Never too hard. With that in mind she closed the notebook with a snap and looked at the back cover. There, written in tiny dark letters below the Dennison trade name, was this:
mein gott
Lisey got to her feet and quickly began to dress.
6
The tree closes them in their own world. Beyond is the snow. And under the yum-yum tree is Scott's voice, Scott's hypnotic voice, and did she think Empty Devils was his horror story? This is his horror story, and except for his tears when he speaks of Paul and how they hung together through all the cutting and terror and blood on the floor, he tells it unfalteringly.
'We never had bool hunts when Daddy was home,' he says, 'only when he was at work.' Scott has for the most part gotten the western Pennsylvania accent out of his talk, but now it creeps in, far deeper than her own Yankee accent, and somehow childish: not home but hum, not work but a strange distortion that comes out rurk. 'Paul would always put the first one close by. It might say '5 stations of the bool'—to tell you how many clues there were—and then something like 'Go look in the closet.' The first one was only sometimes a riddle, but the others almost always were. I member one that said 'Go where Daddy kicked the cat,' and accourse that was the old well. Another one said 'Go where we 'farm all' day.' And after a little bit I figured out that meant the old Farmall tractor down in eastfield by the rock wall, and sure enough, there was a station of the bool right there on the seat, held down with a rock. Because a station of the bool was only a scrap of paper, you know, written on and folded over. I almost always got the riddles, but if I was stuck, Paul would give me more clues until I solved it. And at the end I'd get my prize of a Coke or an RC Cola or a candybar.'
He looks at her. Beyond him is nothing but white—a wall of white. The yum-yum tree—it is actually a willow— bends around them in a magic circle, shutting out the world.
He says: 'Sometimes when Daddy got the bad-gunky, cutting himself wasn't enough to let it out, Lisey. One day when he was like that he put me
7
up on the bench in the hall, that was what he had said next, she could remember it now (whether she wanted to or not), but before she could follow the memory deeper into the purple where it had been hidden all this time, she saw a man standing on her back porch stoop. And it was a man, not a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner but an actual man. Luckily, she had time to register the fact that, although he wasn't Deputy Boeckman, he was also dressed in Castle County khaki. This saved her the embarrassment of screaming like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween movie.
Her visitor introduced himself as Deputy Alston. He had come to fetch away the dead cat in Lisey's freezer, and also to assure her that he would be checking on her throughout the day. He asked if she had a cell phone and Lisey said she did. It was in the BMW, and she thought it might even be working. Deputy Alston suggested she keep it with her at all times, and that she program the Sheriff's Office into the speed-dial directory. He saw her expression and told her he was prepared to do that for her, if she 'was not conversant with that feature.'
Lisey, who rarely used the little cell phone at all, led Deputy Alston to her BMW. The gadget turned out to be only half-charged, but the cord was in the console compartment between the seats. Deputy Alston reached out to unplug the cigarette lighter, saw the light scattering of ashes around it, and paused.
'Go ahead,' Lisey told him. 'I thought I was going to take the habit up again, but I guess I've changed my mind.'
'Probably wise, ma'am,' Deputy Alston said, unsmiling. He removed the Beemer's cigarette lighter and plugged in the phone. Lisey had had no idea you could do that; when she thought of it at all, she'd always recharged the little Motorola phone in the kitchen. Two years, and she still hadn't quite gotten used to the idea that there was no man around to read the instructions and puzzle out the meanings of Fig 1 and Fig 2.
She asked Deputy Alston how long the charging-up would take.
'To full? No more than an hour, maybe less. Will you be within reach of a telephone in the meantime?'
'Yes, I've got some things to do in the barn. There's one there.'
'Fine. Once this one's charged, clip it to your belt or hang it on the waistband of your pants. Any cause for alarm, hit the 1-key and bam, you're talking to a cop.'
'Thank you.'
'Don't mention it. And as I said, I'll be checking on you. Dan Boeckman will make this his twenty again tonight unless he has to roll on a call. That'll probably happen—small towns like this, Friday nights are busy nights—but you've got your phone and your speed-dial, and he'll always return here.'
'That's fine. Have you heard anything at all about the man who's been bothering me?'
'Not boo, ma'am,' Deputy Alston said, comfortably enough…but of course he could afford to be comfortable, no one had threatened to hurt him, and quite likely no one would. He stood approximately six-five and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Might go one-seventy-five, dressed n hung, her father might have added; in Lisbon, Dandy Debusher had been known for such witticisms.
'If Andy hears anything—Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he's running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon—I'm sure he'll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you're inside, right? Especially after dark.'
'Right.'
'And keep that phone handy.'
'I will.'
He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. 'I'll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you'll be glad to see the last of it.'
'Yes,' Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought
(mein gott)
in Germany. In Germany where
8
everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Lisey doesn't remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn't matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen: Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Everything that can, does.
The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott's calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing expense—mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn't looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on! Goinzee on, mein Fuhrer, bitte, bitte! That year Scott is drinking, Scott is joking,
