"They are."

Lisey closed her own. For a moment she saw that blunt head that wasn't a head at all but only a maw, a straw, a funnel into blackness filled with endless swirling bad-gunky. In it she still heard Jim Dooley screaming, but the sound was now thin, and mixed with other screams. With what felt like tremendous effort, she swept the images and sounds away, replacing them with a picture of the red maple desk and the sound of Ole Hank-who else?-singing "Jambalaya." There was time to think of how at first she and Scott hadn't been able to come back when they so badly needed to with the long boy so close, time to think of (it's the african Lisey I feel it like an anchor) what he had said, time to wonder why that should make her think again of Amanda looking with such longing at the good ship Hollyhocks (a goodbye look if there ever was one), and then time was up. Once more she felt the air turn, and the moonlight was gone. She knew even with her eyes closed. There was the sense of taking a short, jolting fall. Then they were in the study and the study was dark because Dooley had killed the electricity, but still Hank Williams was singing-My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh-because even with the power cut, Ole Hank meant to have his say.

12."Lisey? Lisey!"

"Manda, you're crushing me, get off-"

"Lisey, are we back?"

Two women in the dark. Lying tangled together on the carpet.

"Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozens..." Drifting out of the alcove.

"Yes, would you get the smuck off me, I can't breathe!"

"Sorry...Lisey, you're on my arm..."

"Son-of-a-gun, we'll have big fun...on the bayou!"

Lisey managed to roll to her right. Amanda pulled her arm free, and a moment later the weight of her body came off Lisey's midsection. Lisey gasped in a deep-and deeply satisfying-breath. As she let it out, Hank Williams quit singing in mid-phrase.

"Lisey, why is it so dark in here?"

"Because Dooley cut the power, remember?"

"He cut the lights," Amanda said reasonably. "If he'd cut the power, the TV wouldn't have been playing."

Lisey could have asked Amanda why the TV had suddenly stopped playing, but didn't bother. Other matters needed discussing. They had other fish to fry, as the saying was. "Let's go in the house."

"I'm a hundred percent down with that," Amanda said. Her fingers touched Lisey's elbow, groped down her forearm, and seized her hand. The sisters stood up together. Amanda added, in a confiding tone: "No offense, Lisey, but if I ever come here again it'll be too soon."

Lisey understood how Amanda felt, but her own feelings had changed. Scott's study had daunted her, no argument there. It had kept her at arm's length for two long years. But she thought the major ch.o.r.e which had needed doing in here was now done. She and Amanda had cleansed Scott's ghost away, kindly and-time would tell, but she was almost positive-completely.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go in the house. I'll make hot chocolate."

"And maybe a little brandy to start with?" Amanda asked hopefully. "Or don't crazy ladies get brandy?"

"Crazy ladies don't. You do."

Holding hands, they groped toward the stairs. Lisey stopped only once, when she stepped on something. She bent over and picked up a round of gla.s.s easily an inch thick. She realized it was one of the lenses from Dooley's night-vision goggles and dropped it with a grimace of disgust.

"What?" Amanda asked.

"Nothing. I'm able to see a little. How about you?"

"A little. But don't let go of my hand."

"I won't, honey."

They descended the stairs to the barn together. It took longer to do it that way, but it felt a lot safer.

13.Lisey set out her smallest juice gla.s.ses and poured them each a shot of brandy from a bottle she found at the very back of the dining room drinks cabinet. She held her gla.s.s up and clinked it against Amanda's. They were standing at the kitchen counter. Every light in the room was on, even the gooseneck lamp in the corner where Lisey scribbled checks at a child's schooldesk.

"Over the teeth," Lisey said.

"Over the gums," Amanda said.

"Look out guts, here it comes," they said together, and drank.

Amanda bent and blew out a gust of breath. When shestraightened up, there were roses in her formerly pale cheeks, a line of red forming on her brow, and a tiny saddle of scarlet on the bridge of her nose. Tears stood in her eyes.

"s.h.i.t-a-G.o.ddam! What was that?"

Lisey, whose throat felt as hot as Manda's face looked, took hold of the bottle and read the label. STAR BRANDY, it said. A PRODUCT OF ROMANIA.

"Romanian brandy?" Amanda looked aghast. "Ain't no such animal! Where'd you get it?"

"It was a gift to Scott. He got it for doing something-I forget what-but I think they threw in a pen set, too."

