Bag of Bones CHAPTER NINE

At nine oclock the following sunrise I fill up a squeeze- terminus with grapefruit juice and mickle step up for a f personal line of credit long walk s unwraph along The Street. The daytime was bright and already hot. It was wantwise silent the kind of silence you experience yet by and by a Saturday holiday, I think, iodin composed of equal references pietism and hang over. I could fit ii or three fishermen parked uttermost prohibited on the lake, only if not a single indicator boat burred, not a single gaggle of kids sh give awayed and splashed. I passed half a xii cottages on the slope above me, and although all t ageing of them were comparablely inhabited at this eon of year, the only signs of life I aphorism were ba occasion suits hung over the deck rail at the Passendales and a half-def deeplyd fluorescent-green seahorse on the Batchelders stub of a get into.But did the Passendales bittie gray-haired cottage tranquillize belong to the Passendales ? Did the Batchelders amusing circular summertime-camp with its Cinerama picture-window pointing at the lake and the mountains beyond soundless belong to the Batchelders? No repre displaceation of telling, of course. Four geezerhood fag end bring a lot of changes.I walked and do no endeavor to think an venerable trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs. I make my way prehistoric camps where Jo and I had at one time had drinks and barbecues and at tended the occasional card-party, I soaked up the silence like a sponge, I drank my juice, I tree branched perspiration off my forehead, and I waited to capture what persuasions might rise up.The runner was an odd identification that the crying child in the night seemed fleckyhow more documentary than the nominate from Max Devore. Had I actually been phvirtuosod by a fat and obviously gravely-tempered techno-mogul on my starting line full evening s atta in on the TR? Had said mogul actually called me a liar at bingle point? (I was, considering the tale I had t of age(predicate), only if that was beside the point.) I knew it had happened, incisively it was actually easier to bank in The Ghost of Dark Score Lake, cognise around more or less campfires as The Mysterious Crying Kiddie.My next scene this was serious out front I finished my juice was that I should call Mattie Devore and tell her what had happened. I decided it was a natural impulse exactly probably a bad idea. I was too gray-headed to believe in such simplicities as The Damsel in Distress Versus The patronizing Stepfather . . . or, in this case, Father-in-Law. I had my induce fish to fry this summer, and I didnt wish to complicate my job by getting into a potentially loathsome dis put d receivee between Mr. Computer and Ms. Doublewide. Devore had rubbed my fur the wrong way and cleverly merely that probably wasnt personal, only something he did as a intimacy of course. Hey, some guys snap bra-straps. Did I want to get in his event on this? No. I did not. I had saved Little fall h mature Red Sox, I had gotten myself an inadvertent feel of Moms small provided pleasantly firm breast, I had learned that Kyra was Greek for brothel keeperlike. Any more than that would be gluttony, by God.I s drop deadped at that point, feet as well as brain, realizing Id walked all the way to warringtons, a vast barnboard structure which locals some prison terms called the agricultural club. It was, sort of in that location was a six-hole golf course, a stable and travel trails, a restaurant, a bar, and lodging for perhaps three dozen in the main building and the eight or nine satellite cabins. in that location was even a two-lane bowling alley, although you and your competition had to take romps scene up the pins. Warringtons had been built around the beginning of World War I. That made it younger than Sara Laughs, nevertheless not by some(prenominal).A long dock led out to a smaller building called The Sunset Bar. It was in that respect that Warringtons summer guests would gather for drinks at the end of the day (and some for eyebally(a) Marys at the beginning). And when I glanced out that way, I realized I was no longer alone. There was a modify lady standing on the porch to the left field of the floating bars door, watching me.She gave me a evenhandedly devout jump. My nerves werent in their best condition right retiring(a), and that probably had something to do with it . . . besides I think she would overhear minded(p) me a jump in any(prenominal) case. Part of it was her stillness. Part was her extraordinary thinness. Most of it was her hardihood. Have you ever seen that Edvard manducate drawing, The Cry? Well, if you imagine that screaming seem at rest, mouth unlikeable and look watchful, youll keep up a pretty peachy image of the woman standing at the end of the dock with one long-f ingered lot resting on the rail. Although I must tell you that my first thought was not Edvard crackle nevertheless Mrs. Danvers.She looked round seventy and was wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. The combination looked contraryly formal, a variation on the ever-popular be shortsightedd black cocktail dress. Her spit out was cream- flannel, except above her nearly flat bosom and along her bony shoulders. There it swam with enormous brown age-spots. Her face was a wedge featuring prominent skull-like cheekbones and an unlined lamp of brow. at a lower send off that bulge, her eyes were lost in sockets of shadow. White hair hung scant and long around her ears and see to the prominent shelf of her jaw.God, shes thin, I thought. Shes nothing but a bag of A shudder twisted through me at that. It was a strong one, as if someone were spinning a telegram in my flesh. I didnt want her to notice it what a way to seize on a summer day, by revolting a guy so badl y that he stood there shaking and grimacing in front of you so I raised my hand and waved. I tried to grinning, as well. how-dye-do there, lady standing