the silver spade back over her shoulder just as she had in August of 1988, finishing her windup as the approaching car breasted Sugar Top Hill, flooding her yard with momentary light and revealing the power-mower she herself had left in the angle of the barn and the shed. The shadow of its handle leaped upward on the side of the barn, then faded as the car's headlights faded. Once more the lawnmower could have been a man with a suitcase at his feet, she supposed, although once you'd seen the truth…
In a horror movie, she thought, this is where the monster would leap out of the darkness and grab me. Just as I'm starting to relax.
Nothing leaped out to grab her, but Lisey didn't think it would hurt to take the silver spade inside with her, if only for good luck. Carrying it in one hand now, down by the collar where the shaft met the silver scoop, Lisey went to call Norris Ridgewick, the Castle County Sheriff.
VII. Lisey and The Law
VII. Lisey and The Law
(Obsession and The Exhausted Mind)
1
The woman who took Lisey's call identified herself as Communications Officer Soames and said she couldn't put Lisey through to Sheriff Ridgewick, because Sheriff Ridgewick had been married the week before. He and his new bride were on the island of Maui, and would be for the next ten days.
'Who can I talk to?' Lisey asked. She didn't like the closeto-strident sound of her voice, but she understood it. Oh God, did she. This had been one long goddam day.
'Hold on, ma'am,' CO Soames said. Then Lisey was in limbo with McGruff the Crime Dog, who was talking about Neighborhood Watch groups. Lisey thought this a considerable improvement on the Two Thousand Comatose Strings. After a minute or so of McGruff, a cop with a name Scott would have loved came on the line.
'This is Deputy Andy Clutterbuck, ma'am, how can I help you?'
For the third time that day—third time's the charm, Good Ma would have said, third time pays for all—Lisey introduced herself as Mrs. Scott Landon. Then she told Deputy Clutterbuck a slightly edited version of the Zack McCool story, beginning with the call she had received the previous evening and finishing with the one she'd made tonight, the one that had netted the Jim Dooley name. Clutterbuck contented himself with uh-huhs and variations thereof until she had finished, then asked her who had given her 'Zack McCool''s other, possibly real name.
With a twinge of conscience
(tattle-tale tit all the dogs in town come to have a little bit)
that caused her a moment of bitter amusement, Lisey gave up the King of the Incunks. She did not call him Woodsmucky.
'Are you going to talk to him, Deputy Clutterbuck?'
'I think that's indicated, don't you?'
'I guess so,' Lisey said, wondering what, if anything, Castle County's acting Sheriff could get out of Woodbody that she hadn't been able to pry loose. She supposed there might be something—she'd been pretty mad. She also realized that wasn't what was bothering her. 'Will he be arrested?'
'On the basis of what you've told me? Not even close. You might have grounds for a civil action—you'd have to ask your lawyer—but in court I'm sure he'd say that as far as he knew, all this guy Dooley meant to do was show up on your doorstep and try a little high-pressure sales routine. He'd claim not to know anything about dead cats in mailboxes and threats of personal injury…and he'd be telling the truth, based on what you've just said. Right?'
Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it was right.
'I'm going to want the letter this stalker left,' Clutterbuck said, 'and I'm going to want the cat. What did you do with the remains?'
'We have a wooden box-thingy attached to the house,' Lisey said. She picked up a cigarette, considered it, put it back down again. 'My husband had a word for it—my husband had a word for just about everything—but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, it keeps the raccoons out of the swill. I put the cat's body in a garbage bag and put the bag in the orlop.' Now that she wasn't struggling to find it, Scott's word came effortlessly to mind.
'Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?'
'Yes…' Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.
'I want you to put the cat in your freezer, Mrs. Landon. It's perfectly okay to leave it in the bag. Someone will pick it up tomorrow and take it over to Kendall and Jepperson. They're the vets we have our county account with. They'll try to determine a cause of death—'
'It shouldn't be hard,' Lisey said. 'The mailbox was full of blood.'
'Uh-huh. Too bad you didn't take a few Polaroids before you wiped it all up.'
'Well excuse me all to hell and gone!' Lisey cried, stung.
'Calm down,' Clutterbuck said. Calmly. 'I understand that you were upset. Anybody would have been.'
Not you, Lisey thought resentfully. You would have been as cool as…as a dead cat in a freezer.
She said, 'That takes care of Professor Woodbody and the dead cat; now what about me?'
Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once—Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer—to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call—an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley 'checked by'
(Clutterbuck's oddly delicate way of putting it), he'd see the County cruiser and move along.
Lisey hoped Clutterbuck was right about that.
Guys like this Dooley, Clutterbuck continued, were usually more show than go. If they couldn't scare someone into giving them what they wanted, they had a tendency to forget the whole deal. 'My guess is you'll never see him again.'
Lisey hoped he was right about that, too. She herself had her doubts. What she kept coming back to was the way 'Zack' had set things up. How he'd done it so he couldn't be called off, at least not by the man who had hired him.
2
Not twenty minutes after finishing her conversation with Deputy Clutterbuck (whom her tired mind now kept wanting to call either Deputy Butterhug or—perhaps cross- referencing Polaroid cameras—Deputy Shutterbug), a slim man dressed in khaki and wearing a large gun on his hip showed up at her front door. He introduced himself as Deputy Dan Boeckman and told her he'd been instructed to
