Lisey’sStory

by Stephen King

  Amanda was rinsing their glasses. “If someone found out we were here, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. But if your deputies found out we came with a gun…and that man just happened to disappear off the face of the earth around the same time…”

  Lisey, who had thought only as far as getting Dooley to the Bell-and-Spade Tree (and the long boy had never been a part of her imaginings), realized she still had work to do and had better get busy doing it. Professor Woodbody wasn’t ever going to report his old drinking buddy missing, but the man might have relatives somewhere, and if anybody in the world had a motive for getting rid of the Black Prince of the Incunks, it was Lisey Landon. Of course there was no body (what Scott had sometimes been pleased to refer to as the corpus delicious), but still, she and her sister had spent what some might construe as an extremely suspicious afternoon and evening. Plus the County Sheriff’s Department knew Dooley had been harassing her; she’d told them so herself.

  “I’ll get his shite,” she said.

  Amanda did not smile. “Good.”

  14

  The flashlight cut a wide swath, and the study wasn’t as spooky on her own as Lisey had feared it might be. Having stuff to do no doubt helped. She began by putting the Pathfinder back in its shoebox, then went prospecting along the floor with the light. She found both of the lenses that went with the night-vision goggles, plus half a dozen double-A batteries. She assumed these were from the gadget’s power-pack. The pack must have traveled, although she couldn’t remember actually seeing it; the batteries obviously hadn’t. Then she picked up Dooley’s terrible paper bag. Amanda had either forgotten the bag or hadn’t even realized Dooley had it, but the stuff in here would look bad for her if it were found. Especially when combined with the gun. Lisey knew they could do tests on the Pathfinder that would show it had been fired recently; she wasn’t dumb (and she watched CSI). She also knew the tests wouldn’t show it had been fired only once, into the ceiling. She tried to handle the paper bag so it wouldn’t clank, and it clanked anyway. She looked around for other signs of Dooley and saw none. There were bloodstains on the rug, but if that were ever tested, both the type and the DNA would match hers. Blood on her rug would look very bad in combination with the stuff in the bag she now held in her hand, but with the bag gone, they’d be all right. Probably all right.

  Where’s his car? His PT Cruiser? Because I know that car I saw was his.

  She couldn’t worry about that now. It was dark. This was what she had to worry about, this stuff rah-cheer. And her sisters. Darla and Canty, currently on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride way the hell and gone up to Acadia Mental Health in Derry. So they wouldn’t get caught in the Jim Dooley version of Mr. Silver’s potato-grader.

  But did she really have to worry about those two? No. They’d be royally pissed, of course…and royally curious…but in the end they’d keep quiet if she and Amanda told them they absolutely had to, and why? Because of the sister thing, that was why. She and Amanda would have to be careful with them, and there would have to be some sort of story (what kind could possibly cover this Lisey had no idea, although she was sure Scott could have come up with something). There had to be a story because, unlike Amanda and Lisey, Darla and Cantata had husbands. And husbands were all too often the back door by which secrets escaped into the outside world.

  As Lisey turned to go, her eye was caught by the booksnake sleeping against the wall. All those quarterly reviews and scholarly journals, all those year-end annuals, bound reports, and copies of theses done on Scott’s work. Many containing pictures of a gone life—call it SCOTT AND LISEY! THE MARRIED YEARS!

  She could easily see a couple of college kids dismantling the snake and loading its component parts into cardboard boxes with liquor brands printed on the sides, then stacking the boxes in the back of a truck and driving them away. To Pitt? Bite your tongue, Lisey thought. She didn’t consider herself a grudge-holding woman, but after Jim Dooley, it would be a snowy day in hell before she put any more of Scott’s stuff where Woodsmucky could look at it without buying a plane ticket. No, the Fogler Library at the University of Maine would do just fine—right down the road from Cleaves Mills. She could see herself standing by and watching the final packing-up, maybe bringing out a pitcher of iced tea to the kids when the work was done. And when the tea was finished, they would set their glasses down and thank her. One of them might tell her how much he’d liked her husband’s books, and the other might say they were very sorry for her loss. As if he had died two weeks ago. She’d thank them. Then she would watch them drive away with all those frozen images of her life with him locked inside their truck.

  You can really let go?

  She thought she could. Still, that snake drowsing along the wall drew the eye. So many shut books, sleeping deep—they drew the eye. She looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman’s high firm breasts. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn’t ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

  “I always loved you, Scott,” she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. “You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn’t I?”

  Then, shining the flashlight’s beam ahead of her, she went back down the stairs with the shoebox in one hand and Dooley’s awful paper bag in the other.

  15

  Amanda was standing at the kitchen door when Lisey came back in.

  “Good,” Amanda said. “I was getting worried. What’s in the bag?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Oh…kay,” Amanda said. “Is he…you know, gone from up there?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I hope so.” Amanda shivered. “He was a scary guy.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Lisey thought.

  “Well,” Amanda said, “I guess we better get going.”

  “Going where?”

  “Lisbon Falls,” Amanda said. “The old farm.”

  “What—” Then she stopped. It made a weird kind of sense.

