Bag of Bones (61 page)

“Is that right?” I asked. I expected no answer—talking out loud was a habit I had picked up since returning here—but somewhere in the woods east of the house, an owl hooted. Just once, as if to say it
was
right, get through tomorrow and things will clarify. The hoot almost brought something else to mind, some association that was ultimately too gauzy to grasp. I tried once or twice, but the only thing I could
come up with was the title of a wonderful old novel—
I Heard the Owl Call My Name.

I rolled forward off the float and into the water, grasping my knees against my chest like a kid doing a cannonball. I stayed under as long as I could, until the air in my lungs started to feel like some hot bottled liquid, and then I broke the surface. I trod water about thirty yards out until I had my breath back, then set my sights on the Green Lady and stroked for shore.

I waded out, started up the railroad ties, then stopped and went back to The Street. I stood there for a moment, gathering my courage, then walked to where the birch curved her graceful belly out over the water. I grasped that white curve as I had on Friday evening and looked into the water. I was sure I'd see the child, his dead eyes looking up at me from his bloating brown face, and that my mouth and throat would once more fill with the taste of the lake:
help I'm drown, lemme up, oh sweet Jesus lemme up.
But there was nothing. No dead boy, no ribbon-wrapped
Boston Post
cane, no taste of the lake in my mouth.

I turned and peered at the gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought
There, right there,
but it was only a conscious and unspontaneous thought, the mind voicing a memory. The smell of decay and the certainty that something awful had happened right there was gone.

When I got back up to the house and went for a soda, I discovered the front of the refrigerator was bare and clean. Every magnetic letter, every fruit and vegetable, was gone. I never found them. I might
have, probably would have, if there had been more time, but on that Monday morning time was almost up.

*   *   *

I dressed, then called Mattie. We talked about the upcoming party, about how excited Ki was, about how nervous Mattie was about going back to work on Friday—she was afraid that the locals would be mean to her, but in an odd, womanly way she was even more afraid that they would be
cold
to her, snub her. We talked about the money, and I quickly ascertained that she didn't believe in the reality of it. “Lance used to say his father was the kind of man who'd show a piece of meat to a starving dog and then eat it himself,” she said. “But as long as I have my job back, I won't starve and neither will Ki.”

“But if there really
are
big bucks . . . ?”

“Oh, gimme-gimme-gimme,” she said, laughing. “What do you think I am, crazy?”

“Nah. By the way, what's going on with Ki's fridgeafator people? Are they writing any new stuff?”

“That is the weirdest thing,” she said. “They're gone.”

“The fridgeafator people?”

“I don't know about them, but the magnetic letters you gave her sure are. When I asked Ki what she did with them, she started crying and said Allamagoosalum took them. She said he ate them in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, for a snack.”

“Allama-
who
-salum?”

“Allamagoosalum,” Mattie said, sounding wearily amused. “Another little legacy from her grandfather.
It's a corruption of the Micmac word for ‘boogeyman' or ‘demon'—I looked it up at the library. Kyra had a good many nightmares about demons and wendigos and the allamagoosalum late last winter and this spring.”

“What a sweet old grandpa he was,” I said sentimentally.

“Right, a real pip. She was miserable over losing the letters; I barely got her calmed down before her ride to V.B.S. came. Ki wants to know if you'll come to Final Exercises on Friday afternoon, by the way. She and her friend Billy Turgeon are going to flannel-board the story of baby Moses.”

“I wouldn't miss it,” I said . . . but of course I did. We all did.

“Any idea where her letters might have gone, Mike?”

“No.”

“Yours are still okay?”

“Mine are fine, but of course mine don't spell anything,” I said, looking at the empty door of my own fridgeafator. There was sweat on my forehead. I could feel it creeping down into my eyebrows like oil. “Did you . . . I don't know . . . sense anything?”

