driven off before I remembered where I wanted to be. Then I thought I might as well go inside and see if my grandmother had come home, or if Dan had persuaded her to kick up her heels-such as she was willing-at the cast party. I knew the instant I opened the door that Grandmother wasn't home-perhaps they were still having curtain calls at the Town Hall; maybe Mr. Merrill had been a faster driver than he appeared to be. I breathed in the still air of the old house; Lydia and Germaine must have been fast asleep, for even someone reading in bed makes a little noise-and Front Street was as quiet as a grave. That was when I had the impression that it was a grave; the house itself frightened me. I knew I was probably jumpy after Owen's alarming 'vision'-or whatever it was- and I was on the verge of leaving, and of running down Front Street to the Gravesend Academy campus (to Dan's dormitory), when I heard Germaine. She was difficult to hear because she had hidden herself in the secret passageway, and she was speaking barely above a whisper; but the rest of the house was so very quiet, I could hear her.
'Oh, Jesus, help me!' she was saying. 'Oh, God; oh, dear Christ-oh, good Lord-help me!'
So there were thieves in Gravesend! I thought. The Vestry members had been wise to lock the parish house. Christmas Eve bandits had pillaged Front Street! Germaine had escaped to the secret passageway, but what had the robbers done to Lydia? Perhaps they had kidnapped her, or stolen her wheelchair and left her helpless. The books on the bookshelf-door to the secret passageway were tumbled all about-half of them were on the floor, as if Germaine, in her panic, had forgotten the location of the concealed lock and key . . . upon which shelf, behind which books? She'd made such a mess that the lock and key were now plainly visible to anyone entering the living room-especially since the books strewn upon the floor drew your attention to the bookshelf-door.
'Germaine?' I whispered. 'Have they gone?'
'Have who gone?' Germaine whispered back.
'The robbers,' I whispered.
'What robbers?' she asked me. I opened the door to the secret passageway. She was cringing behind the door, near the jams and jellies-as many cobwebs in her hair as adorned the relishes and chutneys and the cans of overused, spongy tennis balls that dated back to the days when my mother saved old tennis balls for Sagamore. Germaine was wearing her ankle-length flannel dressing gown; but she was barefoot-suggesting that the manner of her hiding herself in the secret passageway had not been unlike the way she cleared the table.
'Lydia is dead,' Germaine said. She would not emerge from the cobwebs and shadows, although I held the heavy bookshelf-door wide open for her.
'They killed her!' I said in alarm.
'No one killed her,' Germaine said; a certain mystical detachment flooded her eyes and caused her to slightly revise her statement. 'Death just came for her,' Germaine said, shivering dramatically. She was the sort of girl who personified Death; after all, she thought that Owen Meany's voice was simply the speaking vehicle for the Devil.
'How did she die?' I asked.
'In her bed, when I was reading to her,' Germaine said. 'She'd just corrected me,' Germaine said. Lydia was always correcting Germaine, naturally; Germaine's pronunciation was especially offensive to Lydia, who modeled her own pronunciation exactly upon my grandmother's speech and held Germaine accountable for any failures hi imitating my grandmother's reading voice, as well. Grandmother and Lydia often
took turns reading to each other-because their eyes, they said, needed rest. So Lydia had died while resting her eyes, informing Germaine of her mispronunciation of this or mat. Occasionally, Lydia would interrupt Germaine's reading and ask her to repeat a certain word. Whether correctly or incorrectly pronounced, Lydia would then say, 'I'll bet you don't know what the word means, do you?' So Lydia had died in the act of educating Germaine, a task-in my grandmother's opinion-that had no end, Germaine had sat with the body as long as she could stand it.
'Things happened to the body,' Germaine explained, venturing cautiously into the living room. She viewed the spilled books with surprise-as if Death had come for them, too; or perhaps Death had been looking for her and had flung the books about in the process.
'What things?' I asked.
'Not nice things,' Germaine said, shaking her head. I could imagine the old house settling and creaking, groaning against the winter wind; poor Germaine had probably concluded that Death was still around. Possibly Death had expected that coming for Lydia would have been more of a struggle; having found her and taken her so easily, probably Death felt inclined to stay and take a second soul. Why not make a night of it? We held hands, as if we were siblings taking a great risk together, and went to view Lydia. I was quite shocked to see her, because Germaine had not told me of the efforts she had made to shut Lydia's mouth; Germaine had bound Lydia's jaws together with one of her pink leg-warmers, which she had knotted at the top of Lydia's head. Upon closer inspection, I saw that Germaine had also exercised considerable creativity in her efforts to permanently close Lydia's eyes; upon closing them, she had fastened two unmatched coins-a nickel and a quarter-to Lydia's eyelids, with Scotch tape. She told me that the only matching coins she could find had been dimes, which were too small-and that one eyelid fluttered, or had appeared to flutter, knocking the nickel off; hence the tape. She used
