What note?
What note?
Lisey wiped her hands and put the towel back to air-dry on its rod. Then she turned around so her back was to the sink and her kitchen lay before her. It was full of lovely summerlight (and the aroma of Hamburger Helper, a lot less yummy now that her low appetite for the stuff had been satisfied). She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then sprang them open again. Lateday summerlight boomed around her. Into her.
'Scott?' she said, feeling absurdly like her big sister Amanda. Half-nuts, in other words. 'You haven't gone ghost on me, have you?'
She expected no answer—not little Lisey Debusher, who had cheered on the thunderstorms and sneered at the Late Show werewolf, dismissing him as just bad time-lapse photography. But the sudden rush of wind that poured in through the open window over the sink—belling the curtains, lifting the ends of her still-damp hair, and bringing the heartbreaking aroma of flowers—could almost have been taken for an answer. She closed her eyes again and seemed to hear faint music, not that of the spheres but just an old Hank Williams country tune: Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh…
Her arms prickled up in goosebumps.
Then the breeze died away and she was just Lisey again. Not Mandy, not Canty, not Darla; certainly not
(one went south)
run-off-to-Miami Jodi. She was Thoroughly Modern Lisey, 2006Lisey, the widow Landon. There were no ghosts. She was Lisey Alone.
But she did want to find that silver spade, the one that had saved her husband for another sixteen years and seven novels. Not to mention for the Newsweek cover in '92 that had featured a psychedelic Scott with MAGICAL REALISM AND THE CULT OF LANDON in Peter Max lettering. She wondered how Roger 'The Jackrabbit' Dashmiel had liked them apples.
Lisey decided she'd look for the spade right away, while the long light of the early-summer evening still held. Ghosts or no ghosts, she didn't want to be out in the barn—or the study above it—once night had fallen.
3
The stalls opposite her never-quite-completed office were dark and musty affairs that had once held tools, tack, and spare parts for farm vehicles and machinery back when the Landon home had been Sugar Top Farm. The largest bay had held chickens, and although it had been swamped out by a
professional cleaning company and then whitewashed (by Scott, who did it with many references to Tom Sawyer), it still held the faint, ammoniac reek of long-gone fowl. It was a smell Lisey remembered from her youngest childhood and
hated…probably because her Granny D had keeled over and died while feeding the chickens.
Two of the cubbies were stacked high with boxes—liquor-store cartons, for the most part—but there were no digging implements, silver or otherwise. There was a sheeted double bed in the erstwhile chicken pen, the single leftover from their brief nine-month Germany experiment. They had bought the bed in Bremen and had it shipped back at paralyzing expense— Scott had insisted. She had forgotten all about the Bremen bed until now.
Talk about what fell out of the dog's ass! Lisey thought with a kind of miserable exultation, and then said aloud, 'If you think I'd ever sleep in a bed after it sat twenty-some years out in a goddam chicken pen, Scott —'
—then you're crazy! was how she meant to finish, and couldn't. She burst out laughing instead. Christ, the curse of money! The smucking curse of it! How much had that bed cost? A thousand bucks American? Say a thousand. And how much to ship it back? Another thou? Maybe. And here it sat, rah-cheer, Scott might have said, in the chickenshit shadows. And rahcheer it could continue to sit until the world ended in fire or ice, as far as she was concerned. The whole Germany thing had been such a bust, no book for Scott, an argument with the landlord that had come within a hair of degenerating into a fist-fight, even Scott's lectures had gone badly, the audiences either had no sense of humor or didn't get his, and—
And behind the door across the way, the one wearing the HIGH VOLTAGE! sign, the telephone began to shout again. Lisey froze where she was, feeling more goosebumps. And yet there was also a sense of inevitability, as if this was what she'd come out here for, not the silver spade at all but to take a call.
She turned as the phone rang a second time, and crossed the barn's dim center aisle. She reached the door as the third ring began. She thumbed the old-fashioned latch and the door opened easily, just screaming a little on its unused hinges, welcome to the crypt, little Lisey, we've been dying to meet you, heh-heh-heh. A draft whooshed in around her, flapping her blouse against the small of her back. She felt for the lightswitch and flicked it, not sure what to expect, but the overhead went on. Of course it did. As far as Central Maine Power was concerned, all of this was The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road. Upstairs or downstairs, to CMP it was a clearcut case of everything the same.
The telephone on the desk rang a fourth time. Before Ring #5 could wake up the answering machine, Lisey snagged the receiver. 'Hello?'
There was a moment of silence. She was about to say hello again when the voice at the other end did it for her. The tone was perplexed, but Lisey recognized who it was, just the same. That one word had been enough. You knew your own.
'Darla?'
'Lisey—it is you!'
'Sure it's me.'
'Where are you?'
'Scott's old study.'
'No, you're not. I already tried there.'
Lisey only had to consider this briefly. Scott had liked his music loud—in truth he'd liked it at levels normal people would have considered ridiculous—and the telephone up there was located in the soundproofed area he had been amused to call My Padded Cell. It wasn't surprising she hadn't heard it down here. None of this seemed worth explaining to her sister.
'Darla, where did you get this number, and why are you calling?'
There was another pause. Then Darla said, 'I'm at Amanda's. I got the number from her book. She's got four for you. I just ran through all of them. This was the last.'
Lisey felt a sinking sensation in her chest and stomach. As children, Amanda and Darla had been bitter rivals. They'd gotten into any number of scratching matches—over dolls, library books, clothes. The last and gaudiest confrontation had been over a boy named Richie Stanchfield, and had been serious enough to land Darla in the Central Maine General ER, where six stitches had been needed to close the deep scratch over her left eye. She still wore the scar, a thin white dash. They got on better as adults only to this extent: there had been plenty of arguments but no more spilled blood. They stayed out of each other's way as much as possible. The once- or twice-monthly Sunday dinners (with spouses) or sisterlunches at Olive Garden or Outback could be difficult, even with Manda and Darla sitting apart and Lisey and Canty mediating. For Darla to be calling from Amanda's house was not a good thing.
'Is something wrong with her, Darl?' Dumb question. The only real question was how wrong.
'Mrs. Jones heard her screaming and carrying on and breaking stuff. Doing one of her Big Ts.'
One of her Big Tantrums. Check.
'She tried Canty first, but Canty and Rich are in Boston. When Mrs. Jones got that message on their answering machine she called me.'
That made sense. Canty and Rich lived a mile or so north of Amanda on Route 19; Darla lived roughly two miles
