Something rattled in the underbrush to my left. I turned that way, expecting to see Sara step out of the woods wearing Mattie’s dress and Mattie’s white sneakers. In this gloom, they would seem almost to float by themselves, until she got close to me . . .
There was no one there, of course, it had undoubtedly been nothing but Chuck the Woodchuck headed home after a hard day at the office, but I no longer wanted to be out here, watching as the light drained out of the day and the mist came up from the ground. I turned for home.
Instead of going into the house when I got back, I made my way along the path to Jo’s studio, where I hadn’t been since the night I had taken my IBM back in a dream. My way was lit by intermittent flashes of heat lightning.
The studio was hot but not stale. I could smell a peppery aroma that was actually pleasant, and wondered if it might be some of Jo’s herbs. There was an air conditioner out here, and it worked —
I turned it on and then just stood in front of it a little while. So much cold air on my overheated body was probably unhealthy, but it felt wonderful.
I didn’t feel very wonderful otherwise, however. I looked around with a growing sense of something too heavy to be mere sadness; it felt like despair. I think it was caused by the contrast between how little of Jo was left in Sara Laughs and how much of her was still out here. I imagined our marriage as a kind of playhouse — and isn’t that what marriage is, in large part? playing house?
— where only half the stuff was held down. Held down by little magnets or hidden cables.
Something had come along and picked up our playhouse by one corner — easiest thing in the world, and I supposed I should be grateful that the something hadn’t decided to draw back its foot and kick the poor thing all the way over. It just picked up that one corner, you see. My stuff stayed put, but all of Jo’s had slid . . .
Out of the house and down here.
‘Jo?’ I asked, and sat down in her chair. There was no answer. No thumps on the wall. No crows or owls calling from the woods. I put my hand on her desk, where the typewriter had been, and slipped my hand across it, picking up a film of dust.
‘I miss you, honey,’ I said, and began to cry.
When the tears were over — again — I wiped my face with the tail of my tee-shirt like a little kid, then just looked around. There was the picture of Sara Tidwell on her desk and a photo I didn’t remember on the wall — this latter was old, sepia-tinted, and woodsy. Its focal point was a man-high birchwood cross in a little clearing on a slope above the lake. That clearing was gone from the geography now, most likely, long since filled in by trees.
I looked at her jars of herbs and mushroom sections, her filing cabinets, her sections of afghan.
The green rag rug on the floor. The pot of pencils on the desk, pencils she had touched and used. I held one of them poised over a blank sheet of paper for a moment or two, but nothing happened. I had a sense of life in this room, and a sense of being watched . . . but not a sense of being helped.
‘I know some of it but not enough,’ I said. ‘Of all the things I don’t know, maybe the one that matters most is who wrote “help her” on the fridge. Was it you, Jo?’
No answer. I sat awhile longer — hoping against hope, I suppose — then got up, turned off the air conditioning, turned off the lights, and went back to the house, walking in soft bright stutters of unfocused lightning. I sat on the deck for a little while, watching the night. At some point I realized I’d taken the length of blue silk ribbon out of my pocket and was winding it nervously back and forth between my fingers, making half-assed cat’s cradles. Had it really come from the year 1900?
The idea seemed perfectly crazy and perfectly sane at the same time. The night hung hot and hushed. I imagined old folks all over the TR — perhaps in Motton and Harlow, too — laying out
their funeral clothes for tomorrow. In the doublewide trailer on Wasp Hill Road, Ki was sitting on the floor, watching a videotape of The Jungle Book — Baloo and Mowgli were singing ‘The Bare Necessities.’ Mattie was on the couch with her feet up, reading the new Mary Higgins Clark and singing along. Both were wearing shorty pajamas, Ki’s pink, Mattie’s white.
After a little while I lost my sense of them; it faded the way radio signals sometimes do late at night. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and crawled onto the top sheet of my unmade bed.
I fell asleep almost at once.
I woke in the middle of the night with someone running a hot finger up and down the middle of my back. I rolled over and when the lightning flashed, I saw there was a woman in bed with me. It was Sara Tidwell. She was grinning. There were no pupils in her eyes. ‘Oh sugar, I’m almost back,’
she whispered in the dark. I had a sense of her reaching out for me again, but when the next flash of lightning came, that side of the bed was empty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Inspiration isn’t always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was shaving and thinking about nothing more than remembering the beer for the party. And like the best inspirations, it came out of nowhere at all.
I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the Tough Stuff crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I’d gone first in an effort to decipher ‘go down nineteen’ and ‘go down ninety-two.’ Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did Tough Stuff have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I’d completed, I’d done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand —
I snatched it off the dining-room table. Although it covered the whole southern part of Castle County — Motton, Harlow, and Kashwakamak as well as the TR — it was pretty thin. The first thing I did was check the white pages to see if there were at least ninety-two. There were. The Y’s and Z’s finished up on page ninety-seven.
This was the answer. Had to be.
‘I got it, didn’t I?’ I asked Bunter. ‘This is it.’
Nothing. Not even a tinkle from the bell.
‘Fuck you — what does a stuffed moosehead know about a telephone book?’
Go down nineteen. I turned to page nineteen of the telephone book, where the letter F was prominently showcased. I began to slip my finger down the first column and as it went, my excitement faded. The nineteenth name on page nineteen was Harold Failles. It meant nothing to me. There were also Feltons and Fenners, a Filkersham and several Finneys, half a dozen Flahertys and more Fosses than you could shake a stick at. The last name on page nineteen was Framingham.
It also meant nothing to me, but —
Framingham, Kenneth P.
I stared at that for a moment. A realization began to dawn. It had nothing to do with the refrigerator messages.
You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, I thought. This is like when you buy a blue Buick
—
‘You see blue Buicks everywhere,’ I said. ‘Practically got to kick em out of your way. Yeah, that’s it.’ But my hands were shaking as I turned to page ninety-two.
Here were the T’s of southern Castle County, along with a few U’s like Alton Ubeck and Catherine Udell just to round things out. I didn’t bother checking the ninety-second entry on the page; the phone book wasn’t the key to the magnetic crosspatches after all. It did, however, suggest something enormous. I closed the book, just held it in my hands for a moment (happy folks with blueberry rakes on the front cover), then opened it at random, this time to the M’s. And once you knew what you were looking for, it jumped right out at you.