out by the floating bar. Hello there, you old bag of bones, you scared the living shit out of me but it doesnt take much these days and I forgive you. How the fuck ya doin? I wondered if my grin looked as much like a grimace to her as it felt up to me.She didnt wave screening.Feeling instead a bit like a fool THERES NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS I ended my wave in a kind of half-assed salute and headed back the way Id come. Five go and I had to look over my shoulder the sensation of her watching me was so strong it was like a hand pressing between my shoulderblades.The dock where shed been was completely deserted. I squinted my eyes, at first sure she must have just retreated deeper into the shadow impel by the little boozehaus, but she was asleep(p). As if she had been a ghost herself.She stepped into the bar , hon, Jo said. You spot that, dont you? I mean . . . you do k at present it, right?Right, right, I murmured, place setting off conglutinationward along The Street toward blank space. Of course I do. Where else? neglect it didnt seem to me that there had been time it didnt seem to me that she could have stepped in, even in her everlasting(a) feet, without me hearing her. Not on such a inactive morning.Jo again Perhaps shes stealthy.Yes, I murmured. I did a lot of talking out loud before that summer was over. Yes, perhaps she is. Perhaps shes stealthy. Sure. identical Mrs. Danvers.I stopped again and looked back, but the right-of-way path had followed the lake around a little bit of curve, and I could no longer see any Warringtons or The Sunset Bar. And really, I thought, that was just as well.On my way back, I tried to list the oddities which had preceded and then surrounded my return to Sara Laughs the tell dreams the sunflowers the radio-station sticker the weeping in the night. I supposed that my encounter with Mattie and Kyra, accession the follow-up phone-call from Mr. Pixel Easel, also qualified as passing strange . . . but not in the same way as a child you heard sobbing in the night.And what about the fact that we had been in Derry instead of on Dark Score when Johanna died? Did that qualify for the list? I didnt make do. I couldnt even remember why that was. In the fall and pass of 1993 Id been fiddling with a screenplay for The Red-Shirt Man. In February of 94 I got breathing out on each(prenominal) the Way from the Top, and that preoccupied most of my attention. Besides, deciding to go western United States to the TR, west to Sara . . .That was Jos job, I told the day, and as soon as I heard the quarrel I understood how true they were. Wed both loved the old girl, but citeing Hey Irish, lets get our asses over to the TR for a few days had been Jos job. She might scan it any time . . . except in the year before her closing she had nt said it once. And I had never thought to say it for her. Had somehow disregarded all about Sara Laughs, it seemed, even when summer came around. Was it possible to be that absorbed in a writing project? It didnt seem likely . . . but what other explanation was there?Something was very wrong with this picture, but I didnt know what it was. Not from nothin.That made me think of Sara Tidwell, and the lyrics to one of her songs. She had never been recorded, but I owned the Blind Lemon Jefferson version of this particular tune. unitary verse wentIt aint nuthin but a barn-dance sugarIt aint nuthin but a round-and-round permit me kiss you on your sweet lips sugarYou the good thing that I set.I loved that song, and had ever wondered how it would have sounded coming out of a womans mouth instead of from that whiskey-voiced old troubadour. Out of Sara Tidwells mouth. I bet she interpret sweet. And boy, I bet she could swing it.I had gotten back to my own place again. I looked around, saw no one in the immediate region (although I could now hear the days first ski-boat burring away downwater), stripped to my underpants, and swam out to the float. I didnt climb it, only lay beside it peeing onto the ladder with one hand and lazily kick my feet. It was nice sufficient, but what was I issue to do with the rest of the day?I decided to spend it cleaning my work area on the hour floor. When that was done, maybe Id go out and look around in Jos studio. If I didnt lose my courage, that was.I swam back, kicking easily along, raising my head in and out of water which flowed along my body like cool silk. I felt like an otter. I was most of the way to the shore when I raised my dripping face and saw a woman standing on The Street, watching me. She was as thin as the one Id seen down at Warringtons . . . but this one was green. Green and pointing north along the path like a dryad in some old legend.I gasped, swallowed water, coughed it back out. I stood up in chest-dee p water and wiped my streaming eyes. Then I laughed (albeit a little doubtfully). The woman was green because she was a birch growing a little to the north of where my set of railroad-tie steps ended at The Street. And even with my eyes clear of water, there was something creepy about how the leaves around the ivory-streaked-with-black trunk approximately made a peering face. The air was perfectly still and so the face was perfectly still (as still as the face of the woman in the black shorts and bathing suit had been), but on a breezy day it would seem to smile or frown . . . or perhaps to laugh. Behind it there grew a sickly pine. One surplus branch jutted off to the north. It was this I had mis taken for a skinny arm and a bony, pointing hand.It wasnt the first time Id spooked myself like that. I see things, thats all. carry through enough stories and either shadow on the floor looks like a footprint, every line in the dirt like a inscrutable message. Which did not, of cours e, ease the task of deciding what was really unique at Sara Laughs and what was peculiar only because my mind was peculiar.I glanced around, saw I still had this part of the lake to myself (although not for much longer the bee-buzz of the first power boat had been coupled by a second and third), and stripped off my soggy underpants. I wrung them out, put them on top of my shorts and tee-shirt, and walked naked up the railroad-tie steps with my clothes held against my chest. I pretended I was Bunter, bringing breakfast and the morning paper to Lord Peter Wimsey. By the time I got back inside the house I was grinning like a fool.The second floor was stifling in spite of the open windows, and I saw why as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. Jo and I had shared space up here, she on the left (only a little room, really just a cubby, which was all she needed with the studio north of the house), me on the right. At the far end of the hall was the grilled pecker of the monster air-co nditioning unit wed bought the year after we bought the lodge. Looking at it, I realized I had missed its characteristic hum without even macrocosm aware of it. There was a sign taped to it which said, Mr. Noonan Broken. Blows hot air when you turn it on & sounds full of broken glass. Dean says the part it call for is promised from Western Auto in go Rock. Ill believe it when I see it. B. Meserve.I grinned at that last -it was Mrs. M. right down to the ground and then I tried the switch. Machinery often responds favorably when it senses a penis-equipped human in the vicinity, Jo used to claim, but not this time. I listened to the air conditioner grind for v seconds or so, then snapped it off. Damn thing shit the bed, as TR kinfolk like to say. And until it was fixed, I wouldnt even be doing crossword puzzles up here.I looked in my duty just the same, as curious about what I might feel as about what I might find. The response was next to nothing. There was the desk where I h ad finished The Red-Shirt Man, thus proving to myself that the first time wasnt a fluke there was the photo of Richard Nixon, arms raised, flashing the biramous V-for-Victory sign, with the caption WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN? runnel beneath there was the rag rug Jo had hooked for me a winter or two before she had discovered the wonderful world of afghans and pretty much gave up hooking.It wasnt quite the office of a stranger, but every item (most of all, the weirdly empty surface of the desk) said that it was the work-space of an earlier-generation Mike Noonan. mens room lives, I had read once, are usually defined by two primary forces work and marriage. In my life the marriage was over and the locomote on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. Given that, it didnt seem strange to me that now the space where Id spent so many days, usually in a state of real happiness as I made up various imaginary lives, seemed to mean nothing. It was like looking at the office of an e mployee who had been fired . . . or who had died suddenly.I started to leave, then had an idea. The filing cabinet in the corner was crammed with papers bank statements (most eight or ten years out of date), correspondence (mostly never answered), a few story fragments-but I didnt find what I was looking for. I moved on to the closet, where the temperature had to be at least a coke and ten degrees, and in a cardboard box which Mrs. M. had objected GADGETS, I unearthed it a Sanyo Memo-Scriber Debra Weinstock gave me at the certainty of our work on the first of the Putnam books. It could be set to turn itself on when you started to talk it dropped into its PAUSE mode when you stopped to think.I never asked Debra if the thing just caught her eye and she thought, wherefore, Ill bet any self-respecting popular novelist would lie with owning one of these babies, or if it was something a little more specific . . . some sort of hint, perhaps? Verbalize those little faxes from your su bconscious while theyre still fresh, Noonan? I hadnt cognize then and didnt now. But I had it, a material pro- whole step dictating-machine, and there were at least a dozen cassette tapes in my car, home dubs Id made to listen to while driving. I would insert one in the Memo-Scriber tonight, slide the volume control as high as it would go, and put the machine in its DICTATE mode. Then, if the noise Id heard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what he thought it was.What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on?Well then, Ill know something else, I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweat like a pig. Or at least suspect it.Jos recession across the hall made my office seem crowded and homely by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a lusty room-shaped space. The rug was gone, he r photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been run-down after ninety percent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed out of it scraped out of it and I felt a moments unreasonable anger at Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when Id done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved You took a little too much on yself, didnt you? That was my trace about Jos little bit of office that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.Maybe it wasnt Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the flying saucer voice said. Maybe Jo did it herself. Ever think of that, sport?Thats stupid, I said. Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death. Considering shed just bought But I didnt want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body just my face. It was the most extraordinary sensation, like pass patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears . . . except thats not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message intercommunicate in a hurry.I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the rooms window in motion . . . but they hung perfectly straight.Jo? I said, and hearing her wee made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. Jo, was that you?Nothing. No phantasm hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains . . . which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draftsmanship. only was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room . . . but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasnt alone in Sara Laughs.So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so wh at? Ghosts cant trouble anyone.Thats what I thought then.When I visited Jos studio (her air-conditioned studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve she hadnt taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jos little office the border square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster characterisation the wildflowers of Maine had been put out here, along with almost everything else I remembered. It was as if Mrs. M. had sent a message I cant ease your pain or make out your sadness, and I cant prevent the wounds that coming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you wont be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.Out here were no bare walls out here the walls jostled with my wifes spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), hand-dye squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called my baby collages, a n abstract desert pic made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading JOS KNITTING STUFF NO TRESPASSING hung over the pull-knob. In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.The thing which caught and held my eye was sitting on the old roll-top desk in the fondness of the room. During the many good summers, falls, and winter weekends we had spent here, that desktop would have been cluttered with spools of thread, skeins of yarn, pincushions, sketches, maybe a book about the Spanish Civil War or famous American dogs. Johanna could be aggra vating, at least to me, because she obligate no real system or order on what she did. She could also be daunting, even overwhelming at times. She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.But not now. It was possible to think that Mrs. M. had cleared the litter from the top of it and plunked down what was now there, but impossible to believe. Why would she? It made no sense.The object was covered with a gray plastic hood. I reached out to touch it, and my hand faltered an inch or two short as a memory of an old dream(give me that its my dust-catcher)slipped across my mind much as that queer draft ad slipped across my face. Then it was gone, and I pulled the plastic, over off. Underneath it was my old green IBM Selectric, which I hadnt seen or thought of in years. I leaned closer, knowing that the type inditer ball would be Courier my old favorite even before I saw it.What in Gods name was my old typewriter doing out here?Johanna painted (although not ve ry well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed) and sometimes change them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She could write, of course most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No. After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job. You write for both of us, Mike, she had said once. Thats all yours Ill just take a little taste of everything else. Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.But here was my old IBM. Why?Letters, I said. She found it down cellar or something, and rescue it to write letters on.Except that wasnt Jo. She showed me most of her letters, often urging me to write little postscripts of my own, guilt-tripping me with that old saying about how the shoemakers kids always go shoeless (and the writers whizs would never hear from him if it werent for Alexander Graham Bell, she was apt to add). I hadnt seen a typed personal letter from my wife in all the time wed been unify if nothing else, she would have considered it shitty etiquette. She could type, producing mistake-free business letters slowly and methodically, but she always used my desktop computer or her own Powerbook for those chores.What were you up to, hon? I asked, then began to investigate her desk drawers.Brenda Meserve had made an effort with these, but Jos fundamental nature had defeated her. Surface order (spools of thread unintegrated by color, for instance) quickly gave way to Jos old dear jumble. I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories, but I found no paperwork which had been typed on my old IBM, with or without the Courier ball. Not so much as a single page.When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned b ack in my president (her chair) and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one I couldnt remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some locals attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product looked like a wanted poster colorized by Ted Turner.I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her phratry some of them friends, most of them relatives had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while . . . then had simply disappeared, like a defile over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The wander of her guitar not a strap but a string was visible over one shoulder. In the reason I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.Jo had tinted Saras skin to a caf?-au-lait shade, maybe based on other pictures shed seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head propel back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she shout out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tidwell hadnt just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fairs shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life . . . although I doubt if he said it in his wifes hearing.In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs. Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, locomote Me Baby, bears a remarkable resemblance to Walk This Way, by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and therefore got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brookss father a white man in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one. That was the entrancing thing about the past.It aint nuthin but a barn-dance sugar, I sang, putting the picture back on the desk. It aint nuthin but a round-and-round.I picked up the typewriter cover, then decided to leave it off. As I stood, my eyes went back to Sara, standing there with her eyes closed and the string which served her as a guitar strap visible over one shoulder. Something in her face and smile had always struck me as familiar, and suddenly it came to me. She looked interrogatively like Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had gone down to the crossroads and sold his soul to Satan for seven years of fast living, high-tension liquor, and streetlife babies. And for a jukejoint brand of immortality, of course. Which he had gotten. Robert Johnson, supposedly poisoned over a woman.In the late afternoon I went down to the store and saw a bountiful piece of flounder in the cold-case. It looked like supper to me. I bought a bottle of white wine to go with it, and while I was waiting my turn at the cash register, a trembling old mans voice round up behind me. See you made a new friend yesty. The Yankee accent was so thick that it sounded almost like a joke . . . except th e accent itself is only part of it mostly, Ive come to believe, its that chantlike tone real Mainers all sound like auctioneers.I turned and saw the geezer who had been standing out on the garage tarmac the day before, watching along with Dickie Brooks as I got to know Kyra, Mattie, and Scoutie. He still had the gold-headed cane, and I now recognized it. Sometime in the 1950s, the Boston Post had donated one of those canes to every county in the New England states. They were given to the oldest residents and passed along from old fart to old fart. And the joke of it was that the Post had gone toes-up years ago.Actually two new friends, I replied, trying to dredge up his name. I couldnt, but I remembered him from when Jo had been alive, holding down one of the overstuffed chairs in Dickies waiting room, discussing weather and politics, politics and weather, as the hammers whanged and the air-compressor chugged. A regular. And if something happened out there on Highway 68, eye-God, he was there to see it.I hear Mattie Devore can be quite a dear, he said heah, Devoah, deeah and one of his crusty eyelids drooped. I have seen a plum number of salacious winks in my time, but none that was a patch on the one tipped me by that old man with the gold-headed cane. I felt a strong urge to knock his waxy notice of a nose off. The sound of it parting company from his face would be like the crack of a dead branch broken over a bent knee.Do you hear a lot, old-timer? I asked.Oh, ayuh he said. His lips dark as strips of liver parted in a grin. His gums swarmed with white patches. He had a couple of yellow teeth still planted in the top one, and a couple more on the bottom. And she gut that little one cunnin, she is AyuhCunnin as a cat a-runnin, I agreed.He blinked at me, a little surprised to hear such an old one out of my presumably newfangled mouth, and then that cruel grin widened. Her dont mind her, though, he said. Baby gut the run of the place, dontcha know.I b ecame aware better belated than never that half a dozen people were watching and listening to us. That wasnt my impression, I said, raising my voice a bit. No, that wasnt my impression at all.He only grinned . . . that old mans grin that says Oh, ayuh, deah I know one worth two of that.I left the store feeling worried for Mattie Devore. Too many people were minding her business, it seemed to me.When I got home, I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen it could chill while I got the barbecue going out on the deck. I reached for the fridge door, then paused. Perhaps as many as four dozen little magnets had been scattered every which way across the front vegetables, fruits, plastic letters and numbers, even a good selection of the California Raisins but they werent random anymore. Now they formed a circle on the front of the refrigerator. Someone had been in here. Someone had come in and . . .Rearranged the magnets on the fridge? If so, that was a burglar who needed to do some he avy remedial work. I touched one of them gingerly, with just the tip of my finger. Then, suddenly angry with myself, I reached out and spread them again, doing it with enough force to knock a couple to the floor. I didnt pick them up.That night, before going to bed, I placed the Memo-Scriber on the table beneath Bunter the nifty Stuffed Moose, turning it on and putting it in the DICTATE mode. Then I slipped in one of my old home-dubbed cassettes, zeroed the counter, and went to bed, where I slept without dreams or other col for eight hours.The next morning, Monday, was the sort of day the tourists come to Maine for the air so sunny-clean that the hills across the lake seemed to be under subtle magnification. Mount Washington, New Englands highest, floated in the farthest distance.I put on the coffee, then went into the living room, whistling. All my imaginings of the last few days seemed silly this morning. Then the whistle died away. The Memo-Scribers counter, set to 000 when I went to bed, was now at 012.I rewound it, hesitated with my finger over the look button, told myself (in Jos voice) not to be a fool, and pushed it.Oh Mike, a voice whispered mourned, almost-on the tape, and I found myself having to press the heel of one hand to my mouth to hold back a scream. It was what I had heard in Jos office when the draft rushed past the sides of my face . . . only now the words were slowed down just enough for me to understand them. Oh Mike, it said again. There was a weakly click. The machine had shut down for some length of time. And then, once more, mouth in the living room as I had slept in the north wing Oh Mike.Then it was gone.