Lisey's Story(66)

3

The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it. She'd had no clear reason for wanting the box in the first place, only a strong intuition that something inside, some souvenir from her early marriage, was the next station of the bool.

After awhile, however, the box itself became her goal, Good Ma's cedar box. Bools be damned, if she didn't lay hands on that cedar box - a foot long, maybe nine inches wide and six deep - she'd never be able to sleep. She'd only lie there tortured by thoughts of dead cats and dead husbands and empty beds and Incunk warriors and sisters who cut themselves and fathers who cut -  (hush Lisey hush)

She'd only lie there, leave it at that.

An hour's search was enough to convince her the cedar box wasn't in the attic, after all. But by then she was sure it was probably in the spare bedroom. It was perfectly reasonable to think it had migrated back there...except another forty minutes (including a teetery stepladder exploration of the top shelf in the closet) convinced her the spare room was another dry hole. So the box was down cellar. Had to be. Very likely it had come to rest behind the stairs, where there was a bunch of cardboard boxes containing curtains, rug-remnants, old stereo components, and a few bits of sporting equipment: ice skates, a croquet set, a badminton net with a hole in it. As she hurried down the cellar stairs (not thinking at all of the dead cat now lying beside the pile of petrified moose-meat in her freezer), Lisey began to believe she had even seen the box down there. By then she was very tired, but only distantly aware of the fact.

It took her twenty minutes to drag all the cartons from their long-term resting place. Some were damp and split open. By the time she'd finished going through the stuff inside, her limbs were trembling with exhaustion, her clothes were sticking to her, and a nasty little headache had begun thumping at the back of her skull. She shoved back the cartons that were still holding together and left the ones that had split apart where they were. Good Ma's box was in the attic after all. Must be, had been all along. As she wasted time down here among the rusty ice skates and forgotten jigsaw puzzles, the cedar box was waiting patiently up there. Lisey could now think of half a dozen places she'd neglected to search, including the crawlspace all the way back under the eaves. That was the most likely spot. She'd probably put the box there and just forgotten all about -

The thought broke off cleanly as she realized someone was standing behind her. She could see him from the corner of her eye. Call him Jim Dooley or Zack McCool, by either name he would in the next moment drop a hand on her sweaty shoulder and call her Missus. Then she'd really have something to worry about.

This sensation was so real that Lisey actually heard the shuffle of Dooley's feet. She wheeled around, hands coming up to protect her face, and had just an instant to see the Hoover vacuum she herself had pulled out from under the stairs. Then she tripped over the moldering cardboard carton with the old badminton net stuffed inside. She waved her arms for balance, almost caught it, lost it, had time to think shit-a-brick, and went down. The top of her head missed the underside of the stairs by a whisker, and that was good, because that would have been a nasty crack indeed, maybe the kind that laid you out unconscious. Laid you out dead, if you came down hard enough on the cement floor. Lisey managed to break her fall with her splayed hands, one knee landing safely on the springy mat of the rotted badminton net, the other suffering a harder landing on the cellar floor. Luckily, she was still wearing her jeans.

The fall was fortunate in another way, she thought fifteen minutes later as she lay on her bed, still fully dressed but with her hard crying over; she was by then down to the isolated sobs and rueful, watery gasps for breath that are strong emotion's hangover. The fall - and the scare that had preceded it, she supposed - had cleared her head. She might have gone on hunting the box for another two hours - longer, if her strength had held out. Back to the attic, back to the spare bedroom, back to the cellar. Back to the future, Scott would surely have added; he had a knack for cracking wise at precisely the wrong moment. Or what turned out, later on, to have been precisely the right one.

In any case she might well have gone on until dawn's early light and it would have gotten her a lot of hot air in one hand and a big pile of jack shit in the other. Lisey was now convinced the box was either in a place so obvious she'd already passed it half a dozen times or it was just gone, maybe stolen by one of the cleaning women who'd worked for the Landons over the years or by some workman who'd spied it and thought his wife would like a nice box like that and that Mr. Landon's Missus (funny how that word got into your head) would never miss it.

Fiddle-de-dee, little Lisey, said the Scott who kept his place in her head. Think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.

"Yep," Lisey said, then sat up, suddenly aware that she was a sweaty, smelly woman living inside a set of sweaty, dirty clothes. She got out of them as quickly as she could, left them in a heap by the foot of the bed, and headed for the shower. She had scraped the palms of both hands breaking her fall in the cellar, but she ignored their stinging and soaped her hair twice, letting suds run down the sides of her face.

Then, after almost dozing under the hot water for five minutes or so, she resolutely turned the shower's control-lever all the way over to C, rinsed off under the near-freezing needlespray, and stepped out, gasping. She used one of the big towels, and as she dropped it into the hamper she realized she felt like herself again, sane and ready to let this day go. She went to bed, and her last thought before sleep swatted her into the black was of Deputy Boeckman standing watch. It was a comforting thought, particularly after her scare in the cellar, and she slept deeply, without dreams, until the shrill of the telephone woke her.