by Stephen King
She heard a car coming and understood that its headlights were going to sweep the yard, revealing him fully. When that happened, he would leap at her. She swung the silver spade back over her shoulder just as she had in August of 1988, finishing her windup as the approaching car breasted Sugar Top Hill, flooding her yard with momentary light and revealing the power-mower she herself had left in the angle of the barn and the shed. The shadow of its handle leaped upward on the side of the barn, then faded as the car’s headlights faded. Once more the lawnmower could have been a man with a suitcase at his feet, she supposed, although once you’d seen the truth…
In a horror movie, she thought, this is where the monster would leap out of the darkness and grab me. Just as I’m starting to relax.
Nothing leaped out to grab her, but Lisey didn’t think it would hurt to take the silver spade inside with her, if only for good luck. Carrying it in one hand now, down by the collar where the shaft met the silver scoop, Lisey went to call Norris Ridgewick, the Castle County Sheriff.
VII. Lisey and The Law
(Obsession and The Exhausted Mind)
1
The woman who took Lisey’s call identified herself as Communications Officer Soames and said she couldn’t put Lisey through to Sheriff Ridgewick, because Sheriff Ridgewick had been married the week before. He and his new bride were on the island of Maui, and would be for the next ten days.
“Who can I talk to?” Lisey asked. She didn’t like the close-to-strident sound of her voice, but she understood it. Oh God, did she. This had been one long goddam day.
“Hold on, ma’am,” CO Soames said. Then Lisey was in limbo with McGruff the Crime Dog, who was talking about Neighborhood Watch groups. Lisey thought this a considerable improvement on the Two Thousand Comatose Strings. After a minute or so of McGruff, a cop with a name Scott would have loved came on the line.
“This is Deputy Andy Clutterbuck, ma’am, how can I help you?”
For the third time that day—third time’s the charm, Good Ma would have said, third time pays for all—Lisey introduced herself as Mrs. Scott Landon. Then she told Deputy Clutterbuck a slightly edited version of the Zack McCool story, beginning with the call she had received the previous evening and finishing with the one she’d made tonight, the one that had netted the Jim Dooley name. Clutterbuck contented himself with uh-huhs and variations thereof until she had finished, then asked her who had given her “Zack McCool”’s other, possibly real name.
With a twinge of conscience
(tattle-tale tit all the dogs in town come to have a little bit)
that caused her a moment of bitter amusement, Lisey gave up the King of the Incunks. She did not call him Woodsmucky.
“Are you going to talk to him, Deputy Clutterbuck?”
“I think that’s indicated, don’t you?”
“I guess so,” Lisey said, wondering what, if anything, Castle County’s acting Sheriff could get out of Woodbody that she hadn’t been able to pry loose. She supposed there might be something—she’d been pretty mad. She also realized that wasn’t what was bothering her. “Will he be arrested?”
“On the basis of what you’ve told me? Not even close. You might have grounds for a civil action—you’d have to ask your lawyer—but in court I’m sure he’d say that as far as he knew, all this guy Dooley meant to do was show up on your doorstep and try a little high-pressure sales routine. He’d claim not to know anything about dead cats in mailboxes and threats of personal injury…and he’d be telling the truth, based on what you’ve just said. Right?”
Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it was right.
“I’m going to want the letter this stalker left,” Clutterbuck said, “and I’m going to want the cat. What did you do with the remains?”
“We have a wooden box-thingy attached to the house,” Lisey said. She picked up a cigarette, considered it, put it back down again. “My husband had a word for it—my husband had a word for just about everything—but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, it keeps the raccoons out of the swill. I put the cat’s body in a garbage bag and put the bag in the orlop.” Now that she wasn’t struggling to find it, Scott’s word came effortlessly to mind.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?”
“Yes…” Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.
“I want you to put the cat in your freezer, Mrs. Landon. It’s perfectly okay to leave it in the bag. Someone will pick it up tomorrow and take it over to Kendall and Jepperson. They’re the vets we have our county account with. They’ll try to determine a cause of death—”
“It shouldn’t be hard,” Lisey said. “The mailbox was full of blood.”
“Uh-huh. Too bad you didn’t take a few Polaroids before you wiped it all up.”
“Well excuse me all to hell and gone!” Lisey cried, stung.
“Calm down,” Clutterbuck said. Calmly. “I understand that you were upset. Anybody would have been.”
Not you, Lisey thought resentfully. You would have been as cool as…as a dead cat in a freezer.
She said, “That takes care of Professor Woodbody and the dead cat; now what about me?”
Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once—Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer—to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call—an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley “checked by” (Clutterbuck’s oddly delicate way of putting it), he’d see the County cruiser and move along.
Lisey hoped Clutterbuck was right about that.
Guys like this Dooley, Clutterbuck continued, were usually more show than go. If they couldn’t scare someone into giving them what they wanted, they had a tendency to forget the whole deal. “My guess is you’ll never see him again.”
Lisey hoped he was right about that, too. She herself had her doubts. What she kept coming back to was the way “Zack” had set things up. How he’d done it so he couldn’t be called off, at least not by the man who had hired him.
