‘I’m clearun the table.’
‘You can finish later. Go on outside now.’ There was a pause as she watched Ki go out the door, taking Strickland with her. Although the kid had left the trailer, Mattie still spoke in the lowered tone of someone who doesn’t want to be overheard. ‘Are you trying to scare me?’
‘No,’ I said, drawing repeated circles around the word DANGER. ‘But I want you to be careful.
Bill and Kenny may have been on Devore’s team, like Footman and Osgood. Don’t ask me why I think that might be, because I have no satisfactory answer. It’s only a feeling, but since I got back on the TR, my feelings are different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you wearing a tee-shirt with a duck on it?’
‘How do you know that? Did Ki tell you?’
‘Did she take the little stuffed dog from her Happy Meal out with her just now?’
A long pause. At last she said ‘My God’ in a voice so Low I could hardly hear it. Then again:
‘How — ‘
‘I don’t know how. I don’t know if you’re still in a . . . a bad situation, either, or why you might be, but I feel that you are. That you both are.’ I could have said more, but I was afraid she’d think I’d gone entirely off the rails.
‘He’s dead! ‘ she burst out. ‘That old man is dead! Why can’t he leave us alone?’
‘Maybe he has. Maybe I’m wrong about all this. But there’s no harm in being careful, is there?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Usually that’s true.’
‘Usually?’
‘Why don’t you come and see me, Mike? Maybe we could go to the Fair together.’
‘Maybe this fall we will. All three of us.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘In the meantime, I’m thinking about the key.’
‘Thinking is half your problem, Mike,’ she said, and laughed again. Ruefully, I thought. And I saw what she meant. What she didn’t seem to understand was that feeling was the other half. It’s a sling, and in the end I think it rocks most of us to death.
I worked for a while,’ then carried the IBM back into the house and left the manuscript on top. I was done with it, at least for the time being. No more looking for the way back through the wardrobe; no more Andy Drake and John Shackleford until this was over. And, as I dressed in long pants and a button-up shirt for the first time in what felt like weeks, it occurred to me that perhaps something — some force — had been trying to sedate me with the story I was telling. With the ability to work again. It made sense; work had always been my drug of choice, even better than booze or the Mellaril I still kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Or maybe work was only the delivery system, the hypo with all the dreamy dreams inside it. Maybe the real drug was the zone.
Being in the zone. Feeling it, you sometimes hear the basketball players say. I was in the zone and I was really feeling it.
I grabbed the keys to the Chevrolet off the counter and looked at the fridge as I did. The magnets were circled again. In the middle was a message I’d seen before, one that was now instantly understandable, thanks to the extra Magnabet letters:
help her
‘I’m doing my best,’ I said, and went out.
Three miles north on Route 68 — by then you’re on the part of it which used to be known as Castle Rock Road-there’s a greenhouse with a shop in front of it. Slips ‘n Greens, it’s called, and Jo used to spend a fair amount of time there, buying gardening supplies or just noodling with the two women who ran the place. One of them was Helen Auster, Kenny’s wife.
I pulled in there at around ten o’clock that Sunday morning (it was open, of course; during tourist season almost every Maine shopkeeper turns heathen) and parked next to a Beamer with New York plates. I paused long enough to hear the weather forecast on the radio — continued hot and humid for another forty-eight hours at least — and then got out. A woman wearing a bathing suit, a skort, and a giant yellow sunhat emerged from the shop with a bag of peat moss cradled in her arms. She gave me a little smile. I returned it with eighteen per cent interest. She was from New York, and that meant she wasn’t a Martian.
The shop was even hotter and’ damper than the white morning outside. Lila Proulx, the co-owner, was on the phone. There was a little fan beside the cash register and she was standing directly in front of it, flapping the front of her sleeveless blouse. She saw me and twiddled her fingers in a wave. I twiddled mine back, feeling like someone else. Work or no work, I was still zoning. Still feeling it.
I walked around the shop, picking up a few things almost at random, watching Lila out of the corner of my eye and waiting for her to get off the phone so I could talk to her . . . and all the time my own private hyperdrive was humming softly away. At last she hung up and I came to the counter.
‘Michael Noonan, what a sight for sore eyes you are!’ she said, and began ringing up my purchases. ‘I was awfully sorry to hear about Johanna. Got to get that right up front. Jo was a pet.’
‘Thanks, Lila.’
‘Welcome. Don’t need to say any more about it, but with a thing like that it’s best to put it right up front. I’ve always believed it, always will believe it. Right up front. Going to do a little gardening, are you?’ Gointer do a little ga’adnin, aaa you?
‘If it ever cools off.’
‘Ayuh! Isn’t it wicked?’ She flapped the top of her blouse again to show me how wicked it was, then pointed at one of my purchases. ‘Want this one in a special bag? Always safe, never sorry, that’s my motto.’
I nodded, then looked at the little blackboard tilted against the counter. FRESH BLUBERRYS, the chalked message read. THE CROPS IS IN!
‘I’ll have a pint of berries, too,’ I said. ‘As long as they’re not Friday’s. I can do better than Friday.’
She nodded vigorously, as if to say she knew damned well I could. ‘These were on the bush yest’y. That fresh enough for you?’
‘Good as gold,’ I said. ‘Blueberry’s the name of Kenny’s dog, isn’t it?’
‘Ain’t he a funny one? God, I love a big dog, if he’s behaved.’ She turned, got a pint of berries from her little fridge, and put them in another bag for me.
‘Where’s Helen?’ I asked. ‘Day off?.’
‘Not her,’ Lila said. ‘If she’s in town, you can’t get her out of this place ‘less you beat her with a stick. She and Kenny and the kids went down Taxachusetts. Them and her brother’s family club together and get a seaside cottage two weeks every summer. They all went. Old Blueberry, he’ll
chase seagulls until he drops.’ She laughed — it was a loud and hearty one. It made me think of Sara Tidwell. Or maybe it was the way Lila looked at me as she did it. There was no laughter in her eyes. They were small and considering, coldly curious.
Would you for Christ’s sake quit it? I told myself. They can’t all be in on it together, Mike!
Couldn’t they, though? There is such a thing as town consciousness — anyone who doubts it has never been to a New England town meeting. Where there’s a consciousness, is there not likely to be a subconscious? And if Kyra and I were doing the old mind-meld thing, could not other people in TR-90 also be doing it, perhaps without even knowing it? We all shared the same air and land; we shared the lake and the aquifer which lay below everything, buried water tasting of rock and minerals. We shared The Street as well, that place where good pups and vile dogs could walk side-by-side.
As I started out with my purchases in a cloth carry-handle bag, Lila said: ‘What a shame about Royce Merrill. Did you hear?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Fell down his cellar stairs yest’y evening. What a man his age was doing going down such a steep flight of steps is beyond me, but I suppose once you get to his age, you have your own reasons for doing things.’
Is he dead? I started to ask, then rephrased. It wasn’t the way the question was expressed on the TR. ‘Did he pass?’
‘Not yet. Motton Rescue took him to Castle County General. He’s in a coma.’ Comber, she said it.