She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her br**sts.
When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONGHELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the Review author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: "Mr Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!"
Reminding herself this was the school Review , for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped . . . but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season - a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.
Scott, damn him, was gone. And -
"And he bled for you people," she murmured in a resentful voice that sounded spookily like Manda's. "He almost died for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't."
And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice - who had loved it more or remembered it better? - but it didn't feel that way. It felt like him.
You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.
"I suppose there were times when you thought so," she said absently.
- Hot, wasn't it?
Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was -
"Humid," Lisey said. "Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go."
Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. "It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke.
3
She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.