  “I came around at Greenlawn, just like you told that Dr. Alberness, and you took me to my house so I could change my clothes. Then I got freaky and started talking about the farm. Come on, Lisey, let’s go, let’s blow this pop-shop before someone comes.” Amanda led her out into the dark.

  Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late nineteen-eighties paid the property taxes.

  “Why did you want to go to the old farm?” Lisey asked as she slipped behind the BMW’s wheel. “I’m not clear on that.”

  “Because I wasn’t,” Amanda said as Lisey turned in a circle and started down the long drive. “I just said I had to go there and see the old place if I wasn’t going to, you know, slip back into the Twilight Zone, so of course you took me.”

  “Of course I did,” Lisey said. She looked both ways, saw no one coming—especially no County Sheriff’s Department cars, praise God—and turned left, the direction that would take her through Mechanic Falls, Poland Springs, and eventually to Gray and Lisbon beyond. “And why did we send Darla and Canty in the wrong direction?”

  “I absolutely insisted,” Amanda said. “I was afraid if they showed up, they’d take me back to my house or your house or even to Greenlawn before I got a chance to visit with Mom and Dad and then spend some time at the home place.” For a moment Lisey had no idea what Manda was talking about—spend time with Mom and Dad? Then she got it. The Debusher family plot was at nearby Sabbatus Vale Cemet
ery. Both Good Ma and Dandy were buried there, along with Grampy and Granny D and God knew how many others.

  She asked, “But weren’t you afraid I’d take you back?”

  Amanda eyed her indulgently. “Why would you take me back? You were the one who took me out.”

  “Maybe because you started acting crazy, asking to visit a farm that’s been deserted for thirty years or more?”

  “Foof!” Amanda waved a dismissive hand. “I could always wrap you around my finger, Lisey—Canty and Darla both know this.”

  “Bullshit you could!”

  Amanda only gave her a maddening smile, her complexion a rather weird green in the glow of the dashboard lights, and said nothing. Lisey opened her mouth to renew the argument, then closed it again. She thought the story would work, because it came down to a pair of easily grasped ideas: Amanda had been acting crazy (nothing new there) and Lisey had been humoring her (understandable, given the circumstances). They could work with it. As for the shoebox with the gun in it…and Dooley’s bag…

  “We’re going to stop in Mechanic Falls,” she told Amanda. “Where the bridge goes over the Androscoggin River. I’ve got a couple of things to get rid of.”

  “Yes you do,” Amanda said. Then she folded her hands in her lap, put her head back against the rest, and closed her eyes.

  Lisey turned on the radio, and wasn’t a bit surprised to get Ole Hank singing “Honky Tonkin’.” She sang along, low. She knew every word. This did not surprise her, either. Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.

  That was good.

  Part 3: Lisey’s Story

  “You are the call and I am the answer,

  You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,

  You are the night, and I the day.

  What else? It is perfect enough.

  It is perfectly complete,

  You and I,

  What more—?

  Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!”

  —D. H. Lawrence “Bei Hennef”

  XVI. Lisey and The Story Tree

  (Scott Has His Say)

  1

  Once Lisey actually got going on emptying out Scott’s study, the job went faster than she ever would have believed. And she never would have believed she’d end up doing it with Darla and Canty as well as Amanda. Canty remained standoffish and suspicious for a time—it felt like a long time to Lisey—but Amanda was completely unfazed. “It’s an act. She’ll drop it and come around. Just give her time, Lisey. Sisterhood is powerful.”

  Eventually Cantata did come around, although Lisey had a feeling Canty never entirely rid herself of the idea that Amanda had been faking in order to Get Attention, and that she and Lisey had been Up To Something. Probably Something No Good. Darla was puzzled about Amanda’s recovery, and the sisters’ odd trip to the old farm in Lisbon, but she, at least, never believed Amanda had been faking.

  Darla had seen her, after all.

  In any case, the four sisters cleaned and emptied the long, rambling suite over the barn during the week after the Fourth of July, hiring a couple of husky high school boys to help with the heavy lifting. The worst of said heavy lifting turned out to be Dumbo’s Big Jumbo, which had to be disassembled (the component parts reminded Lisey of the Exploded Man in high school biology class, only you’d have to call this version the Exploded Desk), and then lowered with a rented winch. The high school boys bawled encouragement to each other as the pieces went down. Lisey stood by with her sisters, praying like mad that neither of the boys would lose a finger or thumb in one of the slings or pulleys. Neither did, and by the end of the week, everything in Scott’s study had been taken away, marked either for donation or long-term storage while Lisey figured out what the hell to do with it.

  Everything, that was, except for the booksnake. That remained, dozing in the long, empty main room—the hot main room, now that the air conditioners had been removed. Even with the skylights open in the daytime and a couple of fans to keep the air circulating, it was hot. And why wouldn’t it be? The place was nothing but a glorified barn loft with a literary pedigree.

