And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down nineteen, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript—in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.
On page nineteen of My Childhood Friend, Tiffi Taylor—the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting—was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:
FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19
over that way, I was sure of it,” she said, “but when I couldn’t see her anywhere, I went to look in the hot tub.” She lit a cigarette. “What I saw made me feel like screaming, Andy—Karen was underwater. All that was out was her hand… the nails were turning purple. After that… I guess I dived in, but I don’t remember; I was zoned out. Everything from then on is like a dream where stuff runs together in your mind. The yard-guy—Sanborn—shoved me aide and dived. His foot hit me in the throat and I couldn’t swallow for a week. He yanked up on Karen’s arm. I thought he’d pull it off her damn shoulder, but he got her. He got her.”
In the gloom, Drake saw she was weeping. “God. Oh God, I thought she was dead. I was sure she was.”
I knew at once, but laid my steno pad along the left margin of the manuscript so I could see it better. Reading down, as you’d read a vertical crossword-puzzle answer, the first letter of each line spelled the message which had been there almost since I began the book: owls under stud 0
Then, allowing for the indent next-to-last line from the bottom: owls under studio Bill Dean, my caretaker, is sitting behind the wheel of his truck. He has accomplished his two purposes in coming here-welcoming me back to the TR and warning me off Mattie Devore. Now he’s ready to go. He smiles at me, displaying those big false teeth, those Roebuckers. “If you get a chance, you ought to look r the owls,” he tells me. I ask him what Jo would have wanted with a couple of plastic owls and he replies that they keep the crows from shitting up the woodwork. I accept that, I have other things to think about, but still… “It was like she’d come down to do that errand special,” he says. It never crosses my mind—not then, at least that in Indian lklore, owls have another purpose.” they are said to keep evil spirits away. If Jo knew that plastic owls would scare the crows off, she would have known that. It was just the sort of inj3rmation she picked up and tucked away. My inquisitive wij. My brilliant scatterbrain.
Thunder rolled. Lightning ate at the clouds like spills of bright acid.
I stood by the dining-room table with the manuscript in my unsteady hands.
“Christ, Jo,” I whispered. “What did you find out?” And why didn’t you tell me? But I thought I knew the answer to that. She hadn’t told me because I was somehow like Max Devore; his great-grandfather and my own had shit in the same pit. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was.
And she hadn’t told her own brother, either. I took a weird kind of comfort from that. I began to leaf through the manuscript, my skin crawling. Andy Drake rarely frowned in Michael Noonan’s My Childhood Friend. He scowled instead, because there’s an owl in every scowl.
Before coming to Florida, John Shackleford had been living in Studio City, California. Drake’s first meeting with Regina Whiting occurred in her studio. Ray Garraty’s last-known address was the Studio Apartments in Key Largo. Regina Whiting’s best friend was Steffie Underwood.
Steffi’s husband was Towle Underwood—there was a good one, two for the price of one. Owls under studio. It was everywhere, on every page, just like the K-names in the telephone book. A kind of monument, this one built—I was sure of it—not by Sara Tidwell but by Johanna Arlen Noonan. My wife passing messages behind the guard’s back, praying with all her considerable heart that I would see and understand. On page ninety-two Shackleford was talking to Drake in the prison visitors’
room—sitting with his wrists between his knees, looking down at the chain running between his ankles, refusing to make eye-contact with Drake.
FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 92
only thing I got to say. Anything else, fuck, what good would it do?
Life’s a game, and I lost. You want me to tell you that I yanked some little kid out of the water, pulled her up, got her motor going again? I did, but not because I’m a hero or a saint…”
There was more but no need to read it. The message, owls under studio, ran down the margin just as it had on page nineteen. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I’d finally beaten it or found a way around it. Jo had dissolved it. Jo had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher.
When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you. So had Jo helped me. I riffled through the manuscript and saw the key words everywhere, sometimes placed so you could actually read them stacked on different lines, one above the other. How hard she had tried to tell me this. .
and I had no intention of doing anything else until I found out why. I dropped the manuscript back on the table, but before I could re-anchor it, a furious gust of freezing air blew past me, lifting the pages and scattering them everywhere in a cyclone. If that force could have ripped them to shreds, I’m sure that it would have. No./ it cried as I grabbed the lantern’s handle. No, finish the job./ Wind blew around my face in chill gusts—it was as if someone I couldn’t quite see was standing right in front of me and breathing in my face, retreating as I moved forward, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs. I hung the lantern over my arm, held my hands out in front of me, and clapped them together sharply. The cold puffs in my face ceased. There was now only the random swirling air coming in through the partially plugged kitchen window. “She’s sleeping,” I said to what I knew was still there, silently watching. “There’s time.” I went out the back door and the wind took me at once, making me stagger sideways, almost knocking me over. And in the wavering trees I saw green faces, the faces of the dead. Devore’s was there, and Royce’s, and Son Tidwell’s. Most of all I saw Sara’s.
Everywhere Sara.
No! Go back! You don’t need no truck with no owls, sugar! Go back!
Finish the job! Do what you came Jr!
“I don’t know what I came for,” I said. “And until I find out, I’m not doing anything.”
The wind screamed as if in offense, and a huge branch split off the pine standing to the right of the house. It fell on top of my Chevrolet in a spray of water, denting the roof before rolling off on my side.
Clapping my hands out here would be every bit as useful as King Canute commanding the tide to turn. This was her world, not mine… and only the edge of it, at that. Every step closer to The Street and the lake would bring me closer to that world’s heart, where time was thin and spirits ruled. Oh dear God, what had happened to cause this? The path to Jo’s studio had turned into a creek. I got a dozen steps down it before a rock turned under my foot and I fell heavily on my side. Lightning zigged across the sky, there was the crack of another breaking branch, and then something was falling toward me. I put my hands up to shield my face and rolled to the right, off the path. The branch splashed to the ground just behind me, and I tumbled halfway down a slope that was slick with soaked needles. At last I was able to pull myself to my feet. The branch on the path was even bigger than the one which had landed on the roof of the car. If it had struck me, it likely would have bashed in my skull.