"Mrs. Landon, if you'll only let me expl - "
"I'm being threatened and you're responsible, you don't need to explain that. So listen up, and listen up good: call him off right now. I haven't given your name to the authorities yet, but I really think the police getting your name is the least of your worries. If I get one more call, one more letter, or one more dead animal from this Deep Space Cowboy, I'll go to the newspapers." Inspiration struck. "I'll start with the ones in Pittsburgh. They'll love it. CRAZED ACADEMIC THREATENS FAMOUS WRITER'S WIDOW. When that shows up on page one, a few questions from the cops in Maine will be the least of your problems. Goodbye, tenure."
Lisey thought all of this sounded good, and it hid those yellow threads of fear - at least for the moment. Unfortunately, what Woodbody said next brought them back again, brighter than ever.
"You don't understand, Mrs. Landon. I can't call him off."
5
For a moment Lisey was too flabbergasted to speak. Then she said, "What do you mean, you can't?"
"I mean I've already tried."
"You have his e-mail address! Zack999 or whatever it was - "
"Zack991 at Sail-dot-com, for what it's worth. Might as well be triple zero. It doesn't work. It did the first couple of times I used it, but since then my e-mails just bounce back marked CANNOT DELIVER."
He began babbling about trying again, but Lisey hardly paid attention. She was replaying her conversation with "Zack McCool" - or Jim Dooley, if that was his real name. He'd said Woodbody was either going to telephone him or -
"Do you have some special e-mail account?" she asked, interrupting Woodbody in midflow. "He said you were going to e-mail him in some special way and tell him when you'd gotten what you wanted. So where is it? Your University office? An internet cafe?"
"No!" Woodbody nearly wailed. "Listen to me - of course I have an e-mail address at Pitt, but I never gave it to Dooley! It would have been insane! I have two grad students who regularly access the mail there, not to mention the English Department secretary!"
"And at home?"
"I gave him my home e-mail address, yes, but he's never used it."
"What about the phone number you have for him?"
There was a moment of silence on the line, and when Woodbody spoke again, he sounded honestly puzzled. This scared her worse still. She looked at the wide living room window and saw that the sky in the northeast was turning lavender. It would soon be night. She had an idea this might be a long one.
"Phone number?" Woodbody said. "He never gave me a phone number. Just an e-mail address that worked twice, then quit.
He was either lying or fantasizing."
"Which do you think it was?"
Woodbody nearly whispered, "I don't know."
Lisey thought this was Woodbody's chickenshit way of trying not to admit what he really thought: that Dooley was crazy. "Hold on a minute." She started to put the handset down on the sofa, then thought better of it. "You better be there when I get back, Professor."
There was no need to use one of the stove-burners, after all. There were long decorative matches for lighting the fireplace in a brass cuspidor next to the fire-tools. She picked a Salem Light up off the floor and scraped one of the long matches alight on a hearthstone. She took one of the ceramic vases for a temporary ashtray, laying aside the flowers that had been in it and reflecting (not for the first time, either) that smoking was one of the world's nastier habits. Then she went back to the sofa, sat down, and picked up the phone. "Tell me what happened."
"Mrs. Landon, my wife and I have plans to go out - "
"Your plans have changed," Lisey said. "Start at the beginning."