Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

He scaresme. But these days it seems as if everything does.”

“Even though Kyra’s visits have stopped.”

“Even though. It feels… thundery.

Like something’s going to happen. And every day that feeling seems to get stronger.”

“John Storrow’s number,” I said. “Do you want it?” She sat quietly, looking into her lap. Then she raised her head and nodded.

“Give it to me. And thank you. From the bottom of my heart.” I had the number on a pink memo-slip in my front pocket. She grasped it but did not immediately take it. Our fingers were touching, and she was looking at me with disconcerting steadiness. It was as if she knew more about my motives than I did myself. “What can I do to repay you?” she asked, and there it was. “Tell Storrow everything you’ve told me.” I let go of the pink slip and stood up. “That’ll do just fine. And now I have to get along. Will you call and tell me how you made out with him?”

“Of course.” We walked to my car. I turned to her when we got there. For a moment I thought she was going to put her arms around me and hug me, a thank-you gesture that might have led anywhere in our current mood—one so heightened it was almost melodramatic. But it was a melodramatic situation, a fairy tale where there’s good and bad and a lot of repressed sex running under both. Then headlights appeared over the brow of the hill where the market stood and swept past the All-Purpose Garage. They moved toward us, brightening. Mattie stood back and actually put her hands behind her, like a child who has been scolded.

The car passed, leaving us in the dark again… but the moment had passed, too. If there had been a moment. “Thanks for dinner,” I said.

“It was wonderful.”

“Thanks for the lawyer, I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, too,” she said, and we both laughed. The electricity went out of the air. “He spoke of you once, you know. Devore.”

I looked at her in surprise. “I’m amazed he even knew who I was. Before this, I mean.”

“He knows, all right. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection.”

“You’re kidding. You must be.”

“I’m not. He said that your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather worked the same camps and were neighbors when they weren’t in the woods—I think he said not far from where Boyd’s Marina is now. “They shit in the same pit,’ is the way he put it. Charming, huh? He said he guessed that if a couple of loggers from the TR could produce millionaires, the system was working the way it was supposed to.