take 'a certain letter' into safekeeping and photograph 'a certain deceased animal.' Lisey kept a straight face at that, although she had to bite down hard on the soft inner lining of her cheeks to manage the feat. Boeckman placed the letter (along with the plain white envelope) into a Baggie which Lisey provided, then asked if she had put the 'deceased animal' in the freezer. Lisey had done this as soon as she finished talking to Clutterbuck, depositing the green garbage bag in the far left corner of her big Trawlsen, where there was nothing but an elderly stack of venison steaks in hoarfrosty plastic bags, a present to her and Scott from their electrician, Smiley Flanders. Smiley had won a permit in the moose lottery of '01 or '02—Lisey couldn't remember which—and had dropped 'a tol'able big 'un' up in the St. John Valley. Where Charlie Corriveau had bagged his new bride, now that Lisey thought of it. Next to the meat, which she would almost certainly never get around to eating (except perhaps in the event of a nuclear war), was the only place for a dead Galloway barncat, and she told Deputy Boeckman to make sure he put it back there and nowhere else when he had finished his photography. He promised with perfect seriousness that he would 'comply with her request,' and she once more found it necessary to bite the insides of her cheeks. Even so, that one was close. As soon as he was clumping stolidly down the basement stairs, Lisey turned herself to the wall like a naughty child with her forehead against the plaster and her hands over her mouth, laughing in whispery, wide-throated squeals.
It was as this throe passed that she began thinking again about Good Ma's cedar box (it had been Lisey's for over thirty-five years, but she had never thought of it as hers). Remembering the box and all the little mementos tucked away inside helped to ease the hysteria bubbling up from deep inside her. What helped even more was her growing certainty that she had put the box in the attic. Which made perfect sense, of course. The detritus of Scott's working life was out there in the barn and the study; the detritus of the life she had lived while he was working would be here, in the house she had chosen and they had both come to love.
In the attic were at least four expensive Turkish rugs she had once adored and which had at some point, for reasons she did not understand, begun to give her the creeps…
At least three sets of retired luggage that had taken everything two dozen airlines, many of them dinky little commuter puddle-jumper outfits, could throw at them; battered warriors that deserved medals and parades, but would have to be content with honorable attic retirement (hell, boys, it beats the town dump)…
The Danish-Modern living room furniture that Scott said looked pretentious, and how angry with him she'd been, mostly because she'd thought he was probably right…
The rolltop desk, a 'bargain' that turned out to have one short leg which had to be shimmed, only the shim was always coming out and then one day the rolltop had unrolled on her fingers and that had been it, buddy, up to the smucking attic with you…
Ashtrays on stands from their smoking days…
Scott's old IBM Selectric, which she had used for correspondence until it started getting hard to find the ribbons and CorrecTapes…
Stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'othert'ing. Another world, really, and yet it was all rah-cheer, or at least right up dere. And somewhere—probably behind a stack of magazines or sitting on top of the rocking chair with the unreliable split back—would be the cedar box. Thinking about it was like thinking about cold water when you were thirsty on a hot day. She didn't know just why that should be so, but it was.
By the time Deputy Boeckman came up from the cellar with his Polaroids, she was impatient for him to be gone. Perversely he hung on (hung on like a toothache, Dad Debusher would've said), first telling her it looked like the cat had been stabbed with some sort of tool (possibly a screwdriver), then assuring her he'd be parked right outside. It might not say TO SERVE AND PROTECT on their units (he called them units), but the thought was there every minute, and he wanted her to feel perfectly safe. Lisey said she felt so safe she was actually thinking about going to bed—it had been a long day, she'd had a family emergency to deal with as well as this stalker business, and she was utterly whipped. Deputy Boeckman finally took the hint and left after telling her one final time that she was as safe as could be, safe as houses, and there was no need for any of that sleeping- with-one-eye-open stuff. Then he clumped down her front steps as stolidly as he'd clumped down her cellar stairs, shuffling through his dead-cat photos a final time while he still had light enough to see them. A minute or two later she heard what sounded like a puffickly huh-yooge engine rev twice. Headlights washed across the lawn and the house, then abruptly went out. She thought of Deputy Daniel Boeckman sitting across the road with his cruiser parked prominently on the shoulder. She smiled. Then she went upstairs to the attic, with no idea that she would be lying on her bed fully dressed two hours later, exhausted and weeping.
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
