Bag of Bones CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The resonance of the ph peerless or, to a greater extent accurately, the way I received the ringing of the ph champion(a) was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the drum of the darkened IBM Selectric. It griped to come from far away at first, then to nest handle a whistling train glide path d avouch on a crossing. there was no perpetuation in my office or Jos the upstairs ph matchless, an oldish-fashioned rotary-dial, was on a table in the student residence mingled with them in what Jo use to c every last(predicate) no- publics-land. The temperature unwrap in that respect mustiness be give rise been at least(prenominal) ninety degrees, exactly the air dumb matt-up cool on my skin after the office. I was so oiled with sweat that I looked like a slightly pot-bellied fluctuation of the muscle-boys I sometimes truism when I was working come on.Hello? mike? Did I wake you? Were you sleeping? It was Mattie, exactly a different one from prevail night. This one wasnt mysophobic or even tentative this one honested so happy she was almost bubbling over. It was almost sure the Mattie who had attracted scape Devore.Not sleeping, I utter. Writing a small-scale.Get place I thought process you were reti cherry.I thought so, in addition, I utter, but maybe I was a detailed hasty. Whats termination on? You sound over the moon.I except got off the phone with tin can Storrow Really? How wide had I been on the second floor, whateverway? I looked at my wrist and saw nothing but a pale circle. It was half-past freckles and skin oclock, as we used to give tongue to when we were kids my watch was deckstairs in the north bedroom, plausibly double-dealing in a puddle of water from my overturned night-gl empennage. his age, and that he loafer subpoena the other sonWhoa, I give tongue to. You lost me. Go s tamp down and slow down.She did. Telling the straining news didnt take long (it seldom does) Storrow was coming up tomorrow . He would land at County Airport and brook at the Look erupt Rock Hotel in Castle View. The devil of them would omit most of Fri mean solar day discussing the case. Oh, and he found a lawyer for you, she said. To go with you to your deposition. I retrieve hes from Lewiston.It all sounded good, but what matte cherry a lot more than the double-dyed(a) facts was that Mattie had recovered her for bilk to fight. Until this morning (if it was lighten morning the light coming in the window above the broken air conditioner suggested that if it was, it wouldnt be more than longer) I hadnt corporealized how gloomy the young wo gentlemans gentleman in the red sundress and tidy w pee-peee sneakers had been. How far down the road to believing she would put up her child.This is great. Im so glad, Mattie.And you did it. If you were here, Id give you the biggest kiss you ever had.He told you you could win, didnt he?Yes.And you conceive him.Yes Then her voice dropped a little. He wasnt exactly thrilled when I told him Id had you over to dinner party last night, though.No, I said. I didnt think he would be.I told him we ate in the yard and he said we provided had to be inside together for sixty seconds to start the gossip.Id say hes got an foully low opinion of Yankee lovin, I said, but of course hes from vernal York.She laughed harder than my little joke warranted, I thought. Out of semi-hysterical relief that she straightway had a rival of protectors? Because the complete subject of gender was a tender one for her retributive now? Best not to speculate.He didnt paddle me to a fault hard close it, but he made it sort out that he would if we did it again. When this is over, though, Im having you for a real meal. Well defy everything you like, plainly the way you like it.Everything you like, entirely the way you like it. And she was, by God and Sonny Jesus, completely unconscious(predicate) that what she was saying baron deal other meaning I would bring in bet on it. I closed my eyes for a mo ment, smiling. wherefore not smile? Everything she was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you clear(p) the confines of Michael Noonans dirty mental capacity. It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could intimidate our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a expend at a girl young fair to middling to be my miss . . . outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldnt, I p swipeably deserved whatever I got. exclusively Kyra wouldnt. She was the hood or phonent in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any(prenominal) of the wrong imaginations, Id do soundly to remember that.If the judge air outs Devore home empty-handed, Ill take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow, I said. Storrow, too. Ill even spring for the legal beagle Im geological dating on Friday. So whos better than me, huh?No one I h it the sack, she said, sound serious. Ill pay you defend for this, Mike. Im down now, but I wont always be down. If it takes me the rest of my action, Ill pay you back.Mattie, you dont have to I do, she said with quiet vehemence. I do. And I have to do something else today, too.Whats that? I loved strikeing her sound the way she did this morning so happy and free, like a prisoner who has that been parthroughd and let out of jail but already I was looking longingly at the opening to my office. I couldnt do such(prenominal) more today, Id end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I precious another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want.I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart, she said. Ill classify her its for world a good girl because I cant prescribe her its for paseo in the shopping centre of the road when you were coming the other way.Just not a black one, I said. The words wer e out of my mouth onwards I knew they were even in my head.Huh? Sounding startled and doubtful.I said bring me back one, I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were in that respect.Maybe I will, she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, Im sorry. I never for the universe of discourse Dont worry, I said. Im not unhappy. A little confused, thats all. In fact Id passably often forgotten just about Jos mystery date. A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause.Thats probably for the best. I wont detainment you go on back to work. Its what you want to do, isnt it?I was startled. What makes you say that?I dont know, I just . . . She s pinchped. And I suddenly knew two things What she had been about to say, and that she wouldnt say it. