two of them?
'Ma'am?' Dooley asked her. He sounded solicitous. 'Missus?'
If there was a part of him that had to go on telling lies when it was just the two of them, maybe it was because there was a part of him that needed lying to. If so, that was the part of Jim Dooley she needed to reach. The part that might still be sane.
'Mr. Dooley, listen to me.' She pitched her voice low and kept her delivery slow. It had been the way she talked to Scott when Scott was ready to go off half-cocked over anything from a bad review to a shoddy piece of plumbing. 'Professor Woodbody has no way of getting in touch with you, and down inside somewhere, you know that. But I can get in touch with him. I already have. I called him last night.'
'You're lyin,' he said, but this time she wasn't and he knew she wasn't, and for some reason it upset him. That reaction ran exactly counter to the one she wanted to provoke—she wanted to soothe him—but she thought she had to go on, hoping the sane part of Jim Dooley was in there somewhere, listening.
'I'm not,' she said. 'You left me his number and I called him.' Holding Dooley's eyes with hers. Mustering every bit of sincerity she could manage as she headed back into the Land of Fabrication. 'I promised him the manuscripts and told him to call you off and he said he couldn't call you off because he had no way of getting in touch with you anymore, he said his first two e-mails went through, but after that they just bounced ba—'
'One lies and the other swears to it,' Jim Dooley said, and after that things happened with a speed and a ferocity Lisey could hardly credit, although every moment of the beating and mutilation that followed remained vivid in her mind for the rest of her life, right down to the sound of his dry and rapid breathing, right down to the way his khaki shirt strained at the buttons, showing little winks of the white tee- shirt he wore beneath as he slapped her across the face, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand again. Eight blows in all, eight-eight-lay-them-straight they chanted as children skip-roping in the dooryard dust, and the sound of his skin on her skin was like dry kindling snapped over a knee, and although the hand he used was ringless—there was that much to be grateful for—the fourth and fifth blows beat the blood from her lips, the sixth and seventh sent it spraying, and the last rode high enough to smash into her nose and set that gushing, as well. By then she was crying in fear and pain. Her head thumped repeatedly against the underside of the bar sink, making her ears ring. She heard herself crying out for him to stop, that he could have whatever he wanted if he would only stop. Then he did stop and she heard herself saying, 'I can give you the manuscript of a new novel, his last novel, it's all done, he finished it a month before he died and never got a chance to revise it, it's a real treasure, Woodsmucky'll love it.' She had time to think That's pretty inventive, what are you going to do if he takes you up on it, but Jim Dooley wasn't taking her up on anything. He was on his knees in front of her, panting harshly—it was hot up here already, if she'd known she was going to be taking a beating in Scott's study today she certainly would have turned on the air-conditioning first thing—and rummaging in his lunch-sack again. There were big sweat-rings spreading out from under his arms.
'Missus, I'm sorry as hell to do this, but at least it ain't your pussy,' he said, and she had time to register two things before he swept his left hand down the front of her, tearing open her blouse and popping the catch at the front of her bra so that her small breasts tumbled free. The first was that he wasn't sorry a bit. The second was that the object in his right hand had almost certainly come from her very own Things Drawer. Scott had called it Lisey's yuppie church key. It was her Oxo can opener, the one with the heavy-duty rubber handgrips.
X. Lisey and The Arguments Against Insanity
(The Good Brother)
1
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
This line kept going through Lisey's head as she crawled from the memory nook and then slowly across the center space of her dead husband's long and rambling office, leaving an ugly trail behind her: splotches of blood from her nose, mouth, and mutilated breast.
The blood will never come out of this carpet, she thought, and the line recurred, as if in answer: The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
There was insanity in this story, all right, but the only sound she remembered just lately wasn't whirring, purring, or shirring; it was the sound of her screams when Jim Dooley had attached her can opener to her left breast like a mechanical leech. She had screamed, and then she had fainted, and then he had slapped her awake to tell her one more thing. After that he'd let her go back under again, but he had pinned a note to her shirt—after considerately pulling off her ruined bra and buttoning the shirt back up, that was—to make sure she wouldn't forget. She hadn't needed the note. She remembered what he'd said perfectly.
'I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse. And tend yourself by yourself, Missus, you hear me, now? Tell anyone I was here and I'll kill you.' That was what Dooley had said. To this the note pinned to her shirt had added: Let's get this business finish, we will both be happier when it is. Signed, your good freind, 'Zack'!
Lisey had no idea how long she was out the second time. All she knew was that when she came to, the mangled bra was in the wastebasket and the note was pinned to the right side of her shirt. The left side was soaked with blood. She had unbuttoned enough to take one quick peek, then moaned and averted her eyes. It looked worse than anything Amanda had ever done to herself, including the thing with the navel. As to the pain…all she could remember was something enormous and obliterating.
The handcuffs had been removed, and Dooley had even left her a glass of water. Lisey drank it greedily. When she tried to get to her feet, however, her legs were trembling too badly to hold her. So she had crawled out of the alcove on all fours, dripping blood and bloody sweat on Scott's carpet as she went (ah, but she'd never cared for that oyster-white anyway, it showed every speck of dirt), hair plastered to her forehead, tears drying on her cheeks, blood drying to a crust on her nose, lips, and chin.
At first she thought she was headed for the phone, probably to call Deputy Buttercluck in spite of Dooley's admonitions and the failure of the Castle County Sheriff's Department to protect her on its first try. Then that line of poetry
(the arguments against insanity)
started to go through her head and she saw Good Ma's cedar box lying overturned on the carpet between the stairs going down to the barn and the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo. The cedar box's contents were spilled on the carpet in an untidy litter. She understood that the box and its spilled contents had been her destination all along. She especially wanted the yellow thing she could see draped over the bent purple shape of The Antlers menu.
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
From one of Scott's poems. He didn't write many, and those he did he almost never published—he said they weren't good, and he wrote them just for himself. But she had thought that one very good, even though she hadn't been entirely sure what it meant, or even what it was about. She had particularly liked that first line, because sometimes you just heard things going, didn't you? They fell down, level after level, leaving a hole you could look through. Or fall into, if you weren't careful.
SOWISA, babyluv. You're bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap on nice and tight.
Dooley must have brought Good Ma's box up to the study because he thought it had to do with what he wanted.
