On the bed, Jessie’s eyes had begun to move rapidly back and forth behind her lids and now she moaned-a high, wavering sound, full of terror and recognition.
The dog looked up at once, its body dropping into an instinctive cringe of guilt and fear. It didn’t last long; already it had begun to see this pile of meat as its private larder, for which it would fight-and perhaps die-if challenged. Besides, it was only the bitchmaster making that sound, and the dog was now quite sure that the bitchmaster was powerless.
It dipped its head down, seized Gerald Burlingame’s cheek once more, and yanked backward, shaking its head briskly from side to side as it did so. A long strip of the dead man’s cheek came free with a sound like strapping tape being pulled briskly off the dispenser roll. Gerald now wore the ferocious, predatory smile of a man who has just filled a straight-flush in a high-stakes poker game.
Jessie moaned again. The sound was followed by a string of guttural, unintelligible sleeptalk. The dog glanced up at her once more. It was sure she couldn’t get off the bed and bother it, but those sounds made it uneasy, just the same. The old taboo had faded, but it hadn’t disappeared. Besides, its hunger was sated; what it was doing now wasn’t eating but snacking. It turned and trotted out of the room again. Most of Gerald’s left cheek dangled from its mouth like the scalp of an infant.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It is August 14th, 1965-a little over two years since the day the sun went out. It is Will’s birthday; he has gone around all day solemnly telling people that he has now lived a year for each inning in a baseball game. Jessie is unable to understand why this seems like a big deal to her brother, but it clearly does, and she decides that if Will wants to compare his life to a baseball game, that’s perfectly okay.
For quite awhile everything that happens at her little brother’s birthday party is perfectly okay. Marvin Gaye is on the recordplayer, true, but it is not the bad song, the dangerous song. “I wouldn’t be doggone,” Marvin sings, mock-threatening, “I’d be long gone… bay-bee.” Actually sort of a cute song, and the truth is that the day has been a lot better than okay, at least so far; it has been, in the words of Jessie’s great-aunt Katherine, “finer than fiddle-music.” Even her Dad thinks so, although he wasn’t very keen on coming back to Falmouth for Will’s birthday when the idea was first suggested. Jessie has heard him say I guessit war a pretty good idea, after all to her Mom, and that makes her feel good, because it was she-Jessie Mahout, daughter of Tom and Sally, sister of Will and Maddy, wife of nobody-who put the idea over. She’s the reason they’re here instead of inland, at Sunset Trails.
Sunset Trails is the family camp (although after three generations of haphazard family expansion, it is really big enough to be called a compound) on the north end of Dark Score Lake. This year they have broken their customary nine weeks of seclusion there because Will wants-just once, he has told his mother and father, speaking in the tones of a nobly suffering old grandee who knows he cannot cheat the reaper much longer-to have a birthday party with his rest-of-the-year friends as well as his family.
Tom Mahout vetoes the idea at first. He is a stock broker who divides his time between Portland and Boston, and for years he has told his family not to believe all that propaganda about how guys who go to work wearing ties and shirts with white collars spend their days goofing off-either hanging around the watercooler or dictating lunch invitations to pretty blondes from the steno pool. “No hardscrabble spud-farmer in Aroostook County works any harder than I do,” he frequently tells them. “Keeping up with the market isn’t easy, and it isn’t particularly glamorous, either, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary.” The truth is none of them have heard anything to the contrary, all of them (his wife included, most likely, although Sally would never say so) think his job sounds duller than donkeyshit, and only Maddy has the vaguest idea of what it is he does.
Tom insists that he needs that time on the lake to recover from the stresses of his job, and that his son will have plenty of birthdays with his friends later on. Will is turning nine, after all, not ninety. “Plus,” Tom adds, “birthday parties with your pals really aren’t much fun until you’re old enough to have a keg or two.”
So Will’s request to have his birthday at the family’s year-round home on the coast would probably have been denied if not for Jessie’s sudden, surprising support of the plan (and to Will it’s plenty surprising; Jessie is three years older and lots of times he’s not sure she remembers she even has a brother). Following her initial soft-Voiced suggestion that maybe it would be fun to come home-just for two or three days, of course-and have a lawnparty, with croquet and badminton and a barbecue and Japanese lanterns that would come on at dusk, Tom begins to warm to the idea. He is the sort of man who thinks of himself as a “strongwilled son of a bitch” and is often thought of as a “stubborn old goat” by others; whichever way you saw it, he has always been a tough man to move once he has set his feet… and his jaw.
When it comes to moving him-to changing his mind-his younger daughter has more luck than the rest of them put together” Jessie often finds a way into her father’s mind by way of some loop hole or secret passage denied to the rest of the family. Sally believes-with some justification-that their middle child has always been Tom’s favorite and Tom has fooled himself into believing none of the others know. Maddy and Will see it in simpler terms. they believe that Jessie sucks up to their father and that he in turn spoils her rotten. “If Daddy caught Jessie smoking,” Will told his older sister the year before, after Maddy had been grounded for that very offense, “he’d probably buy her a lighter.” Maddy laughed, agreed, and hugged her brother. Neither they nor their mother has the slightest idea of the secret which lies between Tom Mahout and his younger daughter like a heap of rotting meat.
Jessie herself believes she is just going along with her baby brother’s request-that she’s sticking up for him. She has no idea, not on the surface of her mind, anyway, how much she has come to hate Sunset Trails and how eager she is to get away. She has also come to hate the lake she once passionately loved-especially its faint, flat mineral smell. By 1965 she can hardly bear to go swimming there, even on the hottest of days. She knows her mother thinks it’s her shape-Jessie began to bud early, as Sally did herself, and at the age of twelve she has most of her woman’s figure-but it’s not her shape. She’s gotten used to that, and knows that she’s a long way from being a Playboy pin-up in either of her old, faded jantzen tank suits. No, it’s not her breasts, not her hips, not her can. It’s that smell.
Whatever reasons and motives may be swirling around beneath, Will Mahout’s request is finally approved by the Mahout family’s head honcho. They made the trip back to the coast yesterday, leaving early enough for Sally (eagerly assisted by both daughters) to prepare for the party. And now it’s August 14th, and August 14th is surely the apotheosis of summer in Maine, a day of fadedblue-denim skies and fat white clouds, all of it freshened by a salt-tangy breeze.
Inland-and that includes the Lakes District, where Sunset Trails has stood on the shore of Dark Score Lake since Tom Mahout’s grandfather built the original cabin in 1923-the woods and lakes and ponds and bogs lie sweltering under temperatures in the mid-nineties and humidity just below the saturation point, but here on the seacoast it’s only eighty. The seabreeze is an extra bonus, rendering the humidity negligible and sweeping away the mosquitoes and sandflies. The lawn is filled with children, mostly Will’s friends but girls who chum with Maddy and Jessie as well, and for once, mirabile dictu, they all seem to be getting along. There hasn’t been a single argument, and around five o'clock, as Tom raises the first martini of the day to his lips, he glances at Jessie, who is standing nearby with their croquet mallet propped on her shoulder like a sentry’s rifle (and who is clearly within earshot of what sounds like a casual husband-and-wife conversation but which may actually be a shrewd bank-shot compliment aimed at his daughter), then back at his wife. “I guess it was actually a pretty good idea, after all,” he says.