Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee,” I said. “I need you to tell me what I’m stepping in here.”

When we were seated on the deck, me with fresh coffee and Bill with a cup of tea (“Coffee burns me at both ends these days,” he said), I asked him first to tell me the Royce Merrill-Dickie Brooks version of my encounter with Mattie and Kyra. It turned out to be better than I had expected. Both old men had seen me standing at the side of the road with the little girl in my arms, and they had observed my Chevy parked halfway into the ditch with the driver’s-side door open, but apparently neither of them had seen Kyra using the white line of Route 68 as a tightrope. As if to compensate for this, however, Royce claimed that Mattie had given me a big my hero hug and a kiss on the mouth. “Did he get the part about how I grabbed her by the ass and slipped her some tongue?” I asked. Bill grinned. “Royce’s imagination ain’t stretched that far since he was fifty or so, and that was forty or more year ago.”

“I never touched her.” Well. . there had been that moment when the back of my hand went sliding along the curve of her breast, but that had been inadvertent, whatever the young lady herself might think about it. “Shite, you don’t need to tell me that,” he said. “But…” He said that but the way my mother always had, letting it trail off on its own, like the tail of some ill-omened kite. “But what?”

“You’d do well to keep your distance from her,” he said. “She’s nice enough—almost a town girl, don’t you know—but she’s trouble.” He paused. “No, that ain’t quite fair to her. She’s in trouble.”

“The old man wants custody of the baby, doesn’t he?” Bill set his teacup down on the deck rail and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. Reflections from the lake ran up his cheek in ripples, giving him an exotic look. “How’d you know?”

“Guesswork, but of the educated variety. Her father-in-law called me Saturday night during the fireworks. And while he never came right out and stated his purpose, I doubt if Max Devore came all the way back to TR-90 in western Maine to repo his daughter-in-law’s Jeep and trailer.

So what’s the story, Bill?” For several moments he only looked at me. It was almost the look of a man who knows you have contracted a serious disease and isn’t sure how much he ought to tell you. Being looked at that way made me profoundly uneasy. It also made me feel that I might be putting Bill Dean on the spot. Devore had roots here, after all. And, as much as Bill might like me, I didn’t.