When I got back to Sara I called Ward Hankins. Then I finally made that call to Bonnie Amudson. Part of me was rooting for her not to be in at the travel agency in Augusta she co-owned, but she was. Halfway through my talk with her, the fax began to print out xeroxed pages from Jo"s appointment calendars. On the first one Ward had scrawled, "Hope this helps."
I didn"t rehea.r.s.e what I was going to say to Bonnie; I felt that to do so would be a recipe for disaster. I told her that Jo had been writing something - maybe an article, maybe a series of them - about the township where our summerhouse was located, and that some of the locals had apparently been cheesed off by her curiosity. Some still were. Had she talked to Bonnie? Perhaps showed her an early draft?
"No, huh-uh." Bonnie sounded honestly surprised. "She used to show me her photos, and more herb samples than I honestly cared to see, but she never showed me anything she was writing. In fact, I remember her once saying that she"d decided to leave the writing to you and just - "
" - take a little taste of everything else, right?"
"Yes."
I thought this was a good place to end the conversation, but the guys in the bas.e.m.e.nt seemed to have other ideas. "Was she seeing anyone, Bonnie?"
Silence from the other end. With a hand that seemed at least four miles down my arm, I plucked the fax sheets out of the basket. Ten of them - November of 1993 to August of 1994. Jottings everywhere in Jo"s neat hand. Had we even had a fax before she died? I couldn"t remember. There was so f.u.c.king much I couldn"t remember.
"Bonnie? If you know something, please tell me. Jo"s dead, but I"m not. I can forgive her if I have to, but I can"t forgive what I don"t underst - "
"I"m sorry," she said, and gave a nervous little laugh. "It"s just that I didn"t understand at first. "Seeing anyone," that was just so . . . so foreign to Jo . . . the Jo I knew . . . that I couldn"t figure out what you were talking about. I thought maybe you meant a shrink, but you didn"t, did you? You meant seeing someone like seeing a guy. A boyfriend."
"That"s what I meant." Thumbing through the faxed calendar sheets now, my hand not quite back to its proper distance from my eyes but getting there, getting there. I felt relief at the honest bewilderment in Bonnie"s voice, but not as much as I"d expected. Because I"d known. I hadn"t even needed the woman in the old Perry Mason Perry Mason episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all. episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all. Jo Jo.
"Mike," Bonnie was saying, very softly, as if I might be crazy, "she loved you. She loved you you.
"Yes. I suppose she did." The calendar pages showed how busy my wife had been. How productive. S-Ks of Maine . . . the soup kitchens. WomShel, a county-to-county network of shelters for battered women. TeenShel. Friends of Me. Libes. She had been at two or three meetings a month - two or three a week week at some points - and I"d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. "I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn"t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meetings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries?" at some points - and I"d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. "I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn"t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meetings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries?"
Silence from the other end.
"Bonnie?"
I took the phone away from my ear to see if the red LOW BATTERY light was on, and it squawked my name. I put it back.
"Bonnie, what is it?"
"There were were no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there were were no long drives. She quit." no long drives. She quit."
I thumbed through the fax-sheets again. Meetings noted everywhere in Jo"s neat hand, Soup Kitchens of Maine among them.
"I don"t understand. She quit the Soup Kitchens board?"
Another moment of silence. Then, speaking carefully: "No, Mike. She quit all all of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of "93 - her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries . . . she resigned in October or November of 1993." of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of "93 - her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries . . . she resigned in October or November of 1993."
Meetings noted on all the sheets Ward had sent me. Dozens of them. Meetings in 1993, meetings in 1994. Meetings of boards to which she"d no longer belonged. She had been down here. On all those supposed meeting-days, Jo had been on the TR. I would have bet my life on it.
But why?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Devore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn"t have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained. From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.
I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon - my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street - I"d go as far as I could and still be a.s.sured of getting home by dark, and as I went I"d think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I"d think about them the way I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.
I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was - just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn"t exactly young, but I could go north, all right. For awhile, at least.
Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written . . . for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and . . .
help im drown The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness pa.s.sed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so blighted blighted, in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming. No No, I tried to say, but the word wouldn"t come out.
My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands. They were holding me down.
"Won"t it stop doing that?" someone asked - almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. "Won"t it ever stop doing that?"
What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head. They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture . . . or inside a j.a.panese lantern.
help I"m drown help I"m drown blue-cap man say git me blue-cap man say da.s.sn"t let me ramble help I"m drown lost my berries they on the path he holdin me he face shimmer n look bad lemme up lemme up 0 sweet Jesus lemme up lemme up oxen free allee allee oxen free? PLEASE OXEN FREE you go on and stop now ALLEE OXEN FREE she scream my name she scream it so LOUD I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of . . .