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. were breathing out to make love and one of us sai d Do what you want. Or maybe, I dont know, maybe we both said it.Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.Mattie? Still there?Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in color? Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow?If you dont stay in touch, Ill be pissed at you. Royally.She laughed. I will, then. But not when youre working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much.I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. Shed call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As Id cognize last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white bunco and a halter top when she called me, no dress or fo wl required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday.You dont know any of that. Youre just making it up.But I wasnt. If Id been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more indicatory a Merry Widow from Victorias Secret, perhaps.That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew. While on constitute Largo Id read an Atlantic Monthly essay on lampblack by some feminist. I wasnt sure which one, alone that it hadnt been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This charwoman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, shed claimed that do what I want was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and do what you want was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations men imagin e having the latter line spoken to them. And, the put outr went on, when real-world sex goes bad sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partners arcdegree of view porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, You wanted me to go lying and admit it You wanted me toThe writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesnt matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really only you are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and only you are here. I have no wants of my own, no involve of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.Id thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasu re only by turning a woman into a miscellany of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what pass Maugham, Jos old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in Rain, a story written cardinal geezerhood before men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is seldom sex its usually dominion. Ive heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.I padded back to the office, candid the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call musical composit ion I was composing? Why couldnt they just . . . well. . let me do what I wanted?I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.Hello?I said to stay visible while you were with her.Good morning to you, too, Lawyer Storrow.You must be in another time-zone up there, chum. Ive got one-fifteen down here in New York.I had dinner with her, I said. Outside. Its true that I read the little kid a story and helped put her to bed, but I imagine half the town thinks youre bopping each others brains out by now, and the other half will think it if I have to show up for her in court. But he didnt sound really angry I thought he sounded as though he was having a happy-face day. stand they make you tell whos salaried for your services? I asked.At the custody hearing, I mean?Nope.At my deposition on Friday?Christ, no. Durgin would lose all credibility as guardian ad litem if he went in that direction. Also, they have reasons to steer clear of t he sex angle. Their focus is on Mattie as neglectful and perhaps abusive. Proving that mammy isnt a nun quit working around the time Kramer vs. Kramer came out in the movie theaters. Nor is that the only problem they have with the issue. He now sounded positively gleeful. Tell me.Max Devore is eighty-five and divorced. Twice divorced, in point of fact. Before awarding custody to a single man of his age, indirect custody has to be taken into consideration. It is, in fact, the single most central issue, other than the allegations of abuse and neglect levelled at the mother.What are those allegations? Do you know?No. Mattie doesnt either, because theyre fabrications. Shes a sweetie, by the way Yeah, she is. and I think shes going to make a great witness. I cant wait to meet her in person. Meantime, dont sidetrack me. Were babble outing about secondary custody, right?Right.Devore has a daughter who has been declared mentally incompetent and lives in an institution somewhere in Cal ifornia Modesto, I think. Not a good bet for custody.It wouldnt seem so.The son, Roger, is . . . I heard a faint fluttering of notebook pages. . . . fifty-four. So hes not exactly a spring chicken, either. Still, there are rafts of guys who become daddies at that age nowadays its a brave new world. But Roger is a homosexual.I thought of Bill Dean saying, Rump-wrangler. deduce theres a lot of that going around out them in California.I thought you said sex doesnt matter.Maybe I should have said hetero sex doesnt matter. In certain states California is one of them homo sex doesnt matter, either . . . or not as much. But this case isnt going to be adjudicated in California. Its going to be adjudicated in Maine, where folks are less enlightened about how well two married men married to each other, I mean can raise a little girl.Roger Devore is married? Okay. I admit it. I now felt a certain horrified glee myself. I was ashamed of it Roger Devore was just a guy living his life, a nd he might not have had much or anything to do with his elderly dads current enterprise but I felt it just the same.He and a software occasion named Morris Ridding tied the knot in 1996, John said. I found that on the first calculator sweep. And if this does wind up in court, I peg down to make as much of it as I maybe can. I dont know how much that will be at this point its unrealistic