door again. She'd forgotten that, how the inside lights of cars now stayed on for a little while, the courtesy light they called it, but she found nothing courteous about the idea that Dooley could see her and she could no longer see him thanks to the way that smucking light was screwing up her vision. She stepped away from the car, holding the shaft of the spade diagonally across her br**sts. The light inside the BMW finally went out. For a moment that made things worse. She could see only a world of indistinct purple shapes under the fading lavender sky, and she fully expected him to leap out at her, calling her Missus and asking why she hadn't listen as his hands closed around her throat and her breath rattled to an end.