“You mean did I maybe hear the evil alphabet-thief as he slid through the window?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I suppose so.” A pause. “I thought I heard something in the night, okay? About three this morning, actually. I got up and went into the hall. Nothing was there. But . . . you know how hot it's been lately?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not in my trailer, not last night. It was cold as ice. I swear I could almost see my breath.”

I believed her. After all, I
had
seen mine.

“Were the letters on the front of the fridge then?”

“I don't know. I didn't go up the hall far enough to see into the kitchen. I took one look around and then went back to bed. I almost
ran
back to bed. Sometimes bed feels safer, you know?” She laughed nervously. “It's a kid thing. Covers are boogeyman kryptonite. Only at first, when I got in . . . I don't know . . . I thought someone was in there already. Like someone had been hiding on the floor underneath and then . . . when I went to check the hall . . . they got in. Not a nice someone, either.”

Give me my dust-catcher,
I thought, and shuddered.

“What?” Mattie asked sharply. “What did you say?”

“I asked who did you think it was? What was the first name that came into your mind?”

“Devore,” she said. “
Him.
But there was no one there.” A pause. “I wish
you'd
been there.”

“I do, too.”

“I'm glad. Mike, do you have any ideas at all about this? Because it's very freaky.”

“I think maybe . . .” For a moment I was on the verge of telling her what had happened to my own letters. But if I started talking, where would it stop? And how much could she be expected to believe? “ . . . maybe Ki took the letters herself. Went walking in her sleep and chucked them under the trailer or something. Do you think that could be?”

“I think I like the idea of Kyra strolling around in her sleep even less than the idea of ghosts with cold
breath taking the letters off the fridge,” Mattie said.

“Take her to bed with you tonight,” I said, and felt her thought come back like an arrow:
I'd rather take you.

What she said, after a brief pause, was: “Will you come by today?”

“I don't think so,” I said. She was noshing on flavored yogurt as we talked, eating it in little nipping bites. “You'll see me tomorrow, though. At the party.”

“I hope we get to eat before the thunderstorms. They're supposed to be bad.”

“I'm sure we will.”

“And are you still thinking? I only ask because I dreamed of you when I finally fell asleep again. I dreamed of you kissing me.”

“I'm still thinking,” I said. “Thinking hard.”

But in fact I don't remember thinking about anything very hard that day. What I remember is drifting further and further into that zone I've explained so badly. Near dusk I went for a long walk in spite of the heat—all the way out to where Lane Forty-two joins the highway. Coming back I stopped on the edge of Tidwell's Meadow, watching the light fade out of the sky and listening to thunder rumble somewhere over New Hampshire. Once more there was that sense of how thin reality was, not just here but everywhere; how it was stretched like skin over the blood and tissue of a body we can never know clearly in this life. I looked at trees and saw arms; I looked at bushes and saw faces. Ghosts, Mattie had said. Ghosts with cold breath.

Time was also thin, it seemed to me. Kyra and I had really been at the Fryeburg Fair—some version
of it, anyway; we had really visited the year 1900. And at the foot of the meadow the Red-Tops were almost there now, as they once had been, in their neat little cabins. I could almost hear the sound of their guitars, the murmur of their voices and laughter; I could almost see the gleam of their lanterns and smell their beef and pork frying. “
Say baby, do you remember me?
” one of her songs went, “
Well I ain't your honey like I used to be.
”

Something rattled in the underbrush to my left. I turned that way, expecting to see Sara step out of the woods wearing Mattie's dress and Mattie's white sneakers. In this gloom, they would seem almost to float by themselves, until she got close to me . . .

There was no one there, of course, it had undoubtedly been nothing but Chuck the Woodchuck headed home after a hard day at the office, but I no longer wanted to be out here, watching as the light drained out of the day and the mist came up from the ground. I turned for home.

*   *   *

Instead of going into the house when I got back, I made my way along the path to Jo's studio, where I hadn't been since the night I had taken my IBM back in a dream. My way was lit by intermittent flashes of heat lightning.

