And the afghan. Only -
"Only he called it an african," Lisey said in a low voice. "He called it an african, and he called it a bool. Not a boop, not a beep, a bool."
"Lisey?" Amanda called from the other room. "Did you say something?"
"Just talking to myself, Manda."
"Means you've got money in the bank," Amanda said, and then there was only the soundtrack of the movie. Lisey seemed to remember every line of it, every scratchy snatch of music.
If you left me a story, Scott, where is it? Not up here in the study, I'd bet money on it. Not in the barn, either - nothing down there but false bools like Ike Comes Home. But that wasn't quite true. There had been at least two true prizes in the barn: the silver spade and Good Ma's cedar box, tucked away under the Bremen bed. With the delight square in it. Was that what Amanda had been talking about?
Lisey didn't think so. There was a story in that box, but it was their story - Scott & Lisey: Now We Are Two. So what was her story? And where was it?
And speaking of wheres, where was the Black Prince of the Incunks?
Not on the answering machine at Amanda's; not on the answering machine here, either. Lisey had found only one message, on the recorder in the house. It had been from Deputy Alston.
"Mrs. Landon, this storm has done quite a lot of damage in town, particularly at the south end. Someone - I hope me or Dan Boeckman - is gonna check back on you as soon as possible, but in the meantime I want to remind you to keep your doors locked and don't let anyone in you can't identify. That means gettin em to take off their hats or push back the hoods of their slickers even if it's pourin down cats n dogs, okay? And keep that cell phone with you at all times. Remember, in an emergency all you have to do is hit SPEED-DIAL and the 1-key. The call will go right through to the Sheriff's."
"Great," Amanda had commented. "Our blood'll still be runny instead of clotted when they get here. Probably speed up their DNA tests."
Lisey hadn't bothered replying. She had no intention of letting the Castle County Sheriff's Department handle Jim Dooley. As far as she was concerned, Jim Dooley might as well have cut his own throat with her Oxo can opener.
The light on the answering machine in her barn office had been flashing, the number 1
showing in the MESSAGES RECEIVED window, but when Lisey hit the PLAY button, there had been only three seconds of silence, one soft, indrawn breath, and a hang-up. It could have been a wrong number, people dialed wrong numbers and hung up all the time, but she knew it hadn't been.
No. It had been Dooley.
Lisey sat back in the office chair, ran a finger down the rubber grip of the .22, then picked it up and swung open the cylinder. It was easy enough to do, once you'd done it a couple of times. She loaded the chambers, then swung the cylinder closed again. It made a small but final click.
In the other room, Amanda laughed at something in the movie. Lisey smiled a little herself. She didn't believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn't even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes - if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered - it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book. Lisey supposed the Roger Dashmiels of the world didn't believe it and the Joseph Woodbodys thought it had to be something grander
- more exalted - but Lisey had lived with him, and she believed it. Writing a book was a bool hunt. What he'd never told her (but she supposed she'd always guessed it) was that if the string didn't break, it always led back to the beach. Back to the pool where we all go down to drink, to cast our nets, to swim, and sometimes to drown. And did he know? At the end, did he know it was the end?
She sat up a little straighter, trying to remember if Scott has discouraged her from coming along on his trip to Pratt, a small but well-regarded liberal arts school where he'd read from The Secret Pearl for the first and last time. He had collapsed halfway through the reception afterward. Ninety minutes later she had been in an airplane and one of the guests at that reception - a cardiovascular surgeon dragged to Scott's reading by his wife - had been operating in an attempt to save his life, or at least preserve it long enough to get him to a bigger hospital.
Did he know? Did he purposely try to keep me away because he knew it was coming?