Lisey’s Story by Stephen King Page B

could only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. And had not Gerd Allen Cole been a kind of werewolf?
    â€œCome on, kid,” she said, rinsing off her plate and sticking it in the almost empty dishwasher, “maybe Scott could float that downriver in one of his books, but tall stories were never your department. Were they?” She closed the dishwasher with a thump. At the rate it was filling, she’d be ready to run the current load around July Fourth. “If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?”
    Before she could answer this completely rhetorical question, Scott’s voice came again—the clear one at the top of her mind.
    I left you a note, babyluv.
    Lisey froze in the act of reaching for a dishtowel to dry her hands. She knew that voice, of course she did. She still heard it three and four times a week, her voice mimicking his, a little bit of harmless company in a big empty house. Only coming so soon after all this shite about the shovel . . .
    What note?
    What note?
    Lisey wiped her hands and put the towel back to air-dry on its rod. Then she turned around so her back was to the sink and her kitchen lay before her. It was full of lovely summerlight (and the aroma of Hamburger Helper, a lot less yummy now that her low appetite for the stuff had been satisfied). She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then sprang them open again. Late-day summerlight boomed around her. Into her.
    â€œScott?” she said, feeling absurdly like her big sister Amanda. Half-nuts, in other words. “You haven’t gone ghost on me, have you?”
    She expected no answer—not little Lisey Debusher, who had cheered on the thunderstorms and sneered at the Late Show werewolf, dismissing him as just bad time-lapse photography. But the sudden rush of wind that poured in through the open window over the sink—belling the curtains, lifting the ends of her still-damp hair, and bringing the heartbreaking aroma of flowers—could almost have been taken for an answer. She closed her eyes again and seemed to hear faint music, not that of the spheres but just an old Hank Williams country tune: Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh  . . .
    Her arms prickled up in goosebumps.
    Then the breeze died away and she was just Lisey again. Not Mandy, not Canty, not Darla; certainly not
    ( one went south )
    run-off-to-Miami Jodi. She was Thoroughly Modern Lisey, 2006-Lisey, the widow Landon. There were no ghosts. She was Lisey Alone.
    But she did want to find that silver spade, the one that had saved her husband for another sixteen years and seven novels. Not to mention forthe Newsweek cover in ’92 that had featured a psychedelic Scott with MAGICAL REALISM AND THE CULT OF LANDON in Peter Max lettering. She wondered how Roger “The Jackrabbit” Dashmiel had liked them apples.
    Lisey decided she’d look for the spade right away, while the long light of the early-summer evening still held. Ghosts or no ghosts, she didn’t want to be out in the barn—or the study above it—once night had fallen.
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    The stalls opposite her never-quite-completed office were dark and musty affairs that had once held tools, tack, and spare parts for farm vehicles and machinery back when the Landon home had been Sugar Top Farm. The largest bay had held chickens, and although it had been swamped out by a professional cleaning company and then whitewashed (by Scott, who did it with many references to Tom Sawyer ), it still held the faint, ammoniac reek of long-gone fowl. It was a smell Lisey remembered from her youngest childhood and hated . . . probably because her Granny D had keeled over and died while feeding the chickens.
    Two of the cubbies were stacked high with boxes—liquor-store cartons, for the most part—but there were no digging implements, silver or otherwise. There was a sheeted double bed in the erstwhile chicken pen, the single leftover from their brief