The studio was hot but not stale. I could smell a peppery aroma that was actually pleasant, and wondered if it might be some of Jo's herbs. There was an air conditioner out here, and it worked—I turned it on and then just stood in front of it a little while. So much cold air on my overheated body was probably unhealthy, but it felt wonderful.

I didn't feel very wonderful otherwise, however. I looked around with a growing sense of something too heavy to be mere sadness; it felt like despair. I think it was caused by the contrast between how little of Jo was left in Sara Laughs and how much of her was still out here. I imagined our marriage as a kind of playhouse—and isn't that what marriage is, in large part? playing house?—where only half the stuff was held down. Held down by little magnets or hidden cables. Something had come along and picked up our playhouse by one corner—easiest thing in the world, and I supposed I should be grateful that the something hadn't decided to draw back its foot and kick the poor thing all the way over. It just picked up that one corner, you see. My stuff stayed put, but all of Jo's had slid . . .

Out of the house and down here.

“Jo?” I asked, and sat down in her chair. There was no answer. No thumps on the wall. No crows or owls calling from the woods. I put my hand on her desk, where the typewriter had been, and slipped my hand across it, picking up a film of dust.

“I miss you, honey,” I said, and began to cry.

When the tears were over—again—I wiped my face with the tail of my tee-shirt like a little kid, then just looked around. There was the picture of Sara Tidwell on her desk and a photo I didn't remember on the wall—this latter was old, sepia-tinted, and woodsy. Its focal point was a man-high birchwood cross in a little clearing on a slope above the lake. That clearing was gone from the geography now, most likely, long since filled in by trees.

I looked at her jars of herbs and mushroom sections, her filing cabinets, her sections of afghan. The
green rag rug on the floor. The pot of pencils on the desk, pencils she had touched and used. I held one of them poised over a blank sheet of paper for a moment or two, but nothing happened. I had a sense of life in this room, and a sense of being watched . . . but not a sense of being
helped.

“I know some of it but not enough,” I said. “Of all the things I don't know, maybe the one that matters most is who wrote ‘help her' on the fridge. Was it you, Jo?”

No answer.

I sat awhile longer—hoping against hope, I suppose—then got up, turned off the air conditioning, turned off the lights, and went back to the house, walking in soft bright stutters of unfocused lightning. I sat on the deck for a little while, watching the night. At some point I realized I'd taken the length of blue silk ribbon out of my pocket and was winding it nervously back and forth between my fingers, making half-assed cat's cradles. Had it really come from the year 1900? The idea seemed perfectly crazy and perfectly sane at the same time. The night hung hot and hushed. I imagined old folks all over the TR—perhaps in Motton and Harlow, too—laying out their funeral clothes for tomorrow. In the doublewide trailer on Wasp Hill Road, Ki was sitting on the floor, watching a videotape of
The Jungle Book
—Baloo and Mowgli were singing “The Bare Necessities.” Mattie was on the couch with her feet up, reading the new Mary Higgins Clark and singing along. Both were wearing shorty pajamas, Ki's pink, Mattie's white.

After a little while I lost my sense of them; it faded the way radio signals sometimes do late at night. I
went into the north bedroom, undressed, and crawled onto the top sheet of my unmade bed. I fell asleep almost at once.

I woke in the middle of the night with someone running a hot finger up and down the middle of my back. I rolled over and when the lightning flashed, I saw there was a woman in bed with me. It was Sara Tidwell. She was grinning. There were no pupils in her eyes. “Oh sugar, I'm almost back,” she whispered in the dark. I had a sense of her reaching out for me again, but when the next flash of lightning came, that side of the bed was empty.

I
nspiration isn't always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was shaving and thinking about nothing more than remembering the beer for the party. And like the best inspirations, it came out of nowhere at all.

I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the
Tough Stuff
crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I'd gone first in an effort to decipher “go down nineteen” and “go down ninety-two.” Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did
Tough Stuff
have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I'd completed, I'd done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand—