Bag of Bones

Nothing, he replied. Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the putative adopter is a man, it’s worse. At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, poking the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist. That’s blatant sex discrimination, John. I3ah, but usually it’s justified. Blame it on every twisted asshole who ever decided he had a right to take off some little kid’s pants, if you want,’ blame it on the bureaucracy, if you want,’ hell, blame it on cosmic rays if you want. It’s a slow process, but you’re going to win in the end. I3u’ve got a clean record, you’ve got Kyra saying “I want to be with Mike” to every judge and DHS worker she sees, you’ve got enough money to keep ajger them no matter how much they squirm and no matter how many Jrms they throw at you… and most of all, buddy, you’ve got me. I had something else, toowhat Ki had whispered in my ear as I paused to catch my breath on the steps. I’d never told John about that, and it was one of the few things I didn’t tell Frank, either. Mattie says I’m your little guy now, she had whispered. Mattie says you’ll take care of me. I was trying to—as much as the fucking slowpokes at Human Services would let me—but the waiting was hard. Frank picked up the Scotch and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head. Ki had her heart set on snowman-making, and I wanted to be able to face the glare of early sun on fresh snow without a headache.

“Frank, how much of this do you actually believe?” He poured for himself, then just sat for a time, looking down at the table and thinking. When he raised his head again there was a smile on his face.

It was so much like Jo’s that it broke my heart. And when he spoke, he juiced his ordinarily faint Boston brogue. “Sure and I’m a half-drunk Irishman who just finished listenin to the granddaddy of all ghost stories on Christmas night,” he said. “I believe all of it, you silly git.” I laughed and so did he. We did it mostly through the nose, as men are apt to do when up late, maybe in their cups a little, and don’t want to wake the house. “Come on—how much really?”

“All of it,” he repeated, dropping the brogue. “Because Jo believed it. And because of her.” He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs so I’d know which her he meant. “She’s like no other little girl I’ve ever seen. She’s sweet enough, but there’s something in her eyes. At first I thought it was losing her mother the way she did, but that’s not it.

There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s in you, too. It’s touched you both.” I thought of the baying thing which Jo had managed to hold back while I poured the lye into that rotted roll of canvas. An Outsider, she had called it. I hadn’t gotten a clear look at it, and probably that was good. Probably that was very good. “Mike?” Frank looked concerned. “You’re shivering.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”

“What’s it like in the house now?” he asked. I was still living in Sara Laughs. I procrastinated until early November, then put the Derry house up for sale. “Quiet.”

“Totally quiet?” I nodded, but that wasn’t completely true. On a couple of occasions I had awakened with a sensation Mattie had once mentioned—that there was someone in bed with me. But not a dangerous presence. On a couple of occasions I have smelled (or thought I have) Red perfume. And sometimes, even when the air is perfectly still, Bunter’s bell will shiver out a few notes. It’s as if something lonely wants to say hello. Frank glanced at the clock, then back at me, almost apologetically. “I’ve got a few more questions—okay?”

“If you can’t stay up until the wee hours on Boxing Day morning,” I said, “I guess you never can. Fire away.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“I didn’t have to tell them much of anything. Footman talked enough to suit them—too much to suit Norris Ridgewick. Footman said that he and Osgood—it was Osgood driving the car, Devore’s pet broker—did the drive-by because Devore had made threats about what would happen to them if they didn’t. The State cops also found a copy of a wire-transfer among Devore’s effects at Warrington’s. Two million dollars to an account in the Grand Caymans. The name scribbled on the copy is Randolph Footman. Randolph is George’s middle name. Mr. Footman is now residing in Shawshank State Prison.”

“What about Rogette?”

“Well, Whitmore was her mother’s maiden name, but I think it’s safe to say that Rogette’s heart belonged to Daddy. She had leukemia, was diagnosed in 1996. In people her age—she was only fifty-seven when she died, by the way—it’s fatal in two cases out of every three, but she was doing the chemo. Hence the wig.”

“Why did she try to kill Kyra? I don’t understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwell’s hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have… why are you looking at me that way?”

“You’d understand if you’d ever met Devore,” I said. “This is the man who lit the whole fucking TR on fire as a way of saying goodbye when he headed west to su

“And you were right. The chemo.”

“I was also wrong. I know more about ghosts than I did, Frank. Maybe the most important thing is that what you see first, what you think first… that’s what’s usually true. It was him that day. Devore. He came back at the end. I’m sure of it. At the end it wasn’t about Sara, not for him.

At the end it wasn’t even about Kyra. At the end it was about Scooter Larribee’s sled.” Silence between us. For a few moments it was so deep that I could actually hear the house breathing. You can hear that, you know. If you really listen. That’s something else I know now. “Christ,” he said at last. “I don’t think Devore came east from California to kill her,” I said. “That wasn’t the original plan.”

“Then what was? Get to know his granddaughter? Mend his fences?”

“God, no. You still don’t understand what he was.”

“Tell me, then.”

“A human monster. He came back to buy her, but Mattie wouldn’t sell. Then, when Sara got hold of him, he began to plan Ki’s death. I suspect that Sara never found a more willing tool.”

“How many did she kill in all?” Frank asked. “I don’t know for sure. Idon’t think I want to. Based on Jo’s notes and clippings, I’d say that there were perhaps four other… directed murders, shall we call them?

… in the years between 1901 and 1998. All children, all K-names, all closely related to the men who killed her.”

“My God.”

“I don’t think God had much to do with it. . but she made them pay, all right.”

“You’re sorry for her, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I would have torn her apart before I let her put so much as a finger on Ki, but of course I am. She was raped and murdered. Her child was drowned while she herself lay dying. My God, aren’t you sorry for her?”

“I suppose I am. Mike, do you know who the other boy was? The crying boy? Was he the one who died of blood-poisoning?”

“Most of Jo’s notes concerned that part of it—it’s where she got started. Royce Merrill knew the story well. The crying boy was Reg Tid-well, Junior. You have to understand that by September of 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last show in Castle County, almost everyone on the TR knew that Sara and her boy had been murdered, and almost everyone had a good idea ofwho’d done it. “Reg Tidwell spent a lot of that August hounding the County Sheriff, Nehemiah Ba