same. Jim Dooley and Elvis have both left the building.'
'Plug, is that for chewing tobacco?'
'No, ma'am, not at all. In high school, he and I played the line on the Castle Hills Knights team that won the Class A State Championship. Bangor Rams was favored by three touchdowns, but we shocked em. Only team from our part of the state to win a gold football since the nineteen-fifties. And Joey, no one could stop him, not that whole season. Even with four guys hangin off him, he kept pluggin. So we called him Plug, and I still do.'
'If I called him that, do you think he'd swat me?'
Dan Boeckman laughed, delighted. 'No! He'd be tickled!'
'Okay, then. I'm Lisey, you're Dan, and he's Plug.'
'That's square-john with me.'
'And thanks for the call. That was terrific police work.'
'Thanks for saying so, ma'am. Lisey.' She could hear the glow in his voice, and that made her feel good. 'You be in touch, now, if there's anything else we can do. Or if you hear from that lowlife again.'
'I will.'
Lisey went back to her sandwich with a smile on her face and didn't think about Amanda, or the good ship Hollyhocks, or Boo'ya Moon, for the rest of the day. That night, however, she awoke to the sound of distant thunder and a sense that something vast was—not hunting her, exactly (it wouldn't bother), but musing on her. The idea that she should be in such a thing's unknowable mind made her feel like crying and like screaming. At the same time. It also made her want to sit up watching movies on TCM, smoking cigarettes and drinking high-tension coffee. Or beer. Beer might be better. Beer might call back sleep. Instead of getting up, she turned off the bedside lamp and lay still. I'll never go back to sleep, she thought. I'll just lie here like this until it gets light in the east. Then I can get up and make the coffee I want now. But three minutes after having this thought she was dozing. Ten minutes later she was sleeping deeply. Later still, when the moon rose and she dreamed of floating over a certain exotic beach of fine white sand on the PILLSBURY magic carpet, her bed was for a few moments empty and the room filled with the smells of frangipani and jasmine and night-blooming cereus, scents that were somehow longing and terrible at the same time. But then she was back and in the morning Lisey barely remembered her dream, her dream of flying, her dream of flying across the beach at the edge of the pool in Boo'ya Moon.
8
As it happened, Lisey's vision of dismantling the booksnake varied in only two respects from what she had foreseen, and these were minor variations indeed. First, one half of Mr. Partridge's two-person team turned out to be a girl—a strapping twentysomething with a caramel-colored ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox cap. Second, Lisey hadn't guessed how quickly the job would be done. In spite of the study's fearsome heat (not even three fans turning at top speed could do much about it), all the books were packed away in a dark blue UMO van in less than an hour. When Lisey asked the two librarians from Special Collections (who called themselves—only half-jokingly, Lisey thought—the Minions of Partridge) if they'd like iced tea, they agreed
enthusiastically, and put away two large glasses each. The girl was Cory. She was the one who told Lisey how much she had liked Scott's books, especially Relics, which she claimed to have read three times. The boy was Mike, and he was the one who said they were very sorry for her loss. Lisey thanked them both for their kindness, and meant it.
'It must make you sad, seeing it so empty,' Cory said, and tipped her glass toward the barn. The ice cubes clinked in it. Lisey was careful not to look directly at the glass, lest she see something besides ice in there.
'It is a little sad, but it's freeing, too,' she said. 'I put off the job of cleaning it out for too long. My sisters helped me. I'm glad we did it. More tea, Cory?'
'No thanks, but could I use your bathroom before we start back?'
'Of course. Through the living room, first door on the right.'
Cory excused herself. Absently—almost absently—Lisey moved the girl's glass behind the brown plastic iced-tea pitcher. 'Another glass, Mike?'
'No thanks,' he said. 'You'll be taking up the carpet, too, I guess.'
She laughed self-consciously. 'Yes. Pretty bad, isn't it? From Scott's one experiment in wood-staining. It was a disaster.' Thinking: Sorry, honey.
'Looks a little like dried blood,' Mike said, and finished his iced tea. The sun, hazy and hot, ran across the surface of his glass, and for a moment an eye seemed to peer out of it at Lisey. When he set it down, she had to restrain an urge to snatch it and hide it behind the plastic pitcher with the other one.
'Everybody says that,' she agreed.
'World's worst shaving cut,' Mike said, and laughed. They both laughed. Lisey thought hers sounded almost as natural as his. She didn't look at his glass. She didn't think about the long boy that was now her long boy. She thought about nothing but the long boy.
'Sure you won't have a little more?' she asked.
'Better not, I'm driving,' Mike said, and they had another laugh.
Cory came back and Lisey thought Mike would also ask to use the bathroom, but he didn't—guys had bigger kidneys, bigger bladders, bigger somethings, or so Scott had claimed—and Lisey was glad, because that meant only the girl gave her that funny look before they drove away with the disassembled booksnake in the back of the van. Oh, she undoubtedly told Mike what she saw in the living room and found in the bathroom, told him on the long drive north to the University of Maine at Orono, but Lisey wasn't there to hear it. The girl's look wasn't so bad, come to that, because Lisey hadn't known what it meant at the time, although she had patted the side of her head, thinking maybe her hair had fallen funny across her ear or was standing up or something. Then, later (after popping the iced-tea glasses into the dishwasher without so much as a look at them), she'd gone to use the bathroom herself and saw the towel hanging across the mirror in there. She remembered putting the hand-towel over the medicine cabinet mirror upstairs, remembered blinding that one perfectly well, but when had she done this one?
Lisey didn't know.
She went back to the living room and saw there was a sheet hung in a swag over the mirror above the mantel, as well. She should have noticed that on her way through, she imagined Cory had, it was pretty smucking obvious, but the truth was little Lisey Landon didn't spend much time studying her own reflection these days.
She did a walk-through and discovered all but two of the mirrors on the ground floor had been sheeted, toweled, or (in one case) taken down and turned to the wall; the last two survivors she now covered as well, in the spirit of in for a penny, in for a pound. As she did them, Lisey wondered exactly what the young librarian in the fashionable pink Red Sox baseball cap had thought. That the famous writer's widow was either Jewish or had adopted the Jewish custom of mourning, and that her mourning still continued? That she had decided Kurt Vonnegut was right, that mirrors weren't reflective surfaces but leaks, portholes to another dimension? And really, wasn't that what she did think?
Not portholes, windows. And do I have to care what some librarian from Moo U thinks?
Oh, probably not. But there were so many reflective surfaces in a life, weren't there? Not just mirrors. There were juice glasses to avoid glancing in first thing in the morning and wineglasses not to peer into at sundown. There were so many times when you sat behind the wheel of your car and saw your own face looking back at you from the dashboard instruments. So many long nights when the mind of something…other…might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of something? The mind was a highkicking, kilt-wearing rebel, to quote the late Scott Landon. It could get up to…well, shit fire and save your matches, why not say it? It could get up to such bad-gunky.
And there was something else, too. Something even more frightening. Maybe even if it didn't come to you, you wouldn't be able to help going to it. Because once you stretched those