  Then there were those ugly maroon smudges on the carpet—the oyster-white carpet that couldn’t be taken up until the booksnake was gone. She’d dismissed the stains as careless slops of Wood Coat varnish when Canty asked about them, but Amanda knew better, and Lisey had an idea that Darla might have a few suspicions, as well. The carpet had to go, but the books had to go first, and Lisey wasn’t quite ready to dispose of them. Just why she wasn’t sure. Maybe only because they were the last of Scott’s things still up here, the very last of him.

  So she waited.

  2

  On the third day of the sisters’ cleaning binge, Deputy Boeckman called to tell Lisey that an abandoned PT Cruiser with Delaware plates had been found in a gravel pit on the Stackpole Church Road, about three miles from her house. Would Lisey come down to the Sheriff’s Office and take a look? They had it back in the parking lot, the deputy said, where they kept the impounds and a few “drug-rides” (whatever they were). Lisey went with Amanda. Neither Darla nor Canty was much interested; all they knew was that a kook had been sniffing around, making a pest of himself about Scott’s papers. Kooks were nothing new in their sister’s life; over the years of Scott’s celebrity, any number of them had been drawn to him like moths to a bug-light. The most famous, of course, had been Cole. Neither Lisey nor Amanda had said anything to give Darla and Canty the idea that this one was in Cole’s class. Certainly there was no mention of the dead cat in the mailbox, and Lisey had been at some pains to impress discretion on the Sheriff’s deputies, as well.

  The car in Stall 7 was a PT Cruiser, no more and no less, beige in color, nondescript once you got past the slightly flamboyant body-type. It could have been the one Lisey saw as she drove home from Greenlawn on that long, long Thursday; it could have been one of several thousand others. This was what she told Deputy Boeckman, reminding him that she’d seen it coming almost directly out of the setting sun. He nodded sadly. What she knew in her heart was that it was the one. She could smell Dooley on it. She thought: I am going to hurt you places you didn’t let the boys to touch at the junior high dances and had to repress a shiver.

  “It’s a stolen car, isn’t it?” Amanda asked.

  “You bet your bippy,” Boeckman said.

  A deputy Lisey didn’t know strolled over. He was tall, probably six and a half feet; it seemed a rule that these men should be tall. Broad-shouldered, too. He introduced himself as Deputy Andy Clutterbuck and shook Lisey’s hand.

  “Ah,” she said, “the acting Sheriff.”

  His smile was brilliant. “Nope, Norris is back. He’s in court this afternoon, but he’s back, all right. I’m just plain old Deputy Clutterbuck again.”

  “Congratulations. This is my sister, Amanda Debusher.”

  Clutterbuck shook Amanda’s hand. “Pleased, Ms. Debusher.” Then, to both of them: “That car was stolen out of a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.” He stared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt. “Did you know that in France, they call PT Cruisers le car Jimmy Cagney?”

  Amanda seemed unimpressed by this information. “Were there fingerprints?”

  “Nary a one,” he said. “Wiped clean. Plus whoever was driving it took the cover off the dome-light and broke the bulb. What do you think of that?”

  “I think it sounds beaucoup suspicious,” Amanda said.

  Clutterbuck laughed. “Yeah. But there’s a retired carpenter in Delaware who’s going to be very happy to get his car back, busted dome-light and all.”

  Lisey said, “Have you found out anything about Jim Dooley?”

  “That would be John Doolin, Mrs. Landon. Born in Shooter’s Knob, Tennessee. Moved to Nashville at age five with his family, t
hen went to live with his aunt and uncle in Moundsville, West Virginia, when his parents and older sister were killed in a fire in the winter of 1974. Doolin was then age nine. The official cause of the deaths was down to defective Christmas tree lights, but I talked to a retired detective who worked that case. He said there was some suspicion the boy might have had something to do with it. No proof.”

  Lisey saw no reason to pay close attention to the rest, because whatever he called himself, her persecutor was never coming back from the place where she had taken him. Yet she did hear Clutterbuck say that Doolin had spent a good many years in a Tennessee mental institution, and she continued to believe that he had met Gerd Allen Cole there, and caught Cole’s obsession

  (ding-dong for the freesias)

  like a virus. Scott had had a queer saying, one Lisey had never fully understood until the business of McCool/Dooley/Doolin. Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.

  “In any case, you want to keep your eyes peeled for the guy,” Clutterbuck told the two women, “and if it looks like he’s still around—”

  “Or takes some time off and then decides to come back,” Boeckman put in.

  Clutterbuck nodded. “Yep, that’s a possibility, too. If he shows up again, I think we ought to have a meeting with your family, Mrs. Landon—put them all in the picture. Do you agree?”

  “If he shows up, we’ll certainly do that,” Lisey said. She spoke seriously, almost solemnly, but on their way out of town, she and Amanda indulged in a bout of hysterical laughter at the idea of Jim Dooley ever showing up again.

  3

  An hour or two before dawn the next morning, shuffling into the bathroom with one eye open, thinking of nothing but peeing and going back to bed, Lisey thought she saw something moving in the bedroom behind her. That brought her awake in a hurry, and turning on her heels. There was nothing there. She took a hand-towel from the rod beside the sink and hung it over the medicine cabinet mirror in which she’d seen the movement, wedging the towel carefully until it would stay on its own. Then and only then did she finish her business.