‘Got your hot water okay?’
‘All that’s fine, but there is one problem.’
I stopped. How did you tell your caretaker you thought your house was haunted? Probably there was no good way; probably the best thing to do was to go at it head-on. I had questions, but I didn’t want just to nibble around the edges of the subject and be coy. For one thing, Bill would sense it.
He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn’t stupid.
‘What’s on your mind, Mike? Shoot.’
‘I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but — ‘
He smiled in the way of a man who suddenly understands and held up his hand. ‘Guess maybe I know already.’
‘You do?’ I felt an enormous sense of relief and I could hardly wait to find out what he had experienced in Sara, perhaps while checking for dead lightbulbs or making sure the roof was holding the snow all right. ‘What did you hear?’
‘Mostly what Royce Merrill and Dickie Brooks have been telling,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, I don’t know much. Me and mother’s been in Virginia, remember. Only got back last night around eight o’clock. Still, it’s the big topic down to the store.’
For a moment I remained so fixed on Sara Laughs that I had no idea what he was talking about.
All I could think was that folks were gossiping about the strange noises in my house. Then the name Royce Merrill clicked and everything else clicked with it. Merrill was the elderly possum with the gold-headed cane and the salacious wink. Old Four-Teeth. My caretaker wasn’t talking about ghostly noises; he was talking about Mattie Devore.
‘Let’s get you a cup of coffee,’ I said. ‘I need you to tell me what I’m stepping in here.’
When we were seated on the deck, me with fresh coffee and Bill with a cup of tea (‘Coffee burns me at both ends these days,’ he said), I asked him first to tell me the Royce Merrill-Dickie Brooks version of my encounter with Mattie and Kyra.
It turned out to be better than I had expected. Both old men had seen me standing at the side of the road with the little girl in my arms, and they had observed my Chevy parked halfway into the ditch with the driver’s-side door open, but apparently neither of them had seen Kyra using the white line of Route 68 as a tightrope. As if to compensate for this, however, Royce claimed that Mattie had given me a big my hero hug and a kiss on the mouth.
‘Did he get the part about how I grabbed her by the ass and slipped her some tongue?’ I asked.
Bill grinned. ‘Royce’s imagination ain’t stretched that far since he was fifty or so, and that was forty or more year ago.’
‘I never touched her.’ Well . . . there had been that moment when the back of my hand went sliding along the curve of her breast, but that had been inadvertent, whatever the young lady herself might think about it.
‘Shite, you don’t need to tell me that,’ he said. ‘ But . . . ‘
He said that but the way my mother always had, letting it trail off on its own, like the tail of some ill-omened kite.
‘But what?’
‘You’d do well to keep your distance from her,’ he said. ‘She’s nice enough — almost a town girl, don’t you know — but she’s trouble.’ He paused. ‘No, that ain’t quite fair to her. She’s in trouble.’
‘The old man wants custody of the baby, doesn’t he?’
Bill set his teacup down on the deck rail and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. Reflections from the lake ran up his cheek in ripples, giving him an exotic look. ‘How’d you know?’
‘Guesswork, but of the educated variety. Her father-in-law called me Saturday night during the fireworks. And while he never came right out and stated his purpose, I doubt if Max Devore came all the way back to TR-90 in western Maine to repo his daughter-in-law’s Jeep and trailer. So what’s the story, Bill?’
For several moments he only looked at me. It was almost the look of a man who knows you have contracted a serious disease and isn’t sure how much he ought to tell you. Being looked at that way made me profoundly uneasy. It also made me feel that I might be putting Bill Dean on the spot.
Devore had roots here, after all. And, as much as Bill might like me, I didn’t. Jo and I were from
away. It could have been worse — it could have been Massachusetts or New York — but Derry, although in Maine, was still away.
‘Bill? I could use a little navigational help if you — ‘
‘You want to stay out of his way,’ he said. His easy smile was gone. ‘The man’s mad.’
For a moment I thought Bill only meant Devore was pissed off at me, and then I took another look at his face. No, I decided, he didn’t mean pissed off; he had used the word ‘mad’ in the most literal way.
‘Mad how?’ I asked. ‘Mad like Charles Manson? Like Hannibal Lecter? How?’
‘Say like Howard Hughes,’ he said. ‘Ever read any of the stories about him? The lengths he’d go to to get the things he wanted? It didn’t matter if it was a special kind of hot dog they only sold in L.A. or an airplane designer he wanted to steal from Lockheed or Mcdonnell-Douglas, he had to have what he wanted, and he wouldn’t rest until it was under his hand. Devore is the same way. He always was — even as a boy he was willful, according to the stories you hear in town.
‘My own dad had one he used to tell. He said little Max Devore broke into Scant Larribee’s tack-shed one winter because he wanted the Flexible Flyer Scant give his boy Scooter for Christmas.
Back around 1923, this would have been. Devore cut both his hands on broken glass, Dad said, but he got the sled. They found him near midnight, sliding down Sugar Maple Hill, holding his hands up to his chest when he went down. He’d bled all over his mittens and his snowsuit. There’s other stories you’ll hear about Maxie Devore as a kid — if you ask you’ll hear fifty different ones — and some may even be true. That one about the sled is true, though. I’d bet the farm on it. Because my father didn’t lie. It was against his religion.’
‘Baptist?’
‘Nosir, Yankee.’
‘1923 was many moons ago, Bill. Sometimes people change.’
‘Ayuh, but mostly they don’t. I haven’t seen Devore since he come back and moved into Warrington’s, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve heard things that make me think that if he has changed, it’s for the worse. He didn’t come all the way across the country ’cause he wanted a vacation. He wants the kid. To him she’s just another version of Scooter Larribee’s Flexible Flyer.
And my strong advice to you is that you don’t want to be the window-glass between him and her.’
I sipped my coffee and looked out at the lake. Bill gave me time to think, scraping one of his workboots across a splatter of birdshit on the boards while I did it. Crowshit, I reckoned; only crows crap in such long and exuberant splatters.
One thing seemed absolutely sure: Mattie Devore was roughly nine miles up Shit Creek with no paddle. I’m not the cynic I was at twenty — is anyone? — but I wasn’t naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer . . . not if Mr.
Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he’d taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so?
‘What’s the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me.’
It didn’t take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn’t to say they’re not often interesting.
Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanchfield, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanch-field missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulptruck into Kewadin Pond, his widow ‘kinda lost
heart,’ as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder.
Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh? Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rustbucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there: Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children.