There was so fucking much I couldn’t remember.

“Bonnie? If you know something, please tell me. Jo’s dead, but I’m not.

I can forgive her if I have to, but I can’t forgive what I don’t underst—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and gave a nervous little laugh. “It’s just that I didn’t understand at first. “Seeing anyone,’ that was just so… so foreign to Jo… the Jo I knew… that I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about. I thought maybe you meant a shrink, but you didn’t, did you? You meant seeing someone like seeing a guy. A boyfriend.”

“That’s what I meant.” Thumbing through the faxed calendar sheets now, my hand not quite back to its proper distance from my eyes but getting there, getting there. I felt relief at the honest bewilderment in Bonnie’s voice, but not as much as I’d expected. Because I’d known. I hadn’t even needed the woman in the old Perry Mason episode to put in her two cents, not really. It was Jo we were talking about, after all.

J0.

“Mike,” Bonnie was saying, very softly, as if I might be crazy, “she loved you. She loved you. ’i “Yes. I suppose she did.” The calendar pages showed how busy my wife had been. How productive. S-Ks of Maine. . the soup kitchens. Womshel, a county-to-county network of shelters for battered women. Teenshel.

Friends of Me. Libes. She had been at two or three meetings a month-two or three a week at some points — and I’d barely noticed. I had been too busy with my women in jeopardy. “I loved her too, Bonnie, but she was up to something in the last ten months of her life. She didn’t give you any hint of what it might have been when you were riding to meet ings of the Soup Kitchens board or the Friends of Maine Libraries?” Silence from the other end. “Bonnie?”

I took the phone away from my ear to see if the red LOW BATTERY light was on, and it squawked my name. I put it back.

“Bonnie, what is it?”

“There were no long drives those last nine or ten months. We talked on the phone and I remember once we had lunch in Waterville, but there were no long drives. She quit.”

I thumbed through the fax-sheets again. Meetings noted everywhere in Jo’s neat hand, Soup Kitchens of Maine among them.

“I don’t understand. She quit the Soup Kitchens board?”

Another moment of silence. Then, speaking carefully: “No, Mike. She quit all of them. She finished with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of ’93—her term was up then. The other two, Soup Kitchens and Friends of Maine Libraries… she resigned in October or November of 1993.”

Meetings noted on all the sheets Ward had sent me. Dozens of them.

Meetings in 1993, meetings in 1994. Meetings of boards to which she’d no longer belonged. She had been down here. On all those supposed meeting-days, Jo had been on the TR. I would have bet my life on it.

But why?

Devore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn’t have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained. From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.

I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon—my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street—I’d go as far as I could and still be assured of getting home by dark, and as I went I’d think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I’d think about them the way I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.

I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was—just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn’t exactly young, but I could go north, all right. For awhile, at least.

Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written… for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and…

help im drown The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness passed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so blighted, in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming. No, I tried to say, but the word wouldn’t come out.

My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands.

They were holding me down.

“Won’t it stop doing that?” someone asked—almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. “Won’t it ever stop doing that?”

What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head.

They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture. . or inside a Japanese lantern.

help I’m drown help I’m drown blue-cap man say git me blue-cap man say dassn’t let me ramble help I’m drown lost my berries they on the path he holdin me he face shimmer n look bad lemme up lemme up 0 sweet Jesus lemme up oxen free allee allee oxen free? pounds, SE OXEN FREE you go on and stop now ALLEE OXEN FREE she scream my name she scream it so LOUD I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of…

Nothing at all.

The horror of it passed and yet it didn’t pass. I still felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo’s fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward halfa dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening’s flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamp-post.

The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank—an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn’t.

Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I’ll do anything only stop, I tried to say, and still nothing came out. Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods… but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.