"It's probably poison. You pour it out and I'll pray we don't die."

"You pour it out. I'll make the hot chocolate. Swiss. Not from Romania."

She began to turn away, but Amanda touched her shoulder. "Maybe we should skip the hot chocolate and just get out of here before any of those Sheriff's deputies come back to check on you."

"Do you think so?" Even as she asked the question, Lisey knew Amanda was right.

"Yes. Do you dare to go up in the study again?"

"Of course I do."

"Then get my little gun. Don't forget the lights are out up there."

Lisey opened the top of the little desk where she wrote her checks and pulled out the long-barreled flashlight she kept in there. She turned it on. The light was nice and bright.

Amanda was rinsing their gla.s.ses. "If someone found out we were here, that wouldn't be the end of the world. But if your deputies found out we came with a gun...and that man just happened to disappear off the face of the earth around the same time..."

Lisey, who had thought only as far as getting Dooley to the Bell-and-Spade Tree (and the long boy had never been a part of her imaginings), realized she still had work to do and had better get busy doing it. Professor Woodbody wasn't ever going to report his old drinking buddy missing, but the man might have relatives somewhere, and if anybody in the world had a motive for getting rid of the Black Prince of the Incunks, it was Lisey Landon. Of course there was no body (what Scott had sometimes been pleased to refer to as the corpus delicious), but still, she and her sister had spent what some might construe as an extremely suspicious afternoon and evening. Plus the County Sheriff's Department knew Dooley had been hara.s.sing her; she'd told them so herself.

"I'll get his s.h.i.te," she said.

Amanda did not smile. "Good."

14.

The flashlight cut a wide swath, and the study wasn't as spooky on her own as Lisey had feared it might be. Having stuff to do no doubt helped. She began by putting the Pathfinder back in its s...o...b..x, then went prospecting along the floor with the light. She found both of the lenses that went with the night-vision goggles, plus half a dozen double-A batteries. She a.s.sumed these were from the gadget's powerpack. The pack must have traveled, although she couldn't remember actually seeing it; the batteries obviously hadn't. Then she picked up Dooley's terrible paper bag. Amanda had either forgotten the bag or hadn't even realized Dooley had it, but the stuff in here would look bad for her if it were found. Especially when combined with the gun. Lisey knew they could do tests on the Pathfinder that would show it had been fired recently; she wasn't dumb (and she watched CSI). She also knew the tests wouldn't show it had been fired only once, into the ceiling. She tried to handle the paper bag so it wouldn't clank, and it clanked anyway. She looked around for other signs of Dooley and saw none. There were bloodstains on the rug, but if that were ever tested, both the type and the DNA would match hers. Blood on her rug would look very bad in combination with the stuff in the bag she now held in her hand, but with the bag gone, they'd be all right. Probably all right.

Where's his car? His PT Cruiser? Because I know that car I saw was his.

She couldn't worry about that now. It was dark. This was what she had to worry about, this stuff rah-cheer. And her sisters. Darla and Canty, currently on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride way the h.e.l.l and gone up to Acadia Mental Health in Derry. So they wouldn't get caught in the Jim Dooley version of Mr. Silver's potato-grader.

But did she really have to worry about those two? No. They'd be royally p.i.s.sed, of course...and royally curious...but in the end they'd keep quiet if she and Amanda told them they absolutely had to, and why? Because of the sister thing, that was why. She and Amanda would have to be careful with them, and there would have to be some sort of story (what kind could possibly cover this Lisey had no idea, although she was sure Scott could have come up with something). There had to be a story because, unlike Amanda and Lisey, Darla and Cantata had husbands. And husbands were all too often the back door by which secrets escaped into the outside world.

As Lisey turned to go, her eye was caught by the booksnake sleeping against the wall. All those quarterly reviews and scholarly journals, all those year-end annuals, bound reports, and copies of theses done on Scott's work. Many containing pictures of a gone life-call it SCOTT AND LISEY! THE MARRIED YEARS!

