Bag of Bones (27 page)

Storrow laughed dryly. “I'll find someone local to do that. He'll go into this Durgin's office with you, sit quietly with his briefcase on his lap, and listen. I may be in town by that point—I won't know until I talk to Ms. Devore—but I won't be in Durgin's office. When the custody hearing comes around, though, you'll see my face in the place.”

“All right, good. Call me with the name of my new lawyer. My other new lawyer.”

“Uh-huh. In the meantime, talk to the young lady. Get me a job.”

“I'll try.”

“Also try to stay visible if you're with her,” he said. “If we give the bad guys room to get nasty, they'll get nasty. There's nothing like that between you, is there? Nothing nasty? Sorry to have to ask, but I
do
have to ask.”

“No,” I said. “It's been quite some time since I've been up to anything nasty with anyone.”

“I'm tempted to commiserate, Mr. Noonan, but under the circumstances—”

“Mike. Make it Mike.”

“Good. I like that. And I'm John. People are going to talk about your involvement anyway. You know that, don't you?”

“Sure. People know I can afford you. They'll speculate about how
she
can afford
me
. Pretty young widow, middle-aged widower. Sex would seem the most likely.”

“You're a realist.”

“I don't really think I am, but I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

“I hope you do, because the ride could get rough. This is an extremely rich man we're going up against.” Yet he didn't sound scared. He sounded almost . . . 
greedy.
He sounded the way part of me had felt when I saw that the magnets on the fridge were back in a circle.

“I know he is.”

“In court that won't matter a whole helluva lot,
because there's a certain amount of money on the other side. Also, the judge is going to be very aware that this one is a powderkeg. That can be useful.”

“What's the best thing we've got going for us?” I asked this thinking of Kyra's rosy, unmarked face and her complete lack of fear in the presence of her mother. I asked it thinking John would reply that the charges were clearly unfounded. I thought wrong.

“The best thing? Devore's age. He's got to be older than God.”

“Based on what I've heard over the weekend, I think he must be eighty-five. That would make God older.”

“Yeah, but as a potential dad he makes Tony Randall look like a teenager,” John said, and now he sounded positively gloating. “Think of it, Michael—the kid graduates from high school the year Gramps turns one hundred. Also there's a chance the old man's overreached himself. Do you know what a guardian
ad litem
is?”

“No.”

“Essentially it's a lawyer the court appoints to protect the interests of the child. A fee for the service comes out of court costs, but it's a pittance. Most people who agree to serve as guardian
ad litem
have strictly altruistic motives . . . but not all of them. In any case, the
ad litem
puts his own spin on the case. Judges don't have to take the guy's advice, but they almost always do. It makes a judge look stupid to reject the advice of his own appointee, and the thing a judge hates above all others is looking stupid.”

“Devore will have his own lawyer?”

John laughed. “How about half a dozen at the actual custody hearing?”

“Are you serious?”

“The guy is eighty-five. That's too old for Ferraris, too old for bungee jumping in Tibet, and too old for whores unless he's a mighty man. What does that leave for him to spend his money on?”

“Lawyers,” I said bleakly.

“Yep.”

“And Mattie Devore? What does she get?”

“Thanks to you, she gets me,” John Storrow said. “It's like a John Grisham novel, isn't it? Pure gold. Meantime, I'm interested in Durgin, the
ad litem
. If Devore hasn't been expecting any real trouble, he may have been unwise enough to put temptation in Durgin's way. And Durgin may have been stupid enough to succumb. Hey, who knows what we might find?”

But I was a turn back. “She gets you,” I said. “Thanks to me. And if I wasn't here to stick in my oar? What would she get then?”

“
Bubkes.
That's Yiddish. It means—”

“I know what it means,” I said. “That's incredible.”

“Nope, just American justice. You know the lady with the scales? The one who stands outside most city courthouses?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Slap some handcuffs on that broad's wrists and some tape over her mouth to go along with the blindfold, rape her and roll her in the mud. You like that image? I don't, but it's a fair representation of how the law works in custody cases where the plaintiff is rich and the defendant is poor. And sexual equality
has actually made it worse, because while mothers still tend to be poor, they are no longer seen as the automatic choice for custody.”

“Mattie Devore's got to have you, doesn't she?”

“Yes,” John said simply. “Call me tomorrow and tell me that she will.”

“I hope I can do that.”

“So do I. And listen—there's one more thing.”

“What?”

“You lied to Devore on the telephone.”

“Bullshit!”

“Nope, nope, I hate to contradict my sister's favorite author, but you did and you know it. You told Devore that mother and child were out together, the kid was picking flowers, everything was fine. You put everything in there except Bambi and Thumper.”

I was sitting up straight in my deck-chair now. I felt sandbagged. I also felt that my own cleverness had been overlooked. “Hey, no, think again. I never came out and
said
anything. I told him I assumed. I used the word more than once. I remember that very clearly.”

“Uh-huh, and if he was taping your conversation, you'll get a chance to actually count how many times you used it.”

At first I didn't answer. I was thinking back to the conversation I'd had with him, remembering the underhum on the phone line, the characteristic underhum I remembered from all my previous summers at Sara Laughs. Had that steady low
mmmmm
been even more noticeable on Saturday night?

“I guess maybe there could be a tape,” I said reluctantly.

“Uh-huh. And if Devore's lawyer gets it to the
ad litem,
how do you think you'll sound?”

“Careful,” I said. “Maybe like a man with something to hide.”

“Or a man spinning yarns. And you're good at that, aren't you? After all, it's what you do for a living. At the custody hearing, Devore's lawyer is apt to mention that. If he then produces one of the people who passed you shortly after Mattie arrived on the scene . . . a person who testifies that the young lady seemed upset and flustered . . . how do you think you'll sound then?”

“Like a liar,” I said, and then: “Ah, fuck.”

“Fear not, Mike. Be of good cheer.”

“What should I do?”

“Spike their guns before they can fire them. Tell Durgin exactly what happened. Get it in the depo. Emphasize the fact that the little girl thought she was walking safely. Make sure you get in that ‘crossmock' thing. I love that.”

“Then if they have a tape they'll play it and I'll look like a story-changing schmuck.”

“I don't think so. You weren't a sworn witness when you talked to Devore, were you? There you were, sitting out on your deck and minding your own business, watching the fireworks show. Out of the blue this grouchy old asshole calls you. Starts ranting. Didn't even give him your number, did you?”

“No.”

“Your
unlisted
number.”

“No.”

“And while he
said
he was Maxwell Devore, he could have been anyone, right?”

“Right.”

“He could have been the Shah of Iran.”

“No, the Shah's dead.”

“The Shah's out, then. But he could have been a nosy neighbor . . . or a prankster.”

“Yes.”

“And you said what you said with all those possibilities in mind. But now that you're part of an official court proceeding, you're telling the whole truth and nothing but.”

“You bet.” That good
my-lawyer
feeling had deserted me for a bit, but it was back full-force now.

“You can't do better than the truth, Mike,” he said solemnly. “Except maybe in a few cases, and this isn't one. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes.”

“All right, we're done. I want to hear from either you or Mattie Devore around elevenish tomorrow. It ought to be her.”

“I'll try.”

“If she really balks, you know what to do, don't you?”

“I think so. Thanks, John.”

“One way or another, we'll talk very soon,” he said, and hung up.

I sat where I was for awhile. Once I pushed the button which opened the line on the cordless phone, then pushed it again to close it. I had to talk to Mattie, but I wasn't quite ready yet. I decided to take a walk instead.

If she really balks, you know what to do, don't you?

Of course. Remind her that she couldn't afford to be proud. That she couldn't afford to go all Yankee,
refusing charity from Michael Noonan, author of
Being Two, The Red-Shirt Man,
and the soon-to-be-published
Helen's Promise.
Remind her that she could have her pride or her daughter, but likely not both.

Hey, Mattie, pick one.

*   *   *

I walked almost to the end of the lane, stopping at Tidwell's Meadow with its pretty view down to the cup of the lake and across to the White Mountains. The water dreamed under a hazy sky, looking gray when you tipped your head one way, blue when you tipped it the other. That sense of mystery was very much with me. That sense of Manderley.

Over forty black people had settled here at the turn of the century—lit here for awhile, anyway—according to Marie Hingerman (also according to
A History of Castle County and Castle Rock,
a weighty tome published in 1977, the county's bicentennial year). Pretty special black people, too: most of them related, most of them talented, most of them part of a musical group which had first been called The Red-Top Boys and then Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys. They had bought the meadow and a good-sized tract of lakeside land from a man named Douglas Day. The money had been saved up over a period of ten years, according to Sonny Tidwell, who did the dickering (as a Red-Top, Son Tidwell had played what was then known as “chickenscratch guitar”).

There had been a vast uproar about it in town, and even a meeting to protest “the advent of these darkies, which come in a Horde.” Things had settled down and turned out okay, as things have a way of doing, more often than not. The shanty town most
locals had expected on Day's Hill (for so Tidwell's Meadow was called in 1900, when Son Tidwell bought the land on behalf of his extensive clan) had never appeared. Instead, a number of neat white cabins sprang up, surrounding a larger building that might have been intended as a group meeting place, a rehearsal area, or perhaps, at some point, a performance hall.

Sara and the Red-Top Boys (sometimes there was a Red-Top Girl in there, as well; membership in the band was fluid, changing with every performance) played around western Maine for over a year, maybe closer to two years. In towns all up and down the Western Line—Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Motton, Fryeburg—you'll still come across their old show-posters at barn bazaars and junkatoriums. Sara and the Red-Tops were great favorites on the circuit, and they got along all right at home on the TR, too, which never surprised me. At the end of the day Robert Frost—that utilitarian and often unpleasant poet—was right: in the northeastern three we really do believe that good fences make good neighbors. We squawk and then keep a miserly peace, the kind with gimlet eyes and a tucked-down mouth. “They pay their bills,” we say. “I ain't never had to shoot one a their dogs,” we say. “They keep themselves to themselves,” we say, as if isolation were a virtue. And, of course, the defining virtue: “They don't take charity.”

And at some point, Sara Tidwell became Sara Laughs.

In the end, though, TR-90 mustn't have been what they wanted, because after playing a county fair
or two in the late summer of 1901, the clan moved on. Their neat little cabins provided summer-rental income for the Day family until 1933, when they burned in the summer fires which charred the east and north sides of the lake. End of story.

Except for her music, that was. Her music had lived.

I got up from the rock I had been sitting on, stretched my arms and my back, and walked back down the lane, singing one of her songs as I went.

D
uring my hike back down the lane to the house, I tried to think about nothing at all. My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it's generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That's blue-collar labor down there, nonunion guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.

*   *   *

When I tried to call Mattie Devore, an extremely peculiar thing happened—one that had nothing at all to do with spooks, as far as I could tell. Instead of an open-hum line when I pushed the cordless's
ON
button, I got silence. Then, just as I was thinking I
must have left the phone in the north bedroom off the hook, I realized it wasn't
complete
silence. Distant as a radio transmission from deep space, cheerful and quacky as an animated duck, some guy with a fair amount of Brooklyn in his voice was singing: “He followed her to school one day, school one day, school one day. Followed her to school one day, which was against the rule . . .”