‘My house is haunted,’ I said.
He stopped, back to me, shoulders hunched as if to absorb a blow. Then, slowly, he turned back.
‘Sara Laughs has always been haunted, Mike. You’ve stirred em up. P’raps you should go back to Derry and let em settle. That might be the best thing.’ He paused, as if replaying this last to see if he agreed with it, then nodded. He nodded as slowly as he had turned. ‘Ayuh, that might be best all around.’
When I got back to Sara I called Ward Hankins. Then I finally made that call to Bonnie Amudson.
Part of me was rooting for her not to be in at the travel agency in Augusta she co-owned, but she was. Halfway through my talk with her, the fax began to print out xeroxed pages from Jo’s appointment calendars. On the first one Ward had scrawled, ‘Hope this helps.’
I didn’t rehearse what I was going to say to Bonnie; I felt that to do so would be a recipe for disaster. I told her that Jo had been writing something — maybe an article, maybe a series of them
— about the township where our summerhouse was located, and that some of the locals had apparently been cheesed off by her curiosity. Some still were. Had she talked to Bonnie? Perhaps showed her an early draft?
‘No, huh-uh.’ Bonnie sounded honestly surprised. ‘She used to show me her photos, and more herb samples than I honestly cared to see, but she never showed me anything she was writing. In fact, I remember her once saying that she’d decided to leave the writing to you and just — ‘
‘ — take a little taste of everything else, right?’
‘Yes.’
I thought this was a good place to end the conversation, but the guys in the basement seemed to have other ideas. ‘Was she seeing anyone, Bonnie?’
Silence from the other end. With a hand that seemed at least four miles down my arm, I plucked the fax sheets out of the basket. Ten of them — November of 1993 to August of 1994. Jottings
everywhere in Jo’s neat hand. Had we even had a fax before she died? I couldn’t remember. There was so fucking much I couldn’t remember.
‘Bonnie? If you know something, please tell me. Jo’s dead, but I’m not. I can forgive her if I have to, but I can’t forgive what I don’t underst — ‘
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and gave a nervous little laugh. ‘It’s just that I didn’t understand at first.
“Seeing anyone,” that was just so . . . so foreign to Jo . . . the Jo I knew . . . that I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about. I thought maybe you meant a shrink, but you didn’t, did you? You meant seeing someone like seeing a guy. A boyfriend.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ Thumbing through the faxed calendar sheets now, my hand not quite back to its proper distance from my eyes but getting there, getting there. I felt relief at the honest bewilderment in Bonnie’s voice, but not as much as I’d expected. Because I’d known. I hadn’t even needed the woman in the old Perry Mason episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all. Jo.
‘Mike,’ Bonnie was saying, very softly, as if I might be crazy, ‘she loved you. She loved you.
‘Yes. I suppose she did.’ The calendar pages showed how busy my wife had been. How productive. S-Ks of Maine . . . the soup kitchens. WomShel, a county-to-county network of shelters for battered women. TeenShel. Friends of Me. Libes. She had been at two or three meetings a month — two or three a week at some points — and I’d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. ‘I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn’t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meetings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries?’
Silence from the other end.
‘Bonnie?’
I took the phone away from my ear to see if the red LOW BATTERY light was on, and it squawked my name. I put it back.
‘Bonnie, what is it?’
‘There were no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there were no long drives. She quit.’
I thumbed through the fax-sheets again. Meetings noted everywhere in Jo’s neat hand, Soup Kitchens of Maine among them.
‘I don’t understand. She quit the Soup Kitchens board?’
Another moment of silence. Then, speaking carefully: ‘No, Mike. She quit all of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of ’93 — her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries . . . she resigned in October or November of 1993.’
Meetings noted on all the sheets Ward had sent me. Dozens of them. Meetings in 1993, meetings in 1994. Meetings of boards to which she’d no longer belonged. She had been down here. On all those supposed meeting-days, Jo had been on the TR. I would have bet my life on it.
But why?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Devore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn’t have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained.
From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.
I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon — my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street — I’d go as far as I could and still be assured of getting home by dark, and as I went I’d think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I’d think about them the way I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.
I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was — just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn’t exactly young, but I could go north, all right.
For awhile, at least.
Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written . . . for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and . . .
help im drown
The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness passed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so blighted, in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming. No, I tried to say, but the word wouldn’t come out.
My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands. They were holding me down.
‘Won’t it stop doing that?’ someone asked — almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. ‘Won’t it ever stop doing that?’
What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head. They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture . . . or inside a Japanese lantern.