‘Don’t you ever come back here, you town bastard!’ Yvette Dean cried across the sweltering dooryard. ‘You’ve broken his heart! Don’t you ever come back! Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever! ‘
‘Please,’ Mrs. M. said. ‘Don’t ask me any more questions, Mike. I can’t afford to get in Bill Dean’s bad books, any more’n my ma could afford to get into Normal Auster’s or Fred Dean’s.’
I shifted the phone to my other ear. ‘All I want to know is — ‘
‘In this part of the world caretakers pretty well run the whole show. If they say to a summer fella that he should hire this carpenter or that ‘lectrician, why, that’s who the summer fella hires. Or if a caretaker says this one should be fired because he ain’t proving reliable, he is fired. Or she. Because what goes once for plumbers and landscapers and ‘lectricians has always gone twice for housekeepers. If you want to be recommended — and stay recommended — you have to keep on the sunny side of people like Fred and Bill Dean, or Normal and Kenny Auster. Don’t you see?’ She was almost pleading. ‘When Bill found out I told you about what Normal Auster did to Kerry, oooo he was so mad at me.’
‘Kenny Auster’s brother — the one Normal drowned under the pump — his name was Kerry?’
‘Ahuh. I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, think it’s cute. Why, I went to school with a brother and sister named Roland and Rolanda Therriault, I think Roland’s in Manchester now, and Rolanda married that boy from — ‘
‘Brenda, just answer one question. I’ll never tell. Please?’
I waited, my breath held, for the click that would come when she put her telephone back in its cradle. Instead, she spoke three words in a soft, almost regretful voice. ‘What is it?’
‘Who was Carla Dean?’
I waited through another long pause, my hand playing with the ribbon that had come off Ki’s turn-of-the-century straw hat.
‘You dassn’t tell anyone I told you anything,’ she said at last.
‘I won’t.’
‘Carla was Bill’s twin sister. She died sixty-five years ago, during the time of the fires.’ The fires Bill claimed had been set by Ki’s grandfather — his going-away present to the TR. ‘I don’t know just how it happened. Bill never talks about it. If you tell him I told you, I’ll never make another bed in the TR. He’ll see to it.’ Then, in a hopeless voice, she said: ‘He may know anyway.’
Based on my own experiences and surmises, I guessed she might be right about that. But even if she was, she’d have a check from me every month for the rest of her working life. I had no intention of telling her that over the telephone, though — it would scald her Yankee soul. Instead I thanked her, assured her again of my discretion, and hung up.
I sat at the table for a moment, staring blankly at Bunter, then said: ‘Who’s here?’
No answer.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Don’t be shy. Let’s go nineteen or ninety-two down. Barring that, let’s talk.’
Still no answer. Not so much as a shiver of the bell around the stuffed moose’s neck. I spied the scribble of notes I’d made while talking to Jo’s brother and drew them toward me. I had put Kia, Kyra, Kito, and Carla in a box. Now I scribbled out the bottom line of that box and added the name Kerry to the list. I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, Mrs. M. had said. They think it’s cute.
I didn’t think it was cute; I thought it was creepy.
It occurred to me that at least two of these soundalikes had drowned — Kerry Auster under a pump, Kia Noonan in her mother’s dying body when she wasn’t much bigger than a sunflower seed.
And I had seen the ghost of a third drowned child in the lake. Kito? Was that one Kito? Or was Kito the one who had died of blood-poisoning?
They name their kids alike, they think it’s cute.
How many soundalike kids had there been to start with? How many were left? I thought the answer to the first question didn’t matter, and that I knew the answer to the second one already.
This river has almost come to the sea, Bill had said.
Carla, Kerry, Kito, Kia . . . all gone. Only Kyra Devore was left.
I got up so fast and hard that I knocked over my chair. The clatter in the silence made me cry out.
I was leaving, and right now. No more telephone calls, no more playing Andy Drake, Private Detective, no more depositions or half-assed wooings of the lady fair. I should have followed my instincts and gotten the fuck out of Dodge that first night. Well, I’d go now, just get in the Chevy and haul ass for Der —
Bunter’s bell jangled furiously. I turned and saw it bouncing around his neck as if batted to and fro by a hand I couldn’t see. The sliding door giving on the deck began to fly open and clap shut like something hooked to a pulley. The book of Tough Stuff crossword puzzles on the end-table and
the DSS program guide blew open, their pages riffling. There was a series of rattling thuds across the floor, as if something enormous were crawling rapidly toward me, pounding its fists as it came.
A draft — not cold but warm, like the rush of air produced by a subway train on a summer night
— buffeted past me. In it I heard a strange voice which seemed to be saying Bye-BY, bye-BY, bye-BY, as if wishing me a good trip home. Then, as it dawned on me that the voice was actually saying Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, something struck me and knocked me violently forward. It felt like a large soft fist. I buckled over the table, clawing at it to stay up, overturning the lazy susan with the salt and pepper shakers on it, the napkin holder, the little vase Mrs. M. had filled with daisies. The vase rolled off the table and shattered. The kitchen TV blared on, some politician talking about how inflation was on the march again. The CD player started up, drowning out the politician; it was the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Sara Tidwell’s ‘I Regret You, Baby.’ Upstairs, one smoke alarm went off, then another, then a third. They were joined a moment later by the warble-whoop of the Chevy’s car alarm. The whole world was cacophony.
Something hot and pillowy seized my wrist. My hand shot forward like a piston and slammed down on the steno pad. I watched as it pawed clumsily to a blank page, then seized the pencil which lay nearby. I gripped it like a dagger and then something wrote with it, not guiding my hand but raping it. The hand moved slowly at first, almost blindly, then picked up speed until it was flying, almost tearing through the sheet:
I had almost reached the bottom of the page when the cold descended again, that outer cold that was like sleet in January, chilling my skin and crackling the snot in my nose and sending two shuddery puffs of white air from my mouth. My hand clenched and the pencil snapped in two.
Behind me, Bunter’s bell rang out one final furious convulsion before falling silent. Also from behind me came a peculiar double pop, like the sound of champagne corks being drawn. Then it was over. Whatever it had been or however many they had been, it was finished. I was alone again.
I turned off the CD player just as Mick and Keith moved on to a white-boy version of Howling Wolf, then ran upstairs and pushed the reset buttons on the smoke-detectors. I leaned out the window of the big guest bedroom while I was up there, aimed the fob of my keyring down at the Chevrolet, and pushed the button on it. The alarm quit.
With the worst of the noise gone I could hear the TV cackling away in the kitchen. I went down, killed it, then froze with my hand still on the OFF button, looking at Jo’s annoying waggy-cat clock.
Its tail had finally stopped switching, and its big plastic eyes lay on the floor. They had popped right out of its head.
I went down to the Village Cafe for supper, snagging the last Sunday Telegram from the rack (COMPUTER MOGUL DEVORE DIES IN WESTERN MAINE TOWN WHERE HE GREW UP, the headline
read) before sitting down at the counter. The accompanying photo was a studio shot of Devore that looked about thirty years old. He was smiling. Most people do that quite naturally. On Devore’s face it looked like a learned skill.
I ordered the beans that were left over from Buddy Jellison’s Saturday-night beanhole supper.