Bag of Bones (20 page)

She didn't wave back.

Feeling quite a bit like a fool—
THERE'S NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS
—I ended my wave in a kind of half-assed salute and headed back
the way I'd come. Five steps and I had to look over my shoulder; the sensation of her watching me was so strong it was like a hand pressing between my shoulderblades.

The dock where she'd been was completely deserted. I squinted my eyes, at first sure she must have just retreated deeper into the shadow thrown by the little
boozehaus,
but she was gone. As if she had been a ghost herself.

She stepped into the bar, hon,
Jo said.
You know that, don't you? I mean . . . you
do
know it, right?

“Right, right,” I murmured, setting off north along The Street toward home. “Of course I do. Where else?” Except it didn't seem to me that there had been time; it didn't seem to me that she could have stepped in, even in her bare feet, without me hearing her. Not on such a quiet morning.

Jo again:
Perhaps she's stealthy.

“Yes,” I murmured. I did a lot of talking out loud before that summer was over. “Yes, perhaps she is. Perhaps she's stealthy.” Sure. Like Mrs. Danvers.

I stopped again and looked back, but the right-of-way path had followed the lake around a little bit of curve, and I could no longer see either Warrington's or The Sunset Bar. And really, I thought, that was just as well.

*   *   *

On my way back, I tried to list the oddities which had preceded and then surrounded my return to Sara Laughs: the repeating dreams; the sunflowers; the radio-station sticker; the weeping in the night. I supposed that my encounter with Mattie and Kyra, plus the follow-up phone-call from Mr. Pixel Easel, also
qualified as passing strange . . . but not in the same way as a child you heard sobbing in the night.

And what about the fact that we had been in Derry instead of on Dark Score when Johanna died? Did that qualify for the list? I didn't know. I couldn't even remember why that was. In the fall and winter of 1993 I'd been fiddling with a screenplay for
The Red-Shirt Man.
In February of '94 I got going on
All the Way from the Top,
and that absorbed most of my attention. Besides, deciding to go west to the TR, west to Sara . . .

“That was Jo's job,” I told the day, and as soon as I heard the words I understood how true they were. We'd both loved the old girl, but saying “Hey Irish, let's get our asses over to the TR for a few days” had been Jo's job. She might say it any time . . . except in the year before her death she hadn't said it once. And I had never thought to say it for her. Had somehow forgotten all about Sara Laughs, it seemed, even when summer came around. Was it possible to be that absorbed in a writing project? It didn't seem likely . . . but what other explanation was there?

Something was very wrong with this picture, but I didn't know what it was. Not from nothin.

That made me think of Sara Tidwell, and the lyrics to one of her songs. She had never been recorded, but I owned the Blind Lemon Jefferson version of this particular tune. One verse went:

It ain't nuthin but a barn-dance sugar

It ain't nuthin but a round-and-round

Let me kiss you on your sweet lips sugar

You the good thing that I found.

I loved that song, and had always wondered how it would have sounded coming out of a woman's mouth instead of from that whiskey-voiced old troubadour. Out of Sara Tidwell's mouth. I bet she sang sweet. And boy, I bet she could swing it.

I had gotten back to my own place again. I looked around, saw no one in the immediate vicinity (although I could now hear the day's first ski-boat burring away downwater), stripped to my underpants, and swam out to the float. I didn't climb it, only lay beside it holding onto the ladder with one hand and lazily kicking my feet. It was nice enough, but what was I going to do with the rest of the day?

I decided to spend it cleaning my work area on the second floor. When that was done, maybe I'd go out and look around in Jo's studio. If I didn't lose my courage, that was.

I swam back, kicking easily along, raising my head in and out of water which flowed along my body like cool silk. I felt like an otter. I was most of the way to the shore when I raised my dripping face and saw a woman standing on The Street, watching me. She was as thin as the one I'd seen down at Warrington's . . . but this one was green. Green and pointing north along the path like a dryad in some old legend.

I gasped, swallowed water, coughed it back out. I stood up in chest-deep water and wiped my streaming eyes. Then I laughed (albeit a little doubtfully). The woman was green because she was a birch growing a little to the north of where my set of railroad-tie steps ended at The Street. And even with my eyes clear of water, there was something creepy about how the leaves around the ivory-streaked-with-black
trunk almost made a peering face. The air was perfectly still and so the face was perfectly still (as still as the face of the woman in the black shorts and bathing suit had been), but on a breezy day it would seem to smile or frown . . . or perhaps to laugh. Behind it there grew a sickly pine. One bare branch jutted off to the north. It was this I had mistaken for a skinny arm and a bony, pointing hand.

It wasn't the first time I'd spooked myself like that. I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint, every line in the dirt like a secret message. Which did not, of course, ease the task of deciding what was really peculiar at Sara Laughs and what was peculiar only because my
mind
was peculiar.

