The one who always wore the beads? She moved to Alaska, I think it was."
Lisey thought Montana, but it hardly mattered. "Well, we'll see how bad she is. There's the place Scott looked into...Greenlawn, up in the Twin Cities - "
"Oh, Lisey!" The voice of Good Ma, the very voice.
"Lisey-what?" she asked sharply. "Lisey-what? Are you going to move in with her and keep her from carving Charlie Corriveau's initials on her boobs the next time she goes Freak City? Or maybe you've got Canty tapped for the job."
"Lisey, I didn't mean - "
"Or maybe Billy can come home from Tufts and take care of her.
What's one more Dean's List student, more or less?"
"Lisey - "
"Well what are you proposing?" She heard the hectoring tone in her voice and hated it. This was another thing money did to you after ten or twenty years - made you think you had the right to kick your way out of any tight corner you found yourself in. She remembered Scott saying that people shouldn't be allowed houses with more than two toilets to shit in, it gave them delusions of grandeur. She glanced at the shovel again. It gleamed at her. Calmed her. You saved him, it said. Not on your watch, it said. Was that true? She couldn't remember. Was it another of the things she'd forgotten on purpose? She couldn't remember that, either. What a hoot. What a bitter hoot.
"Lisey, I'm sorry...I just - "
"I know." What she knew was that she was tired and confused and ashamed of her outburst. "We'll work it out. I'll come right now. Okay?"
"Yes." Relief in Darla's voice. "Okay."
"That Frenchman," Lisey said. "What a jerk. Good riddance to bad trash."
"Get here as soon as you can."
"I will. G'bye."
Lisey hung up. She walked over to the northeast corner of the room and grasped the shaft of the silver spade. It was as if she were doing it for the first time, and was that so strange?
When Scott passed it to her, she'd only been interested in the glittering silver scoop with its engraved message, and by the time she got ready to swing the darn thing, her hands had been moving on their own...or so it had seemed; she supposed some primitive, survival-oriented part of her brain had actually been moving them for the rest of her, for Thoroughly Modern Lisey.
She slid one palm down the smooth wood, relishing the smooth slide, and as she bent, her eyes once more fell on the three stacked boxes with their exuberant message slashed across the side of each one in black Magic Marker: SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS! The box on top had once contained Gilbey's Gin, and the flaps had been folded together rather than taped. Lisey brushed away the dust, marveling at how thick it was, marveling at the realization that the last hands to touch this box - to fill it and fold the flaps and place it atop the others - now lay folded themselves, and under the ground.
The box was full of paper. Manuscripts, she presumed. The slightly yellowed title sheet on top was capitalized, underlined, and centered. Scott's name neatly typed beneath, also centered. All this she recognized as she would have recognized his smile - it had been his style of presentation when she met him as a young man, and had never changed. What she didn't recognize was the title of this one:
IKE COMES HOME
By Scott Landon
Was it a novel? A short story? Just looking into the box, it was impossible to tell. But there had to be a thousand or more pages in there, most of them in a single high stack under that title-page but still more crammed in sideways in two directions, like packing. If it was a novel, and this box contained all of it, it had to be longer than Gone With the Wind. Was that possible? Lisey supposed it might be. Scott always showed her his work when it was done, and he was happy to show her work in progress if she asked about it (a privilege he accorded no one else, not even his longtime editor, Carson Foray), but if she didn't ask, he usually kept it to himself. And he'd been prolific right up until the day he died. On the road or at home, Scott Landon wrote.
But a thousand-pager? Surely he would have mentioned that. I bet it's only a short story, and one he didn't like, at that.
And the rest of the stuff in this box, the stuff underneath and crammed in at the side? Copies of his first couple of novels, probably. Or galley-pages. What he used to call "foul matter."
But hadn't he shipped all the foul matter back to Pitt when he was done with it, for the Scott Landon Collection in their library? For the Incunks to drool over, in other words? And if there were copies of his early manuscripts in these boxes, how come there were more copies (carbons from the dark ages, mostly) in the closets marked STORAGE upstairs? And now that she thought about it, what about the cubbies on either side of the erstwhile chicken pen? What was stored in those?
She looked upward, almost as if she were Supergirl and could see the answer with her X-ray vision, and that was when the telephone on her desk once more began to ring.