Nothing at all.
The horror of it pa.s.sed and yet it didn"t pa.s.s. I still felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo"s fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward half a dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening"s flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamp-post.
The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank - an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn"t.
Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I"ll do anything only stop Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I"ll do anything only stop, I tried to say, and still nothing came out. Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods . . . but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.
My mouth filled with the unmerciful iron of the lake again. Help me, lemme up, help I"m drown. I leaned out, screaming inside my head, screaming down at the dead face, and I realized I was looking up at myself I was looking up at myself, looking up through the rose-shimmer of sunset water at a white man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt holding onto a trembling, birch and trying to scream, his liquid face in motion, his eyes momentarily blotted out by the pa.s.sage of a small perch coursing after a tasty bug, I was both the dark boy and the white man, drowned in the water and drowning in the air, is this right, is this what"s happening, tap once for yes twice for no.
I retched nothing but a single runner of spit, and, impossibly, a fish jumped at it. They"ll jump at almost anything at sunset; something in the dying light must make them crazy. The fish hit the water again about seven feet from the bank, spanking out a circular silver ripple, and it was gone - the taste in my mouth, the horrible smell, the shimmering drowned face of the Negro child - a Negro, that was how he would have thought of himself whose name had almost surely been Tidwell.
I looked to my right and saw a gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought, There, right there There, right there, and as if in confirmation, that horrible putrescent smell puffed at me again, seemingly from the ground.
I closed my eyes, still hanging onto the birch for dear life, feeling weak and sick and ill, and that was when Max Devore, that madman, spoke from behind me. "Say there, wh.o.r.emaster, where"s your wh.o.r.e?"
I turned and there he was, with Rogette Whitmore by his side. It was the only time I ever met him, but once was enough. Believe me, once was more than enough.
His wheelchair hardly looked like a wheelchair at all. What it looked like was a motorcycle sidecar crossed with a lunar lander. Half a dozen chrome wheels ran along both sides. Bigger wheels - four of them, I think - ran in a row across the back. None looked to be exactly on the same level, and I realized each was tied into its own suspension-bed. Devore would have a smooth ride over ground a lot rougher than The Street. Above the back wheels was an enclosed engine compartment. Hiding Devore"s legs was a fibergla.s.s nacelle, black with red pinstriping, that would not have looked out of place on a racing car. Implanted in the center of it was a gadget that looked like my DSS satellite dish . . . some sort of computerized avoidance system, I guessed. Maybe even an autopilot. The armrests were wide and covered with controls. Holstered on the left side of this machine was a green oxygen tank four feet long. A hose went to a clear plastic accordion tube; the accordion tube led to a mask which rested in Devore"s lap. It made me think of the old guy"s Stenomask. Coming on the heels of what had just happened, I might have considered this Tom Clancyish vehicle a hallucination, except for the b.u.mper-sticker on the nacelle, below the dish. I BLEED DODGER BLUE, it said.
This evening the woman I had seen outside The Sunset Bar at Warrington"s was wearing a white blouse with long sleeves and black pants so tapered they made her legs look like sheathed swords. Her narrow face and hollow cheeks made her resemble Edvard Munch"s screamer more than ever. Her white hair hung around her face in a lank cowl. Her lips were painted so brightly red she seemed to be bleeding from the mouth.
She was old and she was ugly, but she was a prize compared to Mattie"s father-in-law. Scrawny, blue-lipped, the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth a dark exploded purple, he looked like something an archeologist might find in the burial room of a pyramid, surrounded by his stuffed wives and pets, bedizened with his favorite jewels. A few wisps of white hair still clung to his scaly skull; more tufts sprang from enormous ears which seemed to have melted like wax sculptures left out in the sun. He was wearing white cotton pants and a billowy blue shirt. Add a little black beret and he would have looked like a French artist from the nineteenth century at the end of a very long life.
Across his lap was a cane of some black wood. Snugged over the end was a bright red bicycle grip. The fingers grasping it looked powerful, but they were going as black as the cane itself. His circulation was failing, and I couldn"t imagine what his feet and his lower legs must look like.
"Wh.o.r.e run off and left you, has she?"
I tried to say something. A croak came out of my mouth, nothing more. I was still holding the birch. I let go of it and tried to straighten up, but my legs were still weak and I had to grab it again.
He nudged a silver toggle switch and the chair came ten feet closer, halving the distance between us. The sound it made was a silky whisper; watching it was like watching an evil magic carpet. Its many wheels rose and fell independent of one another and flashed in the declining sun, which had begun to take on a reddish cast. And as he came closer, I felt the sense of the man. His body was rotting out from under him, but the force around him was undeniable and daunting, like an electrical storm. The woman paced beside him, regarding me with silent amus.e.m.e.nt. Her eyes were pinkish. I a.s.sumed then that they were gray and had picked up a bit of the coming sunset, but I think now she was an albino.
"I always liked a wh.o.r.e," he said. He drew the word out, making it horrrrrrr horrrrrrr. "Didn"t I, Rogette?"
"Yes, sir," she said. "In their place."
"Sometimes their place was on my face!" he cried with a kind of insane perkiness, as if she had contradicted him. "Where is she, young man? Whose face is she sitting on right now? I wonder. That smart lawyer you found? Oh, I know all about him, right down to the Unsatisfactory Conduct he got in the third grade. I make it my business to know things. It"s the secret of my success."
With an enormous effort, I straightened up. "What are you doing here?"
"Having a const.i.tutional, same as you. And no law against it, is there?
The Street belongs to anyone who wants to use it. You haven"t been here long, young wh.o.r.emaster, but surely you"ve been here long enough to know that. It"s our version of the town common, where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side."
Once more using the hand not bunched around the red bicycle grip, he picked up the oxygen mask, sucked deeply, then dropped it back in his lap. He grinned - an unspeakable grin of complicity that revealed gums the color of iodine.
"She good? That little horrrrrr horrrrrr of yours? She must be good to have kept my son prisoner in that nasty little trailer where she lives. And then along comes you even before the worms had finished with my boy"s eyes. Does her c.u.n.t of yours? She must be good to have kept my son prisoner in that nasty little trailer where she lives. And then along comes you even before the worms had finished with my boy"s eyes. Does her c.u.n.t suck suck?"
"Shut up."
Rogette Whitmore threw back her head and laughed. The sound was like the scream of a rabbit caught in an owl"s talons, and my flesh crawled. I had an idea she was as crazy as he was. Thank G.o.d they were old. "You struck a nerve there, Max," she said.
"What do you want?" I took a breath . . . and caught a taste of that putrescence again. I gagged. I didn"t want to, but I couldn"t help it.
Devore straightened in his chair and breathed deeply, as if to mock me. In that moment he looked like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now Apocalypse Now, striding along the beach and telling the world how much he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. His grin widened. "Lovely place, just here, isn"t it? A cozy spot to stop and think, wouldn"t you say?" He looked around. "This is where it happened, all right. Ayuh."
"Where the boy drowned."
I thought Whitmore"s smile looked momentarily uneasy at that. Devore didn"t. He clutched for his translucent oxygen mask with an old man"s overwide grip, fingers that grope rather than reach. I could see little bubbles of mucus clinging to the inside. He sucked deep again, put it down again.
"Thirty or more folks have drowned in this lake, and that"s just the ones they know about," he said. "What"s one boy, more or less?"
"I don"t get it. Were there two two Tidwell boys who died here? The one that got blood-poisoning and the one - " Tidwell boys who died here? The one that got blood-poisoning and the one - "
"Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? Your immortal soul? G.o.d"s b.u.t.terfly caught in a coc.o.o.n of flesh that will soon stink like mine?"
I said nothing. The strangeness of what had happened before he arrived was pa.s.sing. What replaced it was his incredible personal magnetism. I have never in my life felt so much raw force. There was nothing supernatural about it, either, and raw raw is exactly the right word. I might have run. Under other circ.u.mstances, I"m sure I would have. It certainly wasn"t bravery that kept me where I was; my legs still felt rubbery, and I was afraid I might fall down. is exactly the right word. I might have run. Under other circ.u.mstances, I"m sure I would have. It certainly wasn"t bravery that kept me where I was; my legs still felt rubbery, and I was afraid I might fall down.
"I"m going to give you one chance to save your soul," Devore said. He raised a bony finger to ill.u.s.trate the concept of one. "Go away, my fine wh.o.r.emaster. Right now, in the clothes you stand up in. Don"t bother to pack a bag, don"t even stop to make sure you turned off the stoveburners. Go. Leave the wh.o.r.e and leave the wh.o.r.elet."
"Leave them to you."
"Ayuh, to me. I"ll do the things that need to be done. Souls are for liberal arts majors, Noonan. I was an engineer."
"Go f.u.c.k yourself."
Rogette Whitmore made that screaming-rabbit sound again. The old man sat in his chair, head lowered, grinning sallowly up at me and looking like something raised from the dead. "Are you sure you want to be the one, Noonan? It doesn"t matter to her, you know - you or me, it"s all the same to her."
"I don"t know what you"re talking about."
I drew another deep breath, and this time the air tasted all right. I took a step away from the birch, and my legs were all right, too. "And I don"t care. You"re never getting Kyra. Never in what remains of your scaly life. I"ll never see that happen."
"Pal, you"ll see plenty," Devore said, grinning and showing me his iodine gums. "Before July"s done, you"ll likely have seen so much you"ll wish you"d ripped the living eyes out of your head in June."