2
Not twenty minutes after finishing her conversation with Deputy Clutterbuck (whom her tired mind now kept wanting to call either Deputy Butterhug or—perhaps cross-referencing Polaroid cameras—Deputy Shutterbug), a slim man dressed in khaki and wearing a large gun on his hip showed up at her front door. He introduced himself as Deputy Dan Boeckman and told her he’d been instructed to take “a certain letter” into safekeeping and photograph “a certain deceased animal.” Lisey kept a straight face at that, although she had to bite down hard on the soft inner lining of her cheeks to manage the feat. Boeckman placed the letter (along with the plain white envelope) into a Baggie which Lisey provided, then asked if she had put the “deceased animal” in the freezer. Lisey had done this as soon as she finished talking to Clutterbuck, depositing the green garbage bag in the far left corner of her big Trawlsen, where there was nothing but an elderly stack of venison steaks in hoarfrosty plastic bags, a present to her and Scott from their electrician, Smiley Flanders. Smiley had won a permit in the moose lottery of ’01 or ’02—Lisey couldn’t remember which—and had dropped “a tol’able big ’un” up in the St. John Valley. Where Charlie Corriveau had bagged his new bride, now that Lisey thought of it. Next to the meat, which she would almost certainly never get around to eating (except perhaps in the event of a nuclear war), was the only place for a dead Galloway barncat, and she told Deputy Boeckman to make sure he put it back there and nowhere else when he had finished his photography. He promised with perfect seriousness that he would “comply with her request,” and she once more found it necessary to bite the insides of her cheeks. Even so, that one was close. As soon as he was clumping stolidly down the basement stairs
, Lisey turned herself to the wall like a naughty child with her forehead against the plaster and her hands over her mouth, laughing in whispery, wide-throated squeals.
It was as this throe passed that she began thinking again about Good Ma’s cedar box (it had been Lisey’s for over thirty-five years, but she had never thought of it as hers). Remembering the box and all the little mementos tucked away inside helped to ease the hysteria bubbling up from deep inside her. What helped even more was her growing certainty that she had put the box in the attic. Which made perfect sense, of course. The detritus of Scott’s working life was out there in the barn and the study; the detritus of the life she had lived while he was working would be here, in the house she had chosen and they had both come to love.
In the attic were at least four expensive Turkish rugs she had once adored and which had at some point, for reasons she did not understand, begun to give her the creeps…
At least three sets of retired luggage that had taken everything two dozen airlines, many of them dinky little commuter puddle-jumper outfits, could throw at them; battered warriors that deserved medals and parades, but would have to be content with honorable attic retirement (hell, boys, it beats the town dump)…
The Danish-Modern living room furniture that Scott said looked pretentious, and how angry with him she’d been, mostly because she’d thought he was probably right…
The rolltop desk, a “bargain” that turned out to have one short leg which had to be shimmed, only the shim was always coming out and then one day the rolltop had unrolled on her fingers and that had been it, buddy, up to the smucking attic with you…
Ashtrays on stands from their smoking days…
Scott’s old IBM Selectric, which she had used for correspondence until it started getting hard to find the ribbons and CorrecTapes…
Stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d’other-t’ing. Another world, really, and yet it was all rah-cheer, or at least right up dere. And somewhere—probably behind a stack of magazines or sitting on top of the rocking chair with the unreliable split back—would be the cedar box. Thinking about it was like thinking about cold water when you were thirsty on a hot day. She didn’t know just why that should be so, but it was.
By the time Deputy Boeckman came up from the cellar with his Polaroids, she was impatient for him to be gone. Perversely he hung on (hung on like a toothache, Dad Debusher would’ve said), first telling her it looked like the cat had been stabbed with some sort of tool (possibly a screwdriver), then assuring her he’d be parked right outside. It might not say TO SERVE AND PROTECT on their units (he called them units), but the thought was there every minute, and he wanted her to feel perfectly safe. Lisey said she felt so safe she was actually thinking about going to bed—it had been a long day, she’d had a family emergency to deal with as well as this stalker business, and she was utterly whipped. Deputy Boeckman finally took the hint and left after telling her one final time that she was as safe as could be, safe as houses, and there was no need for any of that sleeping-with-one-eye-open stuff. Then he clumped down her front steps as stolidly as he’d clumped down her cellar stairs, shuffling through his dead-cat photos a final time while he still had light enough to see them. A minute or two later she heard what sounded like a puffickly huh-yooge engine rev twice. Headlights washed across the lawn and the house, then abruptly went out. She thought of Deputy Daniel Boeckman sitting across the road with his cruiser parked prominently on the shoulder. She smiled. Then she went upstairs to the attic, with no idea that she would be lying on her bed fully dressed two hours later, exhausted and weeping.
3
The exhausted mind is obsession’s easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it. She’d had no clear reason for wanting the box in the first place, only a strong intuition that something inside, some souvenir from her early marriage, was the next station of the bool. After awhile, however, the box itself became her goal, Good Ma’s cedar box. Bools be damned, if she didn’t lay hands on that cedar box—a foot long, maybe nine inches wide and six deep—she’d never be able to sleep. She’d only lie there tortured by thoughts of dead cats and dead husbands and empty beds and Incunk warriors and sisters who cut themselves and fathers who cut—
(hush Lisey hush)
She’d only lie there, leave it at that.
