‘No.’
‘Your unlisted number.’
‘No.’
‘And while he said he was Maxwell Devore, he could have been anyone, right?’
‘Right.’
‘He could have been the Shah of Iran.’
‘No, the Shah’s dead.’
‘The Shah’s out, then. But he could have been a nosy neighbor . . . or a prankster.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you said what you said with all those possibilities in mind. But now that you’re part of an official court proceeding, you’re telling the whole truth and nothing but.’
‘You bet.’ That good my-lawyer feeling had deserted me for a bit, but it was back full-force now.
‘You can’t do better than the truth, Mike,’ he said solemnly. ‘Except maybe in a few cases, and this isn’t one. Are we clear on that?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, we’re done. I want to hear from either you or Mattie Devore around elevenish tomorrow. It ought to be her.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘If she really balks, you know what to do, don’t you?’
‘I think so. Thanks, John.’
‘One way or another, we’ll talk very soon,’ he said, and hung up.
I sat where I was for awhile. Once I pushed the button which opened the line on the cordless phone, then pushed it again to close it. I had to talk to Mattie, but I wasn’t quite ready yet. I decided to take a walk instead.
If she really balks, you know what to do, don’t you?
Of course.
Remind her that she couldn’t afford to be proud. That she couldn’t afford to go all Yankee, refusing charity from Michael Noonan, author of Being Two, The Red-Shirt Man, and the soon-to-be-published Helen’s Promise. Remind her that she could have her pride or her daughter, but likely not both.
Hey, Mattie, pick one.
I walked almost to the end of the lane, stopping at Tidwell’s Meadow with its pretty view down to the cup of the lake and across to the White Mountains. The water dreamed under a hazy sky, looking gray when you tipped your head one way, blue when you tipped it the other. That sense of mystery was very much with me. That sense of Manderley.
Over forty black people had settled here at the turn of the century — lit here for awhile, anyway
— according to Marie Hingerman (also according to A History of Castle County and Castle Rock, a weighty tome published in 1977, the county’s bicentennial year). Pretty special black people, too: most of them related, most of them talented, most of them part of a musical group which had first been called The Red-Top Boys and then Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys. They had bought the meadow and a good-sized tract of lakeside land from a man named Douglas Day. The money had been saved up over a period of ten years, according to Sonny Tidwell, who did the dickering (as a Red-Top, Son Tidwell had played what was then known as ‘chickenscratch guitar’).
There had been a vast uproar about it in town, and even a meeting to protest ‘the advent of these darkies, which come in a Horde.’ Things had settled down and turned out okay, as things have a way of doing, more often than not. The shanty town most locals had expected on Day’s Hill (for so Tidwell’s Meadow was called in 1900, when Son Tidwell bought the land on behalf of his extensive clan) had never appeared. Instead, a number of neat white cabins sprang up, surrounding a larger building that might have been intended as a group meeting place, a rehearsal area, or perhaps, at some point, a performance hall.
Sara and the Red-Top Boys (sometimes there was a Red-Top Girl in there, as well; membership in the band was fluid, changing with every performance) played around western Maine for over a year, maybe closer to two years. In towns all up and down the Western Line — Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Morton, Fryeburg — you’ll still come across their old show-posters at barn bazaars and junkatoriums. Sara and the Red-Tops were great favorites on the circuit, and they got along all right at home on the TR, too, which never surprised me. At the end of the day Robert Frost — that utilitarian and often unpleasant poet — was right: in the northeastern three we really do believe that good fences make good neighbors. We squawk and then keep a miserly peace, the kind with gimlet eyes and a tucked-down mouth. ‘They pay their bills,’ we say. ‘I ain’t never had to shoot one a their dogs,’ we say. ‘They keep themselves to themselves,’ we say, as if isolation were a virtue. And, of course, the defining virtue: ‘They don’t take charity.’
And at some point, Sara Tidwell became Sara Laughs.
In the end, though, TR-90 mustn’t have been what they wanted, because after playing a county fair or two in the late summer of 1901, the clan moved on. Their neat little cabins provided summer-rental income for the Day family until 1933, when they burned in the summer fires which charred the east and north sides of the lake. End of story.
Except for her music, that was. Her music had lived.
I got up from the rock I had been sitting on, stretched my arms and my back, and walked back down the lane, singing one of her songs as I went.
CHAPTER TWELVE
During my hike back down the lane to the house, I tried to think about nothing at all. My first editor used to say that eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That’s blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos.
Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.
When I tried to call Mattie Devore, an extremely peculiar thing happened — one that had nothing at all ro do with spooks, as far as I could tell. Instead of an open-hum line when I pushed the cordless’s on button, I got silence. Then, just as I was thinking I must have left the phone in the north bedroom off the hook, I realized it wasn’t complete silence. Distant as a radio transmission from deep space, cheerful and quacky as an animated duck, some guy with a fair amount of Brooklyn in his voice was singing: ‘He followed her to school one day, school one day, school one day. Followed her to school one day, which was against the rule . . . ‘
I opened my mouth to ask who was there, but before I could, a woman’s voice said ‘Hello?’ She sounded perplexed and doubtful.
‘Mattie?’ In my confusion it never occurred to me to call her something more formal, like Ms. or Mrs. Devore. Nor did it seem odd that I should know who it was, based on a single word, even though our only previous conversation had been relatively brief. Maybe the guys in the basement recognized the background music and made the connection to Kyra.
‘Mr. Noonan?’ She sounded more bewildered than ever. ‘The phone never even rang!’
‘I must have picked mine up just as your call was going through,’ I said. ‘That happens from time to time.’ But how many times, I wondered, did it happen when the person calling you was the one you yourself had been planning to call? Maybe quite often, actually.
Telepathy or coincidence? Live or Memorex? Either way, it seemed almost magical. I looked across the long, low living room, into the glassy eyes of Bunter the moose, and thought: Yes, but maybe this is a magic place now.
‘I suppose,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I apologize about calling in the first place — it’s a presumption.
Your number’s unlisted, I know.’
Oh, don’t worry about that, I thought. Everyone’s got this old number by now. In fact, I’m thinking about putting it in the Yellow Pages.
‘I got it from your file at the library,’ she went on, sounding embarrassed. ‘That’s where I work.’
In the background, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ had given way to ‘The Farmer in the Dell.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ I said.
‘Especially since you’re the person I was picking up the phone to call.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Ladies first.’
She gave a brief, nervous laugh. ‘I wanted to invite you to dinner. That is, Ki and I want to invite you to dinner. I should have done it before now. You were awfully good to us the other day. Will you come?’
‘Yes,’ I said with no hesitation at all. ‘With thanks. We’ve got some things to talk about, anyway.’
There was a pause. In the background, the mouse was taking the cheese. As a kid I used to think all these things happened in a vast gray factory called The Hi-Ho Dairy-O.