She could easily see a couple of college kids dismantling the snake and loading its component parts into cardboard boxes with liquor brands printed on the sides, then stacking the boxes in the back of a truck and driving them away. To Pitt? Bite your tongue, Lisey thought. She didn't consider herself a grudge-holding woman, but after Jim Dooley, it would be a snowy day in h.e.l.l before she put any more of Scott's stuff where Woodsmucky could look at it without buying a plane ticket. No, the Fogler Library at the University of Maine would do just fine-right down the road from Cleaves Mills. She could see herself standing by and watching the final packingup, maybe bringing out a pitcher of iced tea to the kids when the work was done. And when the tea was finished, they would set their gla.s.ses down and thank her. One of them might tell her how much he'd liked her husband's books, and the other might say they were very sorry for her loss. As if he had died two weeks ago. She'd thank them. Then she would watch them drive away with all those frozen images of her life with him locked inside their truck.

You can really let go?

She thought she could. Still, that snake drowsing along the wall drew the eye. So many shut books, sleeping deep-they drew the eye. She looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman's high firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn't ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

"I always loved you, Scott," she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. "You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn't I?"

Then, shining the flashlight's beam ahead of her, she went back down the stairs with the s...o...b..x in one hand and Dooley's awful paper bag in the other.

15.

Amanda was standing at the kitchen door when Lisey came back in.

"Good," Amanda said. "I was getting worried. What's in the bag?"

"You don't want to know."

"Oh...kay," Amanda said. "Is he...you know, gone from up there?"

"I think so, yes."

"I hope so." Amanda shivered. "He was a scary guy."

You don't know the half of it, Lisey thought.

"Well," Amanda said, "I guess we better get going."

"Going where?"

"Lisbon Falls," Amanda said. "The old farm."

"What-" Then she stopped. It made a weird kind of sense.

"I came around at Greenlawn, just like you told that Dr. Alberness, and you took me to my house so I could change my clothes. Then I got freaky and started talking about the farm. Come on, Lisey, let's go, let's blow this pop-shop before someone comes." Amanda led her out into the dark.

Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late nineteeneighties paid the property taxes.

"Why did you want to go to the old farm?" Lisey asked as she slipped behind the BMW's wheel. "I'm not clear on that."

"Because I wasn't," Amanda said as Lisey turned in a circle and started down the long drive. "I just said I had to go there and see the old place if I wasn't going to, you know, slip back into the Twilight Zone, so of course you took me."

"Of course I did," Lisey said. She looked both ways, saw no one coming-especially no County Sheriff's Department cars, praise G.o.d-and turned left, the direction that would take her through Mechanic Falls, Poland Springs, and eventually to Gray and Lisbon beyond. "And why did we send Darla and Canty in the wrong direction?"

"I absolutely insisted," Amanda said. "I was afraid if they showed up, they'd take me back to my house or your house or even to Greenlawn before I got a chance to visit with Mom and Dad and then spend some time at the home place." For a moment Lisey had no idea what Manda was talking about-spend time with Mom and Dad? Then she got it. The Debusher family plot was at nearby Sabbatus Vale Cemetery. Both Good Ma and Dandy were buried there, along with Grampy and Granny D and G.o.d knew how many others.

She asked, "But weren't you afraid I'd take you back?"

Amanda eyed her indulgently. "Why would you take me back? You were the one who took me out."

"Maybe because you started acting crazy, asking to visit a farm that's been deserted for thirty years or more?"

"Foof!" Amanda waved a dismissive hand. "I could always wrap you around my finger, Lisey-Canty and Darla both know this."

"Bulls.h.i.t you could!"

Amanda only gave her a maddening smile, her complexion a rather weird green in the glow of the dashboard lights, and said nothing. Lisey opened her mouth to renew the argument, then closed it again. She thought the story would work, because it came down to a pair of easily grasped ideas: Amanda had been acting crazy (nothing new there) and Lisey had been humoring her (understandable, given the circ.u.mstances). They could work with it. As for the s...o...b..x with the gun in it...and Dooley's bag...

"We're going to stop in Mechanic Falls," she told Amanda. "Where the bridge goes over the Androscoggin River. I've got a couple of things to get rid of."

"Yes you do," Amanda said. Then she folded her hands in her lap, put her head back against the rest, and closed her eyes.

Lisey turned on the radio, and wasn't a bit surprised to get Ole Hank singing "Honky Tonkin'." She sang along, low. She knew every word. This did not surprise her, either. Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera-things like songs and moonlight and kisses-were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.

That was good.

Part 3: Lisey's Story

"You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfillment, You are the night, and I the day.

What else? It is perfect enough.

It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more-?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!"

-D. H. Lawrence "Bei Hennef"

XVI. Lisey and The Story Tree

(Scott Has His Say)