I glanced around, saw I still had this part of the lake to myself (although not for much longer; the bee-buzz of the first power boat had been joined by a second and third), and stripped off my soggy underpants. I wrung them out, put them on top of my shorts and tee-shirt, and walked naked up the railroad-tie steps with my clothes held against my chest. I pretended I was Bunter, bringing breakfast and the morning paper to Lord Peter Wimsey. By the time I got back inside the house I was grinning like a fool.

*   *   *

The second floor was stifling in spite of the open windows, and I saw why as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. Jo and I had shared space up here, she on the left (only a little room, really just a cubby, which was all she needed with the studio north of the house), me on the right. At the far end of the hall was the grilled snout of the monster air-conditioning unit we'd bought the
year after we bought the lodge. Looking at it, I realized I had missed its characteristic hum without even being aware of it. There was a sign taped to it which said,
Mr. Noonan: Broken. Blows hot air when you turn it on & sounds full of broken glass. Dean says the part it needs is promised from Western Auto in Castle Rock. I'll believe it when I see it. B. Meserve.

I grinned at that last—it was Mrs. M. right down to the ground—and then tried the switch. Machinery often responds favorably when it senses a penis-equipped human in the vicinity, Jo used to claim, but not this time. I listened to the air conditioner grind for five seconds or so, then snapped it off. “Damn thing shit the bed,” as TR folks like to say. And until it was fixed, I wouldn't even be doing crossword puzzles up here.

I looked in my office just the same, as curious about what I might feel as about what I might find. The answer was next to nothing. There was the desk where I had finished
The Red-Shirt Man,
thus proving to myself that the first time wasn't a fluke; there was the photo of Richard Nixon, arms raised, flashing the double V-for-Victory sign, with the caption
WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN
? running beneath; there was the rag rug Jo had hooked for me a winter or two before she had discovered the wonderful world of afghans and pretty much gave up hooking.

It wasn't quite the office of a stranger, but every item (most of all, the weirdly empty surface of the desk) said that it
was
the work-space of an earlier-generation Mike Noonan. Men's lives, I had read once, are usually defined by two primary forces: work and marriage. In my life the marriage was over and
the career on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. Given that, it didn't seem strange to me that now the space where I'd spent so many days, usually in a state of real happiness as I made up various imaginary lives, seemed to mean nothing. It was like looking at the office of an employee who had been fired . . . or who had died suddenly.

I started to leave, then had an idea. The filing cabinet in the corner was crammed with papers—bank statements (most eight or ten years out of date), correspondence (mostly never answered), a few story fragments—but I didn't find what I was looking for. I moved on to the closet, where the temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten degrees, and in a cardboard box which Mrs. M. had marked
GADGETS
, I unearthed it—a Sanyo Memo-Scriber Debra Weinstock gave me at the conclusion of our work on the first of the Putnam books. It could be set to turn itself on when you started to talk; it dropped into its
PAUSE
mode when you stopped to think.

I never asked Debra if the thing just caught her eye and she thought, “Why, I'll bet any self-respecting popular novelist would enjoy owning one of these babies,” or if it was something a little more specific . . . some sort of hint, perhaps? Verbalize those little faxes from your subconscious while they're still fresh, Noonan? I hadn't known then and didn't now. But I had it, a genuine pro-quality dictating-machine, and there were at least a dozen cassette tapes in my car, home dubs I'd made to listen to while driving. I would insert one in the Memo-Scriber tonight, slide the volume control as high as it would go, and put the machine in its
DICTATE
mode. Then, if the noise I'd
heard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what
he
thought it was.

What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on?

“Well then, I'll know something else,” I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweating like a pig. “Or at least suspect it.”

Jo's nook across the hall made my office seem crowded and homey by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a square room–shaped space. The rug was gone, her photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been abandoned after ninety per cent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed out of it—
scraped
out of it—and I felt a moment's unreasonable anger at Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when I'd done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved: “You took a little too much on y'self, didn't you?” That was my feeling about Jo's little bit of office: that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.

Maybe it wasn't Mrs. M. who cleaned it out,
the UFO voice said.
Maybe Jo did it herself. Ever think of that, sport?

“That's stupid,” I said. “Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death. Considering she'd just bought—”

But I didn't want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.

I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of
cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face. It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears . . . except that's not quite right. It was a susurrus that went
past
my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.

I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room's window in motion . . . but they hung perfectly straight.

“Jo?” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you?”

Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains . . . which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room . . . but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn't alone in Sara Laughs.

So what?
I asked myself.
Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can't hurt anyone.

That's what I thought then.

*   *   *

When I visited Jo's studio (her
air-conditioned
studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve—she hadn't taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jo's little office—the framed square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster depicting the wildflowers of Maine—had been put out here, along with almost everything else I remembered. It was as
if Mrs. M. had sent a message—
I can't ease your pain or shorten your sadness, and I can't prevent the wounds that coming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you won't be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.

Out here were no bare walls; out here the walls jostled with my wife's spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), batik squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called “my baby collages,” an abstract desert painting made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.