"I"m going home. Let me pa.s.s."
"Go home then, how could I stop you?" he asked. "The Street belongs to everyone." He groped the oxygen mask out of his lap again and took another healthy pull. He dropped it into his lap and settled his left hand on the arm of his Buck Rogers wheelchair.
I stepped toward him, and almost before I knew what was happening, he ran the wheelchair at me. He could have hit me and hurt me quite badly - broken one or both of my legs, I don"t doubt - but he stopped just short. I leaped back, but only because he allowed me to. I was aware that Whitmore was laughing again.
"What"s the matter, Noonan?"
"Get out of my way. I"m warning you."
"Wh.o.r.e made you jumpy, has she?"
I started to my left, meaning to go by him on that side, but in a flash he had turned the chair, shot it forward, and cut me off.
"Get out of the TR, Noonan. I"m giving you good ad - " I broke to the right, this time on the lake side, and would have slipped by him quite neatly except for the fist, very small and hard, that hammered the left side of my face. The white-haired b.i.t.c.h was wearing a ring, and the stone cut me behind the ear. I felt the sting and the warm flow of blood. I pivoted, stuck out both hands, and pushed her. She fell to the needle-carpeted path with a squawk of surprised outrage. At the next instant something clouted me on the back of the head. A momentary orange glow lit up my sight. I staggered backward in what felt like slow motion, waving my arms, and Devore came into view again. He was slued around in his wheelchair, scaly head thrust forward, the cane he"d hit me with still upraised. If he had been ten years younger, I believe he would have fractured my skull instead of just creating that momentary orange light.
I ran into my old friend the birch tree. I raised my hand to my ear and looked unbelievingly at the blood on the tips of my fingers. My head ached from the blow he had fetched me.
Whitmore was struggling to her feet, brushing pine needles from her slacks and looking at me with a furious smile. Her cheeks had filled in with a thin pink flush. Her too-red lips were pulled back to show small teeth. In the light of the setting sun her eyes looked as if they were burning.
"Get out of my way," I said, but my voice sounded small and weak.
"No," Devore said, and laid the black barrel of his cane on the nacelle that curved over the front of his chair. Now I could see the little boy who had been determined to have the sled no matter how badly he cut his hands getting it. I could see him very clearly. "No, you wh.o.r.e-f.u.c.king sissy. I won"t won"t."
He shoved the silver toggle switch again and the wheelchair rushed silently at me. If I had stayed where I was, he would have run me through with his cane as surely as any evil duke was ever run through in an Alexandre Dumas story. He probably would have crushed the fragile bones in his right hand and torn his right arm clean out of its socket in the collision, but this man had never cared about such things; he left cost-counting to the little people. If I had hesitated out of shock or incredulity, he would have killed me, I"m sure of it. Instead, I rolled to my left. My sneakers slid on the needle-slippery embankment for a moment. Then they lost contact with the earth and I was falling.
I hit the water awkwardly and much too close to the bank. My left foot struck a submerged root and twisted. The pain was huge, something that felt like a thunderclap sounds. I opened my mouth to scream and the lake poured in - that cold metallic dark taste, this time for real. I coughed it out and sneezed it out and floundered away from where I had landed, thinking The boy, the dead boy"s down here, what if he reaches up and grabs me? The boy, the dead boy"s down here, what if he reaches up and grabs me?
I turned over on my back, still flailing and coughing, very aware of my jeans clinging clammily to my legs and crotch, thinking absurdly about my wallet - I didn"t care about the credit cards or driver"s license, but I had two good snapshots of Jo in there, and they would be ruined. I turned over on my back, still flailing and coughing, very aware of my jeans clinging clammily to my legs and crotch, thinking absurdly about my wallet - I didn"t care about the credit cards or driver"s license, but I had two good snapshots of Jo in there, and they would be ruined.
Devore had almost run himself over the embankment, I saw, and for a moment I thought he still might go. The front of his chair jutted over the place where I had fallen (I could see the short tracks of my sneakers just to the left of the b.i.t.c.h"s partially exposed roots), and although the forward wheels were still grounded, the crumbly earth was running out from beneath them in dry little avalanches that rolled down the slope and pit-a-patted into the water, creating interlocking ripple patterns. Whitmore was clinging to the back of the chair, yanking on it, but it was much too heavy for her; if Devore was to be saved, he would have to save himself. Standing waist-deep in the lake with my clothes floating around me, I rooted for him to go over.
The purplish claw of his left hand recaptured the silver toggle switch after several attempts. One finger hooked it backward, and the chair reversed away from the embankment with a final shower of stones and dirt. Whitmore leaped prankishly to one side to keep her feet from being run over.