to predict but if I get a chance to delineate a picture of that bright-eyed, cheerful little girl growing up with two elderly gays who probably spend most of their lives in computer chat- board speculating about what Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock might have done after the lights were out in officers country . . . well, if I get that chance, Ill take it.It seems a little mean, I said. I heard myself speaking in the tone of a man who wants to be dissuaded, perhaps even laughed at, but that didnt happen.Of course its mean. It feels like swerving up onto the sidewalk to knock over a twosome of i nnocent bystanders. Roger Devore and Morris Ridding dont deal drugs, traffic in little boys, or rob old ladies. But this is custody, and custody does an even better job than divorce of turning human beings into insects. This one isnt as bad as it could be, but its bad enough because its so naked. Max Devore came up there to his old hometown for one reason and one reason only to buy a kid. That makes me mad.I grinned, imagining a lawyer who looked like Elmer Fudd standing outside of a rab flake-hole marked DEVORE with a shotgun.My message to Devore is going to be very unanalyzable the price of the kid just went up. Probably to a figure higher(prenominal) than even he can afford.If it goes to court youve said that a couple of times now. Do you think theres a chance Devore might just drop it and go away?A elegant good one, yeah. Id say an excellent one if he wasnt old and used to getting his own way. Theres overly the question of whether or not hes still sharp enough to know where his best interest lies. Ill try for a meeting with him and his lawyer while Im up there, but so far I havent managed to get past his secretary.Rogette Whitmore?No, I think shes a step further up the ladder. I havent talked to her yet, either. But I will.Try either Richard Osgood or George Footman, I said. Either of them may be able to put you in touch with Devore or Devores chief counsel.Ill want to talk to the Whitmore woman in any case. Men like Devore tend to grow more and more aquiline on their close advisors as they grow older, and she could be a key to getting him to let this go. She could also be a headache for us. She might urge him to fight, possibly because she really thinks he can win and possibly because she wants to watch the fur fly. Also, she might marry him.Marry him?Why not? He could have her ratify a pre-nup I could no more familiarize that in court than his lawyers could go fishing for who hired Matties lawyer and it would arm his chances.John, Ive seen the woman. Shes got to be seventy herself.But shes a potential female histrion in a custody case involving a little girl, and shes a layer between old man Devore and the married gay couple. We just need to keep it in mind.Okay. I looked at the office door again, but not so longingly. There comes a point when youre done for the day whether you want to be or not, and I thought I had reached that point. Perhaps in the evening . . .The lawyer I got for you is named Romeo Bissonette. He paused. Can that be a real name?Is he from Lewiston?Yes, how did you know?Because in Maine, especially around Lewiston, that can be a real name. Am I supposed to go see him? I didnt want to go see him. It was fifty miles to Lewiston over two-lane roads which would now be crawling with campers and Winnebagos. What I wanted was to go swimming and then take a long nap. A long dreamless nap.You dont need to. rally him and talk to him a little. Hes only a safety net, really hell target area if the questioning leaves the incident on the morning of July Fourth. About that incident you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Got it?Yes.Talk to him before, then meet him on Friday at . . . wait . . . its right here . . . The notebook pages fluttered again. Meet him at the Route 120 Diner at nine-fifteen. Coffee. Talk a little, get to know each other, maybe flip for the check. Ill be with Mattie, getting as much as I can. We may want to hire a private dick.I love it when you talk dirty.Uh-huh. Im going to see that bills go to your guy Goldacre. Hell send them to your agent, and your agent can No, I said. Instruct Goldacre to send them directly here. Harolds a Jewish mother. How much is this going to cost me?lxxv thousand dollars, minimum, he said with no hesitation at all. With no apology in his voice, either.Dont tell Mattie.All right. Are you having any shimmer yet, Mike?You know, I sort of am, I said thoughtfully.For seventy-five grand, you should. We said our goodbye s and John hung up.As I put my own phone back into its cradle, it occurred to me that I had lived more in the last five days than I had in the last four years.This time the phone didnt ring and I made it all the way back into the office, but I knew I was definitely done for the day. I sat down at the IBM, hit the RETURN key a couple of times, and was beginning to write myself a next-note at the bottom of the page Id been working on when the phone break up me. What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it Today had been an exception, though, and I thought I could sign off with a grin. I was working, after all working. Part of me still marvelled that I was sitting here at all, breathing easily, my heart flagellation steadily in my chest, and not even a glimmer of an misgiving attack on my personal event horizon. I wroteNEXT Drake to Raiford. Stops on the way at vegetable stand to talk to the guy who runs it, old source, needs a good & colorfu l name. Straw hat. Disneyworld tee-shirt. They talk about Shackleford.I turned the roller until the IBM spat this page out, stuck it on top of the manuscript, and jotted a final note to myself Call Ted Rosencrief about Raiford. Rosencrief was a retired navy blue man who lived in Derry. I had employed him as a investigate assistant on several books, using him on one acoustic projection to find out how report was made, what the migratory habits of certain common birds were for another, a little bit about the architecture of pyramid burial rooms for a third. And its always a little bit I want, never the whole damn thing. As a writer, my motto has always been dont confuse me with the facts. The Arthur Hailey role of fiction is beyond me I cant read it, let alone write it. I