No response, and yet I had a sense that my visitor was still there. Somewhere.
‘I hope I didn’t offend you by turning on the light,’ I said, and now I did feel slightly odd, standing on my cellar stairs and talking out loud, sermonizing to the spiders. ‘I wanted to see you if I could.’ I had no idea if that was true or not.
Suddenly — so suddenly I almost lost my balance and tumbled down the stairs — I whirled around, convinced the shroud-creature was behind me, that it had been the thing knocking, it, no polite M. R. James ghost but a horror from around the rim of the universe.
There was nothing.
I turned around again, took two or three deep, steadying breaths, and then went the rest of the way down the cellar stairs. Beneath them was a perfectly serviceable canoe, complete with paddle.
In the corner was the gas stove we’d replaced after buying the place; also the claw-foot tub Jo had wanted (over my objections) to turn into a planter. I found a trunk filled with vaguely recalled table-linen, a box of mildewy cassette tapes (groups like the Delfonics, Funkadelic, and. 38
Special), several cartons of old dishes. There was a life down here, but ultimately not a very interesting one. Unlike the life I’d sensed in Jo’s studio, this one hadn’t been cut short but evolved out of, shed like old skin, and that was all right. Was, in fact, the natural order of things.
There was a photo album on a shelf of knickknacks and I took it down, both curious and wary.
No bombshells this time, however; nearly all the pix were landscape shots of Sara Laughs as it had been when we bought it. I found a picture of Jo in bellbottoms, though (her hair parted in the middle and white lipstick on her mouth), and one of Michael Noonan wearing a flowered shirt and muttonchop sideburns that made me cringe (the bachelor Mike in the photo was a Barry White kind of guy I didn’t want to recognize and yet did).
I found Jo’s old broken treadmill, a rake I’d want if I was still around here come fall, a snowblower I’d want even more if I was around come winter, and several cans of paint. What I didn’t find was any plastic owls. My insulation-thumping friend had been right.
Upstairs the telephone started ringing.
I hurried to answer it, going out through the cellar door and then reaching back in to flick off the lightswitch. This amused me and at the same time seemed like perfectly normal behavior . . . just as being careful not to step on sidewalk cracks had seemed like perfectly normal behavior to me when I was a kid. And even if it wasn’t normal, what did it matter? I’d only been back at Sara for three days, but already I’d postulated Noonan’s First Law of Eccentricity: when you’re on your own, strange behavior really doesn’t seem strange at all.
I snagged the cordless. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Mike. It’s Ward.’
‘That was quick.’
‘The file-room’s just a short walk down the hall,’ he said. ‘Easy as pie. There’s only one thing on Jo’s calendar for the second week of November in 1993. It says ‘S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.’
That’s on Tuesday the sixteenth. Does it help?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Ward. It helps a lot.’
I broke the connection and put the phone back in its cradle. Yes, it helped. S-Ks of Maine was Soup Kitchens of Maine. Jo had been on their board of directors from 1992 until her death. Freep was Freeport. It must have been a board meeting. They had probably discussed plans for feeding the homeless on Thanksgiving . . . and then Jo had driven the seventy or so miles to the TR in order to take delivery of two plastic owls. It didn’t answer all the questions, but aren’t there always questions in the wake of a loved one’s death? And no statute of limitations on when they come up.
The UFO voice spoke up then. While you’re right here by the phone, it said, why not call Bonnie Amudson? Say hi, see how she’s doing?
Jo had been on four different boards during the nineties, all of them doing charitable work. Her friend Bonnie had persuaded her onto the Soup Kitchens board when a seat fell vacant. They had gone to a lot of the meetings together. Not the one in November of 1993, presumably, and Bonnie could hardly be expected to remember that one particular meeting almost five years later . . . but if she’d saved her old minutes-of-the-meeting sheets . . .
Exactly what the fuck was I thinking of? Calling Bonnie, making nice, then asking her to check her December 1993 minutes? Was I going to ask her if the attendance report had my wife absent from the November meeting? Was I going to ask if maybe Jo had seemed different that last year of her life? And when Bonnie asked me why I wanted to know, what would I say?
Give me that, Jo had snarled in my dream of her. In the dream she hadn’t looked like Jo at all, she’d looked like some other woman, maybe like the one in the Book of Proverbs, the strange woman whose lips were as honey but whose heart was full of gall and wormwood. A strange woman with fingers as cold as twigs after a frost. Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.
I went to the cellar door and touched the knob. I turned it . . . then let it go. I didn’t want to look down there into the dark, didn’t want to risk the chance that something might start thumping again.
It was better to leave that door shut. What I wanted was something cold to drink. I went into the kitchen, reached for the fridge door, then stopped. The magnets were back in a circle again, but this time four letters and one number had been pulled into the center and lined up there. They spelled a single lower-case word:
hello
There was something here. Even back in broad daylight I had no doubt of that. I’d asked if it was safe for me to be here and had received a mixed message . . . but that didn’t matter. If I left Sara now, there was nowhere to go. I had a key to the house in Derry, but matters had to be resolved here. I knew that, too.
‘Hello,’ I said, and opened the fridge to get a soda. ‘Whoever or whatever you are, hello.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke in the early hours of the following morning convinced that there was someone in the north bedroom with me. I sat up against the pillows, rubbed my eyes, and saw a dark, shouldery shape standing between me and the window.
‘Who are you?’ I asked, thinking that it wouldn’t reply in words; it would, instead, thump on the wall. Once for yes, twice for no — what’s on your mind, Houdini? But the figure standing by the window made no reply at all. I groped up, found the string hanging from the light over the bed, and yanked it. My mouth was turned down in a grimace, my midsection tensed so tight it felt as if bullets would have bounced off.
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘Fuck me til I cry.’
Dangling from a hanger I’d hooked over the curtain rod was my old suede jacket. I’d parked it there while unpacking and had then forgotten to store it away in the closet. I tried to laugh and couldn’t. At three in the morning it just didn’t seem that funny. I turned off the light and lay back down with my eyes open, waiting for Bunter’s bell to ring or the childish sobbing to start. I was still listening when I fell asleep.
Seven hours or so later, as I was getting ready to go out to Jo’s studio and see if the plastic owls were in the storage area, where I hadn’t checked the day before, a late-model Ford rolled down my driveway and stopped nose to nose with my Chevy. I had gotten as far as the short path between the house and the studio, but now I came back. The day was hot and breathless, and I was wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off jeans and plastic flip-flops on my feet.
Jo always claimed that the Cleveland style of dressing divided itself naturally into two subgenres: Full Cleveland and Cleveland Casual. My visitor that Tuesday morning was wearing Cleveland Casual — you had your Hawaiian shirt with pineapples and monkeys, your tan slacks from Banana Republic, your white loafers. Socks are optional, but white footgear is a necessary part of the Cleveland look, as is at least one piece of gaudy gold jewelry. This fellow was totally okay in the latter department: he had a Rolex on one wrist and a gold-link chain around his neck.