An hour’s search was enough to convince her the cedar box wasn’t in the attic, after all. But by then she was sure it was probably in the spare bedroom. It was perfectly reasonable to think it had migrated back there…except another forty minutes (including a teetery stepladder exploration of the top shelf in the closet) convinced her the spare room was another dry hole. So the box was down cellar. Had to be. Very likely it had come to rest behind the stairs, where there was a bunch of cardboard boxes containing curtains, rug-remnants, old stereo components, and a few bits of sporting equipment: ice skates, a croquet set, a badminton net with a hole in it. As she hurried down the cellar stairs (not thinking at all of the dead cat now lying beside the pile of petrified moose-meat in her freezer), Lisey began to believe she had even seen the box down there. By then she was very tired, but only distantly aware of the fact.
It took her twenty minutes to drag all the cartons from their long-term resting place. Some were damp and split open. By the time she’d finished going through the stuff inside, her limbs were trembling with exhaustion, her clothes were sticking to her, and a nasty little headache had begun thumping at the back of her skull. She shoved back the cartons that were still holding together and left the ones that had split apart where they were. Good Ma’s box was in the attic after all. Must be, had been all along. As she wasted time down here among the rusty ice skates and forgotten jigsaw puzzles, the cedar box was waiting patiently up there. Lisey could now think of half a dozen places she’d neglected to search, including the crawlspace all the way back under the eaves. That was the most likely spot. She’d probably put the box there and just forgotten all about—
The thought broke off cleanly as she realized someone was standing behind her. She could see him from the corner of her eye. Call him Jim Dooley or Zack McCool, by either name he would in the next moment drop a hand on her sweaty shoulder and call her Missus. Then she’d really have something to worry about.
This sensation was so real that Lisey actually heard the shuffle of Dooley’s feet. She wheeled around, hands coming up to protect her face, and had just an instant to see the Hoover vacuum she herself had pulled out from under the stairs. Then she tripped over the moldering cardboard carton with the old badminton net stuffed inside. She waved her arms for balance, almost caught it, lost it, had time to think shit-a-brick, and went down. The top of her head missed the underside of the stairs by a whisker, and that was good, because that would have been a nasty crack indeed, maybe the kind that laid you out unconscious. Laid you out dead, if you came down hard enough on the cement floor. Lisey managed to break her fall with her splayed hands, one knee landing safely on the springy mat of the rotted badminton net, the other suffering a harder landing on the cellar floor. Luckily, she was still wearing her jeans.
The fall was fortunate in another way, she thought fifteen minutes later as she lay on her bed, still fully dressed but with her hard crying over; she was by then down to the isolated sobs and rueful, watery gasps for breath that are strong emotion’s hangover. The fall—and the scare that had preceded it, she supposed—had cleared her head. She might have gone on hunting the box for another two hours—longer, if her strength had held out. Back to the attic, back to the spare bedroom, back to the cellar. Back to the future, Scott would surely have added; he had a knack for cracking wise at precisely the wrong moment. Or what turned out, later on, to have been precisely the right one.
In any case she might well have gone on until dawn’s ear
ly light and it would have gotten her a lot of hot air in one hand and a big pile of jack shit in the other. Lisey was now convinced the box was either in a place so obvious she’d already passed it half a dozen times or it was just gone, maybe stolen by one of the cleaning women who’d worked for the Landons over the years or by some workman who’d spied it and thought his wife would like a nice box like that and that Mr. Landon’s Missus (funny how that word got into your head) would never miss it.
Fiddle-de-dee, little Lisey, said the Scott who kept his place in her head. Think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.
“Yep,” Lisey said, then sat up, suddenly aware that she was a sweaty, smelly woman living inside a set of sweaty, dirty clothes. She got out of them as quickly as she could, left them in a heap by the foot of the bed, and headed for the shower. She had scraped the palms of both hands breaking her fall in the cellar, but she ignored their stinging and soaped her hair twice, letting suds run down the sides of her face. Then, after almost dozing under the hot water for five minutes or so, she resolutely turned the shower’s control-lever all the way over to C, rinsed off under the near-freezing needle-spray, and stepped out, gasping. She used one of the big towels, and as she dropped it into the hamper she realized she felt like herself again, sane and ready to let this day go.
She went to bed, and her last thought before sleep swatted her into the black was of Deputy Boeckman standing watch. It was a comforting thought, particularly after her scare in the cellar, and she slept deeply, without dreams, until the shrill of the telephone woke her.
4
It was Cantata, calling from Boston. Of course it was. Darla had called her. Darla always called Canty when there was trouble, usually sooner rather than later. Canty wanted to know if she should come home. Lisey assured her sister that there was absolutely no reason to return from Boston early no matter how distressed Darla might have sounded. Amanda was resting comfortably, and there was really nothing Canty could do. “You can visit, but unless there’s been a big change—which Dr. Alberness told us not to expect—you won’t be able to tell if she even knows you’re there.”