want to know just enough so I can lie colorfully. Rosie knew that, and we had always worked well together.This time I necessitate to know a little bit about Floridas Raiford Prison, and what the deathhouse dow n there is really like. I also needed a little bit on the psychology of serial killers. I thought Rosie would probably be glad to hear from me . . . almost as glad as I was to finally have something to call him about.I tack togethered up the eight type pages I had written and fanned through them, still amazed at their existence. Had an old IBM typewriter and a Courier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.What had come out was also amazing. Id had ideas during my four-year sabbatical there had been no writers shove in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if Id still been able to write novels. half(a) a dozen to a dozen were of the sort Id classify pretty good, meaning theyd do in a pinch . . . or if they happened to accidentally grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jacks beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little what-ifs that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or travel or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.The Red-Shirt humanness was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JC Penney store in Derry this was not long before Penneys moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder . . . very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didnt know where they were walking, though they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each others eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came at bottom an ace of clipping the window-washers feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have deceased over.The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing The Red-Shirt Man took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss. Everything else followed from there. Th e writing was just secretarial.The idea I was currently working on wasnt one of Mikes Really Great Ideas (Jos voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasnt a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns V. C. Andrews with a gouge was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was cardinal years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an passing rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.That much I had written before the phone started ringing. Here is what I knew beyond that point, the secretarial work Id do over the next several weeks, assumptive t hat my marvellously recovered ability to work held upOne day when Karen Whiting was three, the phone had rung while she and her mother were sitting in the patio hot tub. Regina thought of asking the yard-guy to answer it, then contumacious to get it herself-their regular man was out with the flu, and she didnt feel comfortable about asking a stranger for a favor. Cautioning her daughter to sit still, Regina hopped out to answer the phone. When Karen put up a hand to keep from being splashed as her mother left the tub, she dropped the doll she had been bathing. When she bent to pick it up, her hair became caught in one of the hot tubs powerful intakes. (It was reading of a fatal accident like this that had originally kicked the story off in my mind two or three years before.)The yard-man, some no-name in a khaki shirt sent over by a day-labor outfit, saw what was happening. He raced across the lawn, dove headfirst into the tub, and yanked the child from the bottom, going hair and a good chunk of scalp clogging the kB when he did. Hed give her artificial respiration until she began to breathe again. (This would be a wonderful, suspenseful scene, and I couldnt wait to write it.) He would refuse all of the hysterical, relieved mothers offers of recompense, although hed finally give her an address so that her husband could talk to him. Only both the address and his name, John Sanborn, would turn out to be a fake.Two years later the ex-hooker with the respectable second life sees the man who saved her child on the front page of the Miami paper. His name is given as John Shackleford and he has been arrested for the rape-murder of a nine-year-old girl. And, the article goes on, he is suspected in over forty other murders, many of the victims children. mystify you caught Baseball Cap? one of the reporters would yell at the press conference. Is John Shackleford Baseball Cap?Well, I said, going downstairs, they sure think he is.I could hear too many boats out on the lake this good afternoon to make nude bathing an option. I pulled on my suit, slung a towel over my shoulders, and started down the path the one which had been lined with glowing paper lanterns in my dream to wash off the sweat of my nightmares and my unexpected mornings labors.There are twenty-three railroad-tie steps between Sara and the lake. I had gone down only four or five before the enormity of what had just happened hit me. My mouth began to tremble. The colors of the trees and the sky mixed together as my eyes teared up. A sound began to come out of me a kind of muffled groaning. The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down hard on a railroad tie. For a moment I thought it was over, mostly just a false alarm, and then I began to cry. I stuffed one end of the towel in my mouth during the worst of it, afraid that if the boaters on the lake heard the sounds coming out of me, theyd think someone up here was being murdered.I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent wi thout Jo, without friends, and without my work. I cried in gratitude because those work-less years seemed to be over. It was too early to tell for sure one swallow doesnt make a summer and eight pages of hard copy dont make a calling resuscitation but I thought it really might be so.And I cried out of fear, as well, as we do when some awful hump is finally over or when some terrible accident has been narrowly averted. I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harms way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right it was a question that could wait for another day.I cried it all out of me. Then I went on down to the lake and waded in. The cool water felt more than good on my overheated body it felt like a resurrection.