‘Some will. Royce Merrill will. Dickie Brooks will. Old ladies in pants, Yvette calls em.’
‘Well fuck them,’ I said. ‘Every last one.’
‘I understand how you feel, but tell her not to shove it in folks’ faces,’ he almost pleaded. ‘Do that much, Mike. It wouldn’t kill her to drag her grill around back of her trailer, would it? At least with it there, folks lookin out from the store or the garage wouldn’t see nothing but the smoke.’
‘I’ll pass on the message. And if I make the party, I’ll put the barbecue around back myself.’
‘You’d do well to stay away from that girl and her child,’ Bill said. ‘You can tell me it’s none of my business, but I’m talkin to you like a Dutch uncle, tellin you for your own good.’
I had a flash of my dream then. The slick, exquisite tightness as I slipped inside her. The little breasts with their hard nipples. Her voice in the darkness, telling me to do what I wanted. My body responded almost instantly. ‘I know you are,’ I said.
‘All right.’ He sounded relieved that I wasn’t going to scold him — take him to school, he would have said. ‘I’ll let you go n have your breakfast.’
‘I appreciate you calling.’
‘Almost didn’t. Yvette talked me into it. She said, “You always liked Mike and Jo Noonan best of all the ones you did for. Don’t you get in bad with him now that he’s back home.”
‘Tell her I appreciate it,’ I said.
I hung up the phone and looked at it thoughtfully. We seemed to be on good terms again . . . but I didn’t think we were exactly friends. Certainly not the way we had been. That had changed when I
realized Bill was lying to me about some things and holding back about others; it had also changed when I realized what he had almost called Sara and the Red-Tops.
You can’t condemn a manor what may only be a figment of your own imagination.
True, and I’d try not to do it . . . but I knew what I knew.
I went into the living room, snapped on the TV, then snapped it off again. My satellite dish got fifty or sixty different channels, and not a one of them local. There was a portable TV in the kitchen, however, and if I dipped its rabbit-ears toward the lake I’d be able to get WMTW, the ABC
affiliate in western Maine.
I snatched up Rogette’s note, went into the kitchen, and turned on the little Sony tucked under the cabinets with the coffee-maker. Good Morning America was on, but they would be breaking for the local news soon. In the meantime I scanned the note, this time concentrating on the mode of expression rather than the message, which had taken all of my attention the night before.
Hopes to return to California by private jet very soon, she had written.
Has business which can be put off no longer, she had written.
If you promise to let him rest in peace, she had written.
It was a goddam suicide note.
‘You knew,’ I said, rubbing my thumb over the raised letters of her name. ‘You knew when you wrote this, and probably when you were chucking rocks at me. But why?’
Custody has its responsibilities, she had written. Don’t forget he said so.
But the custody business was over, right? Not even a judge that was bought and paid for could award custody to a dead man.
GMA finally gave way to the local report, where Max Devore’s suicide was the leader. The TV
picture was snowy, but I could see the maroon sofa Bill had mentioned, and Rogette Whitmore sitting on it with her hands folded composedly in her lap. I thought one of the deputies in the background was George Footman, although the snow was too heavy for me to be completely sure.
Mr. Devore had spoken frequently over the last eight months of ending his life, Whitmore said.
He had been very unwell. He had asked her to come out with him the previous evening, and she realized now that he had wanted to look at one final sunset. It had been a glorious one, too, she added. I could have corroborated that; I remembered the sunset very well, having almost drowned by its light.
Rogette was reading Devore’s statement when my phone rang again. It was Mattie, and she was crying in hard gusts.
‘The news,’ she said, ‘Mike, did you see . . . do you know . . . ‘
At first that was all she could manage that was coherent. I told her I did know, Bill Dean had called me and then I’d caught some of it on the local news. She tried to reply and couldn’t speak.
Guilt, relief, horror, even hilarity — I heard all those things in her crying. I asked where Ki was. I could sympathize with how Mattie felt — until turning on the news this morning she’d believed old Max Devore was her bitterest enemy — but I didn’t like the idea of a three-year-old girl watching her mom fall apart.
‘Out back,’ she managed. ‘She’s had her breakfast. Now she’s having a d-doll p-p-p . . . doll pi-p-pic — ‘
‘Doll picnic. Yes. Good. Let it go, then. All of it.
Let it out.’ She cried for two minutes at least, maybe longer. I stood with the telephone pressed to my ear, sweating in the July heat, trying to be patient.
I’m going to give you one chance to save your soul, Devore had told me, but this morning he was dead and his soul was wherever it was. He was dead, Mattie was free, I was writing. Life should have felt wonderful, but it didn’t.
At last she began to get her control back. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t cried like that — really, really cried
— since Lance died.’
‘It’s understandable and you’re allowed.’
‘Come to lunch,’ she said. ‘Come to lunch please, Mike. Ki’s going to spend the afternoon with a friend she met at Vacation Bible School, and we can talk. I need to talk to someone . . . God, my head is spinning. Please say you’ll come.’
‘I’d love to, but it’s a bad idea. Especially with Ki gone.’
I gave her an edited version of my conversation with Bill Dean. She listened carefully. I thought there might be an angry outburst when I finished, but I’d forgotten one simple fact: Mattie Stanchfield Devore had lived around here all her life. She knew how things worked.
‘I understand that things will heal quicker if I keep my eyes down, my mouth shut, and my knees together,’ she said, ‘and I’ll do my best to go along, but diplomacy only stretches so far. That old man was trying to take my daughter away, don’t they realize that down at the goddam general store?’
‘ I realize it.’
‘I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’
‘What if we had an early supper on the Castle Rock common? Same place as Friday? Say five-ish?’
‘I’d have to bring Ki — ‘
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Bring her. Tell her I know “Hansel and Gretel” by heart and am willing to share. Will you call John in Philly? Give him the details?’
‘Yes. I’ll wait another hour or so. God, I’m so happy. I know that’s wrong, but I’m so happy I could burst!’
‘That makes two of us.’ There was a pause on the other end. I heard a long, watery intake of breath. ‘Mattie? All right?’
‘Yes, but how do you tell a three-year-old her grandfather died?’
Tell her the old fuck slipped and fell headfirst into a Glad Bag, I thought, then pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to stifle a spate of lunatic cackles.
‘I don’t know, but you’ll have to do it as soon as she comes in.’
‘I will? Why?’
‘Because she’s going to see you. She’s going to see your face.’
I lasted exactly two hours in the upstairs study, and then the heat drove me out — the thermometer on the stoop read ninety-five degrees at ten o’clock. I guessed it might be five degrees warmer on the second floor.
Hoping I wasn’t making a mistake, I unplugged the IBM and carried it downstairs. I was working without a shirt, and as I crossed the living room, the back of the typewriter slipped in the sweat coating my midriff and I almost dropped the outdated sonofabitch on my toes. That made me think of my ankle, the one I’d hurt when I fell into the lake, and I set the typewriter aside to look at it. It was colorful, black and purple and reddish at the edges, but not terribly inflated. I guessed my immersion in the cool water had helped keep the swelling down.