Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

Admire her velvet Elvis painting on the wall, or her commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint, or whatever she had going in the way of trailer decoration; I’d let Kyra show me her bedroom and exclaim with wonder over her excellent assortment of stuffed animals and her favorite dolly, if that was required. There are all sorts of priorities in life.

Some your lawyer can understand, but I suspect there are quite a few he can’t. “Am I handling this right, Bunter?” I asked the stuffed moose.

“Bellow once for yes, twice for no.” I was halfway down the hall leading to the north wing, thinking of nothing but a cool shower, when from behind me, very soft, came a brief ring of the bell around Bunter’s neck. I stopped, head cocked, my shirt held in one hand, waiting for the bell to ring again. It didn’t. After a minute, I went the rest of the way to the bathroom and flipped on the shower.

The Lakeview General had a pretty good selection of wines tucked away in one corner—not much local demand for it, maybe, but the tourists probably bought a fair quantity—and I selected a bottle of Mondavi red.

It was probably a bit more expensive than Mattie had had in mind, but I could peel the price-sticker off and hope she wouldn’t know the difference. There was a line at the checkout, mostly folks with damp tee-shirts pulled on over their bathing suits and sand from the public beach sticking to their legs. While I was waiting my turn, my eye happened on the impulse items which are always stocked near the counter.

Among them were several plastic bags labeled ^C, NABET, each bag showing a cartoon refrigerator with the message BACK SOON stuck to it. According to the written info, there were two sets of consonants in each Magnabet, PLUS EXTRA VOWELS. I grabbed two sets… then added a third, thinking that Mattie Devore’s kid was probably just the right age for such an item.

Kyra saw me pulling into the weedy dooryard, jumped off the slumpy little swingset beside the trailer, bolted to her mother, and hid behind her. When I approached the hibachi which had been set up beside the cinderblock front steps, the child who’d spoken to me so fearlessly on Saturday was just a peeking blue eye and a chubby hand grasping a fold of her mother’s sundress below the hip. Two hours brought considerable changes, however. As twilight deepened, Kyra sat on my lap in the trailer’s living room, listening carefully—if with growing wooziness—as I read her the ever-enthralling story of Cinderella. The couch we were on was a shade of brown which can by law only be sold in discount stores, and extremely lumpy into the bargain, but I still felt ashamed of my casual preconceptions about